Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

“Did you miss me terribly, Flannery?” Heath had returned from the bathroom and now stood next to the table, offering up a rakish, leading-man smile. “Does it indeed seem an eternity since you last gazed upon my devilishly handsome vi-sage?”

  Flannery had a moment of overwhelmed confusion—similar, she thought, to the eleventh-hour cramming for the math section of the PSAT, her brain too fried to take in more stimuli. No, it was nothing like that, really, because calculus didn’t make her hands shake; working equations didn’t make it hard to swallow. Still, she managed to offer up a quick laugh before she turned away and looked out the window for Miss Sweeney, who might be walking past Nussbaum & Wu with the taxicab bouquet clutched to her heart.

  “I’m actually quite stupid,” he said. “Please do not give me any encouragement.” He looked pleased, though, and as Flannery registered his pleasure, she blushed, astonished to realize that a world-class nerd like herself knew how to act on a date. (Don’t forget to laugh at his jokes, gals! Boys love to feel they’re showing you a fun time!) She took a drink of her cappuccino, a long slug, her hand still shaking so much that she clapped her other hand on the cup to steady it. Would Heath find it odd that she drank two-handed, with her neck stretched back, a parched baby bear? And how could she be enjoying herself–laughing it up, ho, ho!—with Miss Sweeney in the depths of anguish, a dead lover’s breath on her neck? The cappuccino dregs stinging Flannery’s recently filled molar were a bracing antidote to this new reality, which had just offered up another miracle; she had apparently morphed into the typically callow Sacred Heart Girl.

  “Answer me this, Flannery.” He sat down and scooted his chair closer to hers, a small, thrilling gesture.

  Heath: so companionable, so exciting!

  Miss Sweeney: so despondent, so vulnerable.

  Flannery wished she could parse these two worlds and give her full attention to each one. She thought of Heathcliff’s despair about Cathy’s growing interest in Edgar Linton, his plaintive gaze at the calendar: “The crosses are for the evenings you have spent with the Lintons, the dots for those spent with me.” She wanted a tidy system to separate the anxiety and joy converging in her chest.

  “Were you worried that I escaped through the bathroom window?”

  Flannery shrugged, envisioning Heath shimmying out of the men’s room window and landing headfirst in a Dumpster of sodden vegetables and furiously squeaking rats in the alley behind Nussbaum & Wu. But along with the stinking produce would probably be old bouquets, too—spent roses with brittle stems.

  “I did leave the restaurant, you know.”

  “Well … where’d you go, Bernadette?” Flannery wished she hadn’t blurted something so weird, but Heath seemed nonchalant.

  “I stepped outside for a cigarette. And actually my name is not Bernadette, though it’s quite an understandable mistake.”

  “It’s just a book I read that I really liked—”

  “No need whatsoever for the apologetic tone, Flannery. I do have quite a lot in common with Bernadette, she of the wondrous visions at Lourdes, the young saint known as the most spectacular of the incorruptibles. I would like to, henceforth, be referred to as such myself.”

  “Um … You know what it means, right?”

  “The most astonishing of the righteous, yes?”

  “Ah … not quite.” Flannery tried to shrug in a way she hoped was equally humble and fetching. “Actually not at all. The incorruptibles are the saints whose bodies—allegedly—didn’t decompose after they died. Whenever the need arose, they could, you know, hop up and go about their earthly business.”

  “Great Scott!” Heath clapped his hands to his head.

  Flannery laughed at his old-timey exclamation. “It’s totally true.”

  In the heart of her fun, Miss Sweeney’s words came to her, not the irreverent mockery of her studied verbs and extraneous adjectives, but the fierce voice from yesterday’s lecture: I would go to New York City, and I would never ever come back.

  “Well, Flannery, that’s the last time I hear a cool phrase and start using it randomly. In any case, my definition is better. I would still like to be referred to as the most spectacular of the incorruptibles.”

  Nussbaum & Wu was playing The Essential Bob Dylan, Heath’s knee bobbing to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but the sugary melody felt all wrong. Flannery looked out the window and imagined Miss Sweeney rattling her bouquet and singing along, harshly and sarcastically: Hey there, Flannery Fields, you can flirt with Heath all day, but in your jingle-jangle morning you should be following me.

  Heath cleared his throat dramatically. “Am I boring you?”

  Flannery looked back at Heath: “Oh, no, I’m just—”

  “God, I’m joking. You are free to look out the window. You’re a dreamy girl and all. I get it.”

  He was making fun of her, sure, but Heath’s voice was so luscious, the scant t in his get, that she felt confident he was the most spectacular of anyone, of anything.

  “But did you know, Flannery, that it’s actually quite possible for a corpse not to deteriorate? It has to do with the quality of the soil.”

  She decided to make fun of him too. “You’re quite Gothic.”

  “Shame you’re not a Goth girl, then.” Heath smiled, crinkling the skin around his eyes. “And it’s pure science. Soil with a high concentration of peat can keep the skin on the bone. You need not be a saint at all.”

  Flannery’s own smile receded into a neutral, nervous grin, and her words devolved too: “Oh? That’s … good. Not having to be a saint is good.”

  Because the sum total of her knowledge about soil analysis came from Wuthering Heights, from Heathcliff, who had unearthed Cathy’s casket eighteen years after her death and found her face wholly unchanged. It was for the reader to decide if this was due to the rich peat in Haworth—known not only for producing the heralded flora and fauna of the moors, but also for its embalming quality—or the supernatural.

  “You might in fact be the patron saint of reading.” Heath tapped the cover of Wuthering Heights with his forefinger. “Because you were so lost in this that you didn’t see me walk out the door, or look up while I paced like a livid zoo leopard in front of the windows here.” He raised his arm to the windows, to the receded world beyond the café. “Because God forbid I should be allowed to smoke inside an eating establishment while I enjoy conversation with a lovely girl. I suppose the powers that be think pneumonia is highly preferable to cancer.”

  Flannery nodded, though it was true that pneumonia usually was better than cancer. She looked back out the window for Miss Sweeney, a gesture that seemed fraught with contrived concern—where oh where could she be?—even though she truly was worried: She was! And she still felt so unnerved by Heath’s graveyard ruminations that she considered the demise of Heath himself: He would probably die early and needlessly of a preventable cancer; he would be that skinny guy in loose jeans with a hole in his throat and the electric kazoo bzzzz bzzzz of an artificial voice box. But a lovely girl could hold two opposing thoughts in her head at once: Flannery had heard that kissing a smoker was like licking an ashtray, and she thought of the green ceramic shell ashtray in her grandfather’s Florida condo, how licking it would be like tasting a deliciously seared sea-candy, and how ash was inherently holy and sexy: Ash Wednesday ashes smeared on your forehead, the charcoal briquettes glowing in the belly of the barbecue grill, a seared marshmallow on your tongue, all that sweet sizzling before death.

  “I suppose if I quit smoking I can join the smug, healthy American Militia of Nicotine Haters. But I recognize that fanaticism is the heart of evil, so I buy a pack every morning, Flannery, and I smoke whenever I feel like it.” He sighed and looked out the rain-pegged window of Nussbaum & Wu, flaunting his beautiful profile, suddenly morose. “Fighting the power, that’s me.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Flannery said.

  What else was there to say? She imagined that her brain was growing, swelling and rising like yeast
y gray bread dough. Miss Sweeney’s laughter rang in Flannery’s ears, the descending ha ha ha! ha ha ha! of cathedral bells, and one red-inked sentence ribboned through Flannery’s mind in Gothic font: Give us this day our daily brain! But Flannery did think her mind was expanding, trying hard to catch up with the shape-shifting universe.

  Heath put his palm on the window. “I believe it’s letting up out there.”

  Oh, God, Miss Sweeney was lost to her delusions, and instead of saying, “My teacher is in danger. I’m going to look for her right now. Nice knowing you!” Flannery pined for the harsh weather to last so she could have a semi-legitimate reason to stay inside Nussbaum & Wu with Heath.

  “Would you want to take a walk with me? I love to walk right after the rain stops.” He tipped his head and put his hand to his heart. “May God strike me dead for my relentless idiocy because walking after the rain stops is such a highly original concept. Most people prefer to stroll in the crashing rain.”

  “You are rather devoid of idiocy.” Flannery had hoped to sound sardonic, but her voice emitted a robotic cadence: Greetings, earthling. I do not come from this planet. You, good sir, are rather devoid of idiocy.

  Heath took out his wallet, and Flannery quickly, and with maximum awkwardness—Oops, there goes the cappuccino cup! Thank God I drank every last drop like I was in the Sahara, heh heh—lunged for her backpack to get out some cash for the tip, but he waved her efforts away. She stared at his hands as he placed a five on the table. Heath had surprisingly wide fingers; his knuckles looked knobbed and raw in spots, as if he’d been exposed to the elements for too long, and his nail beds looked red and warm, rimmed with infection. As they walked through the maze of tables of Nussbaum & Wu, the hardware on Heath’s leather jacket gave off a metallic cicada creak creak: Who even knew insect sounds were sexy?

  Well, he was certainly different from any boy Flannery had ever been romantically involved with, which, granted, was a small pool. (A baby pool, really, holding only Brian McNamara, whom she’d met at a Knights of Columbus breakfast while visiting her grandparents in Florida. At first, it had been thrilling when he’d kissed her in the parking lot of Saint Mary, Star of the Sea, but the Knights had served pancake-and-sausage roll-ups—pigs in a blanket, which sounded like the punch line to an awkward sex joke—and Brian had braces: The porcine, maple/metallic taste of Brian’s warm mouth had put her off food for the rest of the day. Plus, Flannery had been able to see the statue of the Virgin Mary staring at her from the side yard—granite seashells strung through her carved, flowing mermaid hair and a peaceful, stone smile—which hadn’t made the make-out session any sexier.) And though they weren’t technically romantically involved, not yet, Heath was following along so closely behind her that Flannery felt confident that anyone at Nussbaum & Wu would think he was her boyfriend.

  But somewhere in Kansas, Miss Sweeney’s old boyfriend was being laid to rest, and Miss Sweeney was in Manhattan searching for him. Flannery imagined her teacher’s sadness presenting like an autoimmune disease, the lump in her throat migrating to her connective tissue, joints, and brain before attacking her rationale.

  And Flannery was in Manhattan, too, while her friends and non-friends were rushing through the halls of Sacred Heart, the chemical citrus smell of clean girls and the impending boredom and minor heartaches of the day; here she was with the door of Nussbaum & Wu being swung open for her by Heath Smith: “You first, M’lady.”

  Heath Smith was certainly a real flesh-and-blood boy, unlike the fictional one dreamed up by Emily Brontë, another lonely girl. But Flannery’s brain zoomed away from the laws of space and time, all those snoozy, corporeal constraints, to indulge her fantasy life, to imagine that she was with some clever boy who claimed his name was Heath Smith, but was in fact Heathcliff himself, with his cruel-to-be-cruel sexiness and fierce vulnerability.

  Flannery marveled at the potentialities of the fast-paced miracle of the day. She was not only in upper Manhattan with Heath, she had apparently entered into Miss Sweeney’s own private Wuthering Heights, and Flannery was on the pages too, not just a few casual mentions, but as essential backstory. Miss Sweeney was carrying the roses that Flannery had found in the taxi.

  Oh. My. God. Have I Gone Intertextual?

  Wherever she was in the real world, Miss Sweeney lingered in Flannery’s brain, choking back laughter. Well, Flannery, perhaps you’ll be given the chance to express your textuality with Heath Smith.

  But Flannery was already so deep in this new world that she would not have been surprised to see that other boy on the sidewalk outside of Nussbaum & Wu: the doomed Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran lingering between this world and the next.

  The wuthering elements had cleared off, and a pale wash of winter rainbow arched over the island of Manhattan as Flannery and Heath walked down the street, dodging a pack of children on Razor scooters, moms in their athletic clothes pushing fancy double strollers with plaid hoods, and a pool of vomit on the sidewalk that made a mother screech: “Darwin! Watch your step!”

  Heath snickered. “Because not everyone believes in your theory of evolution, young man. Some people believe in Christ or the stars.”

  “That poor kid! People will always be mocking his name.” But Flannery laughed too, even with the considerable weight of her own name. She took a quick look up and down Broadway, searching for her teacher among all the random pedestrians, and as she could think of no way to ease into her tale, she asked a blunt question, and she sounded as phony and bizarre as any B-movie adventure actress: “Hey, can I tell you something that’s completely crazy?”

  “You may. I assure you, nothing is too crazy for me. Truly.”

  Flannery looked up at Heath. He was a confident Brit, a citizen of the world, really, while she was a suburban mouse, a Connecticut mall mouse, when you got right down to it. Well, she was mostly just a girl seized by the sudden desire never to be away from the boy striding next to her.

  Miss Sweeney’s red pen was unrelenting: “Seized by the sudden desire?” Well, that’s a little TMI, Harlequin Hannah.

  It was hard to know where to begin.

  The boy looked down at Flannery. “Out with it, you. What’s the crazy thing you want to tell me?” When he rested his hand on her shoulder, she shivered.

  “Oh, you’re freezing cold, Flannery.”

  “That’s not it.”

  Their eyes met, and they both looked studiously away, taking an overwrought interest in pigeons picking at a rain-sodden hotdog bun in the gutter. Flannery wondered if it was possible to die of embarrassment, if there was a gravestone in her immediate future, baroque letters carved in marble: RIP LITTLE MISS AWKWARD. But then Heath darted behind Flannery, and gently slid her backpack off her shoulders and down the length of her arms. He took off his leather jacket—the fluidity of his movement was pure ballet—and draped it around Flannery’s shoulders.

  Though she felt like passing out, Flannery managed to make conversation. “Oh, thanks, but I’m fine.”

  He ignored that and took Flannery’s backpack so she could stick her arms into the sleeves. The jacket was warm, heated by the blood and bones and internal organs of another human, of the biological manifestation of whatever their souls were sharing, and she now knew that magic existed in the world, that magic might suddenly burst the routine of any old dismal day.

  She tried to figure out just the right way to say it; she tried to channel Miss Sweeney’s confident conversational style. “So anyway, this is going to sound crazy, like get-thee-to-a- mental-hospital bananas, so brace yourself—”

  “You’re pregnant, and the baby is mine? I get it, though we’ve never even kissed, you’ve conceived, just being in my über-manly presence.” He pitched his voice to a fine Elvis timbre, muting his British accent with a Tennessee twang: “Everything will be fine; I’ll make an honest woman of you, Flannery.”

  If he was trying to shock her, Flannery felt pretty sure she could best him.

  “It’s actually a littl
e crazier than that.”

  Heath leaned in close: “The question is: Is it crazier than that?” He tilted his chin at the woman walking in front of them, who was wearing a gold crushed-velvet coat with striped orange-and-black sleeves and a snarling, emerald-eyed tiger embroidered across the back.

  Heath leaned down and laugh-whispered in Flannery’s ear, “Do we think she’s a William Blake groupie? Is this pure homage?” Heath cleared his throat dramatically and whispered: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.”

  The poem and his mouth so close to her face made Flannery light-headed. Oh, Miss Sweeney, forgive my incessant dallying. I am sorry for your anguish, but this is the best day ever.

  She whispered back: “What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Though her voice cracked, she managed to squeak out another verse. “In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. Heath shook his fist at the sky, as if cursing God. “You’re smart, too.”

  Flannery acted like she hadn’t heard what he’d said, but she could not escape the raw ascension of bliss that made her feel as if she were floating down Broadway like a Macy’s balloon, a bloated Garfield, bobbing along and ruing nothing, living entirely for the moment.

  Miss Sweeney guffawed in her brain: Easy there, girl. Simmer down with the parade poetry.

  But it was too late for any kind of moderate joy, all the churches in Manhattan had already lost their iconography: The lost saints and marble angels and carved Christs had flown down from the altars and architecture, leaving their old haunts stripped plain as Quaker meeting houses. Now their marble bodies turned supple and fluid as they maypoled around Flannery and sang Heath’s three words, a trinity of bliss: You’re smart, too.

  Yet there was nothing unique about the moment: Flannery felt the same as anyone who had ever fallen in love in an instant, all the living and the dead who had known the hard-earned magic of finding the one person in the city who was perfect for you, the person who found you interesting and heart-wrenchingly beautiful: You, little old you! And, hey. You’re smart, too.