by Mindy Mejia
Not officially, of course. One of the math teachers coached the team and he tried to rope me into the assistant coach job, but there was no way in hell I was giving up every Saturday morning from now until Thanksgiving for their meets. I just ran with the boys. They knew every shortcut and trail in a thirty-mile radius and on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school we tackled the country, a small herd of humans trekking by pastures where cows chewed and stared. Most of the kids looked like I had in high school—awkward and sunburnt and hollow between their bones—but they understood endurance through uneven terrain. We practiced hills between rows of corn and did laps on freshly harvested fields full of soft dirt. We sprinted the easy straights on the football field to practice getting the lead position early and ran the trail around Lake Crosby dozens of times to work on maneuvering on a confined path. Most of them tried to pass each other where the trail opened up by the abandoned barn and it became a joke, all of them tensing as we approached it, grinning and preparing for the mad dash to the front. I stayed at the back to encourage the stragglers, saying things like, “Pacing, pacing,” “It’s not about tempo, it’s about effort,” and “Keep it up. Don’t lose sight of it.”
I would forget.
I’d run for miles, measuring my breaths, feeling my calves burn and then go numb, and watch the wide, empty horizon with a feeling of utter happiness. Her words would filter through like raindrops, unconnected to anything, and quench something inside me, a bone-deep aridity I’d barely let myself acknowledge.
And I would forget what a complete sack of shit I was.
I was cheating on my wife.
I tried to rationalize it most of the time, telling myself I hadn’t even met HollyG. She was just a screen name, an internet Siren. Was my increasing fixation with her functionally any different from buying a Penthouse?
I knew her completely and yet not at all. I could say exactly how she’d feel about any given book or play, what her favorite drink was, why she hated reality TV, the kind of people that made her nervous. Yet I didn’t know her face, her age, her weight, or her life. She could be divorced with six kids. She could be waiting on a job transfer so she could leave her husband. How could I be cheating with someone I couldn’t pick out in a lineup?
Yes, we’d had sex. Three times. It was cyber sex, though. What was the difference between that and one of Elsa’s romance novels? There was no one I could ask, no one I trusted besides HollyG, and when I did break down and ask her one day, she told me that everyone cheats in their heart and she was happy to tell me that I wasn’t any better than anyone else. I laughed, of course, but answered that I was more worried about being worse than everyone else. Then she said something I’ll never forget. She waited a long time to respond before she wrote, “You’re no worse than me. That’s all that matters.”
God, I was euphoric when I saw those words. Absolutely euphoric in a way only a complete sack of shit can be. I read her reply a dozen times, loving how she paired us together in a few simple phrases, how we had become the only ruler against which the other could be measured. You’re no worse than me, she said. So she was married, too. It made it somehow better, to know that she was as culpable as I was, that even our sins were compatible.
I locked myself in the spare room upstairs, telling Mary and Elsa that I was grading papers and developing lesson plans.
“How many lessons do you need for those kids?” Elsa asked me one night as I was clearing the table and preparing my exit.
“It’s a lot of work the first year. I’m starting from scratch and I’ve got six classes with different ages and abilities, not to mention teaching for the standardized tests. I have to go in with a game plan every day.”
“But it’s Friday, isn’t it?” Elsa looked to Mary for confirmation, who nodded silently while scooping the leftover potatoes onto a scarred metal tray that she always set outside after dinner for the barn cats. Since the chicken butchering day, she’d said less and less to me, and nothing that mattered.
“All the more reason to get a jump on it.” I grabbed a Coke from the fridge and ducked out of the kitchen before she could inquire further. I should’ve asked Mary if I could help wash the dishes or what she wanted us to do over the weekend, anything that would tamp down the raging guilt that raced through me every time I looked at her during the last month, but she seemed to want nothing from me, as if my total incompetence as a farmer had excluded me from every other area of her life. I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t try to reach her anymore, and as I shut the door to the spare room and logged onto my computer, I actually felt somewhat justified—complete bastard that I was—because she had turned away from me first. Mary was the one who’d left our marriage for someone else, and when HollyG found me in that forum I was desperate. Every night I’d been searching for first editions, signed copies, and rare or out-of-print books. It was my knee-jerk reaction to loss, ever since my parents’ divorce when I was ten. It wasn’t only the escape that attracted me; it was the predictability. Books were finite, a world contained between two covers that could be repeated as many times as I turned the first page. No matter how much misery Tolstoy unleashed or how often Chuck Palahniuk’s characters fucked their lives up, their stories became charted, inevitable. I could count on them. Lonely and hungering for connection, I went searching for books. What I found was something else entirely.
HollyG: There you are.
Her words, always so vital and direct, able to cut through all my bullshit, appeared on the screen and erased every thought of Mary or infidelity. Everything in me came to attention, but I was surprised. She usually wasn’t online this early.
HollyG: Things are slow tonight. I’m bored and want to see your face.
LitGeek: I’ll take that as a metaphor.
I’d been a teacher for less than two months and I was already doing that speech correction crap.
HollyG: No, actually I meant it literally.
LitGeek: ??
HollyG: Do you want to meet me?
I sat bolt upright in the creaky dining room chair, scanning the words again to make sure I hadn’t misread. I typed, deleted, started again.
LitGeek: I do, but it’s not a good idea. You know my situation.
HollyG: Yes, I know. So how about we meet without meeting?
LitGeek: Again with the “??” What are you up to?
HollyG: There’s a community theater production of Jane Eyre in Rochester next week.
LitGeek: Does the wife take all in this version?
HollyG: You’ll have to come see to find out.
LitGeek: I don’t understand. You’ll be there?
HollyG: I’ll be at the Thursday matinee. I’ll wear a gray dress with white cuffs. We won’t talk or even sit near each other. Just a glance across a crowded room. We’ll meet without meeting.
LitGeek: I can’t. We’re walking a fine line already.
HollyG: Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall. Think about it. I’ll be there, whether you go or not.
God, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. For two straight days it tortured me. The temptation to see, to give face and form to the only person in a hundred miles who gave a shit about me was overwhelming. By Sunday night I’d all but given in. What could be less illicit than two strangers watching a play on opposite sides of a theater? And I had this hope that seeing her in the flesh would kill my demented infatuation. Maybe she’d be sixty or covered in eczema. I could dream.
Calling in sick wasn’t an option. Mary would hear about my sick day before the play even hit intermission, thanks to Elsa’s cozy chats with the principal. I wasn’t eligible for vacation time yet either, but when I walked into school Monday morning I had a plan. We were reading Jane Eyre in my senior Advanced English class, so why not take a field trip? I’d have eighteen kids with me, all eager for a day out of school with their cool, new teacher. It was the perfect cover. I got the principal’s approval, reserved a bus, and printed out permission slips, all before the first student walke
d into my classroom that morning.
As Mary and I got into bed the night before the play, though, my duplicity was making me nauseated.
“What’s wrong?” Mary asked.
I told her about the field trip. “I guess I’m just nervous about what could happen.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said, yawning.
I flipped around to face her, seized with an idea. “Why don’t you come? You could meet us at the high school and ride along on the bus. It’d be just like Minneapolis, except I get educator rates now.”
Hope leapt in my chest, but she shook her head and fluffed her pillow before settling on her side, facing the wall.
“I’m taking Mom to the cardiologist tomorrow. Remember?”
“Reschedule it.”
“No, Peter. We’ve waited three months to see this guy. You’ll be fine.”
“Why can’t you ever make time for me anymore?”
Swiveling back toward me, she pulled the covers toward her side of the bed. “Are you kidding? You ask me the night before and expect me to drop everything?”
“I thought it would be fun. Excuse me for wanting to have fun with my wife.”
She shook her head and jabbed a finger at my chest. “No, you just said you were nervous to go by yourself. Don’t try to pretend like you were thinking about us. If you want to take me out, ask me when you don’t have twenty teenagers tagging along.”
She tossed herself as far away from me as possible on the bed and fell asleep a few minutes later while I lay awake, staring at her back in the darkness.
The next day I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I made all my morning classes work in small groups. I had no appetite at lunch, and when Carl asked me what was wrong I mumbled something about a cold or my sinuses. On the bus, one of the kids had to remind me to take attendance and only then did I remember that Hattie Hoffman, my favorite student in that class, was out with an excused absence. The drive to Rochester was short and before I was ready we filed into a small two hundred–seat theater with faded red velvet chairs. The room was over half-full and I scanned the crowd as subtly as I could, but no one was wearing a gray dress. Even after the lights dimmed and the play started I kept watching that damn door. HollyG would show up, I knew it. She might show up late, though, just to be perverse. I had no idea what was happening onstage until the student sitting on my left gasped and elbowed me in the ribs. “It’s Hattie!”
“What?” I whispered and she pointed at the stage.
I focused on the play and saw Hattie Hoffman in center stage, exchanging lines with an older woman sporting a severe bun. Flipping through the program I saw her name listed at the top of the page in the title role. The little shit. She didn’t mention a word about it when I passed the permission slips around. I had assumed she’d say something about the field trip, because Hattie always had an opinion on everything, but she’d kept silent with her head buried in a notebook. Had she been embarrassed about being in the play?
I paid attention for a few lines, enough to realize Hattie was actually good. She didn’t try for the English accent, which was smart, and she delivered her lines cautiously, with the exact trepidation Jane would have shown when she announced her decision to leave Lowood School for Girls and seek out her destiny at Thornfield Hall. The longer I watched her the more eerie it got. Hattie usually moved with a deliberate grace; I’d always noticed it because it set her apart from the rest of the kids. On stage that assurance disappeared; she’d become Jane completely. As the scene drew out, the back of my neck tingled. I held my breath when Hattie held hers, looked to the places where her eyes strayed. I was captivated to a point I didn’t totally understand. Maybe it was because she was my student and I felt a sense of pride. Except it didn’t feel like pride, not completely. It was more intense and nagging, like I should know something I didn’t. The other kids and I exchanged smiles, bound in the hushed excitement of discovering a secret about one of our own.
Now Mrs. Fairfax was telling her to put on her best dress to meet Mr. Rochester, and Hattie stood solemnly, smoothing the pleats of her gray dress and nervously straightening the bright cuffs. “This is my best dress, Mrs. Fairfax.”
Her dress. Oh. Holy. Fuck.
The nagging sensation in the back of my head exploded and everything blurred. I swayed forward and when I could see again, the two women were crossing the stage into the adjoining set. The back of Hattie’s hips receded calmly, covered in gray, gray, gray. Oh, God.
No. I wrenched around and searched every single body in the crowd, desperate to find someone else. Anyone else. I was not having an affair with one of my students, for the love of Christ. But there was no one. No one else in the entire theater that could be HollyG. And I knew there wouldn’t be. Subconsciously, I’d known it since I first laid eyes on Hattie on that stage.
The rest of the play passed in a fog. I slid down in my seat until one of the kids asked if I was all right and then I used the excuse to go to the bathroom. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there; run through the front doors and never fucking stop.
I splashed a gallon of water on my face and sat on the toilet for ten minutes, trying to figure out what I was going to do. It wasn’t until the second act that I realized I still had an out. HollyG didn’t know who LitGeek was—I hadn’t given her any clues to pick me out of the crowd. And why would she suspect me? I was providing a field trip, for God’s sake. She was expecting our whole class to be there.
I held on to that and went back to my seat, but nothing suppressed the insanity raging in my head for very long. It wasn’t until Mr. Rochester proposed to Jane that I snapped back to reality.
“Do you doubt me, Jane?” The actor grabbed Hattie by the arms and drew her close.
“Utterly and completely.”
When he caught her in an embrace my pulse started jumping. He was older than me, maybe in his early thirties, so not as old as Mr. Rochester was supposed to be, but close enough. And Hattie was almost exactly Jane’s age, the young innocent who captured the world-weary Rochester’s heart. As Jane realized Mr. Rochester was serious and accepted his offer of marriage, several things happened at once in my head. The detached academic in me thought they’d done a good job casting, except for the fact that Hattie was too pretty to play Jane. The teacher in me observed the two of them embrace, her delicate pink cheek brushed up against his grizzly five-o’clock shadow, and felt uncomfortable and protective. And the rest of me just watched her lithe frame wrap around a man twice her age and took a long, hard swallow.
And that reaction was going to stop right now. Jesus, how many headlines had I read about some teacher having an affair with a student? It was usually female teachers, all desperate, insecure, unevolved women who deluded themselves into thinking they loved these idiots. I never blamed the kids. Teenage boys would have sex with a banana peel, but the teachers had no justification worth the breath it took to say. They should have done what I was going to do right now. End it. Stop it before it even began, or at least before it knowingly began. There was no way I could’ve known HollyG was Hattie. HollyG was Hattie was Jane. Her identities shifted in front of me, none of them quite capturing the girl on stage who was now running away from Mr. Rochester in her wedding dress. Their definitions couldn’t hold her any more than the actor could make her marry him. At least she was running away from an already married man. It was the only flash of comfort as I waited for the torture to end, that at least some version of her was doing the right thing.
When it was finally over, the cast filed out in front of the curtain and we all stood and clapped. The actor who played Mr. Rochester pushed Hattie out in front of the line and the applause multiplied as she took a bow. Then, in the middle of the ovation, she looked directly at me and slowly, deliberately, ran her hand down the arm of her dress to her cuff. The corners of her mouth crept up and her eyes lit with a hundred meanings. I felt the obligatory return smile fall off my face and my hands froze in mid-clap.
She knew.
She cornered me after the play when the cast was mingling with the audience in the theater lobby, knowing I couldn’t run away while we were surrounded, our roles as clearly cast as the actors’ had been only minutes ago.
“Hello, Mr. Lund.”
“Hattie.” I clung to the name, a little girl’s name, and tried to force myself to speak to that person alone. “That was a wonderful performance. I didn’t know you were in theater.”
“This was my first production.” If she could tell how uncomfortable I was, she didn’t show it. If anything, her smile only grew wider.
“You’re a natural. It’s like you’ve been acting your whole life.”
She laughed at that and was twirled away by another student before she could torment me further.
Before I deleted my account at Pulse that night, I reread every message we’d sent each other. I’d saved them all and it was mortifying to realize what should have been obvious from the beginning. She was leaving for New York in less than a year. Of course, because she had to graduate high school first. I’d been so impressed about the books she’d read, but that was because I was assigning them to her. It would have been funny if it weren’t happening to me. After debating half the night over it, I decided to send her one last message. It was better to be absolutely clear about what had to happen. I agonized over the diction, wanting to tell her how much she’d meant to me, but I knew I couldn’t give her a single encouraging word.
Over the next week I could tell Hattie was trying to find a way to talk to me and I did everything possible to prevent it. As soon as the bell rang to dismiss Advanced English, I would shoot out the door and play hall monitor or find a reason to run to the main office. I became paranoid about being alone in the school and invented excuses to see Carl during my off-periods. I asked Mary out for a proper date that Friday, but the cardiologist had confirmed Elsa’s heart only had a year left at best and Mary was too depressed to want to do anything. When I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she just shrugged and turned away.