by Leah Raeder
“What happens now?” I said.
“I don’t know, Maise.”
Say my name. God, keep saying it.
“You won’t break me,” I said, my voice low. “I’m not a doll. I’m not fragile. And you can’t possibly screw my life up any more than it is.”
That furrowed look, the mournful angel observing human tragedy. “It’s not just about damage control. It should be more than that.”
“Then give me more,” I said.
The fourth period bell rang.
I walked out, but my heart stayed right there where I’d planted it, a tender little seed waiting for sun.
#
Friday looked like rain. That sneaky summer rain that waits for a still moment and sucks the air out of the world Backdraft-style and explodes the sky into water. For the first time in eons, Mom drove me to school. We sat in the van like strangers on a plane, making awkward small talk.
“You still talk to Melissa?”
“Who?”
“That Melissa girl you went around with. The blonde.”
“I haven’t talked to her since freshman year.”
“Oh.”
Traffic light. Yellow. Red.
“Got lunch money?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you get it?”
“Turned a trick.”
“Watch your fuckin’ mouth.”
Green.
“Can you get out here? I got a pickup.”
I opened the door wordlessly.
“Babe.”
I looked at my mother. She had my face, under crayon makeup. She had the hick accent I’d ironed out of my voice. She had the dead-end future I would never, ever have.
“Let’s go out this weekend. You and me.”
Drop dead.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“Love you.”
I slammed the door. Pictured it closing on her face. The clown stamp she’d leave on the glass.
You wondered why I lied to you, Mr. Wilke? Because I’m never going to be her.
#
“We’re going to do things differently in this class,” he said.
I sat next to Wesley, my attention drifting outside. A big old granddaddy black oak shivered in a sudden breeze, a thousand leaves clicking dryly, like castanets. The smell of gunsmoke drifted through the open windows. The world was tense and desaturated, waiting for the catharsis of rain. I knew exactly how it felt.
Wesley filmed Mr. Wilke. Mr. Wilke said it was okay, as long as he had the subject’s permission. Permission was very important.
Remember that.
“I’m not a believer in tests or quizzes or any of that bullshit,” our teacher said. Bullshit got my attention. I turned to him. Casual today, jeans and a plaid tee. He wore glasses sometimes, simple plastic frames, the narrow lenses emphasizing that crinkling thing his eyes did.
I was not the only girl in class who noticed this. Hiyam, a girl with skin the color of butterscotch toffee and hair like liquid midnight, kept crossing her legs this way, then that.
Wesley held the camera on Mr. Wilke, but he was looking at Hiyam now.
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m only giving you one assignment this semester,” Mr. Wilke continued. “You’re going to make a short film. Any genre, any style, any subject. It can be a documentary about your three-legged cat. It can be a classic sci-fi genre film.” His eyes touched me, and I blushed. “Whatever. It’s up to you. Minimum three minutes long, max ten. You can group up or tackle it solo. I strongly encourage you to group—that’s how most films get made.”
He leaned against his desk. I thought about that body laying atop mine on the long front seat of his car. Hiyam yawned, stretching her arms above her head. Cleavage shot.
Wesley dropped his camera.
“I’m so not working with you,” I murmured.
“However,” Mr. Wilke said, looking straight at me, raising all the blood to my skin, “if you’re some kind of mad genius auteur, you can go it alone. It’s all up to you.”
Hiyam narrowed her eyes at me, like a cat.
“This project is due by winter break. We’ll watch and grade them together. You may not ask me any questions about it. I’ve told you all you need to know. If you weren’t paying attention, I’ll post a copy to our class folder online.”
“Hear that, butterfingers?” I told Wesley.
He grinned. “Wanna be partners?”
“No.”
“I’ve already got an idea for ours. It’ll be sick.”
This boy, I swear.
I dallied when the bell rang, hoping Wesley would leave without me, but he waited, faithful, puppyish. On the way out the door I glanced back. Mr. Wilke watched me, his face angled partially away, shadowed. Our gazes struck like flint and steel. And I realized that gunsmoke smell wasn’t ozone. It was us. We burned.
#
Wesley ate my chicken nuggets as I stared into the parking lot, moon-eyed. Here and there a dash of rain shot down, a meteor streak of water. The sky clenched, desperately holding itself in. There’s something so terrible about wanting something you’ve already had. You know exactly what you’re missing. Your body knows precisely how to shape itself around the ache, the hollowness that wants to be filled.
Jesus Christ, this was only the end of the first week of school. No fucking way would I make it to winter break, let alone June.
“Hey Maise.”
I glanced at Wesley miserably.
You know, he wasn’t terrible-looking. He had character. Deep-set eyes, bruise blue, intense. Shaggy dark hair that always looked windblown. Big Adam’s apple, big mouth that flexed easily into a lupine grin. If he ever gained any weight or body hair, I might’ve—no, I still wouldn’t. But other girls would.
“What?” I said.
“You’ve got a crush on that teacher.”
My belly tightened. Crush was understatement of the year. But it might be good to know how it looked to an outsider. “Why do you think that?”
“Cuz you’ve been walking around with that I-want-to-be-fucked face all day.”
I laughed, and sat across from him, plucking a nugget from his tray. It looked vaguely like a deformed rooster. “Hiyam likes him too.”
Wesley made a disgusted sound.
I dipped into the honey mustard. “You don’t think he’s hot?”
“He’s a million years old.”
“You are so childish.”
“Would you seriously fuck a guy that old?”
Decision time. Do I let Wesley know the real me, or do I make up a persona for him, a suit of armor I can take on and off? As if there was a choice. As if I wasn’t burning up inside with this. Every time I opened my mouth, flame licked up my throat. I could have razed villages, kidnapped princesses.
“Yeah,” I said. “I would.”
His eyebrows went up. He leaned forward. “Have you? With a guy that old.”
I smiled enigmatically and ate my nugget.
“Holy shit.”
“You don’t even know what old is,” I said. “Mr. Wilke is probably like, thirty. That’s nothing.”
“He was in high school before we were born.”
My heart paused. Little factoids like that cut right to the bone of reality. “So?”
“So, he was probably fucking high school girls when we were little kids.”
“Why do you have to be gross?” I said, and shoved his tray at him. “You are such a boy.”
Wesley blinked at me. I think he understood what I actually meant. Not, You are so male. Rather, You are so young. He was still seventeen, a December birthday, but the gulf between us was more than five months. It was generations.
“What makes you such an authority?” he said.
I shook my head and stood up, the armor going on. But I didn’t want it to end like this. “I’ll be your partner,” I said. “If you still want me to.”
Wesley shrugged, eyes on the tray. “Yeah.”
“Good.”
We needed something, I thought. A thing we could do to show we hadn’t meant to hurt each other. On impulse, I flicked his earlobe. He jumped so hard the table rattled, and I laughed.
“By the way,” I said, “we’re officially friends now.”
#
I was waiting at his car when he came out. Most teachers stay late on Friday, catching up on papers, making plans to hit the bars together. Mr. Wilke headed for his car exactly fifteen minutes after the last bell.
I could tell when he saw me, the hitch in his step, the quick, guilty scan for witnesses. In the student lot kids yelled and honked as they took off for the weekend, but the faculty lot was quiet. I sat on the hood of his car, one foot propped on the fender beside it. A tiny, distorted version of myself swirled in the hubcap chrome: a Southern Snow White, all skim milk legs below my cutoffs, red toenails and sandals. The silver sky wrinkled with storm clouds.
He stopped in front of the hood. His hand tightened on the strap of his messenger bag, his knuckles white spurs.
“Do you need to talk?” he said in a muted voice.
I shook my head, slowly.
His chest rose and fell with a deep breath. He went to the driver side, unlocked it. Stood there unmoving.
“We can’t do this,” he said, but it sounded like he was talking to himself.
I hopped off the hood and he got in the car. But he just sat there, keys glinting in a limp hand. Then he turned and looked at me through the passenger window.
My eyes skipped to the dashboard. Somehow, in my daze, I hadn’t noticed it. The stupid velvet pony with its too-human eyes. I looked back at Mr. Wilke.
There was something very boyish about him at that moment, despite the five o’clock shadow, the blue rivers of veins mapping the back of his hand, the entire adult world he was part of. He looked lost. Maybe it was hypocritical, but the boyishness I barely tolerated in guys my age was exactly what drew me to him. He was like me: not fully part of the adult or child world. An exile, watching wistfully from the outside.
Something sharp and cold struck my shoulder.
A car drove past, a face turning to us.
We were utterly still.
Another icy dagger, this time hitting the crown of my head.
Then it all came at once, the sky exploding into water.
Thank you Jesus.
Mr. Wilke sat there watching me. He didn’t take his eyes off mine for a second, even when my hair plastered itself to my face and my shirt turned to cling film, and I stood motionless, expressionless, knowing I was going to win.
He leaned over and opened the door.
I got in.
Rain drummed on metal, a hundred wild heartbeats surrounding us. Mist came off my skin as if I was some ethereal creature. Our bodies faced forward, our faces angled toward each other.
“You kept it,” I said.
A long pause before he said, “It smelled like you.”
Everything solid in me evaporated, leaving only breath. I weighed nothing.
He started the car. I felt the engine rumble in my belly. I was a very thin, transparent piece of skin, everything going right through me. A sheet of nerve endings. I pressed my palms to the seat and drank in the smell: the old leather of the seats, the new leather of his skin, and, startlingly, me. My presence suffused his car. Rain and orange oil, the creamy body lotion that was coming off on the seat. I wiped wet hair out of my face and Mr. Wilke caught my hand.
I waited, wide-eyed, ready for anything.
His fingers curled around mine, painfully. His whole arm was rigid. Tension corded up into his neck, his jaw.
No words. Just that crushing grip.
He let go.
“Where do you live?”
It rained ruthlessly. I had no sense of time passing, of moving through space, only the zircon curtain clattering against the windows and the heat of his body so close to mine. I knew he was barely paying attention either because he almost ran a red. He slammed the brakes so hard the tires screeched and I caught myself on the dashboard, his arm tangling with mine.
“Killing us both is one way to solve it,” I said.
He drove more carefully, his hands strangling the wheel.
The closer we got to my street, the faster something accelerated inside of me, a terrifying urgency. How could I stall? How could I wring more out of this moment before it was over?
He parked several houses down from mine. I didn’t tell him to, and there was room in front of my house. My heart stuttered.
Car interior. Afternoon, heavy rain. Two people turn to each other. Raindrops crawl over the windows and paint shadows across their faces.
Action.
“Evan,” I said.
It was the first time I’d said his name since that night. It hit him like an electric shock, opening his eyes wider, stiffening his muscles. There was power in it and I wanted to play with that power. But not yet.
“I’m sorry I left that night,” I said.
Him and the pony looked at me sadly. I felt a childish urge to hug it.
“Why did you go?” he said.
There was no choice here of putting on the armor. This man had already seen the real me.
“Because I was scared,” I said. “Because you made me feel like being myself wasn’t such a bad thing. Like it might even be special. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and I panicked.”
I grimaced, hearing my words.
“This sounds stupid.”
My left hand lay on the seat. He covered it with his.
“No, it doesn’t. You’re being honest, so I’ll be honest, too.” His fingers contracted. “This feels wrong, Maise. I’m your teacher. It’s not just about getting caught. It’s how our lives will get screwed up even if no one finds out. Sneaking around, secrecy, paranoia—”
“You’re seriously underestimating how much I like espionage. And it’s just until school ends.”
“Is that how you want to spend your senior year?”
“I don’t want to spend it wondering what could have been.”
His expression turned morose, inward-looking.
“Evan,” I said again, and he focused on me. “If I hadn’t left that night, if this kept going…would you still think we should stop now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you really want to stop?”
“No,” he said softly.
There was no desperate collision of bodies this time. We moved in small increments, my fingers lacing through his, my neck craning toward him. My gaze fixed itself on his jaw, the place just under his lower lip where sandy stubble graded into smooth skin. His free hand came up and touched my mouth, traced it, fingertips pushing in, against my teeth. Again I grimaced. I saw him through my wet eyelashes, blurrily. Unbearable. All this restraint, everything furled and reined in, while the rain came down with pure wrath.
A car roared past, throwing up a tsunami against his door.
We both started. It must have broken the trance, because then his arms were around me and I was on my knees, kissing him, pressing his back to the window. I tasted glassy rain and my own wet hair tangling across my face. He didn’t stop me to fix the shot. He wanted me as I was, raw, unedited. His hand ran up the back of my bare leg, his fingers stroking the inside of my thigh. I gasped against his mouth. Lost a sandal. Rubbed my face against his jaw, hard, feeling the grit. Mark me, I thought. Give me something to take away with me. Something I can touch when I’m alone, remembering this.
When we stopped to breathe he took my face between his hands. “You don’t know what you do to me. I can’t look at you in that classroom.”
“You look at me all the time.”
“And do horrible things to you in my head.”
My blood was wildfire. I felt my swollen mouth, my sharp teeth digging into my lip, my dreamy half-shut eyes, and knew what I looked like to him. “Do them to me,” I said. “Take me somewhere.”
He gave a lo
ng, long sigh. His lips were bright red from my attentions. “I want to. You have no idea how much I want to.” Two fingers on my chin, pinching gently. “This is moving very fast. We should think it through. Think about how to be less conspicuous.”
My face lit up with dark glee. “I can be discreet. I can be Harriet the fucking Spy.”
His hands moved to my ribs. Palms cupping my breasts, rubbing my wet shirt into my skin. It chafed, but I didn’t want him to stop. I wanted this. Imprint yourself on me, I thought. It felt like he held all of me, gathered there next to my heart, small enough to fit in his hands.
“I wish I could take you away,” he said in a rough, eerie whisper.
I shivered. “How am I supposed to make it through the weekend?”
“I was wondering the same thing.”
We kissed for a while, soft, sweet goodbye kisses. We traded numbers. We touched each other’s faces, hands. The glass had gone opaque, glowing with fuzzy spots of color, the way a camera blurs background lights. We kissed again. I tried to think of another excuse to stay in his car, and he smiled, reading my thoughts.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with you,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just don’t stop.”
I stood in the rain, watching his car go. A string tied to it looped around my heart and pulled tighter and tighter until it sheared clean through.
—3—
At seven Saturday morning I woke to Mom’s voice, a raven screech ravaged from cheap alcohol and cigarettes.
“Babe! I made breakfast. Let’s go shopping.”
I pulled my pillow over my face, wondering if I had the discipline to suffocate myself.
“Get up, lazybones.”
Curtain swish. Holocaust sunlight ignited my bed, seeping through the pillow.
“Go away,” I groaned. I’d been having a weird dream about being chased through a cornfield by a wild dog. I couldn’t see it when I looked back, just the ripple through the stalks. But when it growled I felt its breath on my neck, hot and toxic.