by Gabi Moore
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All Of Me, Twisted
A Forbidden Romance
By: Gabi Moore
Table of Contents
Main Story
All Of Me, Twisted
Michelle
“Oh, Michelle, could you please see me after class today?” he said.
Words, they taught us in my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class for Adults, have meaning. Sometimes, some words can even have many meanings, and when you’re anxious like me, you learn how to read every possible meaning of every possible word.
I know everything there is to know about words. I know how to tell people off for using future perfect continuous tense incorrectly, I know the etymology of the word “mutilate”, and I know how to spell bureaucracy without cheating. I know that “I’m sorry” can sometimes mean “I hate you”, and “marry me” can sometimes mean “I give up.” It’s all in the context, you see, which is another thing my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class tells me.
“You’re reading too much into things” my exasperated friends tell me almost daily, but no, you can never read too much, into things or out of them, and when Mr. Cain asked to see me after class, well, there’s a whole universe of things that that could mean.
“Sure, no problem.” I said.
Mr. Cain smiled and nodded once, then continued nagging the corner of an old book that was resting in his lap.
If you look closely enough, there are words in everything. Take Mr. Cain for instance. His bleached white collared shirt says “yes sir” but his hairy forearms and five-day stubble say, “I’m a modern-day Hemingway, stand back while I engage in ennui and self-inflicted but romantic alcoholism.”
Maybe you think I have a crush on Mr. Cain. Well, so what if I do? It’s practically unavoidable at this point. There’s fate, and then there’s something even stronger: narrative necessity. I simply had to have a crush on him, you see. I was the plucky but maladjusted loner and he was the brooding and artsy teacher-type who was going to seduce me and awaken my inner slut. Tale as old as time.
He was crinkling up his eyebrows at the book, as though this would help him squeeze out more insight from the words on their pages.
“What makes this passage so visceral, though? What really jumps out at you?” he asked the class.
Mousy Linda cleared her throat and said, “The author is speaking to all five of our senses. She talks about the smell of the soil, the feeling of the air …so it’s all about, like, the body…”
She trailed off as Mr. Cain turned his grizzled gaze to her. It was pretty clear to me that poor Linda was totally not the heroine of this story.
“Right…” he said, gesturing for her to continue. “But what else? Take that further. Let’s develop that idea.”
Linda withered a little more. Nobody raised their hands.
“I think,” I say into the quiet room, “that she wants to show in this piece that the body is speaking. That the conversation is carrying on, but the message is now transmitted through the body itself. Words can have lots of different meanings, but in this passage she’s not interested in words anymore, she wants to show the body, as it is.”
Mr. Cain stops nagging the corner of the page and looks at me. He nods just once.
“Yes, I like that. The body as text. Good.” He nods again and changes his tone, looking back into the pages. “It’s certainly a common interpretation, but thank you for that, Michelle.”
Common? I look down at my arm resting stupidly on my lap. Common. Somewhere around last year, I had decided not to cover up my scars anymore. Yes, I know, self-harm is very 1990, but I was doing Troubled Teenager long before anyone else, I promise, and now there was nothing to do but own the many pale scar lines climbing all the way up my arm …especially when it got as hot as it was today.
I traced a finger over them; they were old calibrations from a time past when I measured my pain in a very different way. When I had ratcheted up all the way to the end of my arm, and had no more room to go, I had had to change my instrument. These days, I tried to use words to cut, instead. Words are sharper, and the wounds they leave sometimes never heal. Though everyone is happy I am 10lbs heavier and significantly less cut up (ha ha!) than I was before. The truth is, nobody knew just how truly lacerating some of the words I used on myself every day were. My body also spoke, except it said “broken” and “dirty” most of the time.
When Mr. Cain said the words “common interpretation,” I had quietly felt the word “stupid” cut into me a little, like a tiny sword. I sat in silence for the rest of the lesson, smarting. The hour drew to a close and I thought about saying something nasty about Linda’s cardigan, then thought better of it.
What on earth did Mr. Cain want to talk to me about? Having a crush on him suddenly started to seem a little inconvenient.
Mr. Cain
If I had a dollar for every time some angsty child came into my class and tried to impress everyone with her Tumblr poetry …well, I wouldn’t have to teach some dead-end writing class for extra cash in the first place.
The trouble with students like Michelle is that they’re desperately immature – and completely unaware of the fact.
Michelle was a thoughtful, subtle writer and created strikingly refined characters in class …but she was also twenty one years old. And no amount of talent could change that fact.
I’ve been writing for years. The old Middle School style melodrama and overwrought dialogue? It was a good thing she was pretty, because there was no way I would put up with that shit if she were otherwise. Michelle played the disturbed waif particularly well, but to be honest it didn’t quite suit her. She was too voluptuous underneath her ratty black clothes. Too robust. Her skin was a little too rosy looking, despite how bitchy she sometimes was to the other students, or how insulted she felt when I gave her a less than brilliant grade for one of her compositions.
I looked down at her assignment in my lap, and my “C” looped round with a big red ring. In hindsight, this wasn’t an entirely fair grade to give he. At the time, I thought it my duty, as an older man, to point out her haughtiness, bring her down a peg or two and truly help her with her writing. I had no idea that within a matter of a few months it would be her showing me a thing or two about writing …but I’ll get to that in a moment. At that point, was I inventing excuses to talk to her alone? I couldn’t say. But I was her senior (by a hell of a lot) and her teacher.
Did I have a crush on her? Well, that’s entirely beside the point. She dutifully stayed behind class and I noticed she was wearing, as usual, an outfit of only black and some junky Goth jewelry. She smelled like lilacs.
“Michelle, thanks for staying. I …wanted to discuss this short story you submitted last week,” I said, relishing the tension this seemed to create. I stroked my beard contemplatively, deciding this would heighten the drama a little, too.
“Oh?” she said.
“It’s an unusual choice …erotica,” I said, hating that she had made me say the word.
She looked out of the window. I was struck anew by how incredibly young she looked. The lower curve of a surprisingly full breast pulled at the cotton of her shirt, but she was sitting bunched up, tucking her body away. In all my years teaching this class, no student had had the guts to voluntarily submit something like this. It felt like a cry for help. Or a massive “fuck you” …I wasn’t sure which.
“It’s …well, it’s brave, I’ll say that much.”
She flashed her dark brown eyes over at mine and then out towards the window again, ignoring me and looking very much like she was sulking. I felt like a pervy headmaster who had called in a naughty student and we were in the first few scenes of a low-budget porno. Jesus, I hated this dynamic.
“Would you like to share why you decided to go with this topic? I’d really like to understand the reasoning behind this story.”
I suddenly felt like a school counselor instead. I felt a headache coming on.
She pouted a little, and kept ignoring me, with that teenage audacity that thinks any disagreement is proof that the person simply can’t “handle them.” I was getting irritated.
She finally spoke, flicking a slice of dyed black hair out of her eyes.
“You told us in the beginning of the class that we were here to express ourselves, and that there were no rules. So, I wrote what I wanted to.”
I bet, in her mind, she thought she had really showed me. How could I tell her that her juvenile scratchings had in fact embarrassed me, but not for the reasons she thought? Fine, the kid gloves, if you’ll pardon the expression, were off. We were here to learn, after all. If I weren’t hard on my students, they’d never learn anything.
I exhaled loudly and tried to seem as bored as possible. “Well, I’ve made quite a few suggestions and corrections, especially to this second bit over here. You switch tense a lot, but don’t worry, that’s a pretty common mistake to make, especially as a beginner. Plus, I’m not really sure you understand the meaning of the word “portentious,” maybe look that up when you get home. I’ve made some other suggestions at the end here…”
Girls like Michelle have one-trick-pony identities. Getting away with things because she was a hot girl who nobody “understood” just wasn’t going to fly in my class. This wasn’t a game to me. And I didn’t take kindly to girls who submitted nasty diary entries and called it art. Nope, she was going to have to try a lot harder than that.
She flushed a peculiar shade of red and looked as though she was about to argue back with me, but bit her tongue. She quickly took the assignment from me and stuffed it into her bag, then mumbled something and left.
She had beautiful eyes and almost mind-numbingly distracting breasts, it was true. But she was a mediocre writer. If she wanted to impress me, she had to do a hell of a lot better than that.
Michelle
I wanted to tear that stupid assignment into a million pieces. The word “common” was still ringing in my ears. I had to be honest: I did not expect that reaction. I mean, I expected he’d want to have a word with me about what I’d written – that was kind of the point – but I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t foresee that he would go on about my tenses or vocab after …well, after all the things I wrote.
I’m not sure why I was compelled, right at that moment, to open my laptop and start writing again. I was dog tired, it was late and I needed to get up early tomorrow for work, but it didn’t matter. I furiously tapped the keyboard.
“The Teacher and the Taught” appeared at the top of the page. Good. What did he know anyway? I’d show him. Not only would I get the technical details perfectly correct, I would make the story even more outrageous. I looked again at the screen. Too obvious. I backspaced it all and wrote instead, “All of Me, Twisted.” There, it had a nice ring to it. I’m no idiot. I know exactly where his eyes had been roaming as we sat alone in the classroom that afternoon, nothing but my filthy piece of writing between us. I know it, and he knows that I know it.
Mr. Cain
It might have been my imagination, but there was something different about Michelle by the time the next class rolled around. Her clothing was tighter, and there seemed to be less of it. Or was I just imagining things? Maybe I had been a little too hard on her. Maybe I didn’t need to be quite so brutal with the red pen. She was so young, after all. I have to admit I was curious to see what she would come up with as her second draft.
We sat in our usual circle, and the students settled in. We started, as we did with every lesson every week, by having each person read out loud a section of a piece they were working on. We’d then take turns to weigh in, giving some feedback on flow, on word choice. True, it was sometimes cringe-inducing, but I wanted every student of mine to know that to create art was to be vulnerable, to be exposed. It wasn’t always pleasant to be criticized.
Linda read a paragraph from her Victorian memoir-style piece – a snooze for all involved but she was fairly competent when it came to describing crinolines and provincial dramas, so I couldn’t fault her much. The guy sitting next to her said his piece and the dutiful students took turns offering feedback. Then it was Michelle’s turn.
She opened a folder she had resting on her lap and retrieved a crisp sheet of printed paper. She started to read; it was a short horror story she had started at the beginning of the course, one with a suspiciously sulky heroin and an outbreak of contagion in a small town. As she read, her dark hair fell in a curtain over her eyes, and at the end of each sentence she paused and inhaled, her ample chest rising and falling softly in the slightly-too-small bodice of her black dress.
Should I say I wanted to speak to her again after this class? Why not? She’d have to obey me. I could whip out my red pen again and scribble even more corrections all over it, just because I could, just to see her squirm. I quickly stopped this train of thought. Why was I letting her get to me like this? I’ve made my mistakes in life, sure, but if there’s one thing I don’t do, it’s let girls like this get to me. She had tried to get a rise out of me with that ridiculous story she submitted. Well, if she wanted to play that game…
“Michelle, I think you’ve shown us that you have that piece pretty well-covered.”
She stopped reading and stared at me, a little surprised. A fake garnet ring glistened on her finger.
“Since we don’t have that much time today, why don’t you share that other piece with the class and we can give you feedback on that instead?”
The color seemed to vanish from her already white face as her panicked eyes locked on mine.
“The other piece, you know the one,” I said with careful indifference.
Her lower lip seemed to tremble visibly. Where she had been cocky a moment before, now she seemed smaller, incredibly vulnerable. In a flash, I felt horrible for being so cruel to her …but then again, I had the feeling she didn’t quite mind it.
“Um… which other piece? This is the only one I…” she began but I loudly cut her off, “Yes, the other piece you’re working on, the erotica piece” I said with emphasis.
These words had a powerful effect on the other students, who all turned to her now with a renewed intensity. She swallowed hard, then pulled another sheet of paper from the folder, the look of horror on her face slowly hardening and becoming defiance.
“Ok, sure,” she said, trying to match my casual tone.
For a few moments, the air was as silent and heavy as it had ever been in that room. In a pitiful voice and with all the confidence she could muster, she began reading the opening paragraph of her piece. I sat back in my chair, secretly thrilled that I had dominated her so easily. I hated being manipulated, but if she wanted to play at this game, well, then I would call her bluff.
Michelle
It was as though every inch of my skin had caught fire. I was blushing so hard I thought I might faint – was he really going to make me do this? Why?
You know, I can appreciate a good story. I can see the irony – I had wanted to make him a little uncomfortable with this story, to shock him, and now he was throwing it back in my face. Every word, I soon realized, had probably been written with him in mind, and those same words were now coming out my mouth, here, in front of all the other students, and I felt like I wanted to peel off my burning skin and run away from it forever.
How dare he?
I had done the same thing to my High School English teacher. I had submitted a “creative writing” piece dripping with expletives and graphic descriptions of all the many, many ways a tempting young Lolita character could seduce and ruin a married man. I had detailed the maddening allure of her forbidden pussy, the way she teased, asking to be put in her place, half daring, half begging to be disciplined for her behavior. And when I breezily dropped that paper onto his desk, I knew without a doubt that I had him on a string for the rest of the school year. He didn’t need to know that I was still technically a virgin, or that I would never in a million years do anything like that …but the control thrilled me nonetheless.
I had half expected the same easy reaction with Mr. Cain, yet here I was, looking like an idiot. I had always relished the idea of being “punished” …but this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. There was nothing I could do. I had to read it.
I worked my way through the first awkward paragraph. It was, I realized, a very similar story of temptation and debauchery. Maybe I was the predictable one?
“He threw her mercilessly against the bed, standing over her for a moment, making sure she understood that she was completely, utterly at his mercy. Slowly, he pulled off his leather belt, one loop after the other, and stood tall; letting it hang at his feet like a weapon, buckle wrapped firmly in his fist. Every part of her body pulsed with anticipation…”