“You’re a little young for a midlife crisis, aren’t you?”
“An existential crisis, then. Something profound.”
What kinds of problems did adults have? Unfathomable things, full of lust and envy and rage—all the sins, probably. He had a whole life outside us, almost certainly filled with sex in grubby bathrooms and arguments where plates smashed against the wall and thrillingly dark depressions and Doonesbury and mortgages. The number of things I didn’t know, hadn’t experienced, seemed like a gulf I’d never be able to bridge.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, though I knew he wouldn’t tell me.
He rubbed his eyes. They were bloodshot from the chlorine, veined like marble. “It’s not important,” he said. “But thank you for asking. I’m more curious how you’re feeling about Oberlin.”
“Oh,” I said. “It seems very far away.” Please stop talking about college, I wanted to say.
“Well, you still have a few months left to enjoy the humorous stylings of Sean et al.” He balled up a napkin and put it next to his plate.
“Your class is what makes me worried,” I said. “I’m starting to realize how much I don’t know.”
“All intellectually curious people feel that way,” he said. “Only incurious people feel comfortable with how little they know.”
“You’re confident about your intelligence,” I said.
“Charlie, I’m an idiot. That’s the only thing I’m confident about.”
“You have whole passages of King Lear memorized.”
“I also have the Ewok song from the end of Return of the Jedi memorized.”
“The ‘Yub Nub’ song?”
His eyes lit up. “Yes! How do you know that?”
“My dad’s a dork,” I said.
He laughed. “I only have it memorized because I’m reasonably sure it’s the nadir of human existence. Worse than Las Vegas.” He tapped his finger on the table for emphasis. “But the thing is, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is that you’ll never know. The point of education is not to teach you everything there is to learn but to teach you how to learn—how to interpret meaning.”
“Good meaning or bad meaning?”
“Stories create meaning,” he said. “The only meaning anything has is what you give it.”
“Hmm.” I traced the map of the states on my paper place mat. “Can I ask you something weird?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Do you ever think about her?”
“About who?” he asked. He was smiling, like he was ready to be pleased at whatever I said next.
“Rachel,” I said.
He kept smiling, laughed even, but the worry lines between his eyebrows folded in. “Rachel? Why do you…Why would that occur to you?”
“I just wondered,” I said.
“I’m surprised you even remember that.” He looked away, out the window at the gray parking lot. “No, not really. It’s not exactly a part of my life I want to dwell on.”
“You don’t ever wonder what happened to her or how she’s doing, or, like, you know…”
“Like, you know…”
“Like, you know, wonder if you missed out on something that could have been great. Or think about getting back in touch and apologizing.”
“No, I don’t….” He sighed. “She doesn’t want to hear from me. It would be arrogant to intrude on her life now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know her.”
“Okay, but don’t you—don’t you wonder if she was the love of your life or something?”
“No,” he said. “And I wasn’t the love of her life either.”
“Maybe you’re just telling yourself that.”
“Oh really?” he said. “How wise.” His voice sounded sharp. He looked annoyed for a moment and then softened. “Sorry. It’s just— I mean, yes, maybe I am, but if that’s what I need to do, then…” He shrugged. “We all lie to ourselves. Even you, Yoda.”
“I guess I do, Doc Daneeka,” I said.
He smiled. “How do you remember all the idiotic things I say? God, of all the characters to be. A coward who can’t even fake his own death.”
My phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket. “Oh good,” I said. “My mom wants to know where I am.”
“This is why I keep my phone turned off at all times,” he said.
“Your mom tracks your movements too, huh?”
“She would if I kept it on.” He raised his eyebrows in a question and reached for my phone. I let him take it. He ran his fingers over it as if it were studded with Braille. “Mine’s practically rotary.”
“You open it here,” I said.
He flinched as the home screen came up. “Nuts.”
I laughed.
“What?” he said, looking up at me guilelessly.
I swallowed and shook my head. The phone buzzed, and he dropped it as if it had shocked him. I laughed again and took it back, running my thumb over the screen.
“You haven’t used a smartphone before?”
“God, no. They’re witchcraft,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “All that bleeping and blooping. Give me numbers on a matte screen.”
“How old are you?”
He laughed. “Old enough to know you should get back home before your mom gets me fired.”
I paused. “Right,” I said.
He looked down and cleared his throat. He took a minute to say “So do we go up to pay?”
I nodded. I followed him to the till, where he paid for both of us and joked with the hostess again, and I stood there thinking she must wonder what our relationship was, and then we went out and faced each other in the parking lot.
I bounced on my toes. “So,” I said.
“So now that I’ve paid you off, you’ll keep the smoking thing under your hat,” he said.
“As long as you don’t tell Ms. Anders I don’t like her,” I said.
“Mutually assured destruction,” he said. “Let’s never get drunk together.”
“Deal,” I said. “You did look a little cool. You know, smoking.”
He smiled, and the lines around his eyes fanned out. I felt something knot up in my throat, and I had to stop myself from throwing my arms around him, looking so big and warm in the cold. It was getting too hard to constantly hold myself back from him.
“I appreciate your pity,” he said.
“It wasn’t pity,” I replied. I crossed my arms over my chest. “And thank you for the meal.”
“Thank you for the company,” he said.
I hesitated, waiting to see whether he would move toward me. He wavered for a second, and then he jammed his hands into his pockets and stepped back. We nodded at each other, and then he turned and walked off. I watched him until he was out of sight, and then I slouched my way to my dad’s car and slumped there with my head on the steering wheel to wait until my phone buzzed with my mother’s messages again.
Every spring there was a senior class trip. The previous year’s class had organized an ambitious but ill-fated camping trip that, rumor had it, ended with one kid almost losing a hand to a smuggled firecracker and a chaperone in tears over the condition of a student-abused Porta Potty. This year’s trip was decidedly less adventurous: we were going to a theme park and then a hotel, where we could be corralled and monitored. I’d vaguely wondered for years how I was going to get out of it when the time came, but then Drummond told us he was going.
Lila and I stood together as we waited for the bus to arrive one cold Saturday morning. The chaperones—a group of half a dozen teachers who looked partly dismayed by us and partly relieved to be wearing jeans—were talking together, bobbing with suppressed laughter. Asha was huddled next to Dev and a few kids from our English class, and Jason was entertaining his acolytes with a story that apparently involved a lot of shouting. Lila had been spending more and more time with them lately. She usually invited me to go along, but I always had an excuse
not to.
“He dressed up for the occasion,” she said, inclining her head toward Drummond, who had broken away from the other chaperones but then got pulled over by a group of kids to talk. He was in jeans and a gray hoodie and he didn’t seem much older than them. Also, his ass looked fantastic.
“I like that he’s comfortable enough with us to not make any kind of effort,” I said.
Lila watched him over my shoulder. “He’s coming this way,” she said. “Why don’t you tell him how hot you think he looks?”
“What, like ‘I just want to rip that elastic right out of your sweatshirt’?”
He stopped in front of us while we were still giggling.
“This happens much too often when I come to talk to you guys for it to be a coincidence,” he said.
“Lila’s drunk,” I said.
He squinted at her. “Sorry, I couldn’t tell the difference.”
She punched his arm, and he winced exaggeratedly. “I have to take it where I can get it, since Charlie won’t join in,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not drinking either. You’re on a trip with a bunch of idiotic seventeen-year-olds.”
“I’m afraid I have to stay sober,” he said. “There’s been far too much imbibing among the faculty lately.”
“What, like at staff meetings?”
“That’s just the organized stuff,” he said. “You would not believe the amount Papakostas can put away.”
“I knew it,” Lila said. “There is no way he’s sober during our class. He—”
“Are they still bugging you about the paper at staff meetings?” I asked. I shot Lila an apologetic look. I had been so impatient to speak I hadn’t realized I’d interrupted her.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been informed we technically have not produced one.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Well, I told them you can’t rush these kids and hadn’t they ever seen The Agony and the Ecstasy, but they weren’t swayed.”
“Frank says he’s finished a whole word search.”
“What, writing one or solving one?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I don’t believe him.”
We both laughed. I glanced at Lila, who was frowning at me.
“I’m going to need you to tell Frank he has to learn how to spell words before he puts them in a puzzle,” he said.
“You’re the teacher!”
“I’m teaching you how to tell someone they’re incompetent without hurting their feelings,” he said. “Believe me, you will need it in your working life.”
The bus pulled in with a weary sigh, and a cheer went up among the crowd.
“I should supervise in case anyone tries to run,” he said. He made a gesture that was something between a wave and a salute. “See you guys on the other side.”
Lila turned to me. “You two have gotten chummy.”
“I guess,” I said.
Lila chose a row of seats halfway down the bus. She let me sit on the inside, next to the window. After a minute, she pulled a bulky pair of headphones from her bag and turned on her music. She waved at Jason, who was sitting in the back with his group of friends, and blew him a kiss. He grinned at her and made a gesture I wasn’t sure I wanted to figure out.
I spent the first half hour watching as the tightly packed suburban houses of our town unspooled into the occasional dilapidated farm. Sometimes I looked at Drummond. He was in front with the other chaperones, sometimes chatting with them but most often reading a paperback.
“What’s he reading?” I asked Lila.
“What?” Lila pulled a headphone off her ear.
“What’s Drummond reading?”
“Oh.” She looked annoyed, but she craned her neck to see if she could tell. “Sorry, no idea.” She readjusted her headphones and clicked the volume up.
I sighed and looked out the window.
“Are you guys talking about Drummond?”
I turned. Two girls I knew vaguely, Irina and Maddy, were sitting behind us. They were both passably popular and shared a kind of spackled beauty born of extensive product knowledge. They had all the signifiers of attractiveness—clear skin, long glossy hair, short skirts—but their faces still looked unfinished, plump with baby fat.
“Yeah,” I said eventually.
“You know him, right?” Irina said.
“Uh, he’s my teacher.”
Maddy crossed her arms over the back of my seat. “You know he’s not circumcised?”
Lila took off her headphones and turned around. “Sorry, what?”
Maddy smiled, knowing she had something we wanted. “A girl on the swim team told me.”
“A girl on the swim team told you?” Lila said. “What, did it fall out of his Speedo while he was swimming?”
“No,” Maddy said as if this was a ridiculous suggestion. “She said she could tell through the fabric.”
“Oh Jesus,” Lila said, and sat back down.
Maddy rolled her eyes at Lila and turned to me as if in confidence. “They’re really tight Speedos, apparently.”
“Kind of a product feature,” I said. I decided not to mention that he hadn’t been wearing a Speedo when I’d stalked him. “So are you guys in a class with him or what?”
“He’s our study hall monitor,” Irina said. “Everyone in there wants to have sex with him. Even the guys.”
“Uh,” I said, but I couldn’t think of anything to say after it. I was never sure what to think when I heard someone else liked him. There were a lot of attractive girls in our class: at the crest of their youthful beauty, eager to test out their power, knowing he wouldn’t reject them. I was happy they saw what I saw in him—even if I knew I saw it more deeply—but they were competition too.
“Are you, like, friends with him?” Irina said.
“Charlie loves him,” Lila said. I hadn’t realized she was still listening.
I shook my head. It seemed cheap somehow to align myself with them, as if I too were just a schoolgirl with a crush.
“He is hot,” Maddy said. “I don’t blame you.”
“I swear he got a semi once,” Irina said.
“He did not,” Maddy said with a tone that implied it was not the first time they’d had this argument.
“He did,” Irina said.
“He was wearing pleated pants,” Maddy said to me.
“And we were talking about my pool party,” Irina said.
“This collective obsession with Drummond is getting pathetic,” Lila said without turning around.
“Hypocrite,” I said.
“I liked him before it was cool,” she said, and put her headphones back on.
—
When we got to the park, Lila pulled her headphones off and tumbled down the steps with Jason without waiting for me.
“I’ll see you at lunch, okay?” she called back.
“Great,” I said.
I went to where Asha and Dev were sitting. They’d been directly behind the chaperones; I’d seen them talking to Ms. Anders occasionally.
“You guys mind if I tag along with you?” I asked.
“Course not,” Dev said.
“I don’t do roller coasters,” Asha said. “But I’ll watch while you puke.”
Dev and I got in line for a ride called the Terminator—Twenty stories of terror!—with a rowdy group of kids from our school. The boys were laughing and shouting and shoving each other; the girls were giggling and hopping in little excited bursts. Sean and Katie from our English class were there, and so were Irina and Maddy. Maddy waved at me, and I smiled and waved back.
“You know her?” Dev asked.
“A little,” I said. “The way you know the people you grew up with, I guess.”
“Not exactly familiar with that experience,” he said. He rubbed his jaw and grinned at me.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Well, I guess I know all these random facts about her, but it’s all surface stuff. Like she used to be obsess
ed with Lisa Frank and she went through a biting phase in kindergarten and she had purple braces when she was twelve. But I don’t really know her.”
“Yeah, but you know her in a way a lot of people never will,” he said.
“I guess,” I said. “But I don’t, like, know her secrets.”
“I think you can know someone without knowing their secrets,” he said. He looked over at Asha, who was taking pictures of people as they waited in line. “I wonder about Asha sometimes, though. I mean, I know everything about her, but I don’t know what’s going on in her head half the time.”
“She just keeps her cards close to her chest,” I said.
He laughed. “Not with me. But I didn’t mean like that. I just…I don’t get girls sometimes.”
I squinted at him. “What’s to get?”
“You’re a mystery,” he said, looking at me thoughtfully.
“We’re no more mysterious than guys are,” I said. “We don’t want anything different.” I turned to Asha and she glanced up and waved. When I turned back, he was still watching me.
“I wish I knew what you did want,” he said.
I was trying to think of a response to that when the group of boys bellowed, “Drummond!”
I spun around. He was walking by us with Ms. Anders. She was laughing at something he’d said and her hands were fluttering in the air, threatening to land on him.
“Ugh,” I muttered.
Drummond looked up. He had been laughing and the smile was still on his face, like an afterimage burned into a screen.
“Get over here, dude!” one of them called. I realized it was Frank. “Come ride the Terminator!”
Drummond waved at them dismissively, and Frank yelled, “Come on, what else are you going to do?”
“No thanks, kids,” he said. “I paid for my lunch.”
The group booed at him and he laughed. He was enjoying this, I could tell. Dev and I looked at each other.
“Five bucks he comes on,” I said.
“I’ll take that bet,” he said. He stuck out his hand and I shook it. His skin was warm and for a second I felt something prickle in me, a small pleasant shiver. I let go.
“Come on, Drummond,” came another voice. Sean’s. “Stop being a girl.”
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