Even When You Lie to Me (24 page)

“I’m organizing a party for your birthday this year,” Lila said as we waited for the bell to ring. “Don’t protest.”

“Fine,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t involve other people.”

“You’re turning eighteen,” she said. “It’s time we got you a hooker.”

“I’d prefer a cake,” I said.

“Guys, let’s get started, shall we?” Drummond said.

Things were sometimes different and sometimes the same with him now. At night I would replay the conversation we’d had in the hotel—more than any other conversation I’d had with him, which was not an easy
accomplishment—going
over each word and gesture with the thoroughness and precision of a surgeon rooting out infected cells, probing each syllable for some hidden meaning. He
had
admitted that he had feelings for me, hadn’t he? I’d been sure I hadn’t misunderstood him—it had seemed very clear at the time—but the longer we went on without mentioning it, acting as if nothing had happened, the more I felt I must have been wrong. I had always imagined that when—if—he did, it would be under duress, when we were both tormented by longing, in the middle of a violent argument, and he would finally confess while standing outside in the rain, crying and bearded and broken. Then we would kiss, repressedly. I hadn’t expected that he would just say it, quietly, freely, that it wouldn’t seem like a surprise to either of us, and that I wouldn’t even get a hug out of it.

That it had happened so easily made me doubt my memory of it; he had been drunk, after all, and while he had seemed lucid, he had also been tired and we’d argued and maybe it was all a
misunderstanding.
Hadn’t he been telling me how ordinary he thought I was, how little I mattered to him, how he only liked me because he was lonely? Or had he been saying the opposite—that I was so special he couldn’t admit it to himself and had to pretend I wasn’t? Or maybe he had been talking about himself, or Lila, or Ms. Anders, or Rachel. I worried it over and over again and never hit on an answer that would allow me to bury the question for good.

I thought about Rachel sometimes, and what she looked like, and how she acted, and whether he still thought about her. I wished I could know how he felt about her, dig around inside his brain and scoop out his memories and squeeze them for information until they popped. I felt sure that this somehow held the key to how he felt about me. Maybe I had read too many books.

Usually he treated me like he always had, with a mixture of affection and distance, and he was still careful not to touch me. I felt like I was always trying to get more from him than he wanted to give me, like I was looking at him underwater and constantly misjudged the distance; he was always farther away than I’d thought he was. Sometimes I would catch his eye in class, or he would catch mine, and I’d try to see if there was anything more behind his look. But he would always turn away first, so I could never quite tell.

I never knew how to act or feel on any given day, or even from moment to moment; I careened from giddiness to terror to anger to lust to frustration. At night I’d decide I was going to confront him, to tell him how I hated that he pretended that evening had never happened, to tell him how angry I was, and then in the morning I would see him and he would smile at me and the words would drop out of my head. It seemed ridiculous, being so angry at him when anyone would think we were just teacher and student. The beige halls of our school didn’t allow for it; the context seemed to push out any interpretation other than benign friendliness.

I couldn’t talk about it to anyone, and while sometimes I liked having a secret, and imagined enjoying clandestine trysts in a back stairwell while people thundered over us, oblivious; or having whispered urgent arguments with him; or getting coded messages that confided his unbearable lust, none of that ever actually happened. Instead there was silence, and in that silence I could fill in any story I wanted, and did.

“Charlie,” he said, “your thoughts?”

“What?” I said. I’d been staring out the window.

“Your thoughts about Mr. Rochester?”

“Oh,” I said. “I think he’s creepy.”

The class laughed. I liked that.

“Really?” he said. “Why?”

“He hides his wife—his foreign wife, from
Jamaica
—in his attic and then acts like this poor tortured soul about it, like
he’s
the one with the horrible life. Jane only finds him interesting because she thinks he’s so dark and troubled.”

“True,” he said, “but there were very few other options for the mentally ill at the time.”

“Maybe she was fine before he locked her up—maybe she just cheated on him or something because she couldn’t stand him—but he got sick of her and she had a mental break after he stuffed her in an attic by herself. As most people probably would.”

“Fair enough,” he said as the class laughed again. He smiled in deference to their laughter, but the arc of worry lines between his eyebrows furrowed. “That’s certainly a valid line of
interpretation.
But let’s not forget that Jane calls him on that. And on everything else. It’s only when he’s humbled and she’s independent that they come together as equals.”

“Yeah, but the whole relationship reads like fan fiction,” I said. “She’s this ordinary girl who gets a handsome, loaded guy to love her for who she really is. It’s bull—BS.”

“Okay,” he said. “But we could read it as a critique of the trope. It’s only after he’s terribly injured and his house burns down that she forgives him. And it’s her forgiveness alone that gives him absolution.”

“Why does he even deserve to be forgiven? He’s a dick.”

“Good question,” he said. “Anyone want to take a crack at it?” No one said anything. “Great. Okay. Well, what if the forgiveness is less about him and more about Jane not allowing him that control over her anymore? Forgiving someone is a powerful act.”

“Or it’s letting the person who has power over you off the hook for what they did.”

“Do you not think that he genuinely loves her? Or that, at least, we’re meant to believe he does?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t get why you’re defending him.”

That stopped him for a minute. “Right,” he said eventually. “So you think the book can be read as a female fantasy of male desire.”

“Yeah,” I said, “sure. I guess I don’t see why you thi—you all think it’s such a great love story. It’s just Brontë’s wet dream of getting some hot guy to go through hell just to marry her.”

The bell rang.

“Okay,” Drummond said, “I guess that will have to stand as the last word on the subject until tomorrow.”

I got up to leave with the others, but he said, “Hang on a sec, would you, Chuck?”

He waited until everyone had left and then shut the door softly. I shivered as he sat down on the table near me.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, I try not to make assumptions where you’re concerned, but you don’t often use the words
wet dream
in class discussions.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”

“That’s not quite what I was getting at,” he said.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m okay.”

“All right,” he said, though he clearly didn’t believe me. “Anyway, the reason I kept you here was because I wanted to ask you for a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“I’m covering Ms. Anders’s study hall tomorrow. She’s got a meeting with Dr. Crowley, and in case it runs late, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind starting the class discussion without me.”

“Me?” I said. “What— Why?”

“Because I think you can do it,” he said. “It’ll be five, ten minutes at most.”

“Is that…allowed?”

“You think our lit class seems likely to riot?”

“Who knows what Frank gets up to in his spare time?” I said.

He smiled. “It’ll be fine. I trust you.”

I looked down. It was true that he’d basically stopped grading me in the past few months; I got As for nearly everything. I’d always done well in his class, but we both knew how strange it would be for him to give me anything less now. “I guess this means I’ll actually have to read the book.”

“Who needs sleep, right?”

“Can I have your notes?”

He laughed. “I love that you think I ever have notes.”

I looked out the windows; the only view was of the other walls of the building. I thought of that night when I’d asked him if he thought I was pretty, when I’d sat there feeling nervous and sick. Then I thought of him in the hotel telling me I wasn’t special. I knew I was frowning.

“You don’t have to say yes,” he said. “In fact, you’re entitled to tell me to fuck off.”

I looked back at him. “You know I won’t do that,” I said quietly.

It struck his eyes first—guilt, then shame, then sadness—and then it spread across his face like a stain. For a moment I enjoyed it: that I had gotten him to acknowledge it, that I did have some power over him after all.

“I know,” he said.

I looked away, guilty that I’d made him feel bad. “So you think I’d be a good teacher.”

He cleared his throat. “If you want to be,” he said. “You can see the many rewards.” He gestured toward the bare cinder block walls I’d been looking at.

“I thought you regretted it.” I felt tense bringing up anything we’d talked about that night, even the edge of it, like a thread that would unravel the whole carpet if I pulled hard enough.

“No,” he said, “I don’t.”

“You must have had other reasons besides the…thing you mentioned.”

“Well,” he said, “the money, obviously. The recognition. The respect. The unbridled power.” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “The cafeteria food. I love square pizza.”

I looked out the window again. “And Tater Tots?”

“Did I ever tell you what we found out about them?”

I shook my head.

“The potato flakes are twenty percent lye.”

I looked at him. “No,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But they do have ten grams of saturated fat per serving, which is probably worse.”

I looked down to hide my smile, but he knew he had me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of his dimples fatten, like someone was tugging a string inside his cheek.

“You teach me something invaluable every day,” I said.

“I haven’t taught you anything you didn’t already know,” he said. “And you know plenty.”

I watched my legs as they swung. “Not enough.”

I could feel him looking at me. “You really want to know why I teach?” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I remember what it was like,” he said.

I swung my legs again and they hit his, gently. “I thought you hated it.”

“Yeah, I did,” he said.

“That seems like it’s worked out well,” I told him, but I laughed as I said it.

“Charlie,” he said. I looked up. That sweet, sickening, queasy feeling was back, the one that came at the moments when I thought my feelings for him would rip me apart. It was like loosening your grip on the handles while your bike careered down a hill. You couldn’t sustain a feeling like that. The center wouldn’t hold.

“What?” I said finally.

We studied each other for a long time, and I kept thinking he was about to say something—he looked poised on the edge of a word—but in the end he only said, “I have a meeting to get to.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So,” he said. He stood up and held out his hands. “Come on. Up with you.”

I didn’t move for a second, I was so surprised, and then I held out my hands and he pulled me up, although I didn’t need any help. His hands were warm. Mine were sweaty. He pulled too hard and I had to rear back before I tumbled against him. Once I was standing firmly, he put his hands on my shoulders, as if to keep me from falling into him again.

“See?” he said. “It’s not so hard.”