Everything You Want Me to Be(49)
What do you think of Hattie’s new boyfriend? —HollyG
Peter’s head snapped up and he stared at me, confusion all over his face. I let my heartbeat settle down and gave him a slow smile, the kind of smile that conspirators exchange, that revealed everything without saying a word, the kind of smile that lit up an entire stage and said to every person in the audience, I’m yours and only yours. I smiled at him with everything buried inside me that longed to break free.
Just as the understanding started to filter through his eyes, I turned and strolled out of the classroom, winking at Tommy as I passed.
PETER / Thursday, December 6, 2007
WHAT DID I think of Hattie’s boyfriend? What did I think of Tommy Kinakis?? I thought he was dating a sociopath, that’s what I thought of him.
My footfalls were hard and driving, chewing up the cartilage in my knees with grim satisfaction. I needed to destroy something and my body was the only available option.
Since cross-country had finished I’d started running at night again, and these holiday nights were endless. The snow we’d gotten for Thanksgiving had melted and given way to a dry, dark December. The sun gave up the horizon as soon as I pulled into Elsa’s driveway after work, casting a final weak flare against the metal silo before the darkness swallowed everything and the silence began. All the summer chirping of insects had vanished. Even the chickens were quiet. There was nothing to interrupt my constant guilt except exertion.
I’d bought a headlight to see the road and its beams bounced jarringly over the rocks. I ran in the middle of the gravel, passing farmhouses that glowed like tiny ships on a rolling, frozen sea. Trees loomed at the edges of the road, their naked branches ghostly in the moonlight, but I barely noticed them.
She was dating Tommy as a cover.
In the three hours since she’d sauntered out of my classroom, I’d been incapable of thinking about anything else. She’d told me at the barn that she would become the last girl in the world who would be having an affair with her English teacher and apparently this massive deceit was her plan. Tommy was a convenience, nothing more to her than a prop. I’d stumbled through the rest of the afternoon and dinner, trying to digest the magnitude of what she had done. She had multiple personalities; it was the only explanation. She was dangerous, calculating, diabolical, and . . . brilliant. She was fucking brilliant.
After that night at the barn, I severed any connection with her, refusing to engage or ignore her in class, because ignoring her would single her out and I couldn’t afford to differentiate her in any way. I slipped up once during lunch, though. Carl had caught me looking at her in the cafeteria.
“Trouble?” he asked. Nothing else. Carl was nothing if not succinct.
He glanced in Hattie’s direction. Even though we were supposed to be monitoring the students for fights and other inappropriate conduct, Carl and I usually just ate and kept to ourselves.
“No.” I looked away quickly, stuffing a bite into my mouth.
“Should be illegal for them to wear sweaters like that until they’re eighteen.”
It was suddenly hard to swallow.
“Some of them don’t even seem like kids. The boys do, of course. Boys don’t become men real fast anymore. These girls, though . . .”
“I know.” I kept myself from looking at Hattie again, but I felt like it was written all over my face. I stared down at my sandwich, as engrossed as it was possible to be with egg salad.
“Out here they sometimes still get married right out of high school,” Carl kept on, feeling conversational that day for some reason. He added that—“out here”—occasionally when he talked to me, like he was my reluctant tour guide to rural southern Minnesota.
“You’ve got to be careful,” he said.
I didn’t respond or even look up and we spent the rest of the lunch period lost in our own heads. If he suspected anything about me and Hattie, he didn’t say so and I never made the mistake of glancing in her direction after that day.
The only interaction we’d had in the last month was through her homework assignments. I read them upstairs in the computer room, ashamed of how much I reacted to her words on the page. Regardless of anything else that had happened, she was still one of the brightest, most agile-minded students I had known. She introduced argument after argument, defeating her own points and turning on a dime to embrace some entirely new theory that she later questioned and half-hung at the end of her paper like both a prize and a warning. She clearly didn’t draft her essays, but I loved that she didn’t. It was like watching her think out loud, as if the page itself was breathing. I didn’t give her anything less than an A, even when her narrative structure obviously needed some improvement, because I knew she would challenge me on the grade and I couldn’t risk any chance of having to talk to her one-on-one.
And after all of that careful distance she ambushed me anyway, just when I’d started to relax and think she’d moved on. She handed me that piece of paper and tossed me right back into the fucking fire.
Turning into the parking lot for Lake Crosby, I passed an empty pickup. There was no one around; the truck looked like it could have been left for dead weeks ago. I slowed my pace as I reached the uneven terrain on the trail that circled the lake. Soften your stride, I’d told the boys. Tense your core.
Then I didn’t need any reminders. My gut clenched as I jogged around the far side of the empty barn and spotted a small glow coming from the window under the oak tree.