Unteachable(18)
Author: Leah Raeder

There’s a very strange clarity when you get close but don’t come. Your whole body feels like an exposed nerve, everything painful and grating but also miraculously clear. You don’t have that sadness, the post-coital tristesse. The world is hard-edged and bright.

Evan held me, one arm around my hips, the other at my neck. His chest rose and fell against my back. Neither of us moved for a while. We knew what we were going to have to face when we looked at each other.

Our bodies separated. I sat on the bed, crossing my legs self-consciously. He sat beside me. We both faced the wall. The refrigerator buzzed in the kitchen. A man shouted unintelligibly outside.

“I’m sorry,” Evan said.

“For not making me come, or for being my teacher?”

He was silent a long moment. “Both.”

“Don’t be.”

He looked at me. I kept looking straight ahead.

“I’ve felt like this since the beginning,” I said. We spoke in whispers, for some reason. Maybe truths weren’t as harsh that way. “I wanted you because you were older. I don’t feel anything for boys my age. And when I found out you were my teacher, something clicked in me. It felt wrong in the best possible way. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

Now I looked at him. “You like me because I’m young.”

“That’s part of it.”

“A big part.”

“Yes,” he said, and I smiled a little.

“Good,” I said. “I like that you’re kind of f**ked up, because I’m kind of f**ked up.” I uncrossed my legs, slipping one behind his. Ran my toes up the light hair on his calf. “I’ve been obsessed with you since that first night. Not just with you, but the way you make me feel.”

“How do I make you feel?”

Alive. Real. Valuable. Whole.

“Like myself,” I said. “More than I’ve ever been.”

He touched my cheek lightly. “Who are you?”

“Your student.”

He shook his head. “No. You’re the one teaching me.”

My smile became full and genuine. I wrapped my arms around him, and we lay back on the bed together, quiet and calm, moonlight draping over our bare skin in a luminous sheet.

“Stay here tonight,” he said after a while.

The first wrong note of the evening. It jangled inside me, discordant. Stop, I told myself. Why are you scared? Has he given you any indication he’s going to leave you? What are you afraid of, being loved?

“I’ve been gone all day. My mom will freak out. I need to butter her up for St. Louis.”

I need do no such thing. Mom hadn’t cared where I spent the night when I was thirteen, and she sure as hell didn’t care now.

Evan kissed my forehead, but I saw the disappointment in his eyes.

“Next weekend,” I said, “we’ll be doing this in a new city.”

Waking up in the morning together. I had never woken up in the morning with anyone else.

“Are you nervous?” he said.

“No.”

That’s another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they’re true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.

Wesley skipped Film Studies on Monday. I looked for him in the cafeteria, but he wasn’t there either. Maybe he’d ditched the whole day.

It felt depressingly empty without him.

Britt and Hiyam didn’t mention the party.

Mr. Wilke smiled at me, relaxed, peaceful. Beatific.

I hit the computer lab after school.

My phone took shitty video, but it wouldn’t matter for this project. This was about impressions, experiences. The feeling of being there, the blurry bright overwhelming way real life looked as you lived it, not the surgical precision of HD after the fact. I scrubbed through my clips, looking for the bones of the story I knew was there.

Somehow, the photos captured what I was looking for better. Receding tail lights on a dark street. Evan’s back, roped with muscle, his arms raised as he put on his shirt in a motel. The little girl with the black-eyed Susans, walking with her dad beneath the Gateway Arch. A series of leavings, endings.

My old life ending. A new one beginning.

There was more to film than live action. I put headphones on, streaming music from my phone, and started scribbling.

you don’t want friends

wise girl lovely too

i’m looking for some coke

just a trail of fire in my hands

I set the text over the photos in a video editing app. Each image flashed onscreen for a couple of seconds, then cut to the next. Tail lights/trail of fire. Little girl/looking for some coke. Jarring. Weird. Kinda disturbingly beautiful. Closer to what I was trying to say, but I still wasn’t quite sure what that was yet. Like Siobhan said, maybe it would emerge.

I missed Siobhan.

And her stupid, stupidly-in-love-with-me son.

“I’m cooking tomorrow night,” Mom announced when I got home Thursday.

I flung my bookbag at the couch. This week had been a trial. Evan and I thought it best not to see each other outside of school until the weekend, in case anyone had noticed our slip-ups. Wesley thought it best not to see me inside or outside of school until I dropped dead.

I was in no mood for Mom’s tweaked-out bursts of chemical enthusiasm and trying to be a Real Mom.

“I’ve got plans this weekend,” I said.

“I bought food already. Steak’s marinating.” She pronounced it meer-uh-nay-ten.

I looked at her dully. “The only thing you know how to cook is meth.”

She did not find that amusing.

“What are you even cooking for?” I said, grabbing a jar of sweet pickles from the fridge.

“We’re having company.”

I froze. “Who?”

“Mr. Gary Rivero.”

“Who is Mr. Gary Rivero?”

“A very important man. A very wealthy man.”

I narrowed my eyes as I laid out bread for a sandwich. “That doesn’t sound shady at all.”

Mom sat at the kitchen table, sparking her lighter.

“Could you not smoke in the house, please?” I said.

“I ain’t.”

She stirred the ashes in a terracotta pot. I gave up trying to get her to quit smoking indoors; my only condition was she not do it while we breathed the same air. Sometimes I could not believe this woman and I shared DNA.

“Mr. Rivero is very interested in meeting you,” she said.

“Stop calling him Mr. Rivero. That sounds like a teacher.” I did not like that association attaching itself to her skeezeball friends. “Why does he want to meet me?”

“Because I told him what a smart, pretty girl you are. How you’re going to college and all.”

I paused in peanut buttering my bread and glanced at her. That was almost a compliment. My mother’s compliments were never without ulterior motive. “Why does he care if I’m smart?”

“I don’t know, babe. Maybe you should talk to him and find out.”

I had zero intention of doing that. “Like I said, I’ve got plans. I’ll be gone all weekend.”

“Where you going?”

“None of your business.”

Mom scooted her chair back and loomed. She had a good three or four inches on me. Mentally, rationally, I knew this woman couldn’t do shit to me. But I imprinted on her, and my brain remembers how to light up the fear circuits when she glowers.

“Long as you live under my roof, everything’s my business.”

I couldn’t meet her stare. I addressed the peanut butter. “I’m going out of town with a friend.”

“A friend? Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“That man who was here the other night?”

“Yeah.”

She mused over this, her makeup almost moving in sync with her facial features.

“Well, I just need you here Friday night. You can go first thing Saturday.”

God f**king dammit. This was not worth fighting over. Fighting with Mom tended to result in the molecular destabilization of household appliances. Lately, she had made threats against my laptop.

“Fine,” I said, slapping pickles into the peanut butter.

Mom finally noticed what I was making. She frowned at the sandwich, then at me, and said with a dry, croaking laugh, “What are you, pregnant?”

Heart failure.

It only lasted a moment, and then I laughed back, right in her face. She couldn’t tell the difference between sincerity and sarcasm anyway. Birth control was one thing I’d gotten right in my ridiculous life. I never missed a pill, and Evan was paranoid about protection for some reason I’d eventually cajole out of him. That, at least, would not be the drama that destroyed us.

Still smiling, I said, “What are you, a mom?”

By Friday afternoon I was utterly miserable. No one to talk to or sleep with or bother all week. Being miserable is even worse without an audience. I would’ve welcomed Wesley’s senior citizen wisecracks right then. Go ahead and talk about how decrepit my mystery boyfriend is, I thought. The same one whose jokes you laughed at third period. The same one Hiyam was imagining f**king in her head.

Wesley had found some clandestine place to eat lunch, so I stopped showing at the cafeteria, too. It was a bad idea, reckless, but I spent that lunch period in Evan’s empty class, mostly talking and only kissing him for about five minutes out of forty.

“This is poor risk management,” he said, pressing me against the whiteboard during those five minutes.

“I want to f**k you in this classroom,” I said.

He exhaled slowly through his teeth.

“On this desk,” I said. “While you’re wearing your shirt and tie, and I’m wearing nothing but socks.”

He kissed me to make me stop talking.

Before I left, he said, “This is torture.”

“I could always drop out.”

He looked horrified.

“Kidding,” I said. “Relax, guy.” But I ran my hand up his arm wistfully, adding, “I can’t wait till tomorrow.”

He embraced me, and said into my ear, “I’m going to f**k the shit out of you.”

I lost my breath.

It was crude, it was unexpected, and it set me on f**king fire.

Mom insisted I wear the new clothes she’d bought. Suspiciously pleasant aromas leaked from the kitchen. It was possible she was concocting something actually edible in her cauldrons.

I was 99.98% sure Gary Rivero was a druglord. The 0.02% was the possibility he was my father, reentering my life at the precise moment I cauterized the wound he’d left in me. Still, because I was forced into this and because f**king with middle-aged men was my favorite pastime, I put on a wispy skirt that showed generous thigh, a snug tank, and a brass locket from Nan. No makeup but a dash of eyeshadow that made my eyes look feral, staring eerily from a shadowed cave. My hair decided to behave and do the milk chocolate waterfall thing. My body looked sleek and tight and new. I took a selfie and sent it to Evan.

Can I kidnap you? he texted.

Is it kidnapping if I give permission?

A delay before he responded. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.

I felt a weird, bittersweet sort of elation. Me either, I thought.