Teach Me

by R. A. Nelson

  I stare. I just now realize Mom’s got on her old-lady-can’t-hang-past-seven nightgown and fuzzy pink Kmart slippers. She’s a Dr. Seuss character. She touches Schuyler’s arm—“Let me fix you something to eat, honey”—and shuffle duffle muzzle muffs off to the kitchen.

  Schuyler frowns.

  It’s the way his face is shaped. People always think he’s mad at them.

  Is he mad at me?

  “I know you saw me coming out of calculus,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “This has got to stop, Nine. You don’t call me back, you duck out at lunch, you ignore—”

  “Okay.”

  He brightens. I’m the only one besides his mom who could tell: his ears go up.

  “Just like that?” he says. “You’re not going to tell me what’s been going on?”

  “Nope.”

  He looks me over for clues. “Okay. You’re dying. You’re hooked on Ecstasy. You’re Mariette in Ecstasy.”

  “I’m tired.”

  The ears droop. When one of us throws out an obscure reference, the other is supposed to immediately regurgitate the source.

  “Come on,” he says. “Mariette in Ecstasy. Book about a gonzo nun.”

  I turn away and slump on the sofa. My cat, Kitty Nation, knows when I’m feeling lost, hurt. He jumps in my lap and starts kneading my stomach with his paws. “Don’t make me think tonight,” I say. “I can’t.”

  “Not possible,” he says.

  As usual, he’s right.

  I’m hot-wired for thought. And right now I’m thinking just how badly I need him to go. He’s too important to me. I’m too used to telling him things. I can’t hold it in much longer without him finding out.

  Say something. Anything but that.

  “Wait a minute,” I say.

  Schuyler despises cars. His parents refuse to drive him anywhere except work until he gets his license. He’s tried three times. I even lent him Wilkie Collins. Now he’s spooked about it, cursed.

  “So how’d you get here?” I say.

  “Whaddya know, there’s this thing called a cab service. You pay them, they haul you anywhere you want to go. No extra charge for the hip-hop ambiance. So where’s your dad?”

  I nod wearily at the hall. “Dreaming of xenon injectors.”

  He plunks down beside me. I’m excruciatingly aware of the pleasant man-boy scent on his T-shirt. I scrunch away as far as I can, pulling Kitty Nation to me like an orange pillow.

  “What’s wrong, you contagious or something?”

  “I’m just—just.” I refuse to explain myself. How can he know he’s the last person I need to see tonight? After the wedding, after seeing Mr. Mann again, I’m tired. I’m sad. Worse.

  I’m explosively frustrated. Yeah, that kind.

  Schuyler tries to get in through a different window.

  “Hey! They fixed the streaming audio at the Kansas City Ghost Club last night. We heard a million bumps in the abandoned morgue. Mirabile dictu! You’ve got to check it out.”

  Schuyler’s invented a prissy psychic who chats with True Believers on the net. Name: Darkwillow Nightseer. No joke. He drives the ghost hunters rabid pretending to spot all sorts of phony ecto crap on their ghost cams. They’ve banned his URL twice.

  Now that I’ve passed over to the Other Side, his virginal enthusiasm creeps me.

  “I don’t feel like anything,” I say. “Not tonight.”

  “But why, what ’s—”

  Chuffing footsteps send us back into Mom mode.

  “It’s ready, Schuyler dear.”

  The Lorax escorts us into the kitchen, knees creaking like saddles. We watch Schuyler lap up a plate of spaghetti and talk about nothing much. Until:

  “Are you going to the prom, Schuyler?” Mom says.

  My foot twitches uncontrollably. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d kick her dear little shins in two.

  Schuyler frowns and glances sideways at me.

  “Not really, Miz Livingston. Nobody psychotic enough to say yes.”

  Mom smiles. After all her worries about me lately, I realize she loves having Schuyler here. This is a rare moment of security, a return to a simpler time when I was practically perfect in her eyes. A time she could better understand. “Well, I know of a certain darling girl—” she says.

  “Mom!”

  “All right.” She sighs and gets up from the table. “It’s past my bedtime. See you night owls in the morning.”

  We watch her go until the bathroom door shuts and we hear water sandblasting the sink.

  “Anybody ask you?” Schuyler says, looking at me probingly again.

  “They better not. Hey, I’m beat. Can I run you home?”

  I grab my keys before he can answer.

  We’re quiet on the way to his house. I refuse to tell him anything about Mr. Mann or the wedding. In retaliation, Schuyler finds a program on public radio he knows I hate. Now we’re submerged in blubbery moans posing as Space Music.

  “Please turn that off,” I say.

  He cranks up the volume threateningly.

  “Nope. Not until you swear things are going to be regular again.”

  “If that whale gets enough fiber, sure.”

  “Come on, Nine.”

  I shrug helplessly. “What’s regular, Schuyler? I don’t know anymore.” This couldn’t be more true. Everything I thought, believed, trusted—

  “You can start by at least not pretending like I don’t exist,” Schuyler says when we get to his house.

  I do my best to manufacture a smile. “That’s a double negative. I will do as you say. Pretend like you exist.”

  “Come on, Nine.”

  His eyes are melting.

  I pull into the driveway and touch his arm, heart stinging.

  “Look, Schuyler. I’m sorry. It’s not you; it’s me. Okay? It’s my problem. I’ll let you know when I can tell you everything. Just . . . not yet. Soon, really. Please don’t give up on me.” I waggle my fingers through his crazy hair. His forehead is hot. “But thanks for coming over.”

  I hope he believes me.

  He hangs in my window and makes me promise to call:

  “I’ve got ideas!”

  Unless it’s a time machine all gassed up and set for six months ago, forget it.

  swimming to mars

  Insomnia.

  Sleep is a soft, cushy place somewhere below me, but I’m stuck on a shelf that won’t let me sink any lower. It’s exhausting up here. By some satanic miracle I’m also forced to hold the shelf up.

  Mr. Mann’s not coming.

  He would have been here by now.

  The terrible high from what I did at the wedding is gone, but the scaffold of the high is still there. It jangles my legs like an electrical field. I lie on my back to spot an orange star out the window. Mars. In another couple of months it will be the closest it has come to the Earth in sixty thousand years. It’s already flooding our planet with War Vibes.

  I’ve grown three inches in one hour. I’m being made ready for battle.

  I grind my teeth. I’m flopping around so much, Kitty Nation leaps off the bed and pads disappointedly up the hall. I shift to a diagonal position on the mattress so my Amazonian feet won’t hang over. You can only do this if nobody is sharing your bed with you.

  Bed.

  I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Mann and Alicia, the newly joined couple.

  What they are doing right now. Newly joining.

  I wiggle my toes together, desperately pretending some of them are his. This is what marriage must feel like: a nest of ecstatic phalanges.

  Sharing.

  A sickening possibility washes over me:

  What if the joining is not so new? What if Mr. Mann was schtupping both of us at the same time? I jerk up to a sitting position, hands in fists. Kill her. Kill them both.

  Is he saying the same things to her that he said to me?

  WILD Nights! Wild nights! Were I with thee, Wild nig
hts should be Our luxury!

  A little poetry, and we flop on our backs in the open-for-business position? Or does Emily Dickinson only work on stupid smart girls like me?

  Were I with thee

  God.

  Another thought sends me springing up like a galvanized frog: Alicia is falling asleep in his arms tonight. I never could.

  I smother a banana spider scream with my pillow. My lips blubber across the pillowcase, but I’m too electromagnetic to bawl. The house is rattling in rhythm to Dad’s vast asthmatic snores.

  I have to do something to keep from tearing at my flesh.

  Go.

  I kick off the covers and haul my telescope, a four-inch refractor, out to the backyard. I’m wearing nothing but a nightshirt, but the hour feels good on my skin. I’m a Japanese carp, a koi, swimming in darkness.

  Dew wets my long toes. I plant the scope’s wooden legs in a grassy spot away from my parents’ window. The light is okay here; Schuyler shot out the streetlamp with a CO2 pistol the day I got my scholarship letter: Professor Emeritus of Astronomy Stephen N. Bracewell is pleased to announce—squat. I didn’t get the paperwork in on time. So now I’m not going. I don’t particularly care. Not anymore.

  Mars is crossing Aquarius.

  Refractors are old school but better than reflectors for resolving surface details. I take out my best eyepiece, a 25-mm orthoscopic, drop it in. For once I don’t wait for the optics to cool. The altizimuth controls turn smoothly in my fingers. There it is: Mars, a tiny orange ball. I have to constantly adjust the scope to keep it in view. I used to be saving up for a clock drive that tracks the object automatically as it crosses the sky.

  Used to be. What’s the use anymore in dreaming, wanting, planning? What good have those things ever done me? In the end?

  I look at Mars. A dust storm covering two billion square acres looks like mold on a peach. Light sweeps over the lawn as a car floats by.

  A Honda.

  My heart expands.

  Mr. Mann drives a ‘99 Civic. Green with tan interior. It smells like vanilla and vinyl. The glove box is crammed with misfolded maps. If you tilt the seats all the way back, you can—he’s here! He’s here!

  The Honda rolls away. I watch until it reaches the end of the block and turns, disappears behind a fence.

  Hopeless.

  When I look again, Mars has skidded out of view and the moon is rising. I put the eyepiece back in its Tupperware box and swim back inside, starting to cry.

  Fact:

  Koi are domestic mutations of the common freshwater carp, Cyprinus carpio. They are sexually mature at twelve inches in length.

  What am I a mutation of?

  cat splitter

  Monday.

  The sky gray as this dissecting table where I’m sitting. There is massive suction today.

  Human phys class. I’m certainly human and physical today. I’ve got my period this morning. I feel like Veruca Salt in the Blueberry-Squeezing Room.

  So I’m not pregnant.

  This makes me want to flip over tables and throw chairs through the windows we don’t have.

  Still, it’s my turn.

  Exactly five minutes past eight I march into the stinking Closet of Death and fetch Pussy Pancreatic from the blue plastic body bin. Pussy Pancreatic is the calico kitty cat we have been hacking to pieces all semester.

  This is the largest dead life I’ve ever held. At this point Pussy Pancreatic is about as organic as Mom’s Victorian hassock, but not as soft. I open the bag on the table and a smell comes into my mouth— not of something dead, but maybe a strange new type of metal.

  “Phew, daddy,” Hub Christy says across from me, blowing out his lips. “Gonna have some fun with you today, aren’t we, sweetie baby?”

  He’s talking to the cat again.

  Hub Christy is an offensive Offensive Tackle from the football team. He has a fifty-four-inch chest and likes to put his size-fourteen clodhoppers between my legs under the table. Ms. Larimore likes to employ the Friction Method of pairing lab partners: she believes my academic mojo will rub off on him. I wonder what will rub off on me.

  Obsessive Thought for the Morning:

  Mr. Mann.

  But I know he won’t come rescue me today, either.

  By now he’s on his honeymoon down in ole Mexico. Exploring Olmec ruins. Dancing around hats. Drinking bottles of stuff with worms on the bottom. Watching skeletons haul statues of the Virgin Mary through town.

  Sleeping in.

  Stop it.

  Focus on something else, anything. That’s what you’re good at. I look around.

  Here nobody has a face yet.

  A few are attempting to speak: Saturday night, bad makeup, cars, hair. Worst of all, TV. I have a theory: Small talk and television are killing Western civilization. I refuse to take part in the slaughter.

  Not that they would ask me to.

  The first day we took our cats out, Susan Carter said: “Just like CSI!” All I could say was, “Um, yeah.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Now she figures I’m a complete freak. She doesn’t try to talk to me anymore.

  I looked it up on the net. CSI is a show about criminal forensics. I don’t watch much TV except for old movies with Mom, the Discovery Channel, History Channel, TLC with Dad. The other stuff is a huge waste of time. Now all the kids are hot to investigate homicides.

  Except me.

  They know to leave me alone.

  But back to business.

  Hub Christy’s eyes are wet. Today he gets to use the big steel bone pliers. He already has them hooked on thumb and forefinger in rednecked anticipation. I clench my teeth and scalpel an entry-way into Pussy’s small head. Hub goes to work quickly, opening the skull with a chicken-crunching sound.

  “Want some?”

  He waves a gobbet of cat-head meat around. Only the pretty girls laugh.

  “Mr. Christy,” Ms. Larimore says.

  But now he’s attacking the membranes, the kitty cat corpus callosum. Splitting poor Pussy Pancreatic into creative side and math side. We take out the bisected brain, weigh it, slice it, seal it like a tiny stack of wrinkly baloney in a kitty cat canopic jar.

  We’re done way ahead of everybody else. Hub Christy is restless; there’s not much left on this cat to violate. The mouth? He pries his way in and explores this tight little cavity with the pliers.

  Pay dirt.

  “Here we go, baby.”

  My stomach lurches. It’s inhuman how far a kitty cat tongue will stretch.

  Exactement, Schuyler would say.

  “Stop it,” I say. “Please.”

  Hub Christy doesn’t notice my horror—that I’m about to spew. His eyes glisten as he strains.

  “Come on, baby! Give!”

  There it is again, the chicken-tearing sound.

  Run.

  I grab a pass from Ms. Larimore, push my way out to a chorus of snickers, stumble down the hall past closed classroom doors.

  My head is full of blood. The empty hallway tips over on its side. My face is sweaty cold.

  Nobody uses the bathroom beside the principal’s office. I stagger in, find a stall, fold over, and hug my knees. It’s possible to sleep sitting on a toilet. My consciousness wanders and finally blackens. I dream about Mr. Mann, his wedding picture in the newspaper. Only now he isn’t smiling. His beautiful eyes are black, hollowed out. He’s dead.

  Serves him right.

  When I wake up, my legs have gone numb.

  How did I get here?

  in the beginning

  Time.

  That’s the only way to explain finding yourself behind the Wal-Mart Rule the World Super Center kissing your teacher. Rewind to January.

  Picture this:

  In the beginning I’m sitting in language arts waiting on Mr. Mann. He’s coming over from a school in Huntsville. Nobody’s ever seen him before. He’s late.

  New block, new year, new teacher. I picked poetry for my last semeste
r as a senior thinking maybe, just maybe, I’m a little top-heavy in the sciences. Really I just wanted to mix up a new batch of kids.

  It doesn’t work.

  Prime example:

  “Hey, Nine, you got a pen I can borrow?”

  Harold Waters is sitting in front of me. He’s been asking me for pens for years. Never once has he given any of them back. I close my eyes and focus.

  What do I know about him? Start with the birthmark on the back of his neck.

  Color: wine. Size: penny. Shape: Large Magellanic Cloud.

  Harold’s head has no crown. His hair divides in a clumsy line, one rank climbing over the top of his skull, the rest spilling down in a long, silky, asymmetrical point I ache to snip.

  More? He loves reruns of Star Trek: Voyager. Robotics. Backgammon. But most of all, HO-scale model railroads. That’s right, choo-choo trains. The kind with cardboard towns and green sandpaper posing as grass.

  The kind you hide in the basement.

  How do I know all this? I focus. That’s what I do best. I observe. I learn.

  Whether I want to or not. It’s a gift. Sometimes it’s also a little bit of a curse.

  I know these kids too well. Their voices, their minds, their eyes, the ways their bodies move, their sounds.

  Which are slow, which are brainy, which probably had sex at fourteen.

  I know their favorite subjects, their clothes. What they think of Asians. How their parents treat them.

  Who’s horny.

  Okay, that’s easy. Anybody can figure that last one out.

  But I’m sick of them all.

  I don’t hate them. I don’t hate. It’s counterproductive. Besides, I actually find people really fascinating. It’s just that, after four years—seven, if you count middle school—twelve, going back all the way with a lot of them—there’s not much left to observe.

  Worse, the older they get, the more crystallized they become. Harold was pretty cool in the fifth grade. This guy was a genius with Legos. Now he’s becoming calcified as we speak.

  That’s why I’m something of a loner. It’s impossible to find more friends like Schuyler. Kids who are fluid, changeable, on fire. Kids with some range.

  “Oh my God, he ’s hot.”