Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  Well, she had never skipped class before, and doubted that she would ever skip it again. But Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights stowed in her backpack changed the rules for the day, even though she was terrified to open it again and find that the pages had reverted back to their original text, her reading a mere bathroom dreamscape. Flannery was also terrified that it was somehow true, that Miss Sweeney’s dead boyfriend was ghosting around the Sacred Heart campus, and that Miss Sweeney was unraveling.

  Shivering, Flannery gingerly stepped over the slick spots and marveled at the litter—the clogged earth mosaic of Starbucks cups and Luna wrappers and cigarette butts, and a lipstick palette that must have dropped out of a purse and flipped open: The palette now bled a slushy stream of rose and fig and pink. Yes, Miss Sweeney was there with her, saying: Flannery, the lipsticks are bleeding? Are they in a sort of cosmetic critical condition? A Lancôme coma?

  She walked through the rows of cars, the occasional beat-up Escort among the Mercedes, the BMWs, and all the shimmering SUVs, until she arrived at the mouth of the long, winding lane that would lead her off the Sacred Heart campus. In the distance was the roar of the highway, which could have been anything at all, lions or typhoons or machete-twirling pirates crooning: Come here, my pretty, I have some lovely candies for you.

  But Flannery had the unwelcome premonition—butterflies in her stomach, circling her sunken heart—that the danger was entirely real, and not for her, but for Miss Sweeney. Yesterday she had seemed pretty animated during class, though contrasted with the dullardly instructional style of the other teachers at Sacred Heart, Miss Sweeney’s literary flamboyance was a delight. But, no, yesterday was really different: Flannery recalled Miss Sweeney chewing her lower lip during class, not pensively, but with alarming enthusiasm. Was her behavior a manifestation of grief, or was she already seguing into something worse? When Miss Sweeney started crying during class, well, sure, it was shocking—later, the words freak show floated down the hallway along with the faux-adult complaints: “God, she’s so unprofessional…” “Somebody missed their therapy appointment this week”—but the blood rosettes staining Miss Sweeney’s chewed lips looked far more jarring than her tears. And of course Flannery thought of Wuthering Heights, of Edgar Linton finding Cathy in a frenzy after he issued an ultimatum about giving up Heathcliff: “She stretched herself out stiff, and turned up her eyes, while her cheeks, at once blanched and livid, assumed the aspect of death … ‘She has blood on her lips’ he said, shuddering.”

  Still, Flannery adored the day’s assignment, a short essay about where Heathcliff might have gone when he dropped out of the narrative of Wuthering Heights, brokenhearted and furious that his beloved Cathy had decided to marry her rich neighbor, the iconic milquetoast blonde guy, Edgar Linton. Flannery’s essay, spell- and grammar-checked to perfection, was sheathed in a manila folder in her backpack, and Flannery was already daydreaming of her modest gaze and slight shrug—Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all, really—as she handed it to Miss Sweeney, of Miss Sweeney reading and rereading and chuckling in droll admiration at the lyrical sentences Flannery had crafted with no help from a mystical wood sprite muse or a perky helicopter mom cooking up adverbs. Flannery’s only tools were Frappuccinos and M&M’s. She imagined Miss Sweeney giving an impromptu reading of her Heathcliff essay in the teacher’s lounge, before push-pinning her paper to the corkboard above the hot chocolate packets and coffee machine and offering a pro tip to her fellow educators. “Peruse it at your leisure, people. You might learn a little something. This kind of work is the reason Flannery Fields got into Columbia.”

  Flannery walked faster, faster still, accelerating to the optimistic mall walk of a senior citizen before she broke out in a full-on run, her backpack pounding her back as she considered the likelihood of her teacher’s lounge dream-sequence. Probably Flannery’s sentences would receive Miss Sweeney’s standard cutting comments flourished with mocking question marks, which were especially mortifying in triplicate: Is Heathcliff really a “sardonic shepherd” trying to herd Cathy’s eternal love??? Even her ellipses were terrifying: Flannery you might want to reconsider this entire paragraph …

  Still, always there was the brightness of I think you could be a writer. And she had Miss Sweeney to thank for getting her into Columbia, her alma mater; she had written a beautiful recommendation letter for Flannery. The day her acceptance letter had arrived, Flannery had sat at her desk, her index finger on the track pad of her computer, already crestfallen. She knew what she would read when she opened the Columbia University e-mail: We sincerely thank you for your application, and regret to inform you that you are a loser who will not be invited to attend our esteemed institution. Alas! But when she had clicked on the e-mail that glorious random Saturday, Flannery had discovered she had no gift for prophecy.

  She kept her thoughts trained on the future, but in her head was the depressing sound of the present: “Flannery, maybe you could bring Heathcliff as your date?” And so a mean girl’s voice kept her moving when she reached the end of Sacred Heart Lane and made her way, breathless, down the sloped embankment next to the highway. Flannery walked sideways on the slippery earth, descending in careful goat steps. She thought about how happy Miss Sweeney had been when she’d been accepted to Columbia, and how she’d said that Flannery would love going to school in Manhattan, which was the best city in the world to get lost in. It had seemed fairly weird at the time—had she mistaken Flannery for someone so definitely found? And yesterday’s proclamation, straight from Miss Sweeney’s blood-bitten lips: I would go to New York City and I would never, ever come back.

  And today’s words: Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega!

  Flannery thought of the obituary in Miss Sweeney’s purse: the good-looking Marine, Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, his sonorous, hyphenated last name elevating his first name, his ghost-self at the window staring in at his Caitlin, at Flannery’s Miss Sweeney.

  She stood next to the highway and took a quick look back at Sacred Heart.

  I’ll do it. I will find you. And I’ll help you.

  She would repay Miss Sweeney for the incredible gift of giving Flannery a future to think about beyond the world of Sacred Heart High, a future wherein she would find her people. And so, bravely, foolishly, and with the laughter of the barfing girl ringing in her mind, Flannery made her way across six lanes of highway traffic, cautious as a drunken squirrel darting back twice—Holy crap, that eighteen-wheeler is flying!—no, three times before racing victoriously to the other side, keeping her head down as she crunched along in the frosty gravel, lest a passing car mistake her for a hitchhiker on the exit ramp.

  Maybe she was just stoned on the sudden adventure of finding herself on the other side of the highway, the world of quotidian miracles: a Metro North ticket to NYC and a cruller and a large white coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, purchased with the crisp twenties her parents had given her before they went on vacation. Because Flannery wasn’t puzzling out why she had decided to ditch school to look for Miss Sweeney in Manhattan, she was wondering why she’d never before given in to the unfurling magic of any old weekday, all the truant adventures that had passed her by while she learned how to detect hyperbole and dissect a fetal pig and try, try, try, to hover beneath the radar of the popular girls. If AP English via Miss Sweeney had taught Flannery anything, it was that life was brimming with various traumas and tragedies—the great novels didn’t lie—and that there was no need to court sorrow by writing Goth poetry in a black spiral notebook or listening to death-rock because sorrow was always, always looming, sorrow would be thrust upon you, and, as the foot-stomping song from the junior year musical went—everyone was a girl who couldn’t say no, everyone was in a terrible fix.

  But sorrow’s wacky twin was on the Metro North train from Nowheresville, Connecticut, to Manhattan: Euphoria rode along with Flannery, even as she worried about Miss Sweeney, even as Flannery texted her friends (Went home. CRAMPS. Awesome.) and her parents in Flor
ida (Got sick of school, went home. Oops, AT not OF). And even if she was the kind of girl to skip class, the teachers at Sacred Heart would be too busy concentrating on Miss Sweeney’s absence to worry about an errant girl, and no one and nobody knew that Flannery was lighting out for the territory. How she knew the hardcore thrill of carpe diem, as she sipped her coffee and looked out the window, the ice-glazed world spilling past. Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights stayed safely zipped in her backpack—she didn’t have the courage to open it again, not quite yet, but the original text was there in her mind as she rode to Manhattan, Emily Brontë’s winter words: “One could hardly imagine that there had been three weeks of summer: the primroses and crocuses were hidden under wintry drifts; the larks were silent, the young leaves of the early trees smitten and blackened.” Flannery looked out at the smitten trees of Connecticut, their branch ends like bony bark hands poking out of their snow shroud to wave good-bye.

  Miss Sweeney’s red ink wrote the next thought in Flannery’s mind: Maybe reconsider your waving winter trees? Seems a bit too “Farewell from Ye Olde Cold Hickory Tree” or “Au Revoir, Exclaimed the Weeping Cherry,” if you see what I mean.

  The Day Before

  The universe was offering up a miracle.

  If I stared right at Brandon, if I turned my face even an inch to look more directly out the window, he would vanish. This knowledge was purely instinctual: I needed only to relax my peripheral vision in order to take in a gauzy view of him out in the snowy parking lot of Sacred Heart High School. His arms hung relaxed at his sides. He wore no coat over his fatigues but didn’t seem to feel the cold. I tried to be calm: I couldn’t feast on the vision of him, couldn’t let my rods and cones fire away—It’s Brandon! O, Brandon!—or he would leave me again.

  But I had to remain steady while I stood in front of my classroom of AP English students. I endured severe feast-or-famine corporeal problems: Sweat drenched my hairline and slicked my palms, but my mouth had dried to turtle shell. I had to bite my bottom lip to keep it from trembling, which I hoped would make me appear intensely, lip-quakingly interested in the comments of the girl geniuses who were shredding Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff, especially, was the victim of their reductive wrath.

  “So Heathcliff is supposed to be this great romantic male character, but, come on, he’s just a bitter, obsessive freak and the whole my love burns eternal theme of the book is just so massively lame.” This dour critique was juxtaposed with a smile that gleamed chemically bright, radiant; the Sacred Heart girls overbleached their teeth.

  The second most popular girl in the senior class rang in after the top dog: “Right? He needs to get over Cathy and get a prescription for Zoloft. You can’t be a Byronic hero 24-7.”

  I tasted blood. I was biting my lip too hard. In my peripheral window-vision, snow fell, soft and silver-white, and Brandon raised his face to it. I silently mouthed his name, my tongue striking the roof of my mouth at the d sound, the melancholy of the second syllable. Bran-duhn. It was the most beautiful name in any language, and the loneliest. He had folded his hands into the prayer position over his heart as if at yoga or mass. They were large-knuckled, and I remembered the chapped coolness of them on my back, in summer. Brandon.

  Meanwhile, haters kept hating:

  “And when Heathcliff drops out of the novel, of course he returns and has oh so conveniently made his fortune, and the reader never finds out where he went, nor do we care. We only know that with Heathcliff back in the house, more misogynistic romance may be on deck. O, joy.”

  Typical Sacred Heart girls! They equated snark and mockery with intelligence; they thought to really love a novel was pure weakness, foolishness perhaps. Except for my favorite brainiac, Flannery Fields: A stripe of muscle in her jawline twitched, and she repeatedly tucked her bobbed, dark hair behind her ear, as if this gesture might ready her for class combat. I recalled her August excitement when she saw Wuthering Heights on the syllabus. It was her favorite novel. My young soul mate!

  Like Flannery, I was growing increasingly vexed by the girls’ trashing of Emily Brontë’s genius, so I was delighted to hear her lone voice of dissent. Flannery defended Heathcliff with supreme nerd-girl righteousness: “But the reader does care! Heathcliff’s disappearance is not some gigantic authorial misstep on the part of Emily Brontë. She’s inviting us to use our imagination, to be part of the narrative. She’s breaking open the story for us.”

  I blinked purposefully, trying to relax my eye muscles so that my peripheral vision would expand: I longed for the sharp, shaded vision of a bubble-eyed squirrel, for the sudden gift of super-powered side eyes. Of course I knew I couldn’t achieve a truly enhanced corneal performance via my simple eye exercises. But it seemed that I possessed sharpened optical clarity as I watched Brandon cut across the student parking lot. He lost his footing on an icy patch but quickly steadied himself, one hand on a blue Toyota to his left, one hand on a white SUV to his right. I flinched when he slipped, but kept my eyes trained on my class—the straight-up dullardly world of uniformed girls wearing white Polo shirts and the knee-length Black Watch plaid skirts that made it seem like bagpipes should be playing in the foggy distance. Cue the crumbling country estates! Ah, the heather, mist, and moors!

  Flannery kept on talking; Flannery was on fire. “And Wuthering Heights is not some rabid, retro romance. It’s a feminist love story, since Heathcliff and Cathy are equals in their obsessiveness. And when he leaves, he’s not just running off to forget about Cathy and make his stereotypical fortune. He wants to get lost; he wants to change, and he does.” Flannery held up one finger, imploring us to wait, wait, while she flipped through the pages. When she found the page she wanted, Flannery gently fist-bumped the air—yes!—and then read aloud: “Now, fully revealed by the fire and candlelight, I was amazed, more than ever, to behold the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man; beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youth-like … His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation.”

  Flannery flipped her book shut, but she kept one thumb inside, marking the page. “In the three years he was away from Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff transformed himself. He wanted to escape from his physical self, to change his entire narrative, and he did.”

  The two requisite awful girls sitting behind Flannery Fields cracked up, their shoulders bobbing with silent laughter. Not being super-pretty or super-smart, they were going with super-mean, and these BFFs were owning it. They were strivers and suck-ups, with long, flat-ironed curtains of hair highlighted in expensive earth tones—oak, walnut, sunshine—and their families donated the big bucks to Sacred Heart High School. But unlike most of the teachers, I didn’t favor these types. I was all in for the geeks; I hearted the downtrodden. Granted, Flannery was way over the top: Rabid retro romance was some awfully audacious alliteration and To Escape from His Physical Self sounded like a Very Special Lifetime movie. But I had the power to penalize nastiness, and I would. My thoughts formed in ye olde 5-7-5 syllabic form.

  Giggle on, mean ones.

  Guess who has just lost their A’s?

  Mom and Dad will weep!

  Dear Reader, I present this craptacular haiku—Fear not! There will be only one—as evidence of my straying, jangled thoughts. Because I could see the briefest snowflakes in Brandon’s hair before his body heat turned them to water and my brain turned giddy, biblical, and out floated the word transubstantiation. He was the loaves and the fishes, the water and wine; he was a Marine who had shaved his head, but now his hair was just growing back, maybe an eighth of an inch, and I wondered how the velvet prickles would feel on my lips. He held his palm out, the sweetest beckoning, and with one slow curl of his hand—O, come back to me—I felt my stomach hollow and drop as the harsh yellow fluorescence of the room turned golden, incandescent. Brandon was not any kind of Christ figure, not really, but he had ce
rtainly gone full-on archangel.

  I cleared my cottonmouth throat. Swallowing was like gurgling sand, a Saharan Listerine of broken glass. Though Flannery was racing ahead to Heathcliff’s return, I stuck to my original lesson plan. “When Heathcliff is brokenhearted over Cathy, when he drops out of the narrative of Wuthering Heights, where do you think he goes?”

  Flannery flipped her book open, literary excitement trumping all shyness. She zigzagged her index finger down the page: “His ‘upright carriage’ suggests him being in the army.”

  Brandon offered me a sardonic smile before he arranged his face into a bodybuilder’s grimace, flexed his arms, and gave his right bicep a quick kiss. I willed myself not to turn to him as the girls duked it out. One-third of their grade was based on classroom participation, so it was a regular Greek chorus of grade grubbers:

  “Wouldn’t Heathcliff just go back to Liverpool, where he was born?”

  “Right. For that matter, he could time-travel to the early 1960s and join a band with the city’s other celebrities: George, John, Paul, and Ringo.”

  “Heathcliff would SO be the Goth guy in back playing cowbell!”

  “Seriously, why would he go back to Liverpool, where he’d been a homeless orphan? He’d make his fortune in a new city, Paris, maybe, or Rome.”

  “No, there’s the language problem. Heathcliff isn’t formally educated, so he’s not going to be able to speak French or Italian. Maybe London…”

  After each comment, a girl would look at me with expectant eyes: Miss Sweeney, are you noting my cleverness, which clearly shows I have read the text and highlighted pertinent passages? For God’s sake, woman, flip open your laptop and put a check next to my name in the class participation column!