“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying you’re a dunce.” From behind her back she produces the dunce cap and jams it on my head. Flashes snap around the room as Dani’s friends take out their phones, capturing my stunned face, a joint wedged in the crook of my fingers.
“Hey.” I tear away the cap.
“Hey, yourself. Don’t be so gloomy. We’re just having fun.”
I expect her to remove herself from my company—I’m the sullen one, sitting by himself, getting too drunk too fast—but instead she sits in the desk in front of me, turns and folds her arms over the back of her chair. She fits her pinky into the groove meant to hold pencils. The wind picks up outside and the eaves utter above us.
“Someone turn on music!” Dani shouts. An iPhone is produced, and speakers, and soon the music gives us some privacy.
She wants to know if I still live with my dad, and what that’s like. Does Mara resent me for it? Have I thought about moving someplace else?
Yes. It’s awkward. I don’t know. Planning is sort of on hold at the moment.
“Oh my gosh. Of course.” She brings her palm quickly to her chest—a mea culpa gesture—and in doing so she knocks my bottle of beer to the ground, where it shatters.
“Oops,” she says, but she doesn’t make a move to clean it up.
Dani and I all but destroyed the apartment where we lived—drinking every night, dishes growing crusty in the sink, a window swollen with humidity, stuck open, so weather, dirt, and pollen blew in. We never cleaned. Once her mom showed up unannounced; we were naked in bed when we heard her on the porch. When we finally let her in, Dani gave her a half-hearted tour. Her mom stopped and stared, aghast, at the still-wet condom in the bedside trash.
“Let’s move,” Dani says. “These desks are uncomfortable.”
She slips from her seat to the floor, slides along the wood until her back’s against the wall. When she does this it’s all one fluid movement. I follow with two new beers in my hand, and I have to jostle myself until I’m seated next to her. Strands of her hair extend toward my face, touch my cheek.
All these little touches: these are what lead to bigger things. I was also drunk when I first started cheating on Dani. Dani believed whatever story I made up that first time, but then Catherine caught me outside a bar with my tongue in a stranger’s mouth.
Things were not going well by then, in a lot of ways. Dani’d started to realize she’d made a mistake. We wore ourselves out with the screaming matches, and I moved back in with my dad, and she went to college the next fall. I found Mara, and things got serious fast, even more so when we found out Brian was on the way—but now when I look at Brian I think all I’ve done is let him down.
I blink him away, grope about in search of the empty feeling that’s allowing me to be here in the schoolhouse in the first place. My gaze settles on Dani. She hasn’t even reached the age I was when we met, but being with her brings me back to the person I was then.
“So you haven’t lived away from home since you were with me, for not even a year?” She looks concerned for me. A thoughtful frown pulls at her lips. Then lightning shocks the room, slashes Dani’s face for a moment, turning the frown into a flat line of ridicule, and I think she’s trying to get me to admit I’m a fool. But I also think she might be doing it for my own good, because her posture is soft and easy. Her arm brushes mine.
Still, I start to push back. “There’s nothing wrong with living at home. It saves money.”
“I can’t imagine not being able to take off on an adventure, though,” she says. “That’s the nice thing about not having anyone tying me down.”
“There are nice things about having people,” I say.
“Are they really your people, though?” she asks.
My heart stumbles. For a minute I think she might know about Brian and how he’s not really my son. But that’s impossible—I promised Mara if we ever told anyone, we would tell it together. I broke this promise once already and told my father, who said it didn’t matter and he wouldn’t tell, and I believe he never has. I’ve fantasized, though, about telling someone—some shadowy version of Dani—and have that person think of me as a hero.
Dani prods my arm; I’ve gotten lost in thought. I realize that she isn’t implying anything. She’s just flirting. She’s saying—I think—that she was my people first.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“I’ve learned a lot since we split up,” she goes on. “It was my fault, too, our marriage. But I got back on track pretty quickly.”
She looks at me closely as though to indicate I haven’t.
“The good girl has never been my natural self,” she says. “But not fitting into the good girl mold isn’t an excuse for being careless. And we were very careless with each other then.”
She speaks matter of factly and as she inspects her nails she opens up a wound in me—a wound that I know I can heal quickly with my desire for her. A desire she knows how to ignite. I want to let her know I made a mistake so she might think of me more kindly.
“It was more my fault than yours,” I rush to say.
“Stop trying to take the blame,” she says hotly, and I can tell she means it. “I was an adult. We shouldn’t have been married, but we had incredible chemistry. You can see how it misled us.”
I look at her and try to believe what she’s saying, believe it wasn’t just me using her back then. The suggestion of forgiveness metastasizes until it’s all I can think of, real or not. It swells and collides with the desire I feel for Dani—a new chemistry, a more complicated version of what we had before.
“Is the chemistry gone?” I ask. I smile to show I’m joking, but Dani answers seriously.
“No. It’s changed. But still there.”
I want to ask her how it’s changed, but instead I kiss her, and she returns the kiss. People around us laugh and exclaim, and I hear Catherine say, “What the fuck, Dani?” but Dani doesn’t pull away from me. Her lips are thin and smooth and taste like weed and beer. I don’t care anymore that the party’s not big enough for any real privacy; I just want more of her. Everything she’s said today has felt so rational and mature, as though she figured out all the mistakes we made and how to avoid them in the future.
We part but stay close. I swallow. “I’m not happy with where I am,” I say.
It’s not entirely true—but I think it might, in this moment, bring me closer to her.
“Of course you’re not happy.” She touches my cheek with her palm. “You might go to prison.”
“It’s not just that,” I say. “It’s my life. You’re right—living in my dad’s basement, my situation with Mara—I blew everything. I blew the best thing in my life years ago.”
“Mara seems good,” Dani says. “She seems like a good one.”
“She is,” I say, now regretting bringing her up. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s really complicated right now—and I feel sometimes that I can’t connect with Brian.”
Dani raises her eyebrows. “Can’t connect how?” she says.
I think of how she said they might not really be my people. I’ll say anything to keep her here with me—anything to try to get her alone. I imagine us leaving together, going somewhere and having sex and smoking after like we used to. I can see a completely different future for myself, and she’s holding it, and in it I’m off the hook.
“He’s not really my son, my biological son. So there’s this feeling that one day he might decide I’m not his father anymore, and it will be true, and I’ll be devastated because I really do love him like a son.”
Dani flashes her eyes to Catherine, who hasn’t heard anything, but in that moment I know she will soon—and I know I’ve betrayed Mara. People talk; they’ve just come to accept us as a family, and now gossip will get built like slipshod houses.
I’ve fucked up, gone too far, gotten too personal. That was what Dani was saying earlier: we were good at sex and nothing el
se. She looks uncomfortable, like she’s woken up in the middle of an absurd dream and is trying to remember what was in it. She clears her throat. “I don’t think we should continue what we’re doing here,” she says.
I’m reaching for her hand and am about to ask her if we can go outside and talk, when she stands up and shakes herself free from me. She pulls her hair up into a bun and dusts off her shorts. The music rings in my ears, too loud, and Dani whispers something to Catherine and gestures to me. I read her lips: I’m gonna go. She waves to her friends, exchanges a few laughs, and I stay on the floor.
Dani opens the schoolhouse door and gasps, her hand flying to her chest. There are two cops walking up the schoolhouse steps, and their car, unheard by us, is parked in the gravel lot.
“All right,” one of them says, almost bored. “Party’s over.”
The cops come in and as we’re led out one by one Catherine gives me a look that says this is my fault. Dani’s trembling; she’s never gotten in trouble like this before. The police radios crackle in the rain and my phone buzzes in my pocket. I know it’s Mara. She’s just a few blocks away, having come back downtown to pick me up from my shift, except I’m not there—I’m here, ducking my head into the back seat of a cruiser, getting taken in again.
* * *
Dani and I don’t speak in the holding cell. A fluorescent tube flickers, phones ring, cops shift slowly from one part of the station to the other. One by one the kids get plucked from jail by their parents. They look fearful, but I’m not worried for them. They’re first timers; they’ll get court dates and pay a fine or maybe do a bit of community service. That was me once.
Dani doesn’t look at me when she goes—she’s the second to last to leave, and she says nothing to me. Her mother says she isn’t surprised to see me here. I think it might be the last I’ll see of Dani. All she wanted today was a little bit of fun; she didn’t invite me along to rewrite my life. If the cops hadn’t found the drugs I’d brought they might’ve just let us all go. I hold my face in my hands—ashamed and embarrassed and wishing I’d done things differently, wishing I’d never left work, or if I had left, that I’d just gone somewhere alone with Dani. And then I sense that someone is standing on the other side of the bars.
I look up. It’s Mara, but she’s not alone. She has Brian on her hip. Brian looks around in fear, his small face twisted with worry, and then his eyes fall on me, and his face wrinkles with the tears that are about to erupt.
Mara stares at me coldly. She holds her sobbing son—the son she could’ve left at home with my father, who was at the house and who answered the phone when I called. But she didn’t. She brought him here to see me like this. She’s done hiding the father I really am from her son. She’s done hiding the man I really am from herself.
Flour Baby
By the spring of Reggie’s junior year, there was only one thing she looked forward to each day: Matt Shames, smiling his lazy smile. Sometimes it was even directed at her, and receiving Matt’s smile made Reggie proud of herself.
She and Matt weren’t exactly friends, though Reggie was hopeful. Matt was easygoing with everyone, most of all himself. Every so often he caused trouble and got suspended, but a few days later he’d roar up again in the ’67 Mustang he’d refurbished himself, flinging the car into its assigned spot, yelling a friendly obscenity to a pal across the parking lot.
He was a junior, too. Reggie longed to have him swear at her like he did his friends. He had beady eyes but Reggie liked his look, which was a little bit punk. He was thin and looked half-starved but he wore it well, like a badge. Rumor had it he did drugs. And a reciprocation of Reggie’s feelings wasn’t out of the question. Lately he’d been paying her more attention in their sociology class, and Reggie clung to that attention. It helped her get through the day.
She needed a distraction from what was wrong in her life: her mom’s new boyfriend (a loser), her father’s three-year prison sentence (vehicular manslaughter), her midsemester progress report that showed a 1.7 GPA (for the whole month of February she hadn’t been able to find her chemistry book). Unlike these problems, the absence of Matt’s affection for her could be remedied. There might be room in his life for her. Often she saw him hanging out with people she wouldn’t have expected: the religious kids from the megachurch; the geeky president of the robotics club; or the willowy blond named Arielle, an exchange student from France who—thankfully—would be gone at the end of the school year.
Besides Matt, Reggie had one other sort-of friend, a prickly girl named Jewel with whom having fun was a chore. Jewel and Reggie argued all the time, but no matter how angry they made each other, Jewel always returned to school the next day ready to be friends again. Reggie suspected that Jewel thought she could fix Reggie’s life somehow. She was always burdening herself with projects—people, pets—if only to feel the satisfaction of disappointment, it seemed.
Officially, Reggie was getting help from Ms. Thorne, the school guidance counselor. Ms. Thorne was young and had been a cheerleader at Michigan State, a characteristic that in Jewel’s mind made her unfit to counsel anyone. Reggie didn’t mind Ms. Thorne. She was on the receiving end of no one else’s sympathy at the moment. In fact, most people hated her, and in the glare of their derision she was simply shutting down, as though her life were a large switchboard and she was throwing one switch at a time. Her affection for Matt was the only thing she was truly devoted to right now.
* * *
One morning in March, Reggie was called out of her life skills class to see Ms. Thorne, who’d heard that Reggie had burst into tears in the cafeteria the previous day.
“I’m worried about you,” Ms. Thorne said. She’d braided her mahogany hair into a crown around her head as though she were a princess in a fairy tale. “I’m also worried about your grades. You started the year with a 3.2.”
“I know,” Reggie said, not wanting to be reminded.
“A lot has happened to you this year,” Ms. Thorne went on, “but you do have control of your GPA. What we might be able to do is get the school to approve extensions for your work, and maybe some extra credit that you can turn in over the summer.”
“Ted Irish got extensions for all his work,” Reggie mumbled. “He doesn’t even have to come back to school until April.”
Ms. Thorne went pale. It was Ted Irish’s father that Reggie’s dad had hit and killed with his car. Ted Irish had been out of school most of the year; he was only returning because baseball season was starting and he was hoping for a scholarship. Reggie hadn’t seen him since early in the fall, before the accident, but he would return in a matter of days.
Reggie lived in a small, conservative town in southeastern Michigan. She’d never really fit in, but now she was a complete outcast. William Irish had been a figure in town. He’d owned an accounting business where everyone got their taxes done. With tax day approaching, his low-budget advertisement still played on the local channels, and when his face appeared on the screen, Reggie’s mind tricked her into hoping for a few brief seconds—he’s not dead, there he is!—but then Reggie’s mom, Carla, would swear and ferret around the couch cushions looking for the remote so she could change the channel.
Reggie wondered why the Irishes didn’t stop the ads. Were they doing it on purpose in order to torture Reggie and themselves? Were the remaining Irishes sniveling into tissues while the gray-haired, bespectacled ghost of William Irish pointed at them and said, “It’s your money, not the government’s. We’ll help you get the big refund you deserve.”
Ms. Thorne said quietly, “That’s true. Ted Irish has been getting homeschooled since the accident. But again, we’re talking about you here.”
Reggie listened to what Ms. Thorne had to say. Then she agreed to more after-school appointments with Ms. Thorne as well as extra tutoring.
Reggie returned to her desk in Ms. Bird’s life skills class. Jewel hissed, “What did Ms. Thorne say?” Reggie didn’t respond. She felt tears brimming behind her
eyes. She was always almost crying. She tried to think of Matt to make herself feel better. While Reggie backhanded a tear away, Jewel yawned. She would only give someone attention without getting any in return for so long.
Ms. Bird stood in front of the class, holding a bag of flour. “You’ll dress up your flour babies, you’ll name your flour babies, and your flour babies will go everywhere with you for two weeks.”
The flour baby project. Ms. Bird had been talking about it all semester, and finally, it was time. In a way, the project offered Reggie a reprieve: it was worth half her grade and was very easy. She would have to endure a certain amount of embarrassment for pretending a bag of flour was her baby for two weeks, but at least she would be taunted for doing something normal, something other people were doing, too.
The class spent the rest of the period gluing yarn to the scalps of their flour babies and drawing clumsy dresses and overalls on the bags.
“I’ll be coming around to sign your bags of flour,” chirped Ms. Bird, “so there’s no swapping out broken babies for new ones.”
On her own bag of flour, Reggie drew plump lips and colored them red. She turned to Jewel. “Do you think it’s weird that Ms. Bird is branding our babies?”
Jewel, however, was staring at Reggie’s flour baby. “Reggie,” she said, “the red lips make her look slutty!”
* * *
Later, Reggie slipped into her sociology class just as Mrs. McMahon was closing the door.
“Tardy, Ms. Taylor,” Mrs. McMahon said, not without some fondness.
“Sorry,” Reggie mumbled. She settled into her desk and stuffed her flour baby into the book tray beneath her seat.
Matt was sitting across from her. She caught his eye; he tapped his wristwatch and wagged one finger back and forth. Reggie tried to smile casually and give a flirtatious half shrug, instead of bursting with the huge, sloppy grin that was welling inside of her.
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