Trophy Life

by Lea Geller

  “You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t. How could you do it, Beeks? How could you talk to Lindsey about me, about Jack, about any of this?”

  “I don’t know. I think I was worried about you and I was blowing off steam. I just blew it in the wrong direction. I’m sorry, really I am.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Listen,” she said, “you don’t need to really forgive me yet. Just don’t not talk to me. I know I deserve the cold shoulder, but I just don’t think I can handle it.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not going to stay mad at you. Certainly not because of Lindsey. I know how you feel about Jack. I’ve always known. You have a terrible poker face.”

  “I’ll be a better friend,” she promised. “I can do better.”

  “OK,” I said, “I’ll hold you to it.”

  “New subject,” she announced, less than a second later. “What you are you making for dinner?”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “Yup. I want to make sure you two aren’t still eating like runaways.”

  “Actually, I haven’t had to cook much lately. I’ve been eating with my neighbor.”

  “No way!” said Beeks. “You’re eating with the Figg?”

  “I am indeed.”

  “How did that happen?” she asked. “Do I need to start yelling?”

  “No, you don’t. It happened because she found me feeling sorry for myself,” I said.

  “Now I really feel bad,” she said. “I drove you to the Figg.”

  “Yes, you did. Right into the arms of her Christmas sweater.”

  “NO WAY!”

  “Yes way. And if you don’t start being nicer to me, I’m gonna ask her if I can borrow one.”

  -27-

  Jack called me again that night. The heat had not yet kicked in. I was sitting in a hot bath, listening to music, when the music paused and the phone rang. I dried my hand on a towel and reached for it. Blocked number.

  “Jack?”

  “Hello, darling.”

  “Hello.”

  “It’s really good to hear your voice again,” he said.

  “Where are you, Jack?” I asked, sitting up, pulling my knees into my chest.

  “What?”

  “Where are you? Are you still in LA? Are you in New York now? Are you somewhere else?”

  “Aggie, I . . .”

  Maybe if he’d called me in the morning I’d have been more patient, but it was late, and I had used up all my patience over the course of the day. “Jack, where are you? Are you just going to keep calling so we can hear each other’s voices? Don’t you need more?”

  “You know I need more,” he growled.

  I leaned back and knocked a shampoo bottle into the bath.

  “What’s that noise?” he asked.

  “Oh. I’m in the bath,” I said.

  “You take baths?” he asked.

  “I do now,” I said. “The heat isn’t on yet, so I’m warming up old-school.”

  He paused. I heard him breathing.

  “What do you look like?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Did Jack know about the ombré fiasco? “Um, I’m kind of the same as I was when you left. My hair is a little darker . . .”

  “No, Aggie. Tell me what you look like. All of you. Right now.”

  Really?

  “Aggie . . .”

  “OK, OK. I’m naked in the bath . . .” I looked down. This was not going to be pretty.

  “Surely you can tell me more than that,” he murmured.

  Sure, Jack. If you must know, I don’t really bother shaving anymore and I haven’t seen any hot wax since I got here, so my bikini line has grown down to my very hairy knees. My skin is the color of milk, and thanks to my toddler diet, my thighs now officially touch.

  This wouldn’t work. Jack didn’t want to hear that. Hell, I didn’t want to say that. I needed to describe myself to him the way I was, the way I used to be, the way he wanted me to be. “Sure,” I said. “I can do that.” But just as I was about to describe my toned, bronzed, hairless legs of yore, I got a text.

  MS P I AM IN TROUBLE

  And then:

  U THERE?

  I texted back immediately. Who is this?

  CALEB.

  “Aggie, what’s going on?” Jack asked while I texted Caleb, Where are you?

  “Oh, one second, Jack.”

  NEED YOUR HELP. OUTSIDE IN BUSHES.

  I texted him back: Wait there. Don’t move. I need to check coast is clear.

  “Aggie?” I could hear his growing impatience.

  “Jack, I have to go. Can you call me later?”

  No answer.

  “Jack, I’m really, really sorry, but something came up.”

  “Something came up?” he asked, almost mimicking me.

  “A problem with a student.”

  “Now? At night?”

  “Yes, now. We can do this later, I promise,” I said.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Goodbye. I love you.” I waited for him to say goodbye, but he was already gone.

  I jumped out of the bath, dried off, threw on some sweats, and raced downstairs and into the foyer. I stuck my head out over the threshold and checked to see if Stacey Figg was keeping watch. Her downstairs lights were off.

  OK, I wrote. Coast clear. Meet me at the door.

  Caleb emerged from the bushes and flew up the stairs. I held the door open, motioned for him to come inside, and we stood in the foyer. So much happened in this tiny, cramped, seemingly inconsequential space.

  “What’s going on, Caleb?”

  “I did something stupid,” he said, staring down at his large feet, which were shuffling back and forth, mashing dirt into the tile. He wore a winter coat and a red hoodie underneath, the red hood pulled up over his head, almost covering his eyes.

  I waited. I found that the boys talked more if I asked less. (In moments like this, I often wondered if I’d remember any of this when Grace was an adolescent. Perhaps I should have been taking notes.)

  He spoke. “The big essay for social studies.”

  I waited some more.

  “I got an essay online.” He looked up at me, his eyes full of tears, his face full of panic. “I cheated and Ms. Creek knows it.”

  Caleb was a boy who didn’t need to crib an essay online. His work for me was sporadic and often rushed, but it was good. I wanted to know why he cheated, but I didn’t ask, the same way I knew not to ask how Caleb got my cell phone number: I really didn’t want to know the answers. I didn’t want to know that he cheated because he could, or because it was easier, or that he got my phone number because he’d hacked into the teacher directory. These kids made stupid mistakes and bad decisions with shocking, almost reflexive regularity. All I could do was help clean up.

  “How do you know you got caught?” I asked.

  Caleb removed his hood and looked at me squarely. “Ms. Creek sent me an email. She wants me to meet with her tomorrow. I’m sure Principal Jerk will be there, too. I’m toast, Ms. Parsons. They’re gonna throw me out.” With each sentence he grew more hysterical, his voice cracking.

  “Let’s just take this one step at a time,” I said. “I’ll talk to Ms. Creek tomorrow. Would you be willing to write the essay yourself? Can you have it done by the weekend?”

  “I can’t do it!” he cried. “I don’t know how! I haven’t taken a single page of notes all year. I don’t know where to start!”

  “Caleb, I’m going to get someone to send you some notes. Read as much as you can. Read all night if you have to, and tomorrow you and I will start work on the essay. Let me deal with Ms. Creek.”

  He exhaled loudly. “I knew you would help,” he said.

  “Of course. And Caleb . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “When this is all said and done, you and I are going to talk about making sure that it doesn’t ever happen again. All right?”

  “All right.” He nodd
ed, reached for the door, pulled his hood up over his head, checked both ways, and ran into the night.

  I closed the door and tried calling Jack back, but the phone went straight to the voice mail lady. At least she had replaced her out-of-service cousin. I wanted desperately to hear Jack’s voice again, but I was annoyed. I tried him one more time, and when I heard the voice mail lady’s voice again, I threw my phone down onto the couch and went to bed.

  -28-

  The next morning I waited for Mona Creek, the boys’ social studies teacher, in front of her first-period class. She was tall and rail thin, with dark hair she wore in a tight bun, giving her a permanently pained, pinched look. She always looked surprised, but she seemed especially surprised to see me.

  “Mona,” I began. “Have you got a minute?”

  She blinked her assent, her large brown eyes quickly shuttering.

  “It’s about Caleb and his essay,” I said. “He’s really panicked. He knows what he did was wrong, and he wants to make it right. He wants to write the essay himself.”

  Mona stared at me. “You mean he wants you to write it for him?”

  “No, Mona. I mean, he wants me to help him write it. I’m supposed to be teaching writing, so I’d like to help.” I smiled at her. I really wanted her to smile back at me, but I wasn’t sure Mona smiled.

  “Fine,” she said. “Good luck to you.”

  “One more thing,” I said, still smiling. “Would it be OK to wait on bringing Gavin into this?”

  Finally, Mona shot me something that resembled a smile. It wasn’t a happy smile—it was a smile of relief. “OK,” she said. “I can do that.” I thought about it for a moment. Was Mona happy because she got to avoid Gavin?

  “Gives me more time to grade papers,” she said. Poor Mona Creek. All she wanted was more time to grade the many, many papers she was assigning and receiving.

  That night, Caleb and I got to work on his essay.

  “I hate social studies,” he said, shivering in the foyer.

  I made two cups of hot chocolate and brought in two chairs.

  “Sit,” I said.

  “Fine,” he agreed, shoving his hands in his pockets and sitting down. He slumped all the way down in the chair so that his legs took up the whole foyer. He gazed down at them. I really wanted to tell him to look at me while I was talking to him, but I heard Marge’s voice in my head from my days at Sunny Day. Boys don’t want to look at you while they are talking to you. Many of them can’t do two things at once, and if one of the things is looking at you, you can kiss the conversation goodbye.

  “Let’s talk about this essay,” I began.

  “I can’t, Ms. P.” He looked up. Some hair fell onto his forehead. “Really, I can’t write a whole essay. Not about the frickin’ American Revolution.”

  I was getting tired of hearing the same thing from the boys. I needed to prove to them that they could do this, that they could in fact write an essay. I handed Caleb a small wire-bound notebook. He looked at it like it was papyrus.

  “For real?”

  “For real. We can use this to help us. I grew up in California, which means I didn’t spend a single day learning about the American Revolution. I’m in worse shape than you are.”

  “Unlikely,” he said.

  “No, I think you have a head start. How many years have you spent learning about colonial America?”

  Caleb looked at his hand and started mumbling to himself and counting on his fingers. “OK,” he said, “you win. But just because I’ve spent five years learning about this stuff doesn’t mean I can write about it.”

  “Caleb, writing is thinking. If you can think, you can write.”

  He did not look convinced.

  I asked him questions about the notes I’d sent him. I told him to write down his answers, each on a separate page. I ripped out all the pages and organized them into three piles.

  “Here,” I announced, now sitting on the floor of the foyer. “This is your essay.” He looked baffled but amused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Each pile is a paragraph,” I said. “Each pile is a different effect of the revolution. One pile is social effect, one is political, and one is economic. They are in your own words. You wrote on those pages. I just helped organize them. We grouped them together and made an essay. All you have to do for now is outline what’s on these pages.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Once you’ve outlined, then you can write an essay. I can help, but seriously, writing is just thinking. You can do this.”

  Caleb eventually reached down and picked up the piles. He laid them on top of each other. “How do you know how to do this?”

  “How to do what?”

  “How to help us like this. How do you know what to do?”

  My own competence was still a total shock to me. “Honestly, Caleb, I have no idea.”

  -29-

  I woke up early to the sound of my phone. I opened one eye and checked the time—2:00 a.m., 11:00 p.m. on the West Coast.

  “Hello,” I breathed, still half-asleep.

  “Hello, darling.”

  I pushed myself up in bed, leaned on my elbows, and clutched the phone to my ear.

  “Are you lying down?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Please, Aggie,” he begged. “Just tell me. Are you lying down?”

  “Sort of,” I replied. “Not really.”

  “Then lie down, Aggie. Lie down and tell me what you’re wearing.” I heard his breathing grow heavier. “Please.”

  Describing my pale, hairy body in the bath was bad enough. Did I really have to do this? Making a mental note to start some sort of exercise as soon as possible, I ran my fingers across the sweatshirt I wore to sleep, the sweatshirt from college that I’d stashed in the back of my closet when I moved in with Jack. I don’t think Jack even knew about this sweatshirt.

  “A sweatshirt,” I said, moving my hand up the neckline I had cut years ago in an effort to look cool.

  “Take it off,” he said.

  “Really, Jack?” I asked.

  “Really.”

  This was the last thing I wanted to be doing. But Jack wanted it. Jack wanted me. Maybe if I gave him what he wanted, he’d come back sooner. I sat up a little and peeled off the sweatshirt. Still holding the phone, not wanting to put Jack down, I yanked the sweatshirt over my head with the other hand and tossed it onto the floor. I lay back down. The phone and Jack were gone.

  “Aggie?” I heard him call. I looked around.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. The phone was trapped in the sweatshirt. I tried to reach for it on the floor but fell out of bed and landed with a thump. I scrambled for the phone. In a sweat, I reached for it.

  “I’m back,” I heaved, on all fours. “I’m here.”

  “Now what,” he breathed. “What’s left?”

  If only you knew how many layers were left. I climbed back into bed, lay flat on my back, closed my eyes, and tried to concentrate.

  “What else?” he said. “What else are you wearing?”

  “A long-sleeved T-shirt,” I said, my eyes closed.

  “Take that off, too.” I put the phone down next to me, hit the speaker button, and pulled the waffle-knit shirt up over my head. I yanked my arms out and threw it down.

  “What else?”

  “An undershirt.”

  “Take it off.” What was he panting about? I was the one doing all the heavy lifting.

  “Sweatpants.”

  “Take them off, Aggie.” I shimmied the pants down to my ankles and kicked them off, all without the use of my hands.

  “Leggings,” I said. “Leggings are next.”

  “Jesus Christ, how much are you wearing to bed?”

  “If you must know,” I said, opening my eyes and sitting up again, “I sleep like a bag lady. I layer up because it’s freezing when I fall asleep, even after I take a bath in a very old tub. Jack, George Washington could have bathed in this tub. A
t some point, usually around five, the heat kicks in. Full blast. I don’t want to boil in my bed, so I need to start peeling off layers. By six, when Grace starts to call for me, I’m in a T-shirt and underwear. Really big underwear. Turns out really big underwear keeps you a lot warmer. You’ve caught me just before the heat wave. It’s about to get pretty damn hot, Jack. You don’t wanna miss it.” I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  “I can wait, Aggie,” he said, refusing to mirror my anger. “I can wait for you to peel off all your layers.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re only halfway there, so I’m just not sure it’s worth it, Jack.”

  “Don’t you want to feel my hands on you?” he asked. “Don’t you want me, Aggie?” The growling had returned, and it was hard to resist. I felt myself getting warmer.

  “My God, yes. I want it more than you know. I want your hands on me, Jack. I just don’t want to spend thirty minutes getting undressed only to feel my hands on me.” I paused and squeezed my eyes shut. “If you don’t want to answer any of my questions, then fine. But if you want me, Jack, if you really want to touch me, then you’re going to have to come and do it yourself.”

  Fantastic, I thought, looking at the pile of clothes next to me. Now I have to put all this shit back on again.

  -30-

  Beeks called first thing in the morning. She called to ask what Grace wanted for Christmas. While she was reeling off a list of ideas, I told her about Jack. I thought catching Beeks off guard would keep her from losing her mind. It did not work.

  “He wanted you to do WHAT?” She launched immediately into her yelling portion. “MY GOD, AGGIE, THAT GUY DOESN’T QUIT. The only thing Brian and I ever do on the phone is fight.” She then proceeded to ask me all sorts of sordid questions.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “What do you have to do to yourself?”

  “Beeks!”

  “And what’s he doing while you’re doing the flannel-pajama striptease? Do I even want to know?”

  “Beeks!”

  “And how does he know you’re actually doing it and not just faking it while you watch TV on mute? Do you have to take pictures? Do you need to send him proof?”