by Ann Angel
See, the faculty didn’t really have offices. They had one big room where they each had a desk, and there was a workroom right off this big room where the copy machine and fax and extra paper and such were. The shared faculty office room was lined in dark wood and it echoed. It felt ancient and meaningful the way old things sometimes do. It felt like things had happened over the years in this room.
Every time Mrs. Jefferson sent me to the workroom, I had to walk right past Mr. P., who was there prepping for the next day’s class. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and I could feel his eyes on me as I went into that room.
At some point he waved me over, and I sidled up to his desk.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m a teacher now,” I said. “You didn’t hear?”
He smirked. His cheeks were kind of puffy up close, and so smooth I doubted he needed to shave much. He had light freckles across the bridge of his nose. “You got in trouble, didn’t you?” He did that thing where he brushed his hair out of his face.
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t like him thinking of me in that way, as some little girl who got time-outs. He just watched me. I wished I knew what he was thinking. I shifted around a bit and twirled a piece of hair around my finger.
“Actually,” I told him, “I’m having some problems staying awake in Mrs. Jefferson’s class.”
“That boring, huh?” he joked, then he looked around, worried perhaps that someone had heard him.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s because I stay out too late.”
“Really.”
That had caught his attention. “Really,” I said. I smiled. He smiled back. And that’s when Mrs. Jefferson told me to get to work.
I was there again the next afternoon, since my punishment was for the full week. I had dressed in my best-fitting jeans, and, yes, I admit that through Western Civ I kept shifting and opening and closing my legs in those jeans, and I was sure I saw Mr. P. looking.
This time, after school, I stopped at his desk and said, “In case you’re curious, I go to Dorrian’s in the city.” I had been planning to tell him all day.
“You’re eighteen,” he said.
“So?” I said. I was seventeen, but I wasn’t about to let him know that.
“So eighteen-year-olds shouldn’t be going to bars.”
I shrugged. “There are lots of things I probably shouldn’t be doing.”
I sat down in the chair across from him and pressed my lips tight. I sounded like a child, and I hated myself for it. I tried something else. “You know about Dorrian’s?” I wondered if he went to bars and brought girls home to his place.
“I know Dorrian’s,” he said. “So you’re a Dorrian’s girl.”
I raised my eyebrows and kept my gaze even with his. I didn’t say what I was thinking — that if I didn’t go to this school and we met each other at that bar, I could totally be one of the girls he brought home. Maybe that’s what he meant by a Dorrian’s girl. Most of the girls who went there were beautiful. Way more beautiful than I would ever be. They were skinny from living off cocaine and vodka and cigarettes. They got the attention of the best-looking guys, the ones who strolled into the bar like they owned it. The ones whose eyes always passed over me and dropped hard on one of those Dorrian’s girls. Maybe, too, he mistook me for beautiful.
“Kerry!” Mrs. Jefferson called, and that was that for the day.
But now Mr. P. was on my mind. When I dressed in the morning, I was thinking of him. When I walked through the halls, I kept my eyes peeled for him. When I drove in town, I peered into cars to see if it was him I passed. I sat in that same chair after school, even now that my punishment was over. Mr. P. didn’t seem to mind.
“What exactly do you do at Dorrian’s?”
“I drink.”
“You’re just a kid!”
“Stop saying that,” I said. I was wearing a tight-fitting shirt that accentuated my breasts. I pressed them out a little and added, “And I meet guys.”
“Really,” he said.
“Really.”
He lowered his voice and leaned forward a little. He had an ankle on the opposite knee. Maybe he was hiding an erection. “And what is it that you do with these guys?”
“What do you think I do with them?” I said, matching his voice.
He laughed. He leaned toward me, and his feathered hair fell over his eye. There was a beat. Then another. Then he said, “Do you give them blow jobs?”
I kept my expression steady, but beneath my skin the electricity zoomed around. “Yes.”
Neither one of us moved. After a bit, he said, “You any good?”
There was some activity at another desk, another student sitting down to talk with a teacher. Nobody knew what we were talking about. As far as they were concerned, we were talking about the fall of Rome or the Revolutionary War. “Yes,” I said again.
He laughed and brushed his hair back. “I’ve had my fair share of blow jobs,” he said. He waited a beat while I processed that. I could see the slightest yearning in his eyes. And just like that, the power shifted a bit. “What makes you think you can give a good one?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said, “I have ways of knowing.”
He smiled, but then the Spanish teacher walked by, her slacks swishing. He looked up at her, changing his smile into one a teacher gives a colleague. “Maybe we better talk about Western Civ class,” he said.
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because,” he said. “Because you know why.”
I shrugged. “No one will know.”
“I kind of like my job,” he said. “And this is inappropriate.”
I laughed. “Inappropriate,” I repeated, because my friends and I would laugh at someone using that word sincerely. He didn’t laugh with me. His expression stayed even. I watched him, trying to ascertain whether he really didn’t want to talk like this. Trying to determine how to keep the power.
“Let’s talk about Western Civ, then,” I said, but when I did, I leaned back and crossed my legs slowly, letting him watch. I’d seen girls at Dorrian’s do that. I’d seen them hold guys in their grip. I couldn’t do that there, but maybe I could do this with Mr. P.
He smiled, seeing what I was doing.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Teach me something.”
He shook his head. He wasn’t smiling.
“You are a dangerous girl.”
A month later, I went into the city with my friends. Dorrian’s was its usual mass of beautiful girls and boys in ties and sports jackets with their prep schools’ crests. The bouncer knew us, never questioned our fake IDs. He didn’t even ask for them anymore. This was when parents like mine ran off to Paris or Nantucket and left hundred-dollar bills on their marble kitchen counters for the teenagers to do with what they would. This was when the other kids at Dorrian’s did cocaine in the bathroom stalls, using their parents’ American Express cards to chop up the powder and rolling up those hundred-dollar bills to snort it into their noses. This was when parents like mine were long gone, when they didn’t care, when they didn’t see that their children — like me — were in need of their love.
My friends and I ordered our sea breezes and sex on the beaches and brought them back to our table. We didn’t care about getting drunk. Drinking wasn’t our thing. We were there for the boys, for that sweet moment when a boy homed in on us, when we knew that this night might matter, that we might matter in some greater way.
And that is when Mr. P. walked in.
I didn’t alert my friends. I watched him walk up to the thick wooden bar. He had a friend with him, some guy who was taller and thinner and just generally more attractive than he was. My whole body was on fire, vigilant. I was certain he was there because of me.
“Oh. My. God.” One of my friends squeezed my arm. “You will never guess who is in here!”
I tried to act nonchalant. “It’s no big deal,” I said.
“No big deal?”
&
nbsp; Our other friends — there were four of us in all — craned their necks to see who we were talking about.
“It’s Mr. P.!” the first friend screamed, and they all freaked.
“Shhhh!” I tried to control them. None of this mattered to them. They still giggled and whispered when he walked by at school. It was different for me. My feelings about Mr. P. had changed. I wanted his attention. I wanted him to want my attention. I needed them to shut up and stop acting like teenage girls. But before I could control them, Mr. P. turned, scanning the booths and tables for girls, and for a moment his eyes met mine.
And then he quickly looked away.
Without thinking, I stood and went to him. I heard one of my friends say, “Kerry!” I couldn’t deny that Mr. P. took a few steps backward, like if it weren’t me, someone he had to see every day, he would have just turned and left.
“Hey,” he said. He glanced at his friend. “What a coincidence.”
“And who is this?” His friend smiled at me and put out his hand.
I shook it.
“I forgot they let underage kids into this place,” Mr. P. said to his friend.
“You forgot?” I asked.
He turned so he was mostly facing his friend and leaned on the bar. “One of my students,” Mr. P. said.
“Oh, man,” his friend said and laughed. “That’s unfortunate.”
A few moments passed. I crossed my arms over my chest. Then Mr. P. said, “Why are you still standing here?”
My face grew warm, and I feared they could see it growing red. Mr. P. turned so his back was to me. I felt sick, unreal. What could I do but go back to the table? My friends squealed.
“What did you say to him?”
“Oh, my God, you are my hero!”
“Dude, you have balls!”
I tried to laugh. “I think I made him uncomfortable.”
They all giggled. I tried not to let them see what I was really feeling.
“He’s scared he’ll wind up in bed with all four of us,” I said, and they squealed again.
When I walked into his class on Monday, he stood facing the board, scratching out dates with chalk. He didn’t turn around, and when he did finally, he avoided my eyes. He walked back and forth with his hands in his pockets.
“What was the significance of the Battle of the Bulge?”
A few hands shot up, but Mr. P. passed by them and looked right at me. “Kerry?”
I widened my eyes, sat up a little straighter.
“I don’t know, Mr. P.,” I said. “What is the significance of the Battle of the Bulge?” A few students snickered. I hadn’t done the reading, hadn’t done much regarding school at all lately.
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
We stared at each other a moment, the tension thick. Then he walked right over to my desk so only I and perhaps a few others could hear what he was about to say.
“You know, Miss Cohen,” he said quietly, “you might consider someday focusing on school instead of boys. That might serve you better in life.”
My breath caught. The room was silent. I didn’t dare look at my friends in the class, one of whom had been at the bar that night. I thought about the fact that he’d asked me whether I gave blow jobs, considered briefly that I could fling that back at him. Considered that I could even tell on him. I could get him fired. I sat red faced, furious, but I could also feel the tears pressing at my eyes. I got up and left the room before they came. He didn’t watch me go, but I could feel his awareness of me.
I had to keep going to his class, of course, if I was to pass the year. And I would pass, always slipping by under the radar so nobody would ever see that there might be something wrong.
In his class I tried to pay attention to his lectures, but mostly I spent the period glaring at him, hating him, wishing him the worst things that could befall him — disease and loss and abandonment. I wished most for him to feel like he’d made me feel, as though I were worthless, needy, as though all the things I most feared about myself were true. All the things I feared made me undesirable.
When I walked through Dorrian’s doors now, the pressure to matter there was like a heavy cloak I couldn’t pull off. My friends and I sat as we had before, smiling and conversing, sea breezes sweating on the table. I couldn’t keep my eyes steady. I scanned the room each night, searching, my desperation unmoored. I was surer than ever that there was a rule to this game, that if I were just more beautiful, simply said the exact right thing or wore the right outfit, I would get what I wanted. The stakes were higher now. If I didn’t find a boy tonight, if a boy didn’t acknowledge me, I would cease to exist. Meanwhile, my friends spotted hot boys from boarding schools in the city and said, “That one is so fine” and “I dare you to smile at him.” For them, this was still just for fun.
The outcome remained unknowable. Sometimes a boy came to me. Sometimes he didn’t.
After one of those nights at Dorrian’s, I fell asleep in Mrs. Jefferson’s class again, and I wound up back in the shared faculty office after school. I stepped into that dark, echoing room and felt some sense of loss, as though Mr. P. and I had shared something real in there, something worth remembering. I saw him. He was hunched over, grading exams. Not that long ago, he’d made me feel wanted. The sight of him there, at that same desk, in that same chair, sent an electric current from my coccyx up my spine. I walked by him and sat in a chair next to Mrs. Jefferson’s desk to wait for her. She came in and gave me a pile of handouts to copy. I sauntered past his desk again and again. Not once did Mr. P. look at me.
The next afternoon he didn’t, either, but I was sure he sensed me there. The following day it went the same way. But on Thursday, Mr. P. leaned back in his chair, and our eyes met across the room. My heart skipped. For a moment I was at Dorrian’s again, and this time his friend wasn’t there, my friends weren’t there; it was just us. He turned away.
Ruthie Kepner carried a Hello Kitty pencil case. She asked teachers questions just before the bell rang at the end of every class. And she had no idea that Kurt Cobain had just left America a suicide note. In April 1994, when Ruthie and her mother moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, from Mississippi, we were between national tragedies. My friends and I had been born too late to remember Kennedy’s assassination or Vietnam, and 9/11 was still years away. The Berlin Wall was down and stocks were up, and the girls at Watson Junior High found only two passionate causes to unite them: mourning Nirvana’s handsome lead singer and making fun of Ruthie.
My seventh-grade classmates shared the same styles, the same friends, even the same opinions. Ruthie was different. We called her “Crazy Kepner,” and from the day she transferred to our school, we found the divide between us both astonishing and threatening. A group of girls who’ve known one another forever, who think and act alike, will sometimes turn, hive-like, on a newcomer. Will leave her out of every game and conversation. Will laugh and point and gossip. That’s what we did that spring.
If she minded, Ruthie didn’t show it. She moved in an envelope of childish goodwill, smiling at us when we mimicked her slow drawl, ignoring the way our ranks closed against her at recess. Day after day, she floated by our tight-knit circles, her neon kneesocks a badge of courage, her untamable cloud of hair shooting careless wisps into the air.
I never questioned my allegiance to our cruelty. I was only eleven then, a whole year younger than most of my class, and I was in constant fear of talking, walking, or acting differently from the sleek, giggly girls who ruled my world. I didn’t look very different from most of them, so it was only a matter of camouflaging my interior life: I kept the song lyrics I scribbled hidden in a notebook in my closet, and I never confided my secret to anyone, never shared my desperate dream of being a rock star. While my friends announced their futures as nurses or teachers or anchorwomen, I pictured myself a bitter poet-songstress like Courtney Love. If you had adored Kurt, of course, you were not supposed to like his loud and funky widow. But I was
mad for her, and all my songs, like hers, were tortured howls about death and underwear.
Did you see the outfit Crazy Kepner wore today? Would you believe those sneaks? Where’d she get that hair? It was easy to make myself one of the Chosen by talking about Ruthie, by repeating the things I heard my mother whisper to my father. Mrs. Kepner lost her job in Jackson, and they got kicked out of their apartment. It’s for sure they’re on welfare. Guess how many wine bottles were in their garbage last week?
I owed such privileged information to the fact that Ruthie lived on the same street I did. But this slight edge was outweighed by the deep embarrassment of Ruthie herself. Because I was the only other girl in our class from her neighborhood, she decided, apparently, that we were friends. Even when I scattered books on all the chairs around me and told her they were saved, she tried to sit by me at lunch. She picked me for her partner in gym. And worst of all, she asked me over after school. Every afternoon she would devise some new temptation, some culinary or cultural pretext for my visit. “Hey, Cynthia,” she’d yell at my back as I raced away from my locker. “Wait up!”
In a shameless effort to avoid her, I would walk faster. Sometimes I was out the front door and around the corner before she caught up with me. “There’s rocky road in the fridge,” she’d tell me, panting. Or “We got cable yesterday — all the premium channels.” Whenever Ruthie invited me over, I made excuses, winking and smirking at the girls who overheard us. I had a dentist appointment one day, a dance lesson the next. My mother needed me after school. I had to babysit, clean my room, do my math. I’d take off at top speed then, racing home to shut myself in my room and give air concerts in front of the mirror. I couldn’t play the guitar and I wasn’t inclined to learn. But I felt brave and experimental, wailing and gyrating in front of the glass. Courtney wasn’t about music, anyway, I decided, so much as she was about living hard and traveling light.
