by Lisa Levchuk
“It is not what you think,” I tell her. “He’s been helping me.”
“I’ll need to talk to him,” Ms. Clewell says. “I know your mother is sick, but someone needs to know about this.”
“You can talk to him,” I say. “That’s fine.”
“I’ll speak to you again. He can’t do this.” She examines me. “You might think you know what you are doing,” she says, “but I assure you, you don’t. You should be going to the prom and spending your time with people your own age.”
She does have a point; a senior boy asked me to prom, but Mr. Howland forbade me from going.
I bolt from her classroom, happy to know that Mr. Howland is absent. After school, I try to call his house from the pay phone by the gym, but no one answers. As luck would have it, he is absent for the next few days, and by Thursday, I figure Ms. Clewell has forgotten all about it. She doesn’t know much of anything other than what she saw and suspects. At this point, she has probably fallen back under the Dracula spell. So I just wait it out. I wait and hope that things with Mr. Howland will stay as they are.
Our Class Trip
MR. HOWLAND IS BACK FRIDAY, and our class trip will take place as scheduled. It turns out that Barbie and Cathy are in Mr. Hurly’s second-period class, so they are going on the trip, too. Even Tyrone is going. Patty is quite dressed up. My gut feeling is that she still has thoughts of stealing Mr. Howland away from me. She is wearing a long black skirt and a denim hippie shirt with lace and beads sewn on the seams. When we board the bus, I wonder who I’m supposed to sit with, Mr. Howland or my friends clustered around the last row of seats. If he were my regular high school boyfriend, then I’d obviously sit with Mr. Howland. Luckily for me, Mr. Hurly sits down next to him so I can go and sit with Barbie. She is still giggling over the fact that Mr. Howland and I had sex. She’s giggling, but she finally gets the importance of not giving everything away by being unable to control herself.
It is obvious that even my classmates suspect Mr. Howland and me of something; they just aren’t clear what it is. There must be some truth to the Dracula Principle, because no one, not even Patty or Mrs. Howland herself, is sure what to call us or what we are doing. Ms. Clewell is the wild card. Tyrone sits by himself in the seat behind Mr. Howland and Mr. Hurly. Sitting with Barbie makes me feel somewhat normal for a change.
The first thing Barbie notices is my new bracelet. I’m wearing it to school for the first time since Mr. Howland gave it to me. “Isn’t that the same bracelet Mr. Howland has?” she whispers.
I must say that for someone who gets C’s in almost every subject, Barbie is extremely observant. She holds my hand and looks at the bracelet more closely.
“It’s really nice,” she says.
Finally, the bus pulls out of the parking lot. It’s always a strange feeling to be leaving school before the day even starts; to be rolling away feels wrong somehow. What feels wrong is leaving everyone else behind to have another regular day.
A kid named Jeff Kiley brought a boom box, so we put on some music. He wants to listen to AC/DC, but the rest of us are into something more mellow because it is so early in the morning. We settle on the Boss and lean back into our seats to listen to the music and talk. Two or three of the uncool girls are sitting up close to Mr. Howland and Mr. Hurly, trying to talk to them and get attention. Tyrone is in between; he serves as a barrier between the world of teachers and the world of kids.
“Where are we going to have lunch?” Patty asks.
None of us know. The only places I’ve been to eat in New York are the restaurants my family went to before Knicks games. These aren’t the kinds of places you’d go to for lunch on a class trip. I did bring a pretty large sum of money with me, but I don’t want to wipe out my funds on lunch.
“My mother told me about a great place in the Village called the Broome Street Bar,” Patty says. I see what she is up to. She is trying to lock me into having lunch with her so that Mr. Howland and I can’t escape and be by ourselves.
Cathy and Barbie look at each other like they don’t care one way or the other. The struggle is between Patty and me—the struggle is always between Patty and me. My silence is a pretty good indicator that I’m not going to get caught up in anything Patty says. Up to this point, Mr. Howland has taken care of everything, and he’ll probably keep taking care of everything. His handsome blond hair is visible over the seat—everyone loves him. Even Mr. Hurly loves him and probably wants to have lunch with him. I’m the lucky one. He chose me, or I chose him. Maybe we chose each other.
When we come to the part of the turnpike where it smells, Barbie pulls her shirt over her face and Cathy shuts the window and everyone on the bus screams “Gross” and “Oh, yuck.” Around us are the smoking cylinders of the oil refineries and the structures made from pipes and metal poles that look like the pipes that Popeye and Olive Oyl always seem to wander out on when they are being chased by Bluto. There is something weirdly beautiful about those structures and even something about the smell that is good because it is so bad.
“I wonder if we’ll see my father,” Cathy says.
It seems unlikely to me because there are so many different toll lanes to go through that hitting the one where Cathy’s dad works would be almost impossible. But she and Barbie are craning their heads out the window and yelling for the bus driver to get to the right. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to be a toll taker on the turnpike because you need to stand in a smelly cubicle all day making change for people. My father is a lawyer, another thing that makes me different from everyone. But I’d rather be a lawyer than a toll taker any day of the week.
The Holland Tunnel is a scary place as far as I am concerned. The walls are dirty, dirtier than the Lincoln Tunnel. Each time I go through I start to imagine a wall of water rushing toward the car as the entire structure collapses. Though it’s somewhat comforting to imagine swimming on top of the wave while everyone else drowns, it doesn’t seem realistic. As I look around, it’s clear that once again no one else is thinking what I’m thinking, because despite the darkness and the lack of clean air and windows, everyone else is talking and laughing and generally having a good time.
Kids start packing their stuff when we emerge from the tunnel, and the bus driver yells for everyone to sit down. Mr. Howland catches my eye with a look that is both knowing and somewhat panicked. We will need to take some pretty intense evasive action to get away from everyone, most especially Patty. She already has her eye on me. It seems possible that she would even grab hold of me if she thought it could keep me away from Mr. Howland. Why she wants so badly to stop me from having fun is still not clear, but there is no doubt that she’ll do anything she can to keep me from Mr. Howland.
New York City
THE BUS STOPS SOMEWHERE DOWN IN SOHO, a section of New York that I’m not really familiar with; to be honest, there aren’t that many parts of the city that I am familiar with. Patty is standing right at Mr. Howland’s elbow, practically hanging on to the sleeve of his jacket. I give Barbie a look that says Help me, and she pulls Patty away and starts heading down the street.
“Stay on the streets marked on your maps and check off the galleries you visit,” Mr. Howland yells. “Hey,” he calls loudly enough that everyone stops in their tracks, “be back here at four o’clock. Don’t be late or we’ll leave you here. I mean it.”
As soon as Mr. Howland and I see Patty getting dragged away against her will, we pretend to be going with some other kids in the opposite direction. It looks like Tyrone Love doesn’t have anyone to hang around with, and that is making me nervous; luckily, Mr. Hurly senses the problem and calls Tyrone over to his group, the pack of loser kids who rely on teachers for companionship as others would their friends.
We let the other group get about a block ahead of us, and then we turn down the first street and are free. Now, it is just Mr. Howland and me, almost like we are on a date together and not on a stupid class trip with forty other people. It is only about eleven and t
he galleries aren’t even open, so we walk around for a while. Mr. Howland puts his arm around me for a second, but it feels weird and he takes it away. It was a simultaneous feeling of weirdness, and we both seem relieved when it is over.
Lunch
MR. HOWLAND DECIDES that we should have lunch before we head over to the galleries. I don’t care one way or the other. Mostly, I find art galleries and museums to be equally boring—they make me want to run away. Something about pictures hanging on walls makes me nervous. Maybe it would be enjoyable if it were my and Tyrone’s gallery—a gallery full of lopsided pots and headless statues. To be honest, I’d rather look at oil refineries from a bus window. I really would.
The restaurant Mr. Howland picks is barely open. The busboys are setting up chairs and writing the day’s menu on the board outside. I look both ways for Patty and company before we duck in. We are the first customers. Mr. Howland says he’s been here before. To me, it seems like the kind of place that vampires would go to drink tall glasses of blood. Our waiter could be a vampire, or one of those guys in school that no one talks to because they wear black lipstick and look like drug addicts. But I should talk; me and Mr. Howland must make a strange pair ourselves. The truth is I am not even hungry.
“I’ll have a Coke,” I say.
“I’ll have the avocado and Muenster sandwich and a bottle of Miller,” Mr. Howland says. He waits for me to say something. “Order something to eat; later, you’ll be hungry.”
I’m wishing we were at McDonald’s because nothing here looks good.
“Can I have a grilled cheese?” I ask.
“What kind of cheese?”
“American cheese?” I say.
I know that this is a stupid order and that I look childish ordering American cheese, but I don’t like other kinds of cheeses.
“I’ll have a Miller, too,” I say. “Forget the Coke.”
The young vampire doesn’t seem to care that I’m not old enough to have a beer. He crosses out the Coke and lets me have the beer.
“This is what we need to do more often,” Mr. Howland says. “Get out in the world like normal people.”
“That would be nice,” I say.
I don’t remind him of all the fun we had at the Happy Family Chinese Restaurant. The memory of our other lunch out in the world, the one in South Jersey, comes back to me almost in the form of a flashback. I see Tim standing outside my car with Mr. Howland, the two of them speaking so seriously to each other. I think back to the expression on Tim’s face as they stood there, the expression I couldn’t quite identify at the time. He was looking toward where I was sitting in the car by myself. He was talking to Mr. Howland, but he was looking at me. Now, from a different perspective, I would say he wanted to help me. Sitting there in the passenger seat of my car, I got a weird feeling that he might want to give me some advice on what to do next, maybe something along the lines of the Dracula Principle, but more useful for the future.
Our beers arrive, and we chink glasses.
“Salut,” Mr. Howland says, and drinks.
My beer tastes so bad I can barely swallow, but, I figure, like everything else I’ve really disliked in life, it will be better after a few more sips.
“Do you think people suspect us?” I ask. I’m trying to gauge how worried Mr. Howland is at this point. My sense is that people are well past the suspicion stage. We are now dealing with people who think they know the truth.
“I don’t give a good god damn,” he says.
He reaches across the table and holds my hand. He twirls my mini–Mr. Howland bracelet around on my wrist. I wish he would stop because there is something about being out in public, even if it is in a vampire bar with a junkie for a waiter, that makes me embarrassed about us. His dark, shadowed face and his hairy, fully developed arms and the gold caps on his teeth don’t match with me. I only got my braces off two years ago, and my teeth haven’t even had a chance to get all rotten yet. I slug the beer, hoping to quell the sensation of floating outside my body and out the door and over to wherever Barbie is with the other kids in my class. It works; I start to get a buzz. I feel like Emory must after he’s had the third vodka and V8. He says “click,” and we know that means that he’s feeling pretty good.
“Click,” I say, but Mr. Howland doesn’t get it, so he doesn’t say anything back to me.
Fortunately, Mr. Howland has to stop holding my hand when the food comes. My perfectly normal grilled cheese is on brown bread and is covered with sprouts and tomatoes, rendering it most unappetizing. I begin the process of picking off the sprouts and setting them in a pile on top of the tomatoes.
“You are hopeless,” Mr. Howland says.
“Hey,” I say, “did you really steal your wife from that guy Tim?”
“He’s full of it,” Mr. Howland says. “They were never more than friends.”
Though we are sitting right across from each other, I feel about a million miles away from Mr. Howland. Fifteen years, the difference in our ages, might not sound like much when you think about numbers, but suddenly fifteen years of life seems like quite a long time.
“When we’re married, I will teach you about how to eat healthy food,” Mr. Howland says.
“You’re already married,” I say, noting the obvious.
“Not for long,” Mr. Howland responds. He takes a long drink of beer.
“Listen,” he says, “I need to tell you something, but I don’t want you to freak out.”
I start to think that maybe this is about Ms. Clewell, but it isn’t.
“Melinda knows, because she was listening in the day I called about going to South Jersey. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on things, but last night she went crazy and threw all my stuff out the window, even my twelve-string guitar. I slept at Ron’s.”
My stomach falls through my body. I knew something like this was possible, likely even, but I feel like puking anyway. At this moment, if I could talk Mr. Howland out of getting divorced, if that is what he is really thinking of doing, I would do that. I imagine a conversation where I convince him that he and Melinda can work things out after all. I’ll be going to college, and they can get back to their lives. In my imaginary conversation, I remind him about their house, a house they have put a lot of work into fixing. It’s a pretty nice place, even if it does look like a house where Hansel and Gretel might get shoved into a potbellied stove. It occurs to me that Mr. Howland might actually believe that he and I are going to get married. Suddenly, everything seems ridiculous.
“Where will you live?” I ask.
“How about here in the city?” he says.
“Sounds good,” I answer. “Maybe you could live in the Empire State Building. Someone told me if you drop a penny off the roof, you can split a person’s head open.” I know I am talking nonsense, but I can’t stop.
Mr. Howland glances around the dark restaurant. It’s hard to know what he is thinking, but I bet it is something about how much he hates being a teacher and being married and how he wishes he lived in New York.
“What would Old Leather Head say if she could see us now?” he asks.
“Nothing good,” I say, imagining that this is something my mother would have said if she were here.
“Hey,” I tell him, “Confucius say, be careful of…” I put my hand over my mouth and mumble some fake words as we leave the restaurant.
Art Galleries
IN MY OPINION, we are walking too fast toward the art galleries. We still haven’t seen a single person from our school. My guess is that they went to the movies or some other fun place and that they aren’t getting dragged around to galleries. There are sunglasses spread across a blanket on the sidewalk, and I stop to examine them. Mr. Howland acts impatient, which makes me want to linger longer over the selection. I buy a pair of pink plastic glasses, sort of movie-star-like.
“That was a waste of money,” Mr. Howland says.
“They were three dollars,” I tell him. “I have forty-seven more dolla
rs to spend as I please.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Furthermore,” I add, “people will think I am a famous person traveling incognito.”
Around Mr. Howland, I can use multisyllable words like “incognito,” the very words that get me into trouble with anyone other than Patty.
There are large canvases with swirling, bright colors hung on ivory walls in the first gallery. Already I’m getting the feeling I’ve never told Dr. Chester about, that I’ve never told anyone about. It is a feeling I am going into another dimension where there is only emptiness and darkness and me. This feeling has gotten worse and more frequent since my mother left. I am floating in a soundless space without connection to anyone or anything. The best remedy is to fight back by being annoying to Mr. Howland. I tug at his shirt as he walks around; little does he know that his shirt is the only thing keeping me in this dimension, the anchor holding me on Earth.
“Stop pulling on me,” he says.
“I am a blind person,” I announce. I put on the pink sunglasses and continue to hold tightly to Mr. Howland’s shirt.
“Let go,” he says.
“I can’t,” I tell him. “I am a poor blind woman who wants to leave this place.”
“You are insane,” he says.
When we step back out into the street, I can let go of Mr. Howland. I walk gingerly because I don’t know how long the feeling of being okay will last.
“No more galleries,” I protest.
Mr. Howland takes me into another gallery. This one isn’t so bad because it isn’t paintings; it is ordinary objects that are extra big. There is a big can of soup and a big crayon and other extra big things. Eventually, the idea gets boring, as you can probably imagine.
“Please,” I repeat, “no more galleries.”
Mr. Howland drags me down the street toward the next one. This gallery is more like the first. Flat gray carpets and ivory walls. The pictures are swirling lines again, this time sand-colored lines, giving the impression you are looking at layers of sand from underneath the ground. Mr. Howland likes these pictures. I sit down in a chair by the door while he walks around. He seems genuinely interested in art, and he seems genuinely surprised that I am not. As I am watching him and the few other people quietly appreciating what they see, it hits me that if I don’t leave, I will enter the dark dimension and I will need to ask someone for help, not something I feel like doing.
