Even When You Lie to Me (14 page)

I spent most of that evening reading over my paper on
The Brothers Karamazov,
which Drummond had returned to me at the end of our meeting. At the top was a large
A,
and at the end, in cramped red lettering, he’d written,
Excellent examination of the intersection of free will and morality as experienced through Ivan—but I still felt it was lacking in circus folk.

“Hey,” my dad said. He stood in my bedroom doorway next to my mother. “You need a break?”

“Sure. What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion,” he said. He sat down on the bed. My mother sat next to him. “We just thought we’d come sit on your bed and watch you for a while.”

“Come on,” I said. “Am I in trouble? Did I win a raffle? Did
Frida
win a raffle?”

Frida’s tail thumped like a heartbeat.

“You didn’t check the mail today,” my mother said.

“No…”

“You got a letter,” my dad said.

I knew what it was. From the way they were smiling, I could tell it wasn’t bad news. “Can I see it?”

“We didn’t look,” my mother said as she pulled a thick envelope from behind her back.

“This could turn gloomy in a minute,” my dad said, but he was grinning.

“Probably,” I said. I took it and opened it, and there was a letter welcoming me to Oberlin College.

I laughed. “I got in.”

My mother squealed—I’d never heard her squeal before—and they both grabbed me into a hug. Frida stood up and nosed her way in, wagging her tail as if she’d had something to do with it. For a moment I let myself think about it: a new start where no one would know me, in a place where he had been. But also a place where he wasn’t anymore.

My dad pulled away first. “You look less excited than I expected,” he said.

“I’m just in shock,” I said. My gaze fell on the letter again. I picked it up and rolled it into a tube and squeezed it. “Let’s celebrate.”

I spent a lot of time watching him. He was tall, and his shoulders were broad. He wasn’t stocky, exactly, but he wasn’t thin either; he was as solid and sturdy as a cart horse. His body always seemed on the verge of overspilling its boundaries, but he swam often enough that it was roped in by muscle. I spent a lot of nights imagining what it would be like to hug him and decided he was big enough to enclose me completely, until we were so close that I could dig myself inside him and curl up in the hollow spaces. I loved watching him move around the room, juggling a tennis ball or sweeping his arms as if he were conducting our conversations. He could get our attention just by drumming his fingers on a table.

He was casually graceful—quiet and steady in class, never quick or impatient, but if pressed, he could move with surprising speed. He’d effortlessly take the stairs three at a time or leap over the low wall in the courtyard if he was running late; boys would wolf whistle at him and he’d give them the finger without turning around. When he ran, it was with the easy springing rhythm of an athlete; one day after school, a group of kids tossed a Frisbee too far and he raced after it with long loping strides and leapt up to catch it with a nimble curl. He moved not as if he were weightless but as if the weight didn’t matter.

He didn’t wear nice
clothes—usually
combinations of jeans or khakis and polos or sweaters—but one day he had a meeting with Dr. Crowley and he came in wearing a dress shirt and tie, and I wanted him so badly my vision blurred. For a moment it was so overpowering that my muscles went slack and my skull felt full of concrete. I had to put my head in my hands and close my eyes to ride it out. Halfway through class he’d loosened the tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt as he listened to Frank ramble about
Wuthering Heights,
and I spent the next twenty minutes thinking about slowly unhooking the rest of them. He glanced at me while I was imagining freeing the lip of his shirt from his belt, and I blushed shamelessly and looked away. By the time I came back after school, he’d rolled up his sleeves: he’d started neatly, folding the sections of fabric over each other, but eventually he’d shoved them the rest of the way up his forearms until they bunched around his elbows like bloomers. “Nice,” I’d said, and he’d replied, “I know; I just can’t stand suits. I feel too restricted.” I’d said I felt that way about skirts and he’d nodded solemnly and said, “Me too.”

His hands were big, his fingers notched evenly at every joint, not thick or tapering but square at the tip. They looked capable of both strength and precision. The bones in the back of his hand showed through sometimes like the ribs of a piano. I stared at them during class, watching as he restlessly clicked a pen or tapped a finger against his thigh. His arms were contoured with muscle, but the soft undersides were as pale as the white of an eye. Blue veins traced a meandering path down his forearms like rivers in a topographical map. When he squeezed his fists, the veins would bulge slightly, and when we cracked him up, the one that crossed his forehead popped out like an extra laugh line.

His chest was solid but not particularly muscular. When he wore button-down shirts, he’d leave them open so that small tufts of his chest hair were visible, not dark and masculine but blond and sparse. He had a tag of skin on his throat, like a leftover bit of paper from a hole punch, that I was forever tempted to pull off.

His ass was round, curved both in profile and straight on, and where it met his thighs they were almost chubby, swollen with slightly too much flesh. They were powerful legs, thick as tree trunks. I tried not to stare at his groin, out of fear he’d catch me doing it more than anything, but every once in a while I couldn’t help looking at the bulge where sometimes the seam of his jeans would push against his balls, and I’d think about what he’d look like with an erection. I’d never seen one in real life, clothed or otherwise, but I liked thinking of him being startled by it, embarrassed and apologetic but unable to stop it. The daydream usually involved us being pressed together and me feeling it on my hip, at which point I was often interrupted by Asha coughing or the scratch of pens on paper as everyone finished their quizzes, or even his rapping the table in front of me with his knuckles. I’d look up at him and blink, my vision briefly doubling as I tried to reconcile the fantasy image with the one of him looking stern as he patrolled us, his groin decidedly flaccid.

He never wore shorts, but sometimes I’d catch him idly scratching his leg, his pant leg rucked up and a crumpled sock exposed. His calf was milky white, knitted with dark hair, and it startled me how much I recoiled when I saw it. I think it was the sock, dark against his pale skin. It made him look ordinary, vulnerable, the way it sagged, the way it made his calf look like any man’s calf, like a sixty-year-old’s, like my father’s. I thought of him in sandals with socks and winced.

He wasn’t handsome, not unless you squinted. He had thick, dark brown hair, but cowlicks always threatened at the back, and it looked like the most thorough combing he gave it was when he dragged his hand through it in class. His mouth was too wide; his lips were too thin; his chin lacked a confident jut. His nose was straight but his profile made him look too young, like a college kid playing at being a teacher. He usually had traces of stubble sweeping his jaw like pencil shavings, but there were always angry red dots along his throat where he’d shaved too quickly.

But I loved his eyes. They were a striking shade of blue—the kind that made you look at them twice to ensure you’d gotten the color right—and they were big and warm and always ready to laugh. They caught mine every day in class, whether I was whispering to Lila or laughing at something he’d said or listening to someone ramble and grinning at him when he shook his head at me.

His crow’s-feet fanned out into sunbursts when he laughed, and the crisp lines that bracketed his mouth pooled into fat dimples. I often imagined tracing those lines with my fingers, mapping his face until I could draw it from memory. His voice was soft in conversation but deeper in class, especially when he was joking with us, as if our whole course were an elaborate parody of teaching. I liked his laugh best when it was low and guttural, but I also loved it when we made him crack up; he’d bury his face in his arms as if he was ashamed to be so defenseless in front of us.

Even the books we read were different to me now, and took on his cast: every one felt like something our class shared, some secret we had together. We joked about them like they were a language only we understood. He made us feel like we had conquered them, understood them, unlocked them in a way other people hadn’t, or couldn’t, or would never be able to. Once I’d read a book for his class, it felt like it was mine, like it said something about me, and we were the only ones who would ever know what it was.

Everyone was infatuated with him to some degree; he pulled us in like a magnet. It started that way for me too, but after a few months I was absolutely helpless in front of him. It was exhausting, feeling as much for him as I did; it was big and violent and felt like it would never end. Some days I felt like a branch trying to hold up under an enormous weight; the pressure got worse and worse until I was sure I would snap. I was so giddy sometimes that I felt manic. I knew it would be wrong for him to feel anything toward me—and in a way I wanted him to feel something but not to allow himself to act on it, to be tortured and desperate but too noble to hurt me—but there was something even more appealing about the thought of him giving in: he’d have to want me so much he’d break the rules to act on it.

I would have done anything he’d asked me, formed any opinion he’d told me to, laid myself bare in front of him and let him do anything he wanted. I often pretended he was on my bed with me, overlit by the afternoon sun, running his hand down my leg. Then I’d try to picture what he was actually doing at that
moment—swimming
at the community center, laughing with a group of friends, talking to his parents, having sex with a girlfriend—and I’d think about how small I must be in his life, while he was everything in mine.

I knew nothing would ever happen. He liked me, of course, and sometimes I let myself think I was his favorite. But I told myself I didn’t even cross his mind outside school. I was an ugly girl with a crush. I didn’t have to worry that it would be wrong of him to be interested in me; he wouldn’t ever be interested. I cringed to think of how he described me to his friends. I’d make myself imagine it:
You wouldn’t believe how some of the girls throw themselves at me. Yes, really! And not even the good-looking ones. I get the ones the boys won’t touch. There’s this one…Jesus, it’s painful. I want to put her out of her misery and tell her, Listen, I wouldn’t be interested if you
weren’t
my student.

But there were other times I could have sworn I saw something else in his eyes, or we shared a grin as if it were a private joke, or he’d pass me kneeling at my locker and gently kick the soles of my shoes, and when I’d turn, he’d feign ignorance, whistling loudly and looking around for the perpetrator. Maybe it was just pity. I’d seen him do similar things with other kids in our class, and maybe it was the only way he knew how to relate to us. Why should I be any different?