Shorts - Sinister Shorts (21 page)

Roo arranged to meet him in the parking lot after the game. She wore a carefully tight cropped knit top, yellow, with white shorts that she hoped showed off the golden glow of last weekend. Standing under a lamppost, she observed as the crowds poured into the parking lot. “They won,” shouted the running back's father to someone, tossing a cap into the air. “Helluva game!” The students seemed more subdued than their parents, but Roo knew why. Their celebrating started later, out from under the glare of adult eyes.

Roo watched for Newell's blond head. He would be happy. Good.

After the crowd thinned out, Newell finally appeared, his hair wet. He found her under the light, gathered her up, and kissed her. “Sorry I took so long. Grabbed a shower.” He steered her over to his car, a blue Cavalier, closing the door behind her with a hard thump.

They drove down the dark streets of their town and up the hill, winding around until the lights flickered like sparks through the trees. Coming out to the clearing, Newell parked the car. Usually the place was packed on Friday night. “Jeff's having a party. Didn't I mention it?”

“You don't want to go,” she said. “Do you?”

“Not really.” Newell put his arm around her and reeled her in close. They kissed awhile, then he watched and waited while she pulled the crop top down into a kind of belt around her waist. “Just a minute,” he said then, his breath a loud exhalation. “I need to tell you something.”

“I thought we decided,” she said, pushing him down, leaning over him. “Tonight's going to be so special…”

“Roo…” he said, and then he said her name a few more times.

Newell started the car up and rolled down the hill. He had to be home by ten. He had promised.

When they hit Main Street, he broke the silence. “Last night my parents got really mad about how much time we're spending together.”

“They finally know about me? About us?”

“Yeah. And I guess you know how my dad is. Don't you have him for English?”

Roo nodded.

“He gets on my case and won't let go. So I blew it. I couldn't help it, Roo. I told them how much I love you,” he said, reaching a hand over to stroke her hair. “How I'd do anything for you.”

“Bet they didn't like hearing that.”

“No. They told me they're sending me to an aunt in Sacramento until school's out. Summer, we're going back East. Renting a house in Truro.”

She didn't know where Truro was, but she could imagine the clapboard cottage overlooking a blue blue sea, sunshine, and pretty girls all in a row.

“Well,” she said. “At least we can write.”

“No. They said no.”

He didn't look at her, and Roo knew why. Newell was basically a coward.

He told her how he had fought them, and how only his mother's tears and the whiteness of his father's face had convinced him that this might be a good thing for both of them.

“God, Newell. You could have told me before we…”

“I know,” he said. “Sorry.”

Well, she couldn't blame him. For months she had teased him. She knew how he felt. He had earned her, with all those dates, the flowers, the whole romance thing. She sighed. “You told them who I was?”

“Yes. Don't worry, though. My dad would never use it against you in your grades or anything. Never. He's scrupulous when it's easy. He's just a weasel when it comes to the hard stuff.”

“You shouldn't talk about your father that way.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You should have told them I didn't mean a thing to you.”

“Why would I do that?”

How could someone with his grades be so dense? “What else did you tell them?”

“My father asked if we'd had sex.”

“But we didn't until tonight.”

“No. That was lucky, wasn't it?”

While he faced the windshield, driving carefully, as he always did, his eyes swerved over to watch her. He drove her all the rest of the way home in silence, probably wondering why she wasn't crying.

In June, while sitting behind a tree at lunchtime listening to a gaggle of teenagers chat, Carl Capshaw found out exactly what his girl students thought of him. They loved having him for English. He looked like Ben Affleck, tall and dark. Deep. Also, they said, he seemed very young, although how could he be, being Newell's dad? He had to be in his thirties, at least.

On the way back to his classroom, he reran the conversation, feeling pleased.

Carl taught English literature, a sometimes arcane and dated subject, according to his students. He used any means at his disposal to keep the kids interested, including his smile, if it worked, or a sharp, mean bark if that worked better. The old songs and dances no longer did the trick. You had to work at penetrating their generally unfocused and overstimulated minds.

Passing by the lockers, waving at a few of the kids, Carl thought this year was winding up rather nicely. A group of his senior English students had rewritten
King Lear
in the style of Harold Pinter, full of pauses and portent, and would be staging their version next week. The junior students had just finished
The Crucible,
quite swept up in witchcraft and hysteria themselves, poor things, victims of spring fever en masse. They had stories to turn in at the end of the quarter.

He taught five classes and directed sixth-period study hall. According to Cath, he didn't make enough money to compensate for the aggravation factor, but then nothing he did lately satisfied her. As time passed, he had begun to wonder if anything would diminish the magnitude of his transgression, and her shocked memory of finding that motel slip in his pocket.

He didn't know why it had happened, except that Shelly, the school counselor, got so drunk that night. She had come on to him after a school board meeting, when they had retired to the bar to indulge in the general gossip and backstabbing they all enjoyed in mild forms, and he had done what was indefensible but entirely natural. He hadn't even come home very late. But, confronted with the evidence by Cath the next day, he confessed immediately.

Now, nearly a year later, at breakfast sometimes, he could see shadows of doubt and pain in Cath's eyes. The crisis in December with Newell had helped them to forge an uneasy alliance, raising a hope in him that someday she would love him wholeheartedly and without reserve again, as she always had before.

At his classroom, he stopped and fiddled for his keys. He had been taken off guard by the whole situation, surprised at himself, and surprised by the powerful aftershocks that had almost toppled his marriage. The truth was, from the moment he had that second drink with Shelly, Cath had flown out of his mind. He had never meant to hurt her. He had never even considered her.

He crumpled his lunch sack, threw it into the plastic container beside his desk, and took his seat. Somehow, he could never get being a couple exactly right. He felt like hell about it. His only consolation was the assurance he made to himself and to Cath that it would never happen again.

This virtuous thought left an indistinct emptiness at the same moment it soothed him.

As the kids raised hell and found their seats, he paused to consider the mighty pines outside the bank of windows his desk faced. He had watched them grow from seedlings. He had watched Mr. Cahill, the school gardener, prune and nurture them for his whole working life through those windows. He had watched the man's hair go gray and fall out.

Fourteen years of a man's life were summed up in those big old trees waving in the wind, looking so happy and well-fed. You could grow plants in any room in this school, as a matter of fact, particularly his classroom, he thought whimsically. You could fill the place up with hothouse flowers, the girls displaying bright blossoms, the boys buzzing around their heady perfume. When they had decided to send Newell away in December, he had tried to remind Cath about how mature seventeen felt, how full-blown, how physically electrifying. She told him Newell was just a pup, in spite of how he looked. That girl had seduced him.

Her naiveté never ceased to astound him.

Carl had met his wife at fourteen and married her at twenty-one. He had enjoyed returning to her cool gravity and good sense after a bevy of selfish, bullheaded college girls. He had experienced enough high drama between fourteen and twenty-one to last a lifetime-at least he thought so until the Shelly incident, and more recently, the escalating scenes with Newell.

At least Newell, being amenable to bribes, had been easy to fix. The promise of a trip East in summer and maybe his own wheels spun his attitude around fast.

He shuffled the papers on his desk, waiting for the kids to settle down. The air in his classroom, thick with evaporating body fluid, stinking of adolescent sexual glory, sometimes made him want to throw his arms around the kids and dance naked with them in circles around a bonfire. More times, it made him sick with longing for the sweeter smells found elsewhere.

Class began. The fifth-period juniors read minimally coherent essays on Miller in monotone, a low roar of voices their accompaniment, until he could stand it no longer. He stormed, raining down until they sat silent and he was spent.

“Capshaw's still pissed about Newell and Roo,” he heard the whisper as they scurried to the bell. “Dude's lost it.”

He cleared his throat to say over the din of their leaving, “Miss Fielding. Please stay after for a moment.”

Roo stopped in her tracks, shifted her books, marched back to the front row, and sat down, feeling curious but acting blasé.

“You're not turning in your work,” Capshaw said, when the door slammed.

Roo knew from the girls' bathroom mirror she had eyes round as plates, edged in red. She looked emotional, dramatic. She hoped he noticed. “I'm sorry, Mr. Capshaw,” she said, but he wanted an explanation. He waited long enough to make her uncomfortable.

“You made As all last year. Now you'll be lucky to get a C this last quarter. Want to tell me what the problem is?”

She looked at him, thinking about Newell. Then she talked about what a mess her life was lately, how her mom was on her case, about how her dog had died. Tears dribbled down her cheeks.

Mr. Capshaw frowned. He handed her a tissue.

“I just miss him so much,” she sobbed. “It's nothing to do with English. I'm doing badly in every class. I just can't seem to concentrate.” Her body shook. This room always felt hot, since the first day of school. Mr. Capshaw kept the windows closed most of the time, to keep the noisy equipment and traffic sounds out, he said.

“I'm sorry for your loss, but we've got another problem here. I'd like to help you. You could bring your grade up to a B with this next story. It's the last creative writing assignment for the year, so I expect everybody to do his or her best work.”

She wiped her face with a tissue. “I sit down to work. I start something. I end up crying. My mom says she cried the whole last half of her junior year. She says it's hormones.”

“Did you tell your mom about you and Newell?”

“No! She could never understand.”

“Think about telling her. And think about this story. You're going to find it hard to swallow, but you need this grade. You need it to get into college. It's dumb, but your future's riding on it.”

She stood up. “I know, Mr. Capshaw. I'll try.”

“Can you get me a preliminary proposal by Friday? It can be about anything.”

“Sure,” she said.

Friday afternoon, Carl had Roo in his sixth-period study hall. She came in looking bedraggled, her face flushed pink with heat.

“Where's your proposal, Miss Fielding?” he asked. “That is due today, last period. I thought I made that clear.”

“I'll work on it right now,” she promised. “I'll get it to you by the end of the day.” The bell rang. The other students hustled to the oak tables, hanging backpacks on chairs, littering the floor with notebooks. He sat at his desk, trying hard not to notice Roo, whose pen hovered over her paper for minutes at a time, unwavering, while she stared at the neck of the boy in front of her. When the bell rang, the fog left her eyes. She looked up with a start and caught his eyes on her face.

“Your story concept?”

“Not done.”

“You'll have to stay after today, Roo. I'll help you if I can.”

Roo called her mother from the office so that she wouldn't panic when she came home late. “I'm working with Mr. Capshaw on finishing something up, Mom.”

“He's that cutie from open house?”

“My English teacher.”

“Newell's father, right?”

How was her mother always so clued-in? “Yes.”

“Where'd he go, anyway?”

“Who?”

“Newell. You went out a couple of times, didn't you?”

“He's at another school.”

“Private school, I bet. All the public school teachers send their kids to private, the paper says. They're canceling Honors English at Obispo next year. I'm just disgusted.”

“Can I stay 'til five? I'll unload the dishes when I get home.”

“Okay, honey. Need a ride? I don't want you to walk home alone, young lady.”

“Don't worry so much. I'll find a ride.”

Roo managed a poor rehash of a story she had written in eighth grade for something to give Mr. Capshaw. He didn't really do anything to help, just sat there at his desk pretending not to look at her the whole time. She finished by five. She asked him for a ride home, explaining that her mother worried. “A guy pulled over off the road once. He got out of his car and followed me for a few blocks. Asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I was only thirteen. Since then, Mom's a maniac about safety.”

Roo had worn the lightest cotton she could find that morning, a sleeveless red blouse over sparkling white slacks. Her mom had helped her to twist her hair into a French braid, but by now she had a curly halo around her face, too messy, she felt. She excused herself for the bathroom and wetted some scratchy paper towels, getting her underarms with one, smoothing back her hair with another. She dabbed a dry towel over her washed face, licked her lips, then glossed them. She was ready.

Mr. Capshaw had parked his car under the row of eucalyptus by the far lot. By the time they got there, she was sweating again. “I hope you have air-conditioning,” she said.