Page 9

alarms and surprises

. . .

lark

A s I say at the top of every school day, to give my students time to transition back into a learning mindset…

Let’s review!

Since stepping foot in Bear Mountain, a mixed Indigenous “outsider” community, I’ve…

o Discovered the person who was supposed to host me for the week is out of town.

o Met a bartender who made my chest flutter. I could’ve talked to him for hours. He showed unexpected romantic interest and offered me a place to stay.

o Encountered a nametag-less hotel clerk who made my down below flutter—and that’s never happened outside of a scene or a really well-written dark romance novel.

One look at him, and there was a spontaneous squeeze in my nether regions.

I didn’t dare look again, and, of course, I shut down his attempts at small talk.

There weren’t enough emotional regulation hacks in the world to allow me to casually chat with someone who made my autonomic nervous system short-circuit like it had better things to do than keep me upright and breathing.

I was still trying to process that this face-meltingly attractive man and I shared the same plane of existence… when we ran into the flirty, friendly bartender who’d offered me a place to stay.

And they said they were identical twins.

Even though they looked nothing alike.

Sure, they were dressed the same. And yes, standing side by side under the footlights lining the town’s main dirt road, I observed a few similarities. Both were clearly six-foot-plus with wavy red hair and well-trimmed beards.

But no. Just… no. One was easy to talk to and someone I could make a socially acceptable amount of eye contact with.

The other was like staring into an eclipse. Beautiful. Overwhelming. Potentially damaging without specialized equipment like those cardboard glasses we handed out to students before the last solar eclipse visible from Vancouver.

So I asked the one I could look at without experiencing a full sensory spiral, “Are you sure your mothers were being totally honest with you? You said they refused to say who gave birth to whom—but is it possible two of them had babies around the same time and just decided to raise you as twins?”

The bartender looked genuinely offended. “You think we have different mothers? We’re obviously identical. Nobody can tell us apart!”

“Listen.” I slid into my gentlest teacher voice. “Robin and I get mistaken for each other all the time. And she’s taller, lighter, and thinner. Sometimes people from different cultural backgrounds?—”

Trrriiiuppp! Trrriiiuppp! Trrriiiuppp!

I stopped talking and lifted my arm to look at my GoNoTo watch when it trilled. My eyes popped wide when I saw the alert: “ Fertility window triggered based on synced biometric data.”

Before I could even process the message, the Osma smart ring buzzed three times on my right ring finger—the signal that it, too, was detecting biomarkers that suggested ovulation was occurring.

And if that wasn’t enough, my phone chimed from inside my backpack before a new message appeared on my watch from the cheeky Hey, Girl, Let’s Get Pregnant! app synced to all my trackers.

Hey, Girl! Your eggs are egging. Do it! Do it! Do it!

This was how I found out I still had Bluetooth in a small mountain town with no cell service.

When every single one of my fertility trackers went off.

I froze.

Even with triple confirmation, I could barely process what all my ovulation monitors were telling me was going down in my pelvic cavity

But my system had never given me a false alert, as far as I could tell. And it hadn’t given me any alert since Christmas.

If this is true…

I thought of the ovulation test kit I always carried in my backpack. Just in case.

Then I somehow found my voice to ask the two outrageously handsome—but not at all identical—men in front of me, “Is there… is there a restroom I could use?”