by K. B. Nelson
“I don’t know.” I clear my throat. “If anyone wants to talk about Nathan, please see the psychologist.” The classroom door swings open. “I said go to the damn office,” I yell, but realize I’m not scolding a rowdy student. I’m scolding my best friend, the Assistant Principal Ashley Salt. A beautiful woman three years older than me, but with decades more wisdom. Long, wavy blonde hair falls upon her shoulders with grace, blending with the earth tones of her mild blazer.
She glares at me curiously, cautiously even.
“I’m sorry,” I say as I approach her, standing in the doorway, and offer her a warm smile. “Jason Mathis will be waiting for you when you get back to your office.”
She sighs. “What did he do now?”
“Snide remark about Nathan.”
“That’s not a crime, Stassi.”
“It was the tone.”
“I’ll talk to him.” She has a way with calming me down. Many would say she’s my better half, the sister I always wanted, but not the one I deserved, but I certainly deserved better than the one I actually got. “I’m here because you have a new student joining your class today.” She’s enthusiastic, and I remember a time not long ago when I would have been too, but now it’s just one more student. One more ungrateful piece of adolescent dead weight.
“I didn’t get the memo.”
“He actually just finished registering.” She peeks around the corner and waves. “Come on, Kemper.”
Kemper? No. It can’t be.
He rounds the corner with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.
It’s fucking him. Same hair. Same eyes. Same fine-cut facial features. Same name. Same, I’m going to fuck you now, eyes.
I freeze in place. He freezes in place. This is a huge fucking cosmic joke, or maybe it’s Karma. We stare at each other just long enough to make things awkward for the innocent bystander.
“Do you two know each other?” Ashley questions, her eyes shifting between the two of us.
“No.” I fold my arms over each other and lean against the frame of the door. “Of course not.”
“Let me introduce you then.” She places her hand on Kemper’s back. “This is Kemper Scott, and he’ll be finishing his senior year here at Ridgefield.”
“Hi.” I throw my hand out to shake his. “I’m Mrs. Hamilton.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Stassi.”
I break away from his touch and feel my body being swallowed by the floor. Ashley’s eyes burn holes through my body, to the point my internal temperature reaches a boiling degree.
“Do you know her?” Ashley questions Kemper.
“It’s on this paper.” He digs into his back pocket and pushes a paper copy of his schedule into Ashley’s hand. “See, right there. Stassi S. Hamilton.”
“We don’t refer to our teachers by there first names here, Kemper.” Ashley scolds him in a tone where he probably doesn’t know he’s being scolded. I’ve been on the receiving end of that tone one too many times. “That might fly in some new-age school district in California, but here in Ohio, we respect our elders.”
“My apologies.” Kemper’s eyes lock with mine. “Mrs. Hamilton.”
10
I’m parked in the comfortable chair behind my desk with my head resting against my palms that are propped up by my elbows. It seems most of my time lately is spent waiting, sometimes for something inevitable and other times for something uncertain, but I’m always waiting.
I don’t dare take my eyes off the clock positioned on the back wall of the classroom, above a shelving unit housing spare textbooks. I watch each tick of the clock, ticking from one second into the excruciating next.
The thirty-something students in front of me all stare at the textbooks folded open on their desks. Some of them are reading, while others are daydreaming, but most of them are playing on their phones.
But Kemper, the man—boy—who seduced me three nights ago, is too busy watching me to indulge in any heavy reading. He’s studying me, and it’s a struggle to not give him any ammunition, so I attempt to keep a straight face.
Another minute passes, but there’s still far too many to go. I grow uncomfortable knowing he’s watching me, and knowing that anyone could see him watching me if they were interested enough to care.
My eyes grow heavy and I feel myself drifting away. There’s nothing more calming, and tiring, than watching the clock tick by.
The bell rings, ripping me out of a trance like state. I push myself back against the chair and sit up straight, forcing a smile as students begin to rush out the door.
“See you at the game, Mrs. H.” Scotty waves as he exits the classroom, leaving only two people remaining in this increasingly claustrophobic tiny box.
Kemper and I.
He slings his backpack over his shoulder as he approaches. For a brief moment, I contemplate running so I don’t have to have this conversation, whatever it’s going to be.
He on the other hand, looks thrilled for the inevitable, if for no other reason than he doesn’t realize it’s going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight. He smiles widely as he reaches my desk.
“You told me you weren’t a student here,” I scowl and look over to the open door for a split second, ensuring we won’t be interrupted. I think about closing the door, but there are already too many whispers about me when it comes to my students.
“To be fair, I wasn’t a student Friday night.” He flashes a cocky grin. “I just enrolled today.”
“You told me you were an adult!”
His dark, brooding eyes flip acrobats, as if my confusion comes as a shock to the system. “That’s because I am.”
I lean across the desk and look up at him with apathy. “You may be eighteen—“
“Nineteen,” he corrects me sternly.
“But you’re still a child. A student.”
A smirk hitches across his beautiful, unobtainable, off-limits face. “Age ain’t nothing but a number.”
“So is a prison sentence.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he sneers.
I climb out of the chair and poke him in the chest. “This is my life. My career.” A life and career I’m holding onto by a thread, but they’re mine regardless.
“I can see it in your eyes.” He leans across the desk until we’re face to face, an inch apart or less. “You’re damaged, and I’m okay with being your distraction.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say with gravel in my voice, because that’s not exactly true. He knows too much about me. He’s seen me at my most vulnerable, more than anyone else has ever seen me. He races to the door and scans the hallway to make sure nobody sees him, then pulls the door shut. “What are you doing?” I scold him and dart to the door with the intention of ripping it open, but he cuts me off with his strong body.
He bites into his lip and presses forward until he’s hovering above me. “I know that you like my lips.”
I step back.
“I know that you love to be fucked, if for no other reason than to take a break from the world for a moment at a time.”
I swallow a lump in my throat.
“I know that when you were beneath me in that car you felt free from whatever the hell it was that was weighing you down.”
“This is wildly inappropriate.” I throw my hand up between us, and shake my head in faux disgust. My heels clatter against the tile as I approach the door
He spins around to face me. “That’s something we can both agree on.”
“Then stop,” I command as I reach for the door handle.
“It’s wrong…” He paces toward me, “but it feels so right.”
“That’s called testosterone. It’s rushing through your blood. You’d fuck a couch if your parents were asleep in a neighboring chair.”
“I don’t live with my parents,” he says so matter-of-a-fucking-factly, as if I’m a dense log for not already knowing his entire life story. “But most of all,” he continues, “I
know what I feel for you. It’s tangible and it’s real.”
“It’s wrong, and it’s not real. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Really?” His brow arches and he steps to me, so close to pinning me against the door but he doesn’t. “I know my cock twitched when I was sitting in my seat.” He points to his seat, the seat nearest the back of the room under the light of the large windows. “I know that when you steal a glance at me, you’re lost in a memory, but you pretend as if you’re staring at a clock.” He inches closer, his body pressing against mine. “I know that every time I’ll pass you in the hall, my heart will flutter the way it’s fluttering now.” He drops a hand to my side, caressing a path down to my hips. “And maybe that makes me a pussy, but I’m a real man.” He drops his head against my neck and presses his knee between my legs. “You’re hurt and broken. So let me teach you how to live again.” And then his mouth is planted against my ear, hot breath burning against me. “I promise, it’ll be one hell of a ride.”
“Number one,” I say and push him backward, “this isn’t happening.” I travel to the center of the room, where he is no longer able to corner me. “Number two, this isn’t happening. Number three, your heart flutters?”
He scratches the back of his head, and his cheeks flush a pinkish red. “Yeah.”
“Love at first sight isn’t a thing, despite what you may read in the books or see in the movies.”
He purses his lips and shakes his head. “I never said I was in love.”
“Saying your heart flutters is practically the same thing.”
He begins to retreat away from me, stumbling backward as one foot hooks around the leg of a desk. “Yeah, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“You excite me.” His eyes glisten. “You thrill me.” His lips so bitable. “The way you provoke me with the most innocent of looks.”
“That’s not provocation. It’s embarrassment. It’s shame.”
“It’s lust.”
“Call it what you want to call it, but Webster defines this relationship as over.” I reach for the door handle one last time. “I’m your teacher. You’re my student. We don’t know each other, and we never will outside of this classroom.”
“Am I just supposed to pretend that night didn’t happen?”
“Do you not remember what you said?” I pull the door open, and gesture for him to leave. “Whatever happens tonight won’t have had happened in the morning.”
“That was before I realized I’d be seeing you again,” he wags a finger at my face as he steps out into the hallway.
“You need to go.” I don’t wait for a response before I close the door on his face. I throw myself backwards against the door, close my eyes, and take a long, deep breath.
There’s no fucking way this ends well.
From the desk, I hear my phone vibrating against the drawer. I rush over and retrieve the phone and put it to my ear.
I grow cold, and taste the vomit rising through my throat. I collapse onto the floor, sobbing and wailing a silent wail.
I rip open the top drawer of our bedroom dresser and search furiously through a deep selection of socks. My hand curls around the butt of a gun. I drop the clip to check to see if it’s loaded.
It is.
I push the clip back into the gun and throw it into my purse, ignoring the silent ringing of the phone, with my husband’s face flashing on the screen. Through the picturesque windows, the sun begins to descend beneath the rolling hills outside.
11
I’ve walked a thousand miles up and down these halls; the same corridors where I spent my youth. The plan was always to become a teacher, but I was never meant to return to this place once I had finally mustered the strength to leave it all behind.
Love has a crazy stupid way of changing everything. It can make you forget you were supposed to be someone else. Sometimes, it can make you forget who you always were as you blossom into someone new.
You take the good with the bad, and pray silent enough so no one can hear you. You pray that somehow the good outweighs the bad, and that’s the secretive formula of happiness:
A + B – C / personal threshold for bullshit = Happiness
There are people in this world who can’t be happy, and there are people in this world who don’t deserve to be happy. I’m not happy, and I don’t know if it’s because I lost that ability a long time ago, or if it’s because I don’t deserve it.
It doesn’t much matter why though.
I feel as if I’m walking a tightrope, but with every careful step along the slim rope, I find the destination slipping away from me. One step forward, and two steps back. I look over the edge, and think about jumping.
I never do. Whether it’s reality, or a too real to not be a dream, I always come back from the brink and continue my march across the tightrope. That was then, and this is now.
Rage races through my veins. It took an injection of anger to diffuse the sadness of a broken heart after that fateful phone call. It was a call I’ve been waiting on for a year minus a day, where each day I woke up thinking, today’s the day. Naively, I always believed he’d pass on his own in the depths of the night. I couldn’t have foreseen that his parents—the people who had sent him into a downward spiral because they refused to accept who he was—would be the ones to pull the plug.
Nathan’s dead, and the last vestige of my heart has been ripped off like a BandAid covering a fresh gunshot wound. It hurts at first, and then it burns. Finally, it goes numb.
I’m numb, but somehow I feel the cold metal sheathed under the weight of my right hand. The hallways are dark, with the softest paintings of artificial light lighting the thin passages just enough to see. The air is thick, but chilly, suffocating me with a torrid vengeance.
Outside these hallowed halls, a battle rages on the field, where each team is lost in a game that has the obtuse power to dictate futures. Young men will lose their souls on that field tonight, while others will find validation.
Others—my husband—will lose everything the way I once lost everything. What’s left of his heart and soul could be shattered, but he’s losing more than that. He’s losing the power he holds over me. No longer will he question me about my whereabouts in the heat of a game.
I come to a stop at a four-way intersection, where a short hallway bleeds into the oversized cafeteria on one side, and three corridors of classrooms all meet in this center.
It’s poetic that my life will end right here in this spot. I raise the gun to my head and close my eyes.
My heart pounds against my chest, crying for me to stop. My brain kicks against my skull, begging me to reconsider. My soul does nothing—it’s too far gone. In a world where I’ve become inundated with voices dictating what I should do, and who I’ve become, I opt to listen to the most silent of the voices.
My finger hovers against the trigger with an eerie rhythm pulsing through my sweating appendage.
“Stassi?” a familiar voice calls from beside me, a voice belonging to a certain stranger named Kemper.
I angle my eyes to look at him, standing beside me in bootcut jeans, wearing a white jersey with purple numbers, tucked underneath denim. He’s sweaty, his hair tangled just above dark brows, and his face glistening under the low blue-toned light. There’s a haunted pale look etched into the design of his face, contrasted against the darkness behind him and in the space between us.
“What are you doing here?” I question.
“I think that’s the least important question in this scenario.” He raises a hand, cautioning me. “You don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t pretend to know what I do or don’t want.” I twist on my foot to face him, holding the gun still in the process so that it’s still aimed squarely at my head. “You don’t know me.”
“That’s true.” His tongue laps around dry, parched lips. “But I want to know you.”
“You’re a student
.”
“That’s also true.” He nods his head, an attempt to distract me with his God-crafted face, but I eye his feet as they take a measured step toward me. “But I know what I feel for you. It’s crazy, I know that, but it feels real.”
“Please stop.”
“You’re not exactly giving me that option.”
“Stop or I’ll shoot.” I reaffirm my grip on the gun, my trigger finger flirting dangerously close to finality. “I mean it.”
“You’ve been hurt by someone or something.” He shrugs, as if he’s carrying apathy on his shoulders. “That’s life. It’s hard and it’s stupid, but it’s also beautiful.” He nods with a forced smile, a promising ray of light in the darkest of nights. “Choose life, because it’s beautiful.” He takes another step, but I counter his approach with two steps back. “There’s pain, and there’s sorrow. There are clouds on rainy days, and sometimes I’m too burdened to get out of my bed on Monday mornings.” He stops moving when he realizes that with every step he takes, I retreat further from him. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but I want to know. I want to know who you are beneath the facade.” He exhales a warm explosion of air and wipes his palm against his sweaty face. “I want to know that people can come back from the darkness, because it gives me hope that the darkest of days will fade away.”
I stand there motionless in every part of my body, except for my beating heart, racing mind, and dancing trigger finger. An uncomfortable silence settles in, and a door slams in the distance. I swear I can hear the bowel of a ship buckling as if it’s sinking, but it’s just the precursor to victorious cries screaming from the stadium as someone has scored a touchdown. Presumably from the thunderous chants, the Chiefs are once again winning.
“My parents disowned me because I was a user,” he continues. “After living on the streets for three months, I checked into rehab. I lost a year of my life, but I saved my life. I’ve got no family, and I’ve got no friends. In this spinning world, I’m driving solo, and sometimes the loneliness eats me alive, and other times, it’s the most peaceful existence.” He eyes me for a brief moment and takes a calculated step toward me. I don’t flinch or stumble backward. I’m stuck in place like a fool who should have jumped a long time ago. “Nobody knows me here. It was the only way I was going to get a fresh start, to move somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past.”