Different Circles

Jake nodded thoughtfully at this. Since he signed the checks, he knew exactly how much all of them had made (and were still making) in royalty money. Their album had just breached the triple platinum mark in the last quarter—more than three million copies sold in the United States. Each member of Brainwash had earned just a hair over five hundred and fifty thousand dollars in royalties since the debut. A tremendous amount to the group of lower middle-class teachers, and certainly very helpful to their cause, but nowhere near enough to comfortably retire on; especially when you considered that a sizable proportion of that $550K had gone to pay taxes to Uncle Sam and Aunt Rhode Island.

“It is nice to not be living paycheck to paycheck anymore,” Marcie put in. “To be able to put big chunks of money into savings each month. And we’ve splurged a little. We paid off all of our credit cards and don’t use them anymore. We’ve bought new cars—a Toyota Camry for me and a Beemer for Jim—and we’ve gone on several trips with the kids to Disney World and stayed in first-class rooms.”

“That’s good,” Jake said with a smile. “You should splurge with your money. Enjoy life.”

“I bought a Corvette,” Jeremy said. “And Jenny and I went on a cruise over last spring break; had a suite and everything.”

“We paid off our house,” said Rick. “It is so nice not having a mortgage payment every month.”

“I bought a new house,” said Steph. “A nice big two-story over in Blackstone.”

“That’s the hoity-toity neighborhood over on the east side,” Jim said. “Where all the doctors and dentists and lawyers and real estate developers live.”

“That’s right,” Steph said with a smile. “And you should see them look down their snobby fuckin’ noses at the lesbian schoolteacher musician that invaded their turf. There ain’t been this much uproar on my street since that black doctor moved in ten years ago.”

Jake chuckled. “I am familiar with the experience,” he told her, thinking of everything that had happened when he first moved into the Nottingham Drive home back when he first started making some real money. “Hopefully, they’re not throwing bowling balls through your window or cementing crosses into your front lawn.”

“Or putting acid in your hot tub,” added Pauline.

Steph was actually shocked by this suggestion. “No, nothing like that,” she said. “It’s more like ignoring me at the mailbox and giving me dirty looks in the grocery store. Oh ... and a couple times they called the cops on me when I had a girlfriend over.”

“Called the cops on you for that?” Pauline asked.

“Apparently, they are under the impression that me entertaining a sister lesbian is illegal under Rhode Island state law.”

Jake and Pauline shook their heads. “The more I get to know people, the more I dislike them,” Jake said.

“I’ll drink to that,” Steph said, picking up her wine glass and doing just that.

“What about the school district people and the PTA?” asked Pauline. “Are they still riding your asses?”

“They have permanent seats on our asses,” Jim assured her. “They have made it their mission to get rid of us by any means possible. They have tried appealing to our sense of professionalism by asking us to resign to protect the children from our influence. The PTA has tried to put pressure on the school board to dismiss us for cause because we are creating a distraction to the learning environment. The school board actually gave that a shot, by the way. They were shot down the first time the grievances we filed got in front of an arbitration board.”

“All of us have been written up for petty or even nonexistent offenses multiple times,” Marcie put in. “None of those writeups survived the arbitration process either, but they still keep trying.”

“My personal favorite,” Steph said, “was when they tried to promote me to management to get rid of me.”

“Promote you to get rid of you?” Jake asked. “How does that work?”

“Out of the blue one day, they offered to promote me to head of the physical education department,” she said. “That way, they explained, I would be out of the classroom and no longer a distraction to the children, and I would be able to shape the curriculum to my heart’s content.”

“An interesting offer,” Pauline said.

“Yeah,” said Steph with a grunt of disgust. “And it also would have made me part of management and therefore no longer protected by our collective bargaining agreement. Therefore, if I accepted the position, I automatically would have become an at-will employee. How long do you think I would have been head of the physical education department before they decided I wasn’t working out and fired me?”

“Not very long, I’m guessing,” Jake said.

“I told them where they could stick their offer,” Steph said with a smile.

“I wish I could have been there to see it,” Pauline replied.