Chapter Thirty-Nine
Zack
That night, we lay in bed for some time after we’d finished, pondering the mystery of each other. She ran her fingers along the tattoos on my back and the stab wound in my side from the time I had been knifed in San Francisco by a deranged ex-Marine. The light from a flickering neon sign cast its green glow over the window.
“Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to me, these bodies,” she said after a long silence in which we were just two creatures without names.
“What do you mean?” There was something oddly endearing and sexy in the strange philosophical insights Kelli always seemed to be having.
“Just the way we express love, and fear, and hope, and anything else worth sharing. There’s something mysterious and ineffable about it, this intertwining of soul and flesh. The spirit and the body.”
“Care to elaborate?” Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did.
Kelli sat up, looking a little frustrated. “It’s just that everything worth doing is done through our bodies. But we’re more than just bodies, or at least I think we are. When we make love, your love shines in your eyes and your whole self, and I never doubt that you love me, even if you never say it in words. You don’t have to. It’s the mystery of sex but I think it’s really the mystery of life itself: how is it that we become conduits of eternal things? I mean, if you turn off your penis and think about it for a minute, sex is actually pretty gross, but it’s how we show love and there’s something really good about it. Does that make any sense?”
I shook my head. “No, you sound so high right now, but I love you.”
It was the first time I had ever told her I loved her, and the words seemed to have a calming effect. She smiled a tranquil smile and said in a quiet voice, “You too.”
“Have you ever thought about becoming a college professor?”
Kelli shrugged her bare shoulders. “I’d have to go back to grad school. I got into journalism right out of college.”
“You ought to think about it.” I leaned over and kissed her bangs lightly. “Sometimes when you get going I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, but I bet there are a lot of students who would love to hear it.”
I lay back down and for a while longer continued to run my fingers along the smooth skin of her arm. But Kelli sat up hugging a throw pillow to her chest with a pensive expression; she looked oddly beautiful in the glow of the neon light. “Professor Pope,” she said quietly. “I like the sound of that.”
***
By the end of the next week, Carson and I were back at the high school. But this time we had visitor’s passes, and no one was going to ask us to leave.
At the doors of the Taft building, we were met by a smiling woman in her mid-twenties wearing a blue cardigan over a striped green and white blouse and a pair of loose-fitting khakis. The tag on her blouse read “Sheryl Caine.”
“It’s only the beginning of the trimester, but my classes are already getting antsy,” she said as she led us through a low-ceilinged hallway filled with rows and rows of blue lockers. “We’ve watched Zoolander twice in the last week.”
“Hey, it’s a good movie,” said Carson.
“But I think they’ll be relieved to have a break from biology. I know some of the boys are going to be really fascinated to hear what you have to say—some of the girls, too, probably. A lot of these kids come from really low-income families and will be lucky even to graduate high school. And even if they can manage that, the best they can hope for is to eventually become a manager at Domino’s.” She paused at the door and turned to face me. “So what you’re doing today, it’s important. You’re not just coming in here to talk for a few minutes. You may actually be giving them a future.”
“Well, we’ll do what we can,” I said. I didn’t like having my job built up like this. But at the same time, it was encouraging to know that even if the kids looked bored, it didn’t mean our time had been wasted.
She led us into a classroom where about two dozen kids were seated. There was a desk in the corner of the room by the window looking out on the courtyard. On the dry-erase board at the front of the room, Ms. Caine had been writing out complex formulas. A copy of a Bill Nye DVD stood on the chalk tray beneath it.
I hadn’t been in a classroom in so long—when I graduated, Facebook wasn’t even a thing yet. It was all so familiar and yet strange at the same time. I wondered if they still used the boxy TVs we’d been forced to watch in the early 2000s, or if they’d upgraded to flat-screens.
The students were between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, and they all looked exhausted, like they had been forced to wake up before dawn and run for an hour in the pale daylight. A girl seated three or four seats from the front was quietly reading a novel. I decided to leave her alone, figuring at least she wasn’t plugging away on her phone.
Carson and I stood together at the wooden podium.
“Hey, listen up,” I said, and two dozen pairs of eyes looked sleepily up at me. “Today we’re gonna be talking about something that you’re gonna want to listen to. Because it’s about more than whether or not you pass an exam. This is your future. Everybody with me…?”