Teach Me

by R. A. Nelson

  If Alicia’s father were going to have me arrested because of the stolen pistol, he would have done it by now. Maybe it’s not registered? Or is Mr. Mann lying for me? Or maybe Mr. Sprunk doesn’t want to ask him who I am? Maybe he doesn’t want there to be any contact between us, ever again.

  All I know is, I’ve spent the last seventy-six hours in a heart-grinding terror. Every siren—

  I’m desperately ready for a friend.

  NAP.

  That’s what Schuyler calls them:

  Nine’s Access Procedures.

  This means that before I can let you in to see all the strange, idiotic, important, ridiculous, scary, beautiful, sad, ecstatic stuff— before you can be my friend—you must pass a series of rigorous safety checks.

  I don’t know what they are.

  I only know if they’ve been satisfied.

  Schuyler gets a free pass. I’ve known him, trusted him since he used to throw himself out of the playground swings and was inexplicably terrified of ventriloquist dummies.

  If Schuyler knew, he would say Mr. Mann is the supreme violation of NAP.

  That I’ve handed my personal Rosetta Stone to a man who— what exactly has he done? What did he do? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know.

  Help me.

  This is eating me alive. I can’t keep going this way. I can’t eat, can’t sleep; I’m barely able to function. I have to tell somebody. I have to tell Schuyler.

  So why am I so scared?

  I don’t know how he’ll react. He warned me. He tried to warn me again and again.

  But do I want him to know he was so right?

  To him it’s just a stupid game, another crush to be stamped out, stomped on, chewed up. Horny Howard, part two.

  But how can he ever know this: that Mr. Mann is life, breathing, love, wonder, joy, pain, rage, murder? How can he understand? And does Schuyler deserve to know this? Is he ready? Can he handle the truth?

  Okay, what’s the worst that could happen?

  I will lose him too.

  No. I can’t believe that. I know him too well. He will be hurt, sure.

  But why? What right does he have to be hurt? He didn’t earn it; I did.

  But best friends don’t keep secrets from each other. Not secrets like this. What about that kind of hurt?

  I hate this. I hate not knowing what to do. I hate arguing with myself. I hate being confused, stuck, scared, smashed.

  Alone.

  That’s it, that’s what I hate worst of all. Going through this alone. That’s what I can’t be anymore. Alone. Not one more day.

  Tell him. Tell him now. Tell him before you explode.

  “Schuyler.”

  He’s sitting on the seat beside me in Wilkie Collins. The sky is blue. The roads are clear. My eyes are itchy from crying.

  “Are you okay?” he says.

  “No.”

  “So are you finally ready to tell me? What’s wrong? What is it?”

  “It’s too—I don’t know.”

  “Too what?”

  “Too big, too awful. I should have told you.”

  He raises one eyebrow, begins scratching an imaginary beard like a half-assed Sigmund Freud. “Okay. Schpill, fräulein.”

  “Stop it. I can’t tell you if you’re going to act stupid like that. It’s too important.”

  “Sorry. So don’t tell me if you think I’m like that.”

  “It’s just—you know how you are.”

  “What. What are you talking about?”

  See. He’s hurt; I’ve hurt him already. But I have to keep going.

  “You know how you are—you’ll say, I told you so. You’ll say you warned me. And you did, yeah, you did, over and over. And you know what? It pisses me off. It really pisses me off like crazy. Why do you always have to be right? Why do I always have to be stupid and wrong and fall flat on my face?”

  “Who says that? I never say that.”

  “Oh yes, you do. In so many ways—you just don’t know it.” I feel fresh tears burning the corners of my eyes. “That’s what hurts. It makes me feel like I get punished for anything I do, anything I try that isn’t what’s expected of me. It’s easy for you: you never try anything, you always hold back.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s true. You just don’t know it. I’m the one who goes out and does things, who experiences things. You’re the one who warns me about it, tells me things will fall apart or somebody’s just after this or that, trying to hurt me.”

  He looks away. “I’m not stupid, Nine.”

  “I know you’re not. Who said you are? That’s the problem.”

  “This is all about him, isn’t it?”

  “Him?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. So why are you protecting him? What did he do, try to jump you? And you like the Mustela nivalis too much to turn him in?”

  “Weasels! What? What are we talking about here? Weasels?”

  “European common, to be exact.”

  “Weasels, Schuyler! That’s what I mean! That’s just what I mean. I’m too tired for this.”

  “Nope. You’re stalling. Come on. Just tell me straight out. If you don’t, I’ll just have to guess.”

  “No.”

  “Then say it.”

  I’m quiet for half a mile, watching the road stretch, feeling my heart pound.

  “Okay,” he says. “Mr. Mann yodels show tunes outside your window each night.”

  “Shut up.”

  “He stole your favorite pink-striped undies from PE and has them hanging from his rearview mirror.”

  “Schuyler.”

  “You read each other moldy poetry every day after lunch to aid your digestion.”

  I elbow him in the mouth.

  “God. God, Nine.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see him probing his lip with the tips of his fingers. We don’t talk for a while.

  “You really fell for him, didn’t you?” Schuyler says finally.

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh God. You did. You really did.”

  I’m having trouble seeing the road. I pull over into a parking lot, trying not to cry. I’m sick of crying. Across the way a fifty-foot red fabric worm with arms is shimmying with compressed air. The worm is holding a cell phone in one hand, a sign in the other:

  Schuyler leaves me alone, lets all of it pour out until at last I’m shaking with grief and rage and beating my hands on the steering wheel. He’s afraid to touch me, but I can tell he wants to.

  “Oh, come here.” I put myself in his arms.

  We hold for a long time; then I tell him everything. All of it. Right from the very start. Everything except the pistol.

  The cell worm wiggles. Schuyler’s ears steadily droop. Finally he shifts away from me on the seat.

  “Enough. I don’t want to hear any more about him. He’s a bastard, and I don’t want to hear any more. I hate him. I can’t believe it, Nine.”

  “See why I didn’t want to tell you?”

  “I hate him.”

  “I knew you’d react this way.”

  “What am I supposed to say? The bastard. If I had any guts, I’d turn him in myself. No. I’d kick his balls up past his Adam’s apple.”

  “But you won’t. Because I don’t want you to.”

  “No. I said if I had any guts. God.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “I can’t help it. God. God!” He’s yelling out the window at the worm. I grab his arm, pull him back inside.

  “Calm down.”

  He lies back against the seat, staring at the visor. “You know what I hate almost most of all?”

  “What?”

  “God, you’re so much braver than me.”

  “I’m not brave. Believe me.” I touch his hand. “You don’t know how good it feels to finally tell someone.”

  Schuyler touches his face and frowns.

  “I’m sorry about your lip,” I s
ay.

  “You should have told me,” he says.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “At least it’s over now. Everything’s over.”

  My throat tightens.

  “What?” he says.

  “It’s over when I say it’s over.”

  Schuyler’s watching me. I have to find out now. Now that he has the power to stop me, to inject some sanity back into my life. Will he run to my parents? Try to keep me from my campaign against Mr. Mann? I’m holding my breath.

  His ears go up. “Okay. So what do we do now? I’ve got ideas.”

  We.

  For the first time in days, I smile.

  tender earthquake

  Bed.

  Confessing to Schuyler helps, but I still can’t sleep.

  There is not a name for what I’m feeling. There is no description for it.

  To call it yearning would be like calling the ocean water.

  Whatever this thing is, it shoves you inside itself and you can’t measure its boundaries, because they go too far and you don’t have enough time. Or you move toward the boundaries and they move away.

  There has been an earthquake in my life.

  Catastrophic, civilization-ending. At least my tiny civilization of one. Followed by massive aftershocks. The fissure is still there, raw and crumbly.

  No one can predict when the tremors will start again, least of all me. A thousand years from now? Tomorrow? Here?

  for the dead

  Graduation is a day.

  That ’s all.

  I’m not sure what I expected, but this Disneyland queue wasn’t it. With a name like Livingston, I’m always in the forgotten middle of everything. Seven high schools attend baccalaureate together. In our gowns, the Civic Center is awash with a chemical warfare of color combinations. Here are the Burst Blood Vessels; over there, the Screaming Bile. I’m with the Neon Pumpkins.

  For once, it’s Dad who gets teary eyed. He doesn’t remember the things you are supposed to remember; he remembers we were supposed to have a colony on Mars by the time I got this old. Terraforming other planets. Travel from New York to London in under fifteen minutes. What happened? He mourns the things people his age would have given to people my age by now.

  Mom takes a hundred million pictures: Schuyler and me, arm in arm. Me accepting my ten-pound diploma, Zeb Greasy’s football-sized handshake, strangers smiling, empty folding chairs. When Hub Christy lumbers across the stage, a Macedonian phalanx rises to its feet in the cheap seats and hyena calls:

  “You made it!”

  I’m the only one who doesn’t throw her pasteboard hat.

  My grandparents have all been dead for years. One of them lived until I was six and another until I was eight. They didn’t last long enough for nicknames or savings bond graduation presents. I wonder what they would think of me now, the silent four of them. All I have of them is pictures. I know what they looked like when they were twenty. Or thirty-five—

  Mr. Mann sits with the other teachers. I never see him look my way. His suit is black. His eyes are black. Alicia is nowhere to be found. Hiding in Sunlake, I suppose. Locking and relocking her sliding glass door.

  They announce my scholarship.

  I’m too ashamed to tell anybody I lost it. I never filled out the paperwork.

  sexual skeletons

  After.

  So high school is gone.

  We’re sitting in Schuyler’s bedroom, gowns crumpled on the floor. I’ve been here hundreds of times. There’s a different feeling now. A sense of interests gone to clutter, a soul hovering between kid and man. Schuyler’s embarrassed about it.

  “Got to get rid of some of this junk,” he says.

  For as long as I can remember, this room has been a museum: heaps of dirty fossils like miniature grist wheels or emery grinders, Ping-Pong-ball solar systems, a starfish dangling on a string.

  “You never get rid of anything,” I say.

  “That’s not true.”

  “You know it is.”

  I flop back on his bed. Directly above me, thumbtacked to the ceiling, is a poster of M20, the Trifid Nebula, taken by the Hubble. I gave it to him. For the millionth time it reminds me of a backlit snail—if a snail were the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe and had posed for a Maxfield Parrish painting.

  Schuyler flops on the bed next to me. This is the first time it feels odd. We’re so close, our arm hairs are touching. His dark, mine tawny. All I can think about is—I look away at the bookshelf.

  “You still have your grandma’s Cenozoic wedding books about what it takes to make a good wife.”

  “A good beating,” Schuyler says. An old joke between us that has lost its juice. He kicks a thin book with a socked toe. “You know everybody parks their trash in here. Winning at Power Golf, for Hrothgar’s sake.” Schuyler’s been reading Beowulf lately, figuring he can leapfrog freshman comp in college.

  Is this what the future looks like? An embarrassed past?

  “The future is nothing but a mythology,” I say.

  “Translation, please?”

  “Can you really make a new life just by throwing out all the junk from your old one?”

  “If you throw him out on his ass.”

  “Quarter.”

  “Ass is no longer a cussword. I heard the president say it.”

  “Only one gluteus at a time, please. Try saying it in front of my parents.”

  Schuyler laughs and props himself on his elbow. “Point taken. Okay, at least you’ve got your sense of humor back. So, on the subject of asses—what are we going to do about Mr. Dick Waddius?”

  “That’s another quarter.”

  “Dick, as you know, is a diminutive form of Richard. And if anybody ever needed to be made to feel diminutive, it’s him. We have to make a plan.”

  “Okay.”

  Schuyler’s an INTP on the Myers-Briggs sorter. Can become very excited about theories and ideas, his profile says. I’m an INTJ. The difference between a P and a J? I want answers. I like closure. I believe you take theories and ideas and make them real.

  I’m looking at an article tacked on his bulletin board. The headline is blown up to max wattage:

  I know the first line by heart:

  “Russian scientists are unable to disprove a teenage girl who claims she has x-ray vision and can see inside human bodies.”

  Schuyler has always said that’s me, only I can do it with the human soul. Right now I’d do better with the spleen.

  There’s a knock at the door. Schuyler’s mom. She’s twenty years younger than my mom and beautiful, except for her protruding front teeth.

  “Pick those up.” She points at the gowns. “You’ll want to save them forever.”

  “Most certainly, memsahib,” Schuyler says in his best Hindustani. We’re still on the bed, but miraculously the distance between us has instantly grown by the length of a cucumber.

  Ms. Green slouches against the door. “So what do you two want?”

  She’s talking about the after-graduation dinner our folks have promised us.

  What do we want?

  “NPH,” Schuyler says when his mom has gone.

  He’s christened a new acronym.

  “NPH?”

  “Nuclear Public Humiliation. That’s the plan! That’s your revenge. Only, now you’ve got me to help.”

  I’m unbending government paper clips, reshaping them into tiny zip guns, thinking, Is that what I’m after? Is it that mindless and simple? Or is it something much bigger and deeper?

  “It’s not about revenge,” I decide. “It’s about making sure he understands. Again and again. Until I know why.”

  “Why he did it?”

  I nod, but this nod is a lie using body language.

  No, I think. Not why he did it.

  Why he ever stopped.

  mouth work

  Focus.

  “First, we need some information,” Schuyler says.

  Now we’re in my be
droom. We Google Mr. Mann on the net:

  Accountants, a psychologist, somebody who knows what Detection and Classification of Motion Boundaries means, a college swimmer from West Virginia, a championship wrestler circa 1948.

  “What the crap is a Bastyr homeopath?”

  “Okay, maybe he doesn’t exist after all,” Schuyler says.

  I slap him. But playfully.

  “So let’s try the Little Woman.”

  “Little is the operative term, all right.”

  A search on Alicia recedes in the opposite direction. Not one listing.

  Schuyler leans back in my desk chair so far the casters squeak. “Maybe she’s too young.”

  “Not funny.”

  “No, really.”

  “No, really, shut up about it.”

  “Okay. Well, anyhow, that’s a bust. What next?”

  Kitty Nation comes into the room and curls past my legs, purring. “So we’ll just have to stake out their place. Look for the best opportunity.”

  “Naturellement. But you promise, nothing too freaky till I get my sea legs under me?”

  I touch my hip. It’s still sore. “I know. I know. But it won’t be quite as satisfying.”

  “Or dangerous. Or idiotic. I still can’t believe you climbed up on his deck like that.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. You wanted to catch them, didn’t you? Catch them doing the nast—”

  I stomp his toe and put a finger to my lips. “Shhh—!”

  Mom pokes her head in the door.

  “Children, could I get you something?”

  “Something to drink, sure. Thanks.” I wait until the door shuts. “Be careful!” I say when she’s gone.

  I get up to rest my eyes and stretch my legs. My room is just as bad as Schuyler’s. Besides the trophies, everything I own is potential trash: jumbled books, old star charts, a Hitachi keyboard I’ve never used, a folk guitar missing two strings, my embarrassing watercolors Mom is so proud of. I did a couple from a book just to show I really was going to a class.

  “So what was it like?” Schuyler says. He stands and arches his back, lacing his fingers behind him, his sternum pointing at me.

  “What?”

  “The whole thing. With Mr. Mann, you know.”