by Jake Wolff
Mr. Foster pressed too hard on the chalkboard, and the squeak sent a shudder through the room. “Now that I have your attention,” he said, “why don’t we get started.”
I pictured Sammy corralling his own students, reading the roster in the drowsy, defeated voice he used whenever he felt put-upon. He’d be leaning against the chalkboard, inviting thick white smudges onto the back of his black shirt. My mind drifted to the summer, and everything we’d done.
I could get in so much trouble for this.
I won’t tell anyone, ever.
Mr. Foster scratched his gossamer hair and took a deep breath. “Welcome back,” he said.
I left the porch light off so no one would see you.
It’s okay. I was quiet.
A girl raised her hand.
“A question already?” said Mr. Foster.
The girl lowered her hand. “Nope.”
Laughter.
Mr. Foster began his announcements, but all I could think of was Sammy’s head next to mine on the pillow. Lying there, after the first time it happened. Stunned, happy. Afraid to look at him.
“Are you okay?” he’d asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m embarrassed to say.”
“We’re both embarrassed,” he said. “It never stops being embarrassing.”
“Okay. A line from The English Patient. Katharine says, ‘I want you to ravish me.’”
Sammy’s face darkened. He stood and began dressing. “Oh, God,” he said, struggling to put his arm through an inside-out sleeve. “Don’t use that word. Don’t say ravish.”
“Why?” I gathered the sheets around me, the way women do in movies when they’re naked and their feelings are hurt.
He stopped cold with only one leg committed to his ash-gray corduroys. He fixed me with a stare. “Ravish means ‘rape.’”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, but I was already working my way toward it. Ravish. To fill with joy or happiness. To seize or carry by force …
He was growing manic. “Ravish, from French and from Latin. Ravish, ravir, rapere, rape. Oh, Jesus.”
“It’s not like that in the book. It’s romantic.”
“The context is different!” He threw his hands up. “They have the desert, East German spies, et cetera. Hitler. Anything goes.”
I’d never felt so confused—how could a person’s feelings change so quickly? “I don’t think you’ve read it.”
He sighed. “Well, that’s true. I haven’t.” He lifted his blue eyes to me. I could see him put the full force of his kindness into them. “Come here.”
Mr. Foster was still talking: “You’ve seen that I’ve put some information on the board about grief counseling. I want you to write all of this down because I have some hard news to share.” He waited while we dug through our bags for notebooks and whispered to each other about borrowing pencils or pens. Homeroom did not usually require note taking. When we were ready, Mr. Foster took a deep breath. “I’m sad to tell you that Mr. Tampari has passed away.”
I blinked. What a strange thing for him to say when I’d been thinking about Sammy that very moment. I’d seen him just the previous night, when I’d gone to his house with one of our lab rats that had fallen sick. If the rat had passed away, I would believe it. But Sammy? No chance. Mr. Foster was confused.
“What happened?” I heard someone ask.
Mr. Foster joined the circle. “I don’t know the details.”
The girl straight across from me started to cry. Melissa, who used to be fat. Melissa, who rollerbladed herself into shape, grew breasts, got a boyfriend. I’d see her skating around town, her blond hair bunched under a pink helmet, throwing heel toes and flat spins for the delight of passing cars. A Franciscan monastery was across from the fire station, a place with paved, wide-open spaces perfect for skating; sometimes I’d see her shoot out of there, laughing, with a line of angry monks jogging behind her.
“Anyone who needs to be excused from class today will be allowed to go to the student lobby,” Mr. Foster was saying, “where our guidance counselors are available to you.”
“Holy shit,” RJ said under his breath. No one knew the extent of my relationship with Sammy, but it was no secret to RJ that Mr. Tampari was my favorite teacher.
“I didn’t know him well,” said Mr. Foster, “but Mr. Tampari was a very good teacher, a very bright guy.”
I nodded, wondering if anyone else in the world knew Sammy as well as I did. I knew he grew up in New York and that his parents died in a car wreck. I knew he traveled a lot and could speak several languages, and not just French and Latin, but weird ones such as Maya. I knew that when he closed his eyes, it meant he was happy. When he cleared his throat, it meant he was falling asleep.
“Do you know what the ancient Mayans called breath?” Sammy once said. He tapped me on the chest, three times, near the heart. “White wind. And when you die, they say your white wind withered.”
RJ signaled to Emmett behind my head. I was aware of a silent conversation between them.
Emmett raised his hand. “Mr. Foster, we’re going to the lobby.”
Mr. Foster understood that we meant the three of us. “Of course, boys. You should.”
RJ grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me out of the room. At least, I assume that’s what happened. I only remember appearing, as if by magic, in a hallway full of snotty, weeping students, most of whom hardly knew Sammy. Near the staircase, a junior named Beth Dennis had attracted a small crowd. It made sense that she would know something: she was a gossip and her mother was a nurse. Her boyfriend stood awkwardly beside her, chewing on the strings of his hoodie.
“He overdosed,” Beth was saying, her eyes wet. “He overdosed at church.”
“Was it on purpose?” someone asked, trying to catch up.
Sammy. Overdose. The words did not make sense together; they were like the north poles of two magnets, pushing apart. Drugs were for unhappy people, for hopeless people, for the deeply depressed. They were not for people who had just spent the summer in bed with me, cuddling and kissing and reading mystery novels out loud. They were not for people who had fallen in love.
Beth’s cheeks bloomed red from the attention. “I dunno. But my mom said he took an insane amount of drugs, like, a world-record amount of drugs.”
I’d only ever seen Sammy take aspirin, though he would swallow several at once with no water. I’d seen him eat ice cubes in large bites when his head hurt, and I’d seen him press his forehead against the cool aluminum of the refrigerator. Just the day before, I’d seen him alive.
“Bullshit,” I said, surprising the crowd and myself. “You’re full of shit.”
The crowd turned to face me.
Beth did not hesitate. “My mom was there.”
I wasn’t one to make a scene, and this was the worst time for me to draw attention to myself. But I hated her red cheeks, her crocodile tears. “You sound so stupid right now,” I said.
“You’re stupid!” said her boyfriend, one string of the hoodie still hooked in the corner of his mouth.
A couple of teachers down the hallway heard his raised voice and began a deliberately slow walk toward the crowd, hoping we’d disperse before they arrived.
“Okay,” RJ said. “Time to go.”
He pulled me away and toward the west exit, which opened onto the soccer field. No teachers would follow us. We were the good kids, and by transitive property, all of our activities were good. I don’t think troublemakers ever realize this, how often the good kids break the rules. It’s a blindness that surely hurts them later in life.
* * *
I first met Sammy at the beginning of my junior year. Freshmen at LHS started school one day early to give them a quieter, less intimidating introduction to the building before the older kids arrived. RJ, Emmett, and I had joined a group of upperclassmen who volunteered to hang out in the hallways and help any lost freshmen find their classes or their lockers. Our jobs left us with little to
do during class time except stretch out on the dirty carpet and make fun of each other until the bell rang.
Sammy came upon us lying this way, holding our stomachs with laughter. He pulled a rolling suitcase behind him. We’d never seen a teacher do this. They all seemed so entrenched. But Sammy was young and ready to run—the suitcase gave him a fugitive quality.
He stopped in front of us and rubbed his eyes. “Look at you guys, all relaxed.” He jerked a thumb to the classrooms behind him. “Do you realize what’s going on behind those doors?” He had the biggest watch I’d ever seen. It looked like a tracking device, which only reinforced the notion that he’d recently escaped from somewhere.
We exchanged looks. “Are you a teacher?” asked Emmett.
Sammy leaned against his suitcase and stared down the hall toward the teacher’s lounge. “They made promises to get me here that I’m beginning to suspect they can’t keep.”
RJ sized him up. “I heard the freshmen this year have the lowest standardized-test scores since basically forever.”
Sammy tilted his head, considering. “That’s not really what I meant, but that’s interesting.” His hair was blond with a hint of red, like a yellow dahlia. It swept up and away from his forehead. Forget best-looking teacher—this was the best-looking person I had ever seen.
“Countries with the highest international test scores often have the lowest economic growth,” I said, my need to impress him completely transparent.
“I don’t think tests tell you anything,” Emmett said. “I think we should have longer school days but no tests.”
Who knows where he picked up that idea. We stared at him, unmoved.
“What do you teach?” I asked.
“Chemistry.”
My heart leapt.
“Conrad’s a science genius,” Emmett said. “The last guy quit because Con knew more than him.”
“That’s not true,” I said. I had liked Mr. Sevigne. He had heart problems.
Sammy checked his watch. “All right, showtime. Stay there, okay? Exactly the way you are. It will make me feel better to know someone is having fun.” He strode off, his suitcase trailing behind him.
After the final bell rang, I tracked him down in the chem lab. He stood behind the podium frowning at his attendance roster. He spotted me through the window of the door, and I had no choice then but to push my way through it. “I think I miscounted,” he said as I approached him. He’d written his name on the chalkboard, along with something about ergoline derivatives. He might have been teaching them about LSD.
He closed the book and frisbeed it to the ground near his suitcase. “I’m teaching something for upperclassmen. Are you in it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, not right now. But I’ve been planning to switch in.”
“You’re a … junior?” he asked, trying to parse my age.
“I skipped two grades.” Normally I tried not to broadcast this information—it alienated me from my peers and made teachers suspicious—but I liked telling him.
“Hey, same here. What are the chances?”
This commonality froze me solid with joy.
“Here’s to escaping high school as quickly as possible,” he said, and mimed clinking a glass with me.
It felt like the end to our conversation, but I didn’t want to leave, so I asked about his watch. This worked even better than I could have imagined. His eyes lit up, and he waved me in closer. We huddled over his slender wrist. He spun the watch face and tapped his fingers along the embossed keys. He smelled like the ocean and baby powder—like an adventurer, but one who would need taking care of.
“This is a graph of the barometric pressure since I moved here. I can compare this graph with the data from anywhere else I’ve been with this watch. Here’s Puerto Rico.” He spun the dial again and pressed more buttons. “Here’s San Jose.” The watch face glowed and combined two graphs into one. He looked up at me, delighted, and I looked back at him, more in love than anyone else had ever been—ever, forever, and anywhere—even in Puerto Rico, even in San Jose.
* * *
RJ, Emmett, and I camped out by the equipment shed at the far loop of the track field. I sat dazed with my back against the grained wood, tearing up clumps of grass with my hands. RJ did it, too. Emmett was cross-legged, squinting under the sun. Behind them, heat waves rose from the tartan rubber of the track. A pole-vaulter had left her equipment to cook in the sun on the inner grass.
Since my outburst in the halls, Emmett had been eyeing me as if I were possessed. My stone-faced silence after our escape only baffled him more. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked RJ.
I laid the back of my head against the equipment shed and shut my eyes. My fingers and toes were tingling, and I recognized this sensation as the same one I’d felt, years ago, when my father sat me down and said, “Something happened to Mom.” In grief, our adrenal glands flood the body with cortisol. A few years after my mother died, I’d written a research paper on the subject.
“Man,” Emmett was saying, undeterred by my silence, “so Mr. Tampari was a drug addict. Do you think he bought meth behind the old Blockbuster?”
“He was not a drug addict,” I said.
Emmett pointed toward the building, toward Mr. Foster and Beth Dennis. “So he just took a bunch of drugs and killed himself out of the blue? Sure.”
“He wasn’t!” I was up on my feet. Above me, the sky was a blur of spinning blue. “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.” What I wanted to say was He wouldn’t leave me, but I couldn’t say this, not without revealing too much. I could only stand there shaking, nauseated, totally lost.
“Okay. Jesus.” Emmett watched me with only the barest glimpse of the disgust he would feel if he knew everything. “I’m just saying. He was—”
“Why don’t you get Con a drink from the vending machine?” RJ interrupted. I can still hear him saying this—the effortlessness in his voice. It was the moment I knew I would break my promise to Sammy: I won’t tell anyone, ever. Twice already I had made too much of a commotion. I would need to be careful, and I would need someone looking out for me. This was especially true considering what I had to do next. I felt my secret fluttering against my throat as if it were a bird I’d swallowed. If Sammy was truly gone, I would need to set it free. RJ, more than anyone else, I could trust.
Once Emmett was out of earshot, I sat back down. Before RJ could speak, I said, “You have to take me to Mr. Tampari’s apartment.”
RJ looked behind him, as though I were making that insane request of someone else. “What are you talking about?”
“I have to get Number Fifty.”
“Fifty of what?”
“Number Fifty is a rat. I left him at Mr. Tampari’s last night, and he was supposed to bring him to school. I have to give him his medicine.”
RJ’s eyebrows went up. “You were at Mr. Tampari’s house last night?”
The pause that followed felt both endless and much too short. “We’re together … like, as a couple.” To say this out loud was not a relief. Sammy had only just died, and I was already betraying him.
“Whoa,” RJ said, but in the same even voice he would use to say hi or chicken nuggets. I could see his understanding of me shifting in his eyes.
I looked away. “Are you grossed out?”
“I guess not,” he said after a moment, but I could tell his own feelings were not what interested him. “So if he wasn’t a drug addict, what do you think happened to him?”
I shook my head—not just as an answer, but as a rejection of everything that had happened that morning. RJ’s words hung in the air, baking under the sun like the rubber of the track, and I blinked at them, watched them harden into permanence. It was my first time hearing the question that I would ask myself a thousand times, a million times, over and over for the rest of my life.
2
The Widow Self
I should acknowledge, for the record, that Sammy’s relationship with me was again
st the law. Sixteen was the age of consent in Maine, but Sammy was my teacher, which made our relationship a crime. Sexual abuse of a minor. If Sammy had been a woman, or me a girl, he would have faced two to three years in jail with the potential for early release. But according to Chapter 11, Title 17-A, Section 257, Subparagraph B, of the Revised Statutes of the Maine Criminal Code, courts could impose a harsher sentence if the victim of the crime was the same sex as the offender. Had someone found out about us, Sammy would have gone away for a decade.
I’ll never see him as a criminal, even if my aunt, my husband, and several very expensive therapists have tried to nudge me in that direction. None of them know the whole truth, the full extent of what I would discover about Sammy and the demons that chased him to Littlefield. I was only one of Sammy’s secrets, and because not even my husband would believe me about the rest, I never told anyone. To the people who love me, I was victimized, and my unwillingness to paint my memories of Sammy with the dark shades of victimhood suggests that I am still traumatized and still, every day, suffering at the hands of my teacher. But to recognize the wrongness of a thing is not the same as to experience it as wrong. In recalling my affair with Sammy, I can only describe it the way it felt to me: like a romance.
* * *
I turned sixteen on the first day of June. Dana baked me a well-intentioned, uninspired cake—chocolate on chocolate—on which she’d written “Sixteen!!” in a halting, weirdly baroque script. She was not the kind of woman who baked cakes. For Emmett’s sixteenth, she had picked up a Dairy Queen cake and decided not to inform the teenager behind the counter that he had spelled both Birthday and Emmett incorrectly. She baked for me, and only me, because she knew my mother had always baked. She knew I grew up with the sugary smell of a birthday morning, the sight of my mother whipping batter in a large wooden bowl, her biceps flexing in time with my breath. And, in turn, I knew that Dana’s concern for me, the way she treated me, was called love, even though it made me feel small and different and as if I would never be loved by anyone the way I was meant to be (like someone who deserved love and didn’t simply need it, like a blood transfusion).