—7—
October was the longest month. Not in days, but in the way the hours dragged as we tilted farther away from the sun, the shadows stretching longer and longer, curving thin blue fingers over the earth. There was an Indian summer, a blush of heat and a warm wind stirring the gold foil leaves. One hot afternoon I jumped into Wesley’s pool with all my clothes on, the water deliciously cool beneath the skin of sunlight on the surface. He took his shirt off and jumped in after me, particolored leaves swirling around us like kaleidoscope pieces. Siobhan stopped by to laugh and offer towels. Wesley tried to pull her in, and she casually threatened to remove him from her will. When we climbed out there was the obligatory pause when we saw each other soaking wet, his long hairless torso glazed with water, my shirt molded to my boobs. I smiled; he didn’t. Siobhan helped dry my hair and caught my hand, raising the ring to the falling sun. I couldn’t read the look she gave me. It seemed deeply knowing.
At first Evan and I were careful, saving everything for the weekends. No making out between classes. No trysts in motels. He called every night, and when I wasn’t talking to him I sent him the absolute filthiest texts I’d ever sent in my life. That second weekend at the loft, we only ventured outdoors once. We spent two days straight having sex and watching movies and talking and laughing and kissing in a hazy, dreamy montage, until finally we stumbled out into the indigo twilight, delirious and exhausted, blinking at the lights and cars and the speed of life as if we’d just come out of a hundred-year sleep. We bought Italian ice and walked along the riverfront, watching the boat lights drift like floating candles, marveling at the bridges stretching across that thick, strong vein of water. The Mississippi was calm but the calm was snake-like, a vast power momentarily relaxed.
October 19th was Evan’s birthday. The night he turned thirty-three, we ate sushi at a place near the Cathedral Basilica. The cathedral looked like an illustration from a storybook, almost every inch of it lined with mosaic tiles scintillating in the candlelight. I wore the sundress he’d seen in that shop window, and eyeshadow, and flat little-girl shoes, refusing to be pigeonholed into an age group. He wore his pinstripe shirt and tie, looking more like Mr. Wilke than Evan. It was the first time I’d had sushi, and the only real conclusion I drew was that it was very sensual. Like eating something still alive. When we staggered into the haunted elevator later, tipsy on sake, I did something else for the first time: I gave him a blowjob. His body melted in my hands, his fingers running through my hair softly, so softly, every part of him boyish and submissive except for the hard dick in my mouth. Another experience that was purely sensual. I swallowed when he came, warm saltiness in the back of my throat, the faint taste of the sea. He pulled me up and kissed me, and I said, “Happy birthday, Mr. Wilke.”
I told Wesley I wanted to work on my own project for Film Studies, and he agreed. But we shot videos together, too, just for the fuck of it: Hiyam holding court with the Mean Girls, causing one of them to run off in tears. Two boys, both in varsity football, kissing under the bleachers, muscular silhouettes merging against the deep purple sky. I wasn’t the only one with a secret. In the grand scheme of things, my secret wasn’t even as dangerous as some of theirs. One day at lunch, half the cafeteria ran out into the hall, and we caught the tail end of a fight in front of a locker where someone had scrawled COCK SUCKING FAG in Sharpie.
Some days I lied to Wesley and skipped lunch. I locked Evan’s classroom door so I could touch him. Only touch. We never had sex in school—that would be too insane, obviously. I had standards for my insanity. But I kissed him and ran my hands over his body, the hardness against his leg, until he said, “Don’t make me do this.” “Do what?” I said, and he answered, “Something I’ll regret.” So I started over, touching his face, his lips, kissing him, and we tormented each other until the bell rang.
Some nights he called me and I biked to his apartment, let myself in with the key he gave me, darting quick glances over my shoulder, and met him in his dark bedroom where we took our clothes off without speaking and fucked like it was the last time, quiet and desperate, breathing in each other’s ears as we exorcised the demons inside us. When it was done I would kiss him and leave without a word, looking over my shoulder again as I biked home, my brain on high alert but my heart calm. In my own bed I lay staring at the monster shadows on the ceiling, clawing, seething. Sometimes I saw watchers in them. Sometimes I saw myself.
“Do you still have a crush on Mr. Wilke?” Wesley asked, and I just looked at him, expressionless.
In mirrors, I saw someone new. A feral girl with electric eyes. She was beautiful, her mouth lush and maroon, her skin glowing like moonlit alabaster, but there was something a little off about her. At certain angles, her bones showed through the skin. Shadows made hollows in her ribs and cheeks. She was starving for something, and the more she ate of it, the thinner she became.
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked Wesley. “What if the dopamine rush doesn’t end? What if it keeps coming and coming until—”
What? What came next? I thought of Mom lying on the living room floor.
The more you took, the more you needed. And you’d keep taking more and more and more until you overdosed.
#
I’d failed my promise to confront a fear during September, unless starting a relationship with someone I actually cared about counted. If not, October was going to count double.
So I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Mom.
I’d come prepared: bank statement, printout of the trust paperwork, and my house keys, all neatly arranged before me. Upstairs, my bags were packed. I’d left the new clothes in the closet.
Turned out I needn’t have bothered. As soon as she walked in on me wearing my Very Special Episode face, she dropped her purse on the floor, sank into a chair, and started bawling.
For God’s sake, I thought.
I stared at the laminate tabletop, counting the cigarette burns. Something slithery twisted in my chest. Look at the cabinet doors. Picture what’s behind them: stale soda crackers, peanut butter, marijuana. I was probably the only kid at school completely uninterested in drugs. Jesus, her face looked like a wax dummy melting. Don’t give in. Don’t give in.
I gritted my teeth, scooted my chair back, and fetched the paper towels.
“I’m so sorry, babe,” she blubbered. The paper towel took half her face with it: magenta clown mouth, centipede eyelashes. “I fucked up. I really did.”
Be hard and cold as steel, I told myself. “You knew why Mr. Rivero wanted to see me.”
She mewled some kind of denial.
“You were trying to pimp me out to him,” I said. Flinty, brittle steel. “Do you have any idea how disgusting you are?”
She had the nerve to raise her face with indignation. “Gary has money. Lots of money. He could take care of us. Of you.”
“I don’t need taking care of.”
“That why you’re running around with older men?”
“Don’t even,” I said. I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I seen that man you’re with. Drives an old beater. You can do better.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “I cannot believe how fucking clueless you are.”
“You ain’t so smart yourself, babe. You’re giving it away for free like a stupid milk cow.”
I slammed my hand on the table, the ring pinging like crystal. Ashes puffed out of the terracotta pot.
“Shut your mouth,” I said.
She stood, making me back up. “Or what? What you gonna do?”
There was fire in me, and for the moment, that fire was stronger than the fear.
“I’ll walk out that door and you’ll never see me again. I’m eighteen. I don’t have to put up with your shit.”
Mom laughed, a throaty, ugly sound. “Yeah, you’re eighteen. That means I don’t got to put up with your shit, either.”
“So don’t,” I yelled. My hands were tingling. My accent slipped out, and I didn’t care. “Throw me on the street. Then you can finally have your empty house, and your gross men, and your fucking drugs. And when the police come, no one’s gonna bail you out. No one’s gonna sit at home waiting for you, because no one else cares about you, you stupid bitch.”
The windows seemed to rattle from my voice. The kitchen light dimmed, a flux in the current, but it felt like it was in response to me. I’d never stood up to her like this.
“You know the worst thing?” I said, stepping closer. “It’s not that you put my life in danger. You did that the day I was born. No, the worst thing was stealing my money. The money Nan gave me for college, so I could make a future for myself instead of turning out like you.”
I saw the precise moment her pride cracked. The moment she stopped being my forty-year-old mother and became a teenage girl, screaming I don’t want to turn out like you at her own mother. Her bloodshot eyes widened, lucid green finally showing. The leathery folds of her face smoothed out with shock. For a moment we probably looked more like each other than we had in years.
My body trembled. I scrubbed a hand across my eyes, smearing hot tears. So much for cold steel.
“Oh, babe,” she said. Her head was nodding slightly, repeatedly, the way you’d rock yourself for comfort. “It’s been real hard for me, too.”
“I don’t care,” I said, crying. “You were supposed to take care of me. Be the adult. For once, be the fucking adult, Mom.”
“You don’t know what it was like,” she said. Her breath stuttered. Jesus, if we both start crying, I am really going to lose it, I thought. “I put myself through shit I never want to think about again, all to make sure you had food to eat and a place to sleep and clothes to wear.”
“It wasn’t all for me. Half your money goes to buy the drugs you’re supposed to be selling.”
“You think it’s easy, living like this? You think I want to live this kind of life sober?”
I thought of the men she’d installed on our living room couch. The kind of men who’d touch a twelve-year-old. If they were that brazen with me, what kind of shit had they done to her? I’d seen some of her scars. There was a long sharktooth ripple just below her collarbone. Car door caught me, she’d said. And a puckered dimple on one thigh. Dropped a cigarette lighter. Sometimes she came home with shiners. Got mixed up in a bar brawl.
Key to making your mother the villain: believing the lies she told to spare you.
“You could’ve been normal,” I said. “Plenty of single moms work at McDonald’s and don’t smoke crystal.”
“It ain’t that simple. You don’t know what being addicted is like.”
Instinctively, unthinkingly, I said, “Yes I do.”
And I stared at her, my mouth hanging open, thinking, Yes, I do.
“Well, then, I pray you don’t turn out like me,” she said, sniffling. “I pray you get away from here and start a new life and do something good.”
My tears had stopped, but my face was still wet. “You can’t get the money you owe, can you?”
“I’m trying, babe. But it don’t look good.”
“So it’s up to me to bail us both out. Again.”
We stared at each other in our dismal little kitchen where no one cooked, and no friends came to visit, and meth was cut on the table late at night.
“You must really hate me, huh?” she said.
“No.” I took a deep breath, wiped my cheeks with my hand. “If I thought you could change, I’d hate you for not trying.” I looked her dead in the eye. “But this is who you are. You’re a liar, and a thief, and a junkie. I don’t hate you, Mom. I’m disappointed in you.”
#
I unpacked my bags and stayed up until 2 A.M. responding to job ads on Craigslist. In the back of my mind, I knew I could stay with Evan, or maybe Wesley and Siobhan. But Mom’s shamelessness and weakness of will had led me to become the opposite: stubborn and proud. Too proud to ask for help, even when I needed it most. Especially when I needed it most.
I’ll do this on my own, I told myself. I’ll stay here till she throws me out, and make back every penny she stole, and work something out with Mr. Rivero. I’m smart, I’m resilient—I had to be, to raise myself without functional parents. I’ll figure it out.
And when I do, I’ll leave and never look back.
Of course, in my eighteen-year-old brain, leaving implicitly entailed bringing Evan and Wesley and even Siobhan, as if I could transplant everything I still loved about this place to a new one, where only the bad things would be erased. I didn’t think, How will I hold on to them? I only thought, I have to get away from her.
#
A few days before Halloween, I skipped lunch with Wesley to see Evan. The minute I locked his door, he pushed me against the wall and put his mouth to my neck. It wasn’t so much a kiss as a display of hunger, his stubble scraping my skin, his teeth nipping, not gently. I leaned my head back and looked out the windows at the world deconstructing, leaves coming off the trees in flurries, everything baring itself to be ravished by winter.
Hello, visual metaphor.
Later, I would understand what drove us to screw up that day. That the more complicated and fucked-up my life became, the more I wanted to shut out reality and lose myself in him. That he was doing the same with me, for reasons I didn’t yet know.
But in the moment, I just wanted to be ravished.
Evan took my jaw in one hand and made me look at him. His body was close, the scent of suede and faint smoke, like a snuffed candlewick, flooding over me. The mere smell of him made something in me unlace, opening itself.
“Come over tonight,” he said.
I laid my palm on his chest as if to push him away, but let it slide down instead, over his tensed abdomen, to his fly.
“That’s so far away,” I said languorously, drawing the words out.
His eyes focused on my mouth.
I unbuttoned his jeans and froze. We were both breathing fast. We’d never done anything more than make out in school. Being discovered here was death.
But there he stood, rock hard, not stopping me.
“Shouldn’t you tell me this is a bad idea?” I whispered, cupping my hand over the erection in his jeans. “I thought you were a responsible adult.”
“I thought you were.”
I felt a little out-of-body right then. Like things weren’t entirely in my control, including my own skin. When I smiled, it felt like someone else smiling with my face. My voice seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, like ventriloquism.
I brushed my lips ever so lightly over his ear, and said, “I’m a girl who wants to be fucked by her teacher.”
His dick strained against his fly.
“Is the door locked?” he said.
“Yes.”
He slipped his hand between my legs. I wore jeans, too, and his heat radiated through the tight denim and seeped into my blood. We’d done this so many times now it shouldn’t have felt so new. It shouldn’t have made my heart go haywire, fluttering wildly, erratically, as if he’d never touched me before. But he hadn’t. Not as Mr. Wilke, not here. This was what we kept dancing around. That no matter who we were outside, in here we were teacher and student.
His other hand slid inside the waist of my jeans. Where our skin met felt like nerves short-circuiting, fuses popping. It filled my belly with static and made me lift up onto my toes, my back arching against the whiteboard. The class was dark, but all someone had to do was peer through the pane in the door and see Mr. Wilke pressing a student to the board. He unbuttoned my fly at the same time his thumb rubbed firmly against the crotch of my jeans and I clutched his collar, gasping. No wrapping myself around him. Avoid anything identifiable from this angle. He pulled my zipper down slowly and it felt like he was opening my skin.
Then he stopped. His palm rested atop my belly.
“We do this every day and no one notices,” I whispered. “No one will notice if we go a little farther.”
I started to unzip him and he grabbed my hand. Moved it to my side, held it there, and put his other hand inside my underwear. My pulse trilled. I looked up at him and his face was blurry with shadow.
“Let me touch you,” I said.
“Shut your mouth.”
My eyes widened. My breath was coming so, so fast. Hot fingers glided over the smooth coolness of my skin, slipping lower until they reached the part of me that burned, too. He put his mouth near my ear.
“Spread your legs.”
I did, my heart wild. He was telling me what to do, like a teacher. My teacher.
He traced me, light and soft, sending ribbons of electricity up into my belly. My jeans were so tight that his palm rubbed against my clit every time he moved. God, fucking sweet agony. When his finger finally parted my lips I was so wet it slid along the inner edge effortlessly, and I sighed, half miserable, half blissful. Adrenaline sizzled in my veins. I was waiting for footsteps in the hall, a knock at the door, a gasping face. It felt so fucking wrong to be doing this, so gloriously fucking wrong. I tried to move my arm and his grip tightened, pinning me to the board. He was so slow, so meticulous it drove me crazy, tracing, teasing, until I realized I’d bared my teeth and was grimacing at him, and when he slid his finger inside of me it felt like a pain being soothed, a raw place being pressed closed. I almost told him to stop. Anxiety and tension and want were mixing in an unpleasant way. But as his finger fucked me the anxiety sweetened, and I wrapped a fist in his shirt and raised my hips toward his hand, and he lowered his face to my mouth and said, “You feel so fucking good,” but didn’t kiss me, just shared my breath. He went in to the knuckle, and then he slid another finger inside, and I put my palms against the whiteboard and tried not to cry out. I thought of the class that had been here twenty minutes ago, Wesley and Hiyam and the rest of them sitting ten feet from where we stood now, not knowing Mr. Wilke and I fucked the shit out of each other almost every day, not knowing he was going to fuck me right here while their chairs were still warm, that I was going to come in the same place he’d stood and lectured, that I was going to come all over that big, gentle hand inside of me.
And then it happened.
The knock.
We both stiffened. I was so close to coming I didn’t care, I just wanted to finish, but he pulled out and for a moment I was fully capable of murdering the person at the door. We didn’t move, our breath grotesquely loud in the silence. God, had I been making noise? I wasn’t even sure.
“Maybe they’ll go,” I whispered.
The knock came again, slower. Almost mocking.
I shivered.
Evan buttoned up, wiped his hand on his jeans, and I did the same. I smoothed his shirt and he straightened my hair.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
The knock again.
He turned and walked to the door. There was nowhere I could hide—everything was open, revealed. I stood beside his desk, my chin up. I felt the radiant flush emanating from my skin and knew there was no masking it. Own it, I told myself. They’re less likely to suspect if you act like you’ve done nothing wrong.
The door opened, and even in the dimness I could make her out.
“Hiyam,” Evan said clearly, for my benefit. “What do you need?”
Her eyes darted past him straight to me. Not a flicker of surprise.
“I didn’t know you were in here,” she said. I wasn’t sure which of us she meant.
“I’m with another student,” Evan said.
It shouldn’t have stung, but I was still jacked and frazzled and suddenly I hated those words. I was not just another student.
“With the lights out,” Hiyam. “And the door locked.”
Not questions.
“We were just on our way out,” Evan said calmly.
Hiyam stepped into the room. “Good thing I caught you, then.” Neither of us missed the double entendre. “I need to talk to you, Mr. Wilke.”
“It’s not really a great time. How about—”
“Oh,” she said with faux coyness, “am I interrupting something?”
My jaw hardened. This bitch. She fucking knew, though she probably couldn’t guess how far it had gone. Probably thought she’d interrupted a chaste little kiss. Whispered words of self-denial. Smell his hand, I wanted to tell her.
“We were just discussing the semester project. Maise had some questions.”
Hiyam strolled up a row of desks toward me, trailing her hand over them. “I thought we weren’t allowed to ask you any questions about it.”
Evan caught my eye from across the room. He finally looked alarmed. I understood. Leave. Give her less ammunition.
“I’ll be going,” I said flatly. “Thanks for the help, Mr. Wilke.”
Hiyam paused, watching us with cool amusement.
“Any time,” he said. His voice and face were vacant.
I walked past him and out of the room, wishing I could scream.
#
“Tell me again who knows,” he said.
He stood at his bedroom window, blinds shut. He looked like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. Just add prison jumpsuit and oncoming train. A lamp cast a brooding glow over us, flickering fretfully. I’d had to argue for five minutes before he let me turn it on. I leaned my palms on the bed, sighing. We’d been over this a hundred times.
“No one,” I said.
“Britt saw us at the party.”
“She saw you taking a drunk student home.”
“Wesley knows about ‘E.’”
“Wesley can barely focus on anything but my tits. And he’s my friend. He won’t say anything.”
Evan rocked on his toes, not looking at me. “Hiyam saw. She was taunting us.”
I stood and moved toward him. “Hiyam’s had a crush on you since the first day of school. She told me at homecoming. Besides, she has a filthy mind.” I touched his forearm, ran my fingers over the soft gold hair. “Even if we weren’t sleeping together, she’d think we were.”
It was terrible, but now that the immediate danger had passed, the idea of people knowing excited me. Without proof, they couldn’t do shit. It was right there under their noses and they couldn’t pin anything to us.
He never touched me, Principal Boyle. That’s a filthy lie.
No, Principal Boyle, I never had sex in school with a teacher.
Mr. Wilke is a great teacher, Principal Boyle. He’s taught me so much about cinema, and life, and myself. About my body. About how fucking amazing he can make it feel.
Of course, if I seriously thought we might be exposed, I’d have cooled everything off. I never wanted Evan to lose his job and get branded with the student-seducer stigma. But Hiyam was all talk. She still thought she could use me for a drug connection. She wouldn’t out us.
Evan wasn’t convinced.
“What are we doing?” he whispered, looking at me with a worryingly tragic face.
“No one’s going to say anything. We just have to be a little more careful.”
“Maybe we should wait, Maise. Until you’re out of school.”
He had never, ever said this before. The idea cut through me like a guillotine blade, splitting everything into cold halves.
“You cannot be serious,” I said.
That pained look deepened.
I stepped closer, my body hovering against his, not quite making contact. “If you think you can stand looking and not touching for eight more months, you’re welcome to try.”
“‘Try’ being the operative word,” he said, sighing. “No, I can’t. And I don’t want to try.”
“But you’ve thought of stopping this? Of waiting?”
He sat in a chair near the lamp, his shoulders bowed. “What if I lost my job? What kind of life could I offer you?”
“Your part-time job teaching an art class? You didn’t even want it. You can do better, Evan. You could be an actor.”
“That’s a pipe dream.”
“Every dream is a pipe dream before someone achieves it.” I leaned beside the blinds, looking up at the ceiling. “What if we went to LA?” I glanced at him without turning my head. “Together?”
He didn’t answer, but his posture became alert, attentive.
“I know it’s expensive as hell. But Wesley’s sister lives out there, and he wants to go, too, after graduation.” I bit my lip. “We could all rent a house together. Me and Wesley will get jobs and go to college. You could teach. Or you could audition for roles. Or—god, you’re fucking gorgeous, maybe you could model. I’m sure some catalog needs hot guys to stand around in V-necks.”
He laughed, softly.
“And if it doesn’t work, if we run out of money and suck at everything, then we can always come back. Or go somewhere else. Or never see each other again.”
“Come here,” he said.
I went to him. I sat in his lap, straddling his legs, his arms around my waist. His hair had a reddish-bronze gleam in the lamplight. Those boyish features looked delicate sitting inside the hard, square lines of his jaw.
“How long have we known each other?” he said.
“About two months.”
Sixty-eight days. Sixteen hundred-odd hours. My entire life.
“It feels like a lot longer,” he said.
“We did more with our time than most people do.”
That Polaroid smile. “I’m crazy about you, Maise O’Malley.”
Another rift of light chiseled into the blood-red gem in my chest.
“Why do I think you’re about to say something I won’t like?” I said.
His smile turned tender, suspiciously regretful. “I want this to work. But we can’t do it like this.”
“What?”
“We have to stop seeing each other in school.”
My throat tightened. “I can’t. I have a class with you.”
“That can change.”
Was it just me, or did time stop for everybody?
“You want me to drop your class?” I said in a small voice.
“You can switch to another elective—”
“I can’t, Evan. I need that class on my transcript.”
“You don’t need it. You can get in without it.”
“To a state school, maybe,” I muttered. Something sharp and thin curled in my chest, like peeled metal. It felt horrible. I could not believe he was saying this.
He made me look at him. “I can write you a letter of recommendation. I am your teacher.”
Uncomfortable pause. It had never felt so awkward before.
I twisted away, swallowing the prickly burr in my throat. “I feel like you’re punishing me for something we both did.”
“It’s not punishment. If I had my way, I’d lock us in that classroom and throw away the fucking key. You’re right, Maise. I can’t look without touching.” He stroked my face. “If they found out they’d call you a victim and they’d call me a predator and those labels would stick. And I hate the thought of people pitying you and telling you how to feel. They don’t know you like I do. They don’t know what you’ve been through, how strong you are. I won’t let them reduce all of that to some checkbox on a police report.” He breathed in, held it, breathed out slowly. “If it makes it easier for you, I’ll resign. You have to be in that school. I don’t.”
My eyes were full of water. It took superhuman willpower to keep from letting it go. “How would that make it easier? I’d just miss you and feel like shit all the time. And it’s not even about the credit, Evan. I like your class. I’m actually fucking learning.”
We stared at each other for a moment, wearing our absurdly pained tragedy masks. Then I started to laugh and cry at the same goddamn time.
Evan touched my face again, kissing away my tears, laughing in a gentle, commiserating way. And once he started kissing me he couldn’t stop. He kissed my cheeks, my mouth, tilting my head, opening my jaw with his hand. I tasted hot saline, the salt of my own tears. All of my tension unraveled into beautiful chaos, a mess of sorrow and hurt and desire and tenderness, completely mixed up and completely mixing me up. His tongue curled around mine and he kissed me like he wanted to draw out something deep, the breath from the bottom of my lungs, the blood from the innermost crypts of my heart, the essence of me. When I pulled away, his arms tightened relentlessly around my back.
“Why do I need you like this?” he said, his voice rasping.
I looked at his glassy, mercurial eyes, the haggard lines of want etched into his face, and said, “Because you’re addicted.”
#
In the tranquil moments after sex, I hatched my plan.
“Let me finish the semester with you,” I said.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, while Evan lay tangled in the sheets.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s only fair. I need to finish my film so I can put it on college apps. You would never jeopardize my future.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re trying to manipulate me.”
“‘Try’ being the operative word,” I said, and he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me down while I squawked, indignant. I failed to free myself and gave in, letting him pin my arms to the bed, and then his humor faded. His expression became pensive.
“Maise,” he said. “I’m worried about the kind of relationship we’re developing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to be your teacher if it’s all that’s driving this.”
“It’s not,” I said immediately, but his hands tightened on my wrists.
“It is, to some degree. Be honest.”
“Don’t act like it’s all me. You liked telling me what to do when you were fucking me in class.”
He breathed deeply. Lamplight ran up one side of his body, gilding the rungs of muscle over his ribs, his roped arms. “I did. And that scares me a little. We had something real before we became teacher and student.”
“This isn’t real?” I said.
“It is. Of course it is.” He squeezed my hand, pressing the ring. “But even if everything goes perfectly, it won’t last forever. It’s over in June, one way or another. And I don’t want it to end. I want to keep you. I want to hold on and never let you go.”
No one in my life had ever said anything like this to me. I felt disembodied again, but this time because my body was too full to contain me, too crowded with light and stars and shimmering galaxies like pinwheels studded with diamonds, spinning their brilliance into the void without caring whether it would ever be seen, just needing to shine. The bed beneath me was cloud, my skin a sheet of moonlight lying atop it. And this man, this amazing, impossible man, was the sun.
“You can’t, though,” I said, trying to defuse the intensity. “Remember? You can’t hold on to a shooting star.”
He smiled, looked away. Released me.
“Besides,” I said in as light a voice as I could manage, “you can’t dump me as your student yet. You still haven’t shown me Casablanca.”
“Promise not to mock me if I cry?”
“Nope.”
“Heartless.”
I blew on my nails and rubbed them on the sheet.
Evan laughed, and tackled me, and wrestled me still and kissed me and started the entire cycle all over again, my numb and tired body somehow rekindling, quickening, giving itself up to him.
And the whole time I wondered, If you weren’t my teacher, who would you be?
#
In his class on Halloween that Thursday, I felt hot, feverish. Not in a good way, but with a curl of nausea in my stomach, a feeling like my body was moving too fast, about to slam into something. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at the whiteboard where he’d held me and put his fingers inside of me. I couldn’t look at Hiyam, her smug eyes glazed with knowing. So I spent the period staring out the windows. Everything was flame shades of tangerine and pomegranate, ripeness on the brink of decay, and when the wind rippled the leaves they looked like a mosaic of fire, like the walls of the Cathedral Basilica. The bell rang and I sighed in relief, following Wesley out.
“You’re actually coming to lunch?” he said.
Cortana and Master Chief walked past, stopping for a group pic with Spock and Kirk. We were allowed to wear costumes as long as they weren’t “disruptive.”
I held Wesley’s gaze. For a moment I could imagine not being in Evan’s class anymore as a good thing. As freedom. “What are you doing tonight?” I said.
He shrugged. “There’s a party I’m thinking of hitting up.”
“Where?”
He glanced at me briefly, then away.
“Hiyam’s?” I said, my voice rising.
“So?” He looked so ridiculous when he was embarrassed. Too much landmass to be self-effacing. “She invited me.”
“She invited you,” I repeated. “She didn’t invite me.”
“I guess you pissed her off.”
“Well, have fun,” I said, turning away.
He followed me down the hall. “Maise, come on. I just thought, since you’re always busy at night…”
He trailed off. Neither of us looked at each other.
“What are you doing tonight?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“This is the last night of the fair. Want to go?”
My turn to shrug.
“You should,” he said. “And I’ll show up and accidentally run into you. We can do a meet-cute.”
I glanced at him, amused, and also feeling a cold frisson of unease. Paranoia. Secrecy. It was bleeding into every part of my life, staining everything.
“You’d ditch the Princess of Persia for me?” I said.
He grinned his friendly wolf grin, and I thought, You are a better friend than I am.
#
It was cold that night, the sky layered with clouds, sheets of cirrus shifting and moving in parallax and occasionally opening like a lens to expose the stars. Siobhan drove us and I insisted she come with, which almost killed Wesley. The truth was that seeing the carnival up close again set off demolition charges in my chest, and I needed all the distraction I could get from the crumbling, collapsing feeling inside me.
It should have been us coming back here. Me and Evan.
In the autumn chill, there was less drunken glee. The laughter that rang around us was crisp and dry. I wore skinny jeans and a hoodie, and whether I was too covered up or because they thought Siobhan was my mom, no man tried to eye-fuck me. I felt very young. We rode the merry-go-round together, and I half-heartedly played tag with Wesley while Siobhan sat on a white tiger, laughing her chiming, melodious laugh. I could see a glimpse of the girl she’d been, savvy and self-possessed, full of mysterious humor. She caught me staring at her and smiled.
“Let’s ride the rollercoaster,” Wesley said as he leapt off the platform.
I froze in my tracks. “No way.”
“Why not?” Then he saw my face. “Is the fearless Maise O’Malley actually scared?”
I’m not scared, I thought. It’s sacred.
“Bullying is grounds for disinheritance,” Siobhan said.
“Mom, this is not bullying. It’s friendly concern.”
“I’m afraid of heights,” I lied. It was the easiest way to shut him up.
But he gave me a funny look, and I thought of swinging out from the crow’s nest. Shit.
Siobhan came to my rescue. “I feel a strong desire to be used as a human canvas. You’re welcome to join me.”
We all sat down, mercifully spared from talking as the face painters worked on us. Wesley got snake fangs at the corners of his mouth, and a freckling of scales. I got a feline rim of kohl around my eyes and abstract whiskery scrolls on my cheeks. But Siobhan went full-out: a feathered mask across the bridge of her nose, complete with stick-on rhinestones and black lipstick. Wesley shook his head, embarrassed, but I beamed at her.
“You’re beautiful,” I said sincerely.
Her fingers grazed my ear. “Sweet child.”
As we walked through the game stalls, Wesley leaned close and whispered, “Do you have a crush on my mom?”
I elbowed him in the ribs, hard. But after a moment I whispered back, “Platonically. You’re so lucky, and you don’t even appreciate it.”
He scowled and walked ahead. But he knew I was right.
The distraction didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. In the funhouse, my reflection stretched out like taffy, a pale girl with haunted black-rimmed eyes and long empty hands. I thought about how I was pulled between two selves: the normal one who went to school and hung out with her friend and his mom, and the secret one who conspired with drug dealers and slept with her teacher. I found a broken mirror that split my face into Picasso shards and lingered there, unable to look away. He’d warned me. He’d said it would be hard to deal with the secrecy. And it wasn’t the secrecy itself that was difficult—it was that not talking about it made me question whether it was even real. I was still a teenager, and part of being a teenager was constantly checking your answers against everyone else’s. What did you get for number four? Is falling in love with someone twice your age gross, weird, amazing, or all of the above? The secrecy insulated me in a vacuum-sealed bubble. I could only ask myself, How does this feel? Is this good? Is this right? And the only answer I ever got was my own echo.
Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d Google things. Is it wrong to have sex with your teacher? The answers were useless to me. I wasn’t a minor. I wasn’t being abused. It had started before we ever set foot in school together, and it was technically legal. What I really wanted was to read other people’s stories. Other girls and boys who’d fallen for a teacher, and how it ended. Depressingly common tropes: power imbalance, surrogate parent figure, midlife crisis. Worse were the ones that ended when the parties realized taboo was all that held them together. That was what we’d finally been forced to confront: if our relationship was based on forbiddenness, what would happen when it was no longer forbidden?
Wesley and Siobhan bought hot dogs loaded with ketchup and onions and relish, and I told them I had to hit the restroom. Really what I needed was a moment alone. I wandered toward Deathsnake, leaning on the railing and watching the cars click-clack up the track, hair whipping off the sides, voices carrying on the wind. I hadn’t felt this lonely since the night I first met him.
“Maise,” a warm voice said.
At first I thought I was hallucinating. How the hell could he be here? But he walked up to me, squinting, smiling in surprise, a beautiful thing emerging from the blur of neon and smoke. He wore a sweater with the sleeves rolled up, his hair raking messily above his forehead.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
We stared at each other. His surprise was brightening into happiness.
“It’s the last night,” he said. “I had to come.”
“Me too.”
We couldn’t have shown up together, but here we were anyway. It was in the script.
Evan peered at me strangely. “What is on your face? Are those whiskers?”
“I’m a lion.”
He laughed. “You are, aren’t you? My little lioness.”
All the loneliness and confusion I’d felt minutes ago evaporated. “Well, I am a Leo.”
“You’re adorable.” He put a hand against my neck, slid it through my hair. His voice dropped. “I missed you so much today.”
Too late, I said, “Evan, Wesley’s here.”
Siobhan stepped up to the railing a few feet down from us, gorgeous and enigmatic in her painted mask, her dark crepe dress flowing around her like an extension of the night. What was that expression? Surprise? Intrigue? “Hello,” she said pleasantly. “Maise, who’s your friend?”
Evan turned, not knowing who she was, not getting enough distance from me. And Wesley appeared right on cue, gnawing on a giant pretzel and raising his eyebrows.
“Mr. Wilke. What are you doing here?”
I took a step away from him and knelt smoothly to tie a shoe that didn’t need tying.
Siobhan glided forward, smiling. “So this is the famous Mr. Wilke.”
“Famous?” Evan said.
Wesley groaned. “Mom.”
I stood up and her eyes swiveled from him to me. They paused on me a moment. I wasn’t imagining it. Fuck.
“I’m Siobhan Brown,” she said, lifting her hand. “Wesley’s mother, much to his dismay.”
Evan laughed graciously and took her hand. “Evan Wilke. Wesley’s teacher.”
“Maise’s teacher too,” Wesley said.
Evan glanced at me and said, “Right.”
Oh my god. I should just make a run for it.
“It’s so weird seeing you here,” Wesley said.
I felt I needed to say something, or my silence would become noticeable. “What, teachers can’t have real lives?”
They all looked at me, and suddenly I wondered whether I’d just blurted out the whole sordid confession. We’re sleeping together. He’s E. Stop fucking staring.
“It’s not much of one,” Evan said, and smiled. The incredible thing was that he could smile like I was just some student, some girl, and yet I saw the brief flare of warmth in his eyes, a secret message just for me.
You really are an actor, I thought.
“Good to see you guys,” he said. “And so nice to meet you, Ms. Brown.”
“Wait,” Wesley said, brandishing the stub of his pretzel, “you’re leaving already?”
I could have decked him.
Siobhan wore an appraising half-smile, the painted mask making it slightly sinister, and for the first time I realized how dangerous a woman she was. “If you don’t have much of a life, you’ll fit right in with us.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
“Seriously,” Wesley agreed.
She piqued an eyebrow at us. “These two think I’m preventing them from having fun because I’m the parent. Such failure of imagination.” Her look turned sly. “A handsome bachelor will remedy this appalling wholesomeness.”
“Mom,” Wesley said, “please do not flirt with our teacher.”
Evan laughed, genuinely, a little shyly. “I’m flattered, really, but I’ve got papers to grade.”
I darted him a warning look. You don’t give out papers, Mr. Wilke. You think papers are bullshit.
“Another time, then,” Siobhan murmured.
Evan smiled at each of us, and when he looked at me his eyes flickered to my hand, then back to my face. You could have clocked him with a stopwatch. He didn’t spend a single extra millisecond on me, yet he’d told me everything. I clenched the ring in my fist.
He walked away. Wesley jammed the end of his pretzel into his mouth and said, “Kinda sad that he comes here for fun.”
“We come here for fun,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’re losers.”
Siobhan clucked her tongue. “One percent of your share is going to your sister.”
“Mom,” he said. “You already said that like five times this week.”
I laughed. “Your sister’s going to be rich, Wesley. Better start being nice to her.”
Siobhan smiled at me. But as we turned back to the carnival, her eyes held mine, and I knew that she knew. Everything.