Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  After that I could tell Peter was watching me. In Advanced English I made sure my hand was up as much as ever. If anything, I worked extra hard on the assignments so I could always make some point about the book’s theme or subtext that would impress him. For a while he tried to gloss over me, but after he saw me kissing Tommy, he loosened up a little. He began admitting I was bringing up interesting viewpoints, then he started debating my ideas for the benefit of the class to try to get someone else to jump in on the argument. A few weeks after Thanksgiving, he opened the discussion by saying, “Does anyone besides Hattie have anything they want to say about the ending?”

  The whole class laughed, including me, but I stuck my hand up anyway.

  “Anyone?” Peter looked around hopefully.

  After another minute, he sighed theatrically and called on me.

  “I thought it was a terrible ending. Nothing was resolved.”

  “Anyone else feel that way? Show of hands, please.” He perched on the edge of his desk, which was my favorite position to watch him in. It meant he was going to launch into a lecture and try to make us think about some of the issues in the book. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and my gaze drifted to the hair sprinkled along his forearms before I blinked and made myself listen to what he was saying.

  “It’s a book about war. War always leaves society with difficult questions that may or may not be able to be answered. Is it O’Brien’s place to answer those questions for us or is it only his responsibility to point them out so that the reader has to confront them?”

  Becca Price answered that one. “I think everyone would have a different answer about whether the war was right or not. I mean, look at how it is now in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one can agree on the right thing to do or whether or not we should even be there. But everybody says it’s the Vietnam of our generation.”

  “Yes, lucky you,” Peter said. Some people laughed. Others just stared at their notebooks. I wasn’t the only one with family over there.

  “So back to Hattie’s complaint that nothing was resolved—”

  “Wait, I didn’t mean that I wanted him to answer big, philosophical questions about war. But none of the characters’ story lines were wrapped up.”

  “Maybe O’Brien wanted his characters to symbolize those bigger questions. If the plot wrapped up too neatly, would you still be thinking about the implications of war on ordinary men and women?”

  I sighed and pursed my lips, knowing I’d lost my point. But then I had an idea.

  Peter kept the discussion bouncing around for a few more minutes and then handed out our essay assignment just as the bell rang. I jumped up and followed him back to his desk while everyone packed up their book bags.

  “Mr. Lund, I still have some issues with the book. Could I stop by after school to talk about them?”

  I kept my face completely innocent, biting my lip and tilting my head for effect. Peter swallowed and glanced around the classroom. Everyone was talking and laughing, pushing their way toward the door.

  “Why don’t you just use those issues as subject matter for your essay?”

  “But I can’t write the synopsis if I’m not sure I understand the book correctly. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  I left before he could tell me no again and was on pins and needles for the rest of the day. Would he be there? I knew he had a free period during the last hour of the day—yes, I had his schedule memorized—so he could bolt out of school before I even got out of chemistry. I practically ran out of class when the last bell rang and beat the crowd down to the first floor. A few people tried to call me over as I passed the locker bays, but I just waved and kept walking with my science book clutched to my chest.

  When I got to his room, I stopped to catch my breath and peeked in the window. Peter sat at his desk reading. My heart flip-flopped and I pushed through the door, eager to watch his face look up and see what expression it would have. When I opened the door, though, I saw two other students working at desks in the back. One of them was Tommy.

  Tommy grinned when he saw me, but I looked away and let my hair fall in a curtain over my cheek, stalking over to Peter’s desk.

  “Oh, Hattie.” He glanced up from his computer. “I forgot you were stopping by. I’ve got a couple students doing last-chance revisions.”

  Behind me, Tommy snorted softly. Peter ignored it, giving me a bland smile.

  “Did you still want to talk about O’Brien?”

  “Yes,” I managed after a minute.

  “Well?”

  I wanted to slap the pretend nonchalance off his face. Instead I rummaged around in my bag to find the book, buying myself some time, and decided two could play this game.

  “Here.” I set my book on his desk and grabbed an empty chair by the whiteboard, pulling it over next to his.

  “I can’t remember the exact passages right now, but I’ve got them marked.”

  He sat up straighter in his chair while I made a show of flipping through the book and making thinking noises. Tommy kept shooting me looks, confused, until I sent him a small grin and a wink to give him the idea I was here for him. It worked. He put a hand over his mouth to hide his smile and went back to work, probably turning all his commas into periods or capitalizing random words.

  “Here it is.” I found a page where I’d written all over the margins, venting about how depressing the whole thing was. I do that a lot. I like to add my words to a book, as if I’m talking to the author and we’re having a conversation that makes the story come alive in a way that it wasn’t before I started reading it.

  “You know this is school property, Hattie. You can’t deface it.”

  “So bill me.” Tommy and the other student laughed, then both tried to pass it off as coughing.

  “Like here. I don’t get this guy’s through line at all. He hangs himself after he gets home? He survived a war and then decides to kill himself? He should’ve just walked toward the Vietcong with a big white flag over his head.”

  “Think about all the flashbacks he keeps having, the guilt he feels over his friend’s death. Maybe if he truly had survived the war, he would have been able to move on. The truth O’Brien wants us to feel in this story is that some part of the character did die in Vietnam and he just didn’t realize it yet.”

  “But look at how long this story is.” I moved to flip the pages and accidentally brushed my fingers over his hand.

  The touch was electric. It shot through my entire arm and I froze for a second, unprepared. I glanced at Tommy, but Peter’s computer hid our hands and the book. We were in plain sight in the middle of the school, twenty feet from my boyfriend, yet no one could see us.

  My heart started racing and my breath sped up. Peter hadn’t moved a muscle. It seemed like he was stunned, too.

  Carefully, so carefully, I paged back to the beginning of the story, staring at his hand. It was a beautiful hand, with long fingers and blunt nails and a dusting of hair on his knuckles and wrists.

  “It’s at least twenty pages long,” I said, low and kind of breathlessly. I didn’t think Tommy could hear me. “And nothing happens in it.”

  “The character can’t move forward. That’s why he keeps circling the lake. If he only did it once, you wouldn’t fully appreciate his impotence.”

  His voice fell, too, although neither of us looked at each other. We both stared at the desk and the book in front of us.

  “If he can’t move forward”—I swallowed and reached out, deliberately this time, and set my hand next to his, barely touching him—“then what’s the point?”

  His skin was tough, not like Tommy’s babyish skin, and I felt the warmth radiate from his pinky finger into mine and through my whole body. I wanted to slip my palm over his and thread our fingers together, but I didn’t dare. Tommy could stand up and see us at any moment. Someone could walk by in the hallway and glance through the window in the door. A second ticked by, then two, while Peter left his hand next to mine
and I thrilled at this tiny, forbidden contact.

  Peter took a deep breath and spoke, carefully and deliberately. “The character made his choices already. That’s the point of the story. He has to face the consequences of his decisions.

  “Read this section again.” He picked up the book, breaking contact, and my heart sank. He found the paragraph he wanted and gave it to me, then scooted a safe distance away.

  The words swam around on the page. I had no idea what any of it said. I remembered my first date with Tommy, how he’d held my hand and twirled me around so sweetly and I didn’t feel anything, not even a single drop of the reaction I’d just had to the barest touch of Peter’s skin. If I was a normal girl with normal dreams, I would have been giddy about Tommy Kinakis’s hesitant touch. I would have giggled over him with all my girlfriends and pulled him closer instead of ducking my head and turning away. It would have been so much simpler and I took a moment to mourn for what I could never be. No matter how well I played the part, I would never become the role.

  So it was time to pull back the curtain and take a bow.

  “Okay, I think I see your point.” I closed the book and put it away.

  “I hope you’ll at least think about what I’ve said before you write the essay.”

  “Of course.” I added, in a softer voice, “I always do.” Before he could say anything, I pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote something, then stood up and pulled on my coat and book bag. I positioned myself between the guys and Peter, so they couldn’t see him, and handed him the piece of paper with the note in the middle of the page.

  What do you think of Hattie’s new boyfriend? —HollyG

  Peter’s head snapped up and he stared at me, confusion all over his face. I let my heartbeat settle down and gave him a slow smile, the kind of smile that conspirators exchange, that revealed everything without saying a word, the kind of smile that lit up an entire stage and said to every person in the audience, I’m yours and only yours. I smiled at him with everything buried inside me that longed to break free.

  Just as the understanding started to filter through his eyes, I turned and strolled out of the classroom, winking at Tommy as I passed.

  PETER / Thursday, December 6, 2007

  WHAT DID I think of Hattie’s boyfriend? What did I think of Tommy Kinakis?? I thought he was dating a sociopath, that’s what I thought of him.

  My footfalls were hard and driving, chewing up the cartilage in my knees with grim satisfaction. I needed to destroy something and my body was the only available option.

  Since cross-country had finished I’d started running at night again, and these holiday nights were endless. The snow we’d gotten for Thanksgiving had melted and given way to a dry, dark December. The sun gave up the horizon as soon as I pulled into Elsa’s driveway after work, casting a final weak flare against the metal silo before the darkness swallowed everything and the silence began. All the summer chirping of insects had vanished. Even the chickens were quiet. There was nothing to interrupt my constant guilt except exertion.

  I’d bought a headlight to see the road and its beams bounced jarringly over the rocks. I ran in the middle of the gravel, passing farmhouses that glowed like tiny ships on a rolling, frozen sea. Trees loomed at the edges of the road, their naked branches ghostly in the moonlight, but I barely noticed them.

  She was dating Tommy as a cover.

  In the three hours since she’d sauntered out of my classroom, I’d been incapable of thinking about anything else. She’d told me at the barn that she would become the last girl in the world who would be having an affair with her English teacher and apparently this massive deceit was her plan. Tommy was a convenience, nothing more to her than a prop. I’d stumbled through the rest of the afternoon and dinner, trying to digest the magnitude of what she had done. She had multiple personalities; it was the only explanation. She was dangerous, calculating, diabolical, and . . . brilliant. She was fucking brilliant.

  After that night at the barn, I severed any connection with her, refusing to engage or ignore her in class, because ignoring her would single her out and I couldn’t afford to differentiate her in any way. I slipped up once during lunch, though. Carl had caught me looking at her in the cafeteria.

  “Trouble?” he asked. Nothing else. Carl was nothing if not succinct.

  He glanced in Hattie’s direction. Even though we were supposed to be monitoring the students for fights and other inappropriate conduct, Carl and I usually just ate and kept to ourselves.

  “No.” I looked away quickly, stuffing a bite into my mouth.

  “Should be illegal for them to wear sweaters like that until they’re eighteen.”

  It was suddenly hard to swallow.

  “Some of them don’t even seem like kids. The boys do, of course. Boys don’t become men real fast anymore. These girls, though . . .”

  “I know.” I kept myself from looking at Hattie again, but I felt like it was written all over my face. I stared down at my sandwich, as engrossed as it was possible to be with egg salad.

  “Out here they sometimes still get married right out of high school,” Carl kept on, feeling conversational that day for some reason. He added that—“out here”—occasionally when he talked to me, like he was my reluctant tour guide to rural southern Minnesota.

  “You’ve got to be careful,” he said.

  I didn’t respond or even look up and we spent the rest of the lunch period lost in our own heads. If he suspected anything about me and Hattie, he didn’t say so and I never made the mistake of glancing in her direction after that day.

  The only interaction we’d had in the last month was through her homework assignments. I read them upstairs in the computer room, ashamed of how much I reacted to her words on the page. Regardless of anything else that had happened, she was still one of the brightest, most agile-minded students I had known. She introduced argument after argument, defeating her own points and turning on a dime to embrace some entirely new theory that she later questioned and half-hung at the end of her paper like both a prize and a warning. She clearly didn’t draft her essays, but I loved that she didn’t. It was like watching her think out loud, as if the page itself was breathing. I didn’t give her anything less than an A, even when her narrative structure obviously needed some improvement, because I knew she would challenge me on the grade and I couldn’t risk any chance of having to talk to her one-on-one.

  And after all of that careful distance she ambushed me anyway, just when I’d started to relax and think she’d moved on. She handed me that piece of paper and tossed me right back into the fucking fire.

  Turning into the parking lot for Lake Crosby, I passed an empty pickup. There was no one around; the truck looked like it could have been left for dead weeks ago. I slowed my pace as I reached the uneven terrain on the trail that circled the lake. Soften your stride, I’d told the boys. Tense your core.

  Then I didn’t need any reminders. My gut clenched as I jogged around the far side of the empty barn and spotted a small glow coming from the window under the oak tree.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  I stopped, not nearly as winded as I’d tried to make myself. The nightly runs—supposed to be both punishment and escape—had only made me stronger, but apparently not strong enough to keep running.

  It was just kids, I tried to reason even as I clicked off my head lamp. Just a couple of kids having beers or smoking pot. I crept closer, tempering my breathing, all the while calling myself a damn idiot for not turning away and sprinting for the woods.

  I got close enough to see inside and there she was.

  She had a blanket spread out on the floor and a camp lantern next to her. She sat cross-legged with a book in her lap and a bottle of water nearby. Her long hair was tucked away in her hood and her cheeks gleamed orange in the lantern light. Despite the recent warmth, I could see small puffs of her breath against her jacket. Something about her straight posture or the tilt of her head reminded me of Alice in
Wonderland and a vertigo came over me, like I was the one tumbling down the rabbit hole.

  I turned and walked silently to where the trail picked up again. I could just make out the line of trees that marked the border of Elsa’s land. All I had to do was click the light on again and run. My calves were cooling off and stiffening up. It was time to move, but I couldn’t.

  I looked back at the barn and the empty horizon behind it. She was alone, exposed, and suddenly all my anger vaulted toward her with a stunning satisfaction. I crossed the clearing in five paces and shoved open the creaking door. She looked up, startled at the intrusion.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  A smile broke over her face as she registered it was me.

  “Studying.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, I’m studying history. The Renaissance was definitely not bullshit.” Her smile only grew wider, until she saw the strap on my head.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a headlamp.” I ripped it off and shoved it in my pocket.

  “Okay.” She seemed amused by my sweaty clothes and my rage.

  “Answer the question, Hattie. What are you doing here?”

  “I told you already. I’m doing some homework.”

  “No, you should be doing homework in your house or at school or the library.”

  “The library’s closed.”

  “In a warm, well-lit room.” I bit out each word, ignoring her attempts at cute quips. “Not in a condemned, unheated building in the middle of the winter.”

  Setting the book aside, she stood up and faced me earnestly, pushing the hood back on the quilted blue jacket that made her look about five years old. “Come on, it’s like forty degrees. We could have a pool party.”

  She laughed, and then added, “I was waiting for you.”

  “How did you know I’d be running out here?”

  “I didn’t, but I thought you might come. After what I told you.”

  “And if I didn’t? Would you just sit out here freezing every night waiting for someone to stumble on you?” I stalked toward her.