Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

  “You’re a smart girl, sweetheart,” he said when I met him in a restaurant, “and that’s why I don’t trust you. You’d rip me off and disappear, and you’re clever enough to get away with it.”

  He asked what I thought of his product, and I told him I had no idea. I didn’t use. This made his eyebrows go up.

  “Very smart girl,” he said.

  Now that my two-faced teacher was gone, I could’ve stopped dealing. Hiyam was no threat. But part of me thought: fuck it. I’d never gotten a call back from all those job apps. Wesley, whose family had money, who had the luxury of stalking me with his expensive camera, was the one who got a job. I got fuck-all and a mom who stole my college fund. The universe seemed intent on presenting me with narrow, unsavory options. Maybe it was time I accepted it.

  For a horrifying moment, I could understand how my mother made certain choices. Sometimes life just shoveled endless shit in your face until you threw down your spade and said, Fuck it, I’ll find another way.

  I sat in my classes, staring at the bleak brown landscape pulverized by snow, decaying from the inside. With Him, winter had been glitter and auroras and feathery snowflakes falling out of the sky. Now it was smashed up and filthy, banal. Rust and rot and endless gray.

  Things I didn’t expect to do my senior year:

  Become a drug dealer.

  Become my mother.

  Find and lose the love of my life.

  #

  One Saturday I went downstairs and Wesley was sitting in my living room.

  “The fuck is this?” I said.

  “Babe,” Mom said, “he says he wants to apologize.”

  “Maise,” Wesley called.

  I was halfway back up to my room. “What,” I said. Not a question. The banister creaked under my hand.

  “You have every right to hate me. What I did was wrong, okay? Really, really wrong. I’m sorry. Can I talk to you, please?”

  Mom stood watching us both with interest.

  “This isn’t a soap opera,” I snapped at her. “Go amuse yourself elsewhere.”

  Her eyes narrowed dangerously, but Wesley’s pleading look assuaged her. She wandered into the kitchen.

  “So talk,” I said.

  “Here?”

  “Do you want to come up to my room? Do you want to pet my hair and put your arm around me and tell me it’s all right? Just say whatever the fuck you have to say.”

  Wesley grimaced, shrugging uncomfortably in his duffel coat. “Look, I know there’s no excuse, okay? But I want you to know I’m sorry, and I feel like shit.” He lowered his voice. “I thought he was using you. Hurting you. I guess I wanted to see it that way, and I tried to make you see that, too. It was wrong and I’m sorry, Maise.”

  I stared at the wallpaper running along the stairwell. In normal families, there’d be pictures here. Mom and Dad. Nan and Pop. Beloved daughter. Our wallpaper just had a yellowish film of cigarette smoke.

  “Why were you at the carnival that night?”

  “Summer job. I ran the darts booth.”

  I laughed. I’d probably looked right at him and not given him a second thought.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, glancing at him. “You always knew it was Evan.”

  I still thought of him as Evan. It was his middle name, according to Google.

  “I don’t know.” Wesley sighed, cheeks puffing out, hair flopping over his eyes. “Because it was your secret. I wanted you to tell me yourself. I wanted you to trust me with it.”

  “You didn’t deserve my trust,” I said.

  He looked at the stairs.

  “This is all moot anyway. I’ve got to study.”

  Wesley wiped a hand across his face.

  Oh my god. Was he actually crying?

  “You were right,” he said, still facing the stairs, his voice deep and shaky. “You were right when you said you’re my only friend. You’re the only person I care about who’s not family. I don’t expect you to ever trust me again, but I’m sorry. I miss you. Mom misses you. She was so pissed—don’t worry, I didn’t mention Mr. Wilke, but she’s told me how stupid I am a million times.” He sniffled. “I wish I could undo it. I put your private life on display for everyone. I thought I was saving you but I was just being a fucking creep. It’s messed up. I know that. I’m sorry.”

  He finally raised his head, but only managed to face the banister, not me. His eyes were glassy, a sheen of wetness on his cheeks.

  “It’s not an excuse, but you’re right. I’m younger than you, Maise. Way younger. You’re years and years ahead. And I didn’t mean to hurt you or fuck things up with him. I’m just a fucking idiot kid.”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

  I swallowed, too. My throat and the back of my eyes felt tight, pinched. “Siobhan didn’t call you stupid,” I said. “I know her. She probably called your actions stupid.”

  “Isn’t that what I said, Captain Obvious?” he muttered miserably.

  I stared at him. “No,” I said, and started to laugh. “You didn’t, you sorry asshole.” My laughter died as quickly as it had come. “You didn’t screw it up with me and Evan. You were right about him.”

  Wesley finally looked at me.

  “He isn’t who I thought he was. And I guess I’m not who I thought I was, either.” I shook my head. “You know who I am?”

  “Who?”

  “Same as you. A fucking idiot kid.”

  #

  Slowly, over weeks, Wesley and I started talking again. Eating lunch together, sometimes walking for miles when the roads were plowed, the fields flat and quilted with snow, our breath trailing mist as we talked about post-graduation plans. Siobhan invited me over for Valentine’s Day dinner and I melted into her arms, struggling not to cry. She didn’t say a word about Evan but I knew she understood everything, and just seeing her, this amazing person I looked up to who’d survived her own affair with a teacher, was enough.

  “To the only love that lasts,” she said when we raised our champagne glasses. “The love of family and friends.”

  I clinked my glass with theirs, but it rang hollowly.

  #

  Hiyam’s audacity knew no limits.

  “I’ve got big plans for spring break, O’Malley,” she said as we sat in the back of Art Appreciation, waiting for the bell. “I need you to come through for me.”

  She hooked her elbows over the back of my chair, leaning close to my ear.

  “Get me a key.”

  I burst out laughing. “You’re hilarious.”

  “I’m totally fucking serious,” she hissed, scraping a fingernail against my jaw. “You know what kind of cut you’ll get? You and your creepy boyfriend could move to Hollywood.”

  She had taken to calling Wesley my creepy boyfriend.

  I turned around. “There is no reality, parallel or otherwise, in which I would do this. You’re delusional.”

  “I’m disappointed, O’Malley. I thought the chance to blow this shithole would appeal to you.”

  “It does. But I don’t believe even you have that kind of money.”

  Her face turned sly and vulpine. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  “Right. Your dad’ll just let you take twenty grand out of your trust fund.”

  “I’ve been withdrawing small amounts for years. I’ve got thirty K he doesn’t even know about.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I’m not risking my life for your Scarface fantasies.”

  “You should reconsider,” she said, leaning forward, “or I’ll have to reconsider whether this arrangement is working out.”

  I stared her dead in the eyes. “He’s gone. I haven’t seen him in months. That threat means nothing to me.”

  “I didn’t mean him going to jail,” Hiyam said, smiling. “I meant you.”

  #

  “Hiyam’s blackmailing me again,” I said to Wesley as we sat on milk crates up in the water tower. “She’s threatening to narc.”

>   I’d told him everything that had happened with Evan, including the blackmail and dealing. He listened without judgment. He said it would make an incredible movie. I couldn’t disagree. We spent hours thinking up titles. White Town. Snowglobe City. The Lights Every Night. In a way, this was his penance for stalking me: acknowledging the secret I’d bottled inside for so long. Listening to me crying, laughing, raging, sighing over it. I could finally talk openly with someone who knew me, who knew how much of my life it had consumed. Now that I hadn’t seen Evan in months and had started to forget the feel of his body, the chemical trance it put me in, the thing I missed most was simply hanging out with him. Watching movies together. Walking through St. Louis, pretending to be characters from films. Staying up all night talking in bed. The way we’d be sitting silently in the car or a theater and see something ridiculous and look over at each other, smiling. The way we’d look at each other in class, through the absurdity of the lives we had to live, and sigh, knowing we’d be in each other’s arms that night.

  I missed the mundane things most. The precious minutiae I’d taken for granted.

  Wesley had asked why I still wore the Claddagh ring if it was over, and I stared at it, not even realizing. I’d taken it off but kept it in my pocket, touching it sometimes, like a talisman.

  “How can she narc on you when she’s the buyer?” he said now, shooting a stream of clove smoke at my face.

  I chipped at the ice on the driftwood with my shoe. It was so cold my eyelashes felt like a brittle fringe of frost that could crumble away in the wind. “I don’t know, but I need to get out of this. It’s like I’m in the middle of Goodfellas. This is way too serious to be my life, Wesley.”

  From up here the world was white on white: white ground, white sky, the clouds shining mutedly and rippling with silver like mother-of-pearl. There was a crystalline tension in the ground waiting to be shattered, all the buried living things raring to burst free and breathe again. That same feeling was in me. I was tired of this chrysalis of ice and frozen tears. I wanted out. I wanted to feel the sun again.

  Wesley had taken Computer Animation as his art elective. He didn’t have a camera glued to his eye anymore—now he was always lugging his laptop around, doing kinetic typography: text unfolding and cascading and flipping, word into word, a visual poem. I was pretty sure he’d shifted focus because of me and the stalking. I knew he missed looking at the world through a lens.

  “Hey,” I said. “I just got an idea.”

  “You have that crazy Irish glint in your eyes.”

  I leaned toward him, doing my best Gary Rivero. “I’ve got a job for you, sweetheart.”

  “Maise, I’m your friend, but I am not getting involved in the trafficking of controlled substances.”

  “No,” I said. “I need your particular skillset. And, more importantly, your willingness to be a creep.”

  He shrugged self-consciously. “What did you have in mind?”

  #

  March. Acceptance letters. A small pile of cash growing in my private bank account. A dream of freedom and Southern California sun.

  And always, in my pocket, in my skin, in the back of my mind, the hollowness where he used to be. The empty circle where my finger used to fit into the ring. The crimson flakes and ruby dust strewn across the ledges of my ribs.

  There were words for this feeling, but none of them conveyed the bone-deep ache of it, the grinding of cell against cell. It pulled my body into itself, a black hole consuming me from the inside, turning my bones supermassive, as heavy as I was on the Gravitron that night. When I thought I would finally collapse into myself I realized it was him, pulling at me. My skin stretched tight. My heart pressed right up against the bars of my ribs. I lay in the snow and watched the stars and even the Earth wasn’t strong enough to hold me down. A stronger gravity pulled at me. And pulled. And pulled.

  #

  It was a strange-looking building, more like an aerospace firm than a high school, steel struts curving gently against the sky with a sense of unfolding wings. The campus was huge, and I spent nearly an hour walking around before I found the car I wanted. I was cold in my wool leggings and skirt and thin coat. I caught my reflection in a car window: the bones of my face too prominent, too chiseled, the hollows faintly violet. Not eating well. Not sleeping enough. The cold got in because there wasn’t enough stuff between my bones and skin, just nerves hanging like spiderwebs, silvery and thin, undisturbed.

  I sat on the hood of the car like I had a lifetime ago.

  Kids milled around the lot, yelling and laughing. Two cheerleaders walked past, one brown-skinned and one tan, ultra-white fluoride smiles. Go Terriers, I thought.

  He wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice me until he was a dozen feet away.

  He stopped, the tension in him slowly unraveling until he stood there, slack and shocked. Jeans, dress shirt, blazer. Smooth-shaven, his hair shorter than it used to be. That face I had been seeing in my dreams.

  I swallowed as he walked toward me. His eyes never left mine. The closer he got the more bewildered he looked, and I thought, ridiculously, He doesn’t recognize me, but he dropped his messenger bag on the ground and raised his arms and I slid off the hood and hugged him, viciously. We stood like that for a long time. My eyes were closed. I breathed too deeply, drinking in the familiar smell of him, insanely thinking I could hold it in me, preserve it. The chest rising and falling against mine felt like warm summer earth, radiating stored sunlight into my bones. I never wanted to move again.

  After a minute or forever or two he leaned back and looked at me, still wearing that bewildered expression.

  “Hi,” he said in a soft voice, half breath.

  The last three months of my life rose into the air and dissolved like mist.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He touched my hair gingerly, let his hand drop. Pulled me close again, then leaned away and touched my face. He couldn’t seem to figure out where the proper boundary was.

  Answer: there wasn’t one.

  He unlocked the passenger door and looked at me and I got in. I closed my eyes again as he picked up his bag and came around. The car smelled so much like him, like warm suede and candle smoke. Like home.

  I had promised myself not to cry until I’d said something appropriately dramatic, but I was about to break that promise.

  Evan got in, still amazed/bewildered/stunned, and saw my face. He reached for me.

  Then I was incoherent for the next ten minutes, sobbing my stupid heart out, clinging to his jacket, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m ruining your jacket,” and when he laughed that beautiful kind laugh and said, “Ruin it, it’s yours,” I cried even harder, accepting his invitation.

  It’s somehow a lot easier to be courageous when you’re a weeping mess. When the waterworks stopped I slid away, burying my face in a tissue, everything a million percent more awkward. I had utterly forgotten why I was here. I had just wanted—needed—to see him, to touch a little, verify his existence. Well, mission fucking accomplished. Now what?

  Evan seemed to sense this and started the engine.

  He drove aimlessly for a while, glancing at me with giddy confusion.

  “Do you want to get some coffee?” he said.

  Slow head shake. Meaningful eye contact.

  His gaze lingered on me. Then it shifted back to the windshield and stayed there.

  He pulled up to an apartment complex. I followed him upstairs. We didn’t speak. Dingy white walls, boxes on the floor. An unlived-in feeling. He walked straight to the fridge and took out two bottles of Blue Moon and leaned there while I leaned on the counter across from him. We each took exactly one sip before we put them down and met in the middle of the kitchen. He clasped my face in his hands, his thumbs hard against my cheekbones, holding me still as he kissed me so, so lightly, as if pressing his lips to a dandelion he might accidentally scatter.

  Then he stopped, looking at me.

  For three months I had forgot
ten what the sweet hot rush of blood in my veins felt like. How alive my body was, not only in the obvious places but in the thriving red marrow, the chill prickling my scalp, the curl of my toes. I’d become as numb as if I was the one snorting all that coke. When Evan touched me I became aware of kitten-soft wool rubbing against my shins, the fine hair on my forearms standing on end, his hands unbuttoning my coat as gently and intently as if removing a bandage.

  “Wait,” I said. “No.”

  His hands dropped.

  God, what was I doing? What was this? I took a step back, walked out of the kitchen and through the apartment. It looked like an art gallery without art. Geometrical patterns of light and shadow slapped across white paint and hardwood. I went through every room, seeking signs of life. Mattress on the bedroom carpet. Beer bottles lined up on windowsills. Shampoo, toothbrush, razor. My reflection in the bathroom mirror, mouth swollen and claret red, eyelashes lacquered with tears, more alive than anything else here.

  “Is this what you wanted to see?” Evan said behind me. “My shell of a life?”

  I turned around and walked past him. My footsteps echoed violently in the empty rooms. If I spoke too loudly, glass might shatter.

  “I didn’t come here to gloat,” I said.

  “Then why did you come?”

  “I don’t know.” I turned again, hands raised. “To see how you’re doing. If you like your new job.”

  “If I’m over you.”

  Yes. “No.”

  He stepped closer. His face was blank, his words a soft growl. “I’m not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?”