Timeless

by Rachel Spangler

  I felt pretty proud of myself, honestly. I’d almost made it through another day without drawing any extra attention to myself. Best of all, the tension between Jody and me practically crackled with electricity. She’d been nothing but professional all day. She hadn’t pulled me out of study hall or even called on me in class. She kept well clear of my personal space and only spoke a polite good morning to me all day. To an outsider it would’ve appeared she paid me less attention than any other student. She came across as studiously unconcerned with me, which made my heart tap a rapid beat against my rib cage.

  Jody simply didn’t do aloof. She didn’t do detached. She didn’t do distant. None of this was her natural state, which told me she was fighting her instincts concerning me, and she wouldn’t be fighting them if they were telling her I was just another kid in need. A normal teenager might have misunderstood her withdrawal, but I’d been in her shoes. I’d tried to play off attraction. I’d lived enough of my life to recognize the difference between generic concern and genuine interest. I also had a writer’s eye. I’d written women on the brink. I knew the subtle signs and how people fought them. Jody played the part with textbook precision. I almost cried with joy to see her turn away as soon as I walked through the door for theater class.

  As we arranged our desks into a horseshoe, I made sure to position mine as close to her as possible. I’d always been the one to be pursued in a relationship, and while I certainly wasn’t coming on strong, I enjoyed the knowledge that my presence affected this graceful, beautiful, driven woman. I got so busy stealing glances at her I didn’t notice Kelsey until she collapsed in a heap into the seat beside me.

  “Hey,” I said cheerfully. “Long day?”

  “Yeah,” she whispered, hanging her head so her dark hair covered her face.

  “TGIF, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Kelsey,” I said more softly, “hang in there. Just one more class, and then we get a few days off.”

  She nodded, but when she looked up, her eyes were red-rimmed and the stain of embarrassment or anger burned pink even under her tan skin. I’d seen her tired and resigned, even frightened, but I’d never seen her so broken down.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” She blinked away tears.

  “Bullshit, Kelsey. Talk to me.”

  “I’m tired, but I’m fine, really.” She raised her chin and took a long, measured breath. “And you’re right. We’re almost done for the day.”

  I didn’t buy it, not a bit. I’d left gym before the rest of my class since I didn’t have to change or shower, but locker rooms, like hallways, were battle zones where teachers either couldn’t see and hear the abuse or simply chose not to. I could only imagine what Kelsey had gone through in the ten minutes since I’d last seen her. I resolved not to leave her alone there again, even if it meant participating in gym class from now on. I was about to tell her that when Jody called the class to order.

  “Today we start our monologues,” she said joyfully.

  “You mean our subtexts.” Deelia sniped like an expert.

  “Yes, but lucky for us, the subtext of a monologue is still a monologue,” Jody said with forced enthusiasm. “Isn’t that exciting?”

  The students grumbled, but Jody forged on, reminding the class of the parameters. We’d do three monologues a day for the next week. Each student would get a turn to perform, then lead the class discussion of the original piece, its subtext, and what they took away from it.

  She looked around, clearly searching for another place to sit before taking the seat beside me, and called the first performer. She crossed her legs so her body angled away from me and gave her full attention to the student. The position caused her black skirt to ride up to reveal a distracting bit of thigh. I had to place my hand on my own cheek and turn my head away in order to keep from staring. I might have failed completely if not for my lingering concern about Kelsey.

  I barely knew the student at the front of the class, but he seemed to do a fine job with the Saint Crispin’s Day speech. I’m sure I would’ve held my manhood cheap for not standing with him, were I not utterly preoccupied with the women sitting on either side of me. My mood had shifted rapidly in a mere matter of minutes. Had I suffered visions of grandeur in believing I could make a real difference in either of their lives? I wasn’t even sure anything I’d experienced in the last week had actually happened. And yet, the tension radiating from both Kelsey and Jody certainly didn’t feel dreamlike. I wanted to reach out to each to them, hug them, protect them, shake some sense into them, make them see what I saw in their futures. I felt like I owed them each something, but could I really make a difference for either of them, or was I deluding myself?

  I didn’t know the monologue the next girl did. Something from The Crucible maybe? I doubted she’d ever read the play all the way through or understood its meaning. She was one of Deelia’s friends, and I wouldn’t waste an ounce of my attention on her. Everything to come in my life seemed to hang on one question: how could I get Jody to give up on the future she planned while at the same time convincing Kelsey to hold on to hers?

  “Kelsey, you’re up,” Jody said.

  Kelsey took a deep breath but didn’t rise from her seat.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered. “Do you want me to go?”

  She shook her head and took another deep breath. “I can do it.”

  She slowly, almost painfully sulked to the middle of the room, then without introducing the piece began to speak in a clear, low voice I barely recognized, “To live or to die, that’s my choice. Is it better to put up with the insults and injuries or stand up for myself, and in the process sign my own death warrant? To die, to sleep.”

  Her performance was no mere recitation of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy. She actually posed these questions to us, or more likely to herself.

  “Death would stop all the pain of this life, all the trials and abuse. I wish for a chance to dream peacefully, but we don’t know what death brings. If I knew I could find peace there, I’d take it freely. Who wouldn’t? It’s only my fear of the unknown that makes me endure the painfully slow passage of time, the bullying, the loneliness, the injustice.”

  I listened helplessly as she grew more animated, clenching her fists at her sides while pleading the case of death and lambasting life for its constant stream of horrors. On the pro and con list of death, the columns weren’t even close to equal. Even if I didn’t know the end of this story, I’d have no doubt which option she favored.

  “If there was some way to end all this hellish torture, who wouldn’t take their own way out? It’s only the fear of what lies beyond that turns us all to cowards.”

  With that she hung her head, and the class applauded lightly, uncomfortably. How many of my classmates, if any, realized she’d cut the last few lines of the monologue? I didn’t doubt the purposefulness of the edit. She’d ended on a line filled with disdain at her own cowardice, because that’s as far as she’d progressed on her own journey into darkness. She wanted to die but was still too afraid to do so. I had time, but not much.

  Kelsey barely sat down before I jumped into the yet-unstarted discussion portion. “First of all, you did a great job with that piece. You captured Hamlet’s main conflict and put it into language we don’t just understand but can also relate to.”

  “I agree,” Jody added, seeming to understand the gravity of Kelsey’s message. “I felt your words down to my toes, and I recognized that place, the position where you just want to ask yourself why you should even bother with the life you’re living.”

  While Jody might not be contemplating the exact choice Kelsey feared, she wasn’t in a dissimilar situation. She too had to decide whether to fight for a dream or let it die.

  “Do any of you have thoughts about this piece?”

  Deelia raised her hand, and Jody sighed heavily. She clearly didn’t want to call on her, but she was the only one prepared to speak, so J
ody nodded.

  “If she was talking about suicide, I think that’s inappropriate for class. It’s a sin, and it sets a bad example.”

  “Hamlet is a classic piece of literature that’s been taught in high schools for hundreds of years,” Jody said, leaving no room for debate. “So, does anyone have anything to say that actually adds to this discussion?”

  She looked around the class from one blank stare to another until her eyes finally met mine. I had to say something, but what? Could I change anything? And, if so, to what outcome? Either I could feed her some silly pep talk about how everything would all work out in the end, or I came down on the side of death. I needed to find some middle ground. Thankfully the happy medium is what I knew best.

  I turned from Jody’s pleading eyes to Kelsey’s dark, haunted ones. “The problem I have with Hamlet, and so many of the others who’ve tried to dissect this piece, is it’s always such a binary. Either he does nothing, or he kills himself and everyone else. It’s a false choice.”

  “How so?” Jody prodded me gently.

  “Maybe for the sake of a play you have to force everything to fit into a two-hour time slot, but in life, we don’t have to resolve every conflict or follow some preordained script. We have a hundred other options in any given situation. Sure, if Hamlet fights, he makes himself a target. Maybe that’s true for us. Maybe it’s not. But he could’ve just gone about his business. Lots of people do. He was a student. He could’ve gone away to college. He could have legitimately gone crazy. Someone very smart once told me sometimes insanity is a survival skill.”

  Kelsey didn’t budge at that allusion. “Yeah, but what do you do when death is the only dream left?”

  “You get a new dream,” I said emphatically. “There’s always another way out. Maybe that way sucks. Maybe it’s hard. Maybe you dumb yourself down for a while or drink yourself into oblivion or join a commune or a rock band, but do whatever you have to do to get to the next step. There’s always a next step.”

  “Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes you do your best and it’s not enough. Why put yourself through it if you’re going to wind up in the same place in the end?”

  “There’s always an alternative future. Hamlet says it himself. ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’ You of all people know that, Kelsey. Just because you can’t see a future doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” She smiled faintly, but a smile nonetheless, and it caused the weight on my chest to lighten immensely. We might be living on stolen time, but perhaps I’d just bought a little more sand for the hourglass.

  With Kelsey stabilized I turned to Jody, who wore a similar expression, her smile tinged with exhaustion and sadness as her eyes met mine. “Thank you, Stevie. That was remarkably eloquent.”

  “Eloquent?” Deelia scoffed. “I have no idea what anyone is talking about anymore. None of this subtext has anything to do with theater. How are you going to grade us on this?”

  Jody rubbed her eyes. “I’ve told you several times, you’ll be graded on how well you capture the essence of your monologue and how well you’re able to discuss your character’s underlying motivations and emotions, something Kelsey did very well today.” Then turning to Kelsey, she added a sincere “thank you.”

  As class dismissed, I wanted to stay behind and talk to Jody. I wanted to know if anything I said had swayed her. I wanted to focus on her beautiful eyes, see her chest rise and fall with each breath, feel her body close to mine, but I simply couldn’t leave Kelsey alone in the hallway.

  I walked with her to my locker, then drove her home. Thankfully, everyone was eager to chase their own Friday-night plans and paid us little attention. Kelsey didn’t talk much but seemed in higher spirits when I dropped her off at her parents’ store. I promised to stop by sometime over the weekend and left feeling secure about her safety, then quickly turned my thoughts and my car back toward Jody.

  I tore into the school parking lot and sprinted up the stairs to her classroom only to find the lights off and the door locked.

  “Damn,” I muttered, then glanced around the empty hallway to make sure no teachers had heard me swear. What could I do now? I could go stalk her at the college, but that seemed creepy. And I didn’t even know if she lived on campus. I could go to St. Louis tomorrow night hoping to run into her. What were the odds of that happening? Waiting until Monday was the only responsible, measured approach. Two days apart wouldn’t kill me. I could probably use some time to myself. A few days off would let me clear my head. I could play it cool or safe, the way I liked to.

  Who was I kidding?

  I couldn’t wait for Jody even under the best circumstances, and certainly not when both our futures were on the line. As soon as my parents left for work tomorrow, I had to go after her.

  Chapter Nine

  I cursed the damned dial-up Internet for the fifth time in ten minutes. I’d finally managed to connect, but every search I ran took ten minutes to load and produced few results. Apparently small Midwestern bookstores didn’t have a big Web presence eleven years ago. They didn’t have Google Maps either, and my car had no GPS. Also, I drove a stick shift, which, incidentally, is not at all like riding a bike. By the time I reached St. Louis it was dark, and my nerves were frayed. It was a miracle I’d made it at all, but now I had no idea what to do next.

  I had a vague recollection of where the Central West End was located, and when I got close enough, I ditched my car. I never drove in New York, and I felt infinitely more in control once on foot. The city—any city—was better than Darlington for my self-esteem. I enjoyed each strike of my heel on the pavement. The snug rise of brick and concrete to either side shielded me from the vast vulnerability of the open plains. The anonymity offered by faceless crowds always soothed me. I passed plenty of people without really seeing them. I wasn’t out of place to them. They didn’t care if I was gay. They didn’t care that I might be a time traveler. They didn’t even know I existed. People passing by were so oblivious to my presence it actually took me three separate tries to get someone’s attention long enough to ask for directions to Left Bank Books.

  I was only a couple blocks away and thanked my internal gay GPS for getting me so close. I practically jogged to the bookstore, which stood bold and proud on a well-lit street corner. Bright light spilled from the large windows, drawing me into their warmth and illumination. Each light shone down on a display of books. Kate Bornstein, Sarah Waters, Dan Savage, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender writers sat right up front with mainstream bestsellers. I exhaled, all the tension slipping from my shoulders, rolling down my neck, and sliding off my back. The last ten days faded behind a dizzying wave of emotion.

  This medium, these books, was timeless. Suddenly I wasn’t lost or unmoored. This art form connected me to brothers and sisters from hundreds of years past—Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall—and tied me to yet-to-be-written books by yet-to-be-born writers hundreds of years into the future. Someday I’d take my place, however small it might be, among them. I noticed my smile in the reflection from the window. I was already there. This moment, this connection, this stirring in my chest was more than anything I could’ve conjured. I’d never felt so certain of my future as I did with my forehead pressed against the windowpane of Left Bank Books.

  Then I noticed something else in the reflection, something completely outside myself and the future I knew, yet unmistakably intertwined with it. I stared first at the reflection, then turned to face the unfiltered beauty of Jody Hadland.

  She smiled reluctantly, as though she didn’t want to but simply couldn’t stop herself. The expression held so much doubt, and so much hope, almost like a resignation to happiness. The depth of concern in her sapphire eyes negated any youthful qualities I might have found in her low-slung jeans and V-neck sweater. So many questions passed from her, unspoken, to my heart. So many dreams hung by the frailest of threads. If I cut those ties, could I use their tattered remains to bind
us together? Could I weave a brighter tapestry for her, or did she deserve more than I could promise? Standing in the face of her untempered beauty, I began to doubt not only my abilities but also my worth. Could a weary time traveler ever offer a future to such a stunning, driven woman? Then again, did I have any choice in the matter? We’d both tried to deny this connection across the years and miles, but here we were in a place and in a time beyond coincidence.

  “Hi,” I said, my gift for prose momentarily overwhelmed by the weight of understanding.

  “Stevie.” She said my name as if she enjoyed it more than she wanted to. “I didn’t want to interrupt. I just saw you and you looked so, I don’t know…like you’d returned home after being gone too long.”

  “I don’t know about home, but certainly standing here took me back to some place I’m not sure I’ve been yet.” I shook my head. Why couldn’t I just not sound like an idiot for once? “I’m sorry. That probably doesn’t sound right, but have you ever just known something that defies reason, logic, and even the laws of physics?”

  “Something you can’t justify or explain or even believe, but you can’t deny?”

  Where could we go from here? What could I say to make her see what I envisioned for us? Finally, she turned away, and I grasped for any strand of connection. “Let’s go look at some books.”

  “What?”

  “We didn’t come to a bookstore to stand outside, right? Come on. You can give me some recommended reading.”