Dear Reader

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Dear Reader Page 3

by Mary O'Connell


  “Sorry,” the girl in the next stall gasped out.

  “Oh, no. It’s not you.” Flannery turned the book over and held it close to her face, squinting as if she were a Quik Shop clerk checking the authenticity of a fifty-dollar bill. To double-check her fading dream theory, Flannery gave the soft ridge of fat bordering her thumbnail a vicious little pinch. It hurt. In dreams, one did not feel physical pain. That leaves crazy, she thought. That leaves exceedingly super-crazy.

  She heard another splash and looked over and saw that the girl’s chestnut brown boots were pointed toward the toilet so that the UGG tags faced the front. All the beautiful Sacred Heart girls had long moved on from the ubiquitous Uggs that middle-aged women wore to the grocery store, so aside from the rosary of potential torments beading though Flannery’s mind—extreme anxiety, the flu, bulimia, pregnancy, extreme anxiety, the flu, bulimia, pregnancy—the girl was barfing in mom boots.

  Flannery church-whispered: “Are you okay?” Her trembling hands made the pages of Wuthering Heights quiver as she reread the sentence: “The spent, ragged breath of someone who loves you.”

  “I have food poisoning,” the girl said, her voice high and hoarse.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Whenever someone vomited on the school grounds, the janitor covered the puddle with colorful, absorbent rock poured from a fifty-pound bag, so as Flannery sat on the closed toilet reading, her mind’s eye envisioned not only the deep colors of Miss Sweeney’s Kansas prairie reverie but also the chemical pastels of aquarium gravel: blue and yellow, lavender and green. Flannery tried not to breathe through her nose as she attempted to both puzzle out how the beginning narrative of Wuthering Heights—Mr. Lockwood meeting the adult, embittered Heathcliff—had been seemingly replaced by Miss Sweeney’s first-person account, and to comfort the girl in the next stall.

  “Um. Do you want me to call someone?”

  “God! Seriously?” Flannery marveled at how quickly the girl’s vulnerable sick-voice reverted to snark: “Just leave me alone, obviously.”

  “Sorry!” Of course—what was she thinking?—of course she should give the girl her privacy. Flannery stood and unlocked the stall door; she grabbed up her backpack and Miss Sweeney’s purse, but kept the copy of Wuthering Heights splayed open, her thumb and pinkie stretched wide. She walked to the sink, turned on the tap, and looked down at the page.

  Dear Reader,

  Flannery paused, pressing her finger to the typeface. Addressing the reader belonged to the world of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë taking an epistolary pause to remind the Dear Reader, the Gentle Reader: I’m talking to you). Emily Brontë hadn’t used this coaxing convention in Wuthering Heights, and she wondered why Miss Sweeney was, apparently, using it to tell her tale now. She flipped the book over and looked at the cover—as if the lushly illustrated Cathy and Heathcliff could answer that question—before she started reading again:

  So there I was at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve—the Kansas sky evidence of God’s Glory, his gorgeous nighttime aesthetic—having a religious experience in reverse. My hand was on Brandon’s heart; his hand was on my rib cage. I stared up at the sky with zero curiosity about the Kingdom of Heaven because the physical world was plenty. Brandon and I would love each other while we were on earth, and when we returned to stardust, another girl and boy would take our place—that was the deal. I had never felt more connected to the earth, to all of the people who had ever walked the Flint Hills. I believed in the innate goodness of everyone: even the piggish family who had visited that very day, as evidenced by a Capri Sun wrapper glinting in the prairie grass, and the starving pioneers who longed for home, and the Pawnee, who would have original sin forced upon them by priests and preachers in love with a book whose varied interpretations would cause so much cruelty. But even those warriors for Christ must have felt so confused when they raised their eyes to the prairie heavens, because how could a person ever really believe in anything but the big sky, in anything but love?

  When the sky opened up, Brandon pulled me closer, his hands moving down the length of my back, and said Caitlin, as if he were naming the rain itself, the Word made flesh.

  Yes, Dear Reader, back in the day I had no use for religion yet I was—conveniently!—my very own Christ figure! Alas, I was certainly no longer the Word made flesh, or if I were, the Word would be REGRET. Wuthering Heights ribboned through my thoughts, Cathy mourning the moors, and Heathcliff: I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free … why am I so changed?

  O, sing it, sister.

  I did not especially want to be a clinically depressed twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher. I wanted to be that love-dazed eighteen-year-old at the Tallgrass preserve and afterward, on the dark drive home, watching raindrops quivering on the windshield before the whisk whisk of the wipers, rubbing my kiss-chapped lips and listening to Neil Young sing “After the Gold Rush”: Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. Oh, and now I wanted to erase my mistakes, to escape from the harsh world of the living and the unknowable world of the dead and join Brandon in that silver spaceship.

  When Brandon put his palm on my classroom window, I walked away from my desk and put my hand to his. In my peripheral vision he closed his eyes, as if in bliss or merely relieved. I had closed out Brandon before and I would not do so again; I would not let Brandon stay on the other side of the glass. And so I walked out of my classroom. I walked right out of my life. By the time I was outside Sacred Heart High and taking a quick lap around the perimeter of the building, Brandon had disappeared, but I knew where to find him: in the city where you could get lost, where you could drop the mask. Say good-bye to the vibrant young teacher from that wonderful Catholic girls school in suburban Connecticut! While I searched for Brandon I could blend in with all the other lost souls, my people. Because though I fancied myself as a kind of postmodern prairie girl, I hearted NYC, too.

  And so I became a deluded pioneer on Metro North at 8:17 without my iPhone or lip gloss. I was so saintly in my lack of possessions! My purse was in my desk drawer at Sacred Heart High, my hands were empty. I could not be weighed down by the minutia of my regular life. Pilgrimage ahoy! No keys or ID for me! Without my ties to my old life, I imagined I was freer to find Brandon, to meet him on his own terms. I’d stopped for gas on my way to Sacred Heart that morning and had left my credit card in my coat pocket—Providence!—so I was able to buy my train ticket and a coffee.

  How wonderful it was to be without my phone, to be unreachable, and if Sacred Heart tried to track me down via my emergency contacts, it would be impossible: My emergency contacts were, sadly, my parents. They were at a yoga retreat in Wisconsin while their kitchen was being remodeled, a journey of comingled hopes: curing middle-age malaise and the unfettered installation of quartz countertops and a Wolf gas range. Namaste!

  As I stepped off the train at Grand Central Station—It was Grand! And Central!—I kept my gaze straight; I didn’t gaze up at the ornate ceilings or whip my head around, touristy and indiscreet. I searched for him, discerning all the rushing people and images in my peripheral vision—not him, not him, not him, not him. Despite all that had happened between us, his boyish voice of optimism was still in my heart: Columbia, Caitlin! I decided to splurge on a cab and go uptown to Columbia, in search of doubled magic.

  “Look who can’t get enough Wuthering Heights!” Flannery looked up to see Jordan King giving her a big Disneyland smile as she walked into the bathroom, holding the door open for—great—Callie Martin. They were her past tormenters, though this year they hadn’t been quite as evil; perhaps they were discovering empathy or at least they were giving their raging stupidity a break. Still, Flannery would normally be horrified at a chance encounter with the bitchiest girls at Sacred Heart, but just now they seemed a respite—life resuming its familiar natural pattern—from what she had just read in Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights.

  “Hey,” Flannery said. She turned of
f the water and protectively tucked Miss Sweeney’s book under her arm, and, never wanting to invite torment, picked up her backpack and Miss Sweeney’s purse and headed for the door.

  Jordan elbowed Callie: “Hey, look who has Sweeney’s purse.”

  Flannery looked down at her shoulder and grimaced at the purse strap as if it were a leathery red growth, a cancerous lash she had just now discovered. “Oh, yeah, this is her purse. I found it in the hall, so … I’m going to go turn it in to the office.”

  “You do your thing, Nancy Drew,” Callie said, accompanying her laugh with an air horn blast, short and harsh. Flannery pressed the book closer to her body. She almost felt sorry for her, for all stupid Callie didn’t know about Miss Sweeney, about the malleable parameters of the known world.

  “God, it smells terrible in here,” Jordan said.

  Callie glanced over at the stalls. She pointed at the backward-facing Uggs and made a gagging motion, her index finger pointing to her open mouth.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Flannery said, feeling great compassion for the barfing girl, for she considered herself a sort of millennial, suburban Dalai Lama, not only wise and calm in the face of her own detractors, but also leading the Sacred Heart girls by example. So she immediately regretted her next cowardly, caving sentences: “But my sense of smell isn’t all that great. I have asthma. And pretty bad allergies.”

  Callie nodded. “Of course you do. But, hey! I’m having a party on Saturday, and I’d love it if you could come.”

  Getting in early decision to Columbia had been a game-changer for Flannery, and though the girls still made fun of her—she knew Callie’s invitation wasn’t sincere—they no longer took such sport in mocking her. At her last teacher-student conference Miss Sweeney had told Flannery that once she was away from Sacred Heart, the world would crack wide open. Flannery had thought of cracked-open geodes, jagged and ugly on the outside, glowing and colorful on the inside. Like a decayed tooth in reverse, you had to drill through the dull gray granite of your days to reach the inside, the new world, which might be creamy opalescent blue, royal purple, garnet, or emerald, and threaded with gold. In Flannery’s mind came Miss Sweeney’s red pen: This dental simile seems a bit slobbery … consider your co-pay before further treatment. But in real life, Miss Sweeney had been kind: “The trick is just to hold on until you make it to Manhattan, to Columbia. Once you get there, you’ll find your people.”

  And now it was Miss Sweeney who was going to find her people, her person, Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, if what Flannery had just read was true. But how could it be? Flannery tried to think of what to say to Callie—the invitation was surely encoded with a mean joke—but her brain was in pure fun-house mode: all undulating words and images and facts and fonts.

  Callie flipped her hair. “It’s just super-casual, my parents are out of town, so … you can bring a date if you want, Flannery.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Flannery said lightly.

  Jordan gave a hearty nod and smiled, the bitchy curve of it showing a quarter-inch of carnation-pink gums. “Thinking is good.”

  Flannery muttered Um and Oh and thus created a new word that braided dread, knowledge, and fear of the up-close future: It was Ummoh time to be sure. She ran her hand through her hair, as if breezy, confident, and the book slipped from under her arm.

  “Smooth,” Callie said.

  Jordan promptly gave her a suck-up affirmation: “Right? Soooo smooth.”

  Flannery picked up Wuthering Heights, unzipped her backpack, and quickly sandwiched it between her bulky Econ book and pencil bag, but Callie had already noticed the distinctive, romantic cover of Miss Sweeney’s vintage edition. “Stalker alert,” she stage-whispered to Jordan. “Flannery has Miss Sweeney’s purse and her book.”

  “I do,” Flannery agreed.

  Flannery hadn’t needed to explain anything to Miss Sweeney about her experience at Sacred Heart. And in this way Miss Sweeney was so different from the other teachers, not just the ones that blatantly sucked up to the rich, popular girls, but from the teachers who didn’t care enough to notice. Once, after class when Flannery was feeling particularly run-down, Miss Sweeney had looked her in the eye with great solemnity and said, “Flannery, Jesus himself said it best: The mean girls you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”

  Flannery had laughed, delighted with Miss Sweeney’s quick revision of the New American Standard Bible. “I thought it was the poor that we will always have with us.”

  “No, Flannery. That kind of error, so endemic to biblical translations, clouds our vision of the true heart of Jesus, who wanted us to know that the mean girls would be a never-ending problem for humanity, a feminist conundrum, which, though documented in popular films and literature, would never be truly untangled.”

  “It’s really hard to be a feminist if you go to a girl’s school,” Flannery had replied.

  Miss Sweeney nodded. “Or if you live in the world.”

  “I don’t mean, like, that I don’t believe in equal pay or anything crazy like that.”

  “Flannery! I know exactly what you mean.”

  Now Callie and Jordan were practically blocking the door, but Flannery scootched past them, her body turned to the side. She reached for the steel door handle, which would be so smooth and reassuring, nirvana on the palm. She thought of Miss Sweeney on the streets of New York City, mourning and grief-dazzled on her pilgrimage to reunite with a dead boyfriend. But Flannery also felt a sting of shameful jealousy: Miss Sweeney was free of Sacred Heart for the day.

  Callie’s smile was neutral, polite. But Flannery could see her eyes shining with predatory excitement as she raised her brows at Jordan, conveying the ancient code: Here it is, here is how one becomes the Alpha Doggett: Listen, dear underling, and you shall learn my evil and triumphant ways.

  And then Callie pounced. “Flannery? I’m dying for you to come to my party. And maybe you could bring Heathcliff as your date?”

  Secreted away in her stall, the barfing girl laughed.

  * * *

  Flannery looked through the square of glass in the door of the school office. A police officer was already there, forming a somber semicircle with the principal, the school secretary, and the ever-creepy guidance counselor, Mrs. Howell, who grinned when she saw Flannery’s face at the glass, but also flapped her hand, trying to shoo, shoo, shoo her away. But Flannery fixed her face in a mask of triumphant innocence—as if she hadn’t just rifled through Miss Sweeney’s purse and discovered her transformed copy of Wuthering Heights, now safely zipped in Flannery’s own backpack—and opened the door.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I found Miss Sweeney’s purse. It was behind her desk.” She used an officious tone and then inflated it further as she overexplained with a hearty: “It was just there, just right behind her desk.”

  Behind, inside … for Flannery, this was not a time to be picky about prepositions.

  The police officer, who looked about her dad’s age, offered up his polite, crestfallen thanks. “Much appreciated. That will help us immensely.” Flannery’s own father was in Florida with her mother, not at the beach or wandering awkwardly through amusement parks, the childfree couple at Disney World. No, they were at a conference on Irish Literature. And they weren’t professors; this was something they did for fun.

  She handed the officer Miss Sweeney’s purse, and he held it at an awkward angle away from his body. Flannery’s hands were still trembling, and when she balled them up at her sides, he gave her a kind smile. The lipstick-red leather of Miss Sweeney’s bag really made his navy blue uniform pop, but he looked so melancholy standing there holding Miss Sweeney’s bag, as if he knew that wherever she was at that moment, she probably needed her purse. Flannery wanted to whisper to him, and only to him: Miss Sweeney’s in Manhattan. Her old Alpha and Omega.

  “Better hustle to class, Flannery,” the principal said. He gave her a hearty, crinkly-eyed smile, as if he found her dear or am
using, before he stole a quick glance at the clock. “Miss Sweeney probably just had to leave for an appointment and forgot to get a substitute. So no worries, Flannery! Don’t you fret about Miss Sweeney’s whereabouts. Joe saw her this morning when he was out shoveling the walkway. She parked her car and walked into school, same as always, and according to Joe, Miss Sweeney seemed just fine.”

  The counselor grimaced, perhaps only worried about the principal blabbing details to a student. And the police officer shot him a look, but to Flannery, the officer’s disapproval seemed a bit more nuanced. Joe was the custodian and the only adult at Sacred Heart that students addressed by his first name, and Miss Sweeney was the only adult to ever correct them: “Hey, girls, I have a really super idea! Let’s not call the janitor by his first name, okey-dokey? You should all at least pretend that you think people are equal, and thus, equally deserving of your respect. Say it with me, now: Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson!” She had started off mocking the Sacred Heart girls, using the singsong cadence of a sweet kindergarten teacher, but in her disgust Miss Sweeney had resumed her regular voice: “Oh my God, it’s such stereotypical Catholic elitism—what is this, Galway, 1957?—that it makes me laugh. Almost.”

  As Flannery turned to leave, perhaps too slowly, she received a jolting shriek of encouragement from Mrs. Howell: “March!” She broke into an ironic march as she said the word, her knees high and arms swinging, and she hooked her thumb toward the office door before she let loose with some high-pitched, hysterical laughter and said, “Keep on truckin’, Flannery!” To make everything that much worse, she had on a burnt-orange turtleneck underneath a sweater vest patterned with tabby cats.

  Flannery did not march down the hall to her second hour study hall; she walked out of Sacred Heart High without her coat and looked up at the meaningless gray clouds, expecting … what?

  She hoisted her backpack over both shoulders and took a little walk, feeling like she could run for miles and miles, and wondered why no one had created a fruit-flavored energy drink based on turmoil, anxiety, and excitement. She had no fear of being caught, as no one would think a thing of it if Little Miss 4.00 GPA Flannery Fields were not in study hall.

 

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