by Leah Raeder
Too late, I said, “Evan, Wesley’s here.”
Siobhan stepped up to the railing a few feet down from us, gorgeous and enigmatic in her painted mask, her dark crepe dress flowing around her like an extension of the night. What was that expression? Surprise? Intrigue? “Hello,” she said pleasantly. “Maise, who’s your friend?”
Evan turned, not knowing who she was, not getting enough distance from me. And Wesley appeared right on cue, gnawing on a giant pretzel and raising his eyebrows.
“Mr. Wilke. What are you doing here?”
I took a step away from him and knelt smoothly to tie a shoe that didn’t need tying.
Siobhan glided forward, smiling. “So this is the famous Mr. Wilke.”
“Famous?” Evan said.
Wesley groaned. “Mom.”
I stood up and her eyes swiveled from him to me. They paused on me a moment. I wasn’t imagining it. Fuck.
“I’m Siobhan Brown,” she said, lifting her hand. “Wesley’s mother, much to his dismay.”
Evan laughed graciously and took her hand. “Evan Wilke. Wesley’s teacher.”
“Maise’s teacher too,” Wesley said.
Evan glanced at me and said, “Right.”
Oh my god. I should just make a run for it.
“It’s so weird seeing you here,” Wesley said.
I felt I needed to say something, or my silence would become noticeable. “What, teachers can’t have real lives?”
They all looked at me, and suddenly I wondered whether I’d just blurted out the whole sordid confession. We’re sleeping together. He’s E. Stop fucking staring.
“It’s not much of one,” Evan said, and smiled. The incredible thing was that he could smile like I was just some student, some girl, and yet I saw the brief flare of warmth in his eyes, a secret message just for me.
You really are an actor, I thought.
“Good to see you guys,” he said. “And so nice to meet you, Ms. Brown.”
“Wait,” Wesley said, brandishing the stub of his pretzel, “you’re leaving already?”
I could have decked him.
Siobhan wore an appraising half-smile, the painted mask making it slightly sinister, and for the first time I realized how dangerous a woman she was. “If you don’t have much of a life, you’ll fit right in with us.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
“Seriously,” Wesley agreed.
She piqued an eyebrow at us. “These two think I’m preventing them from having fun because I’m the parent. Such failure of imagination.” Her look turned sly. “A handsome bachelor will remedy this appalling wholesomeness.”
“Mom,” Wesley said, “please do not flirt with our teacher.”
Evan laughed, genuinely, a little shyly. “I’m flattered, really, but I’ve got papers to grade.”
I darted him a warning look. You don’t give out papers, Mr. Wilke. You think papers are bullshit.
“Another time, then,” Siobhan murmured.
Evan smiled at each of us, and when he looked at me his eyes flickered to my hand, then back to my face. You could have clocked him with a stopwatch. He didn’t spend a single extra millisecond on me, yet he’d told me everything. I clenched the ring in my fist.
He walked away. Wesley jammed the end of his pretzel into his mouth and said, “Kinda sad that he comes here for fun.”
“We come here for fun,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’re losers.”
Siobhan clucked her tongue. “One percent of your share is going to your sister.”
“Mom,” he said. “You already said that like five times this week.”
I laughed. “Your sister’s going to be rich, Wesley. Better start being nice to her.”
Siobhan smiled at me. But as we turned back to the carnival, her eyes held mine, and I knew that she knew. Everything.
—8—
The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else. So I did: my semester project.
I was infatuated with Terrence Malick those days, especially his latest stuff: Tree of Life and To the Wonder, films that evoked the old silent era of storytelling. They were fragmented, visual, more stream-of-consciousness than stories with clear dramatic arcs. Watching them wasn’t so much like watching a movie as dipping yourself into someone’s memories. Wisps of dialogue floating atop swirling, too-close images. Music drifting in and out like something heard from a passing car. Echoes and shadows.
I had built up a library of clips now, mostly from St. Louis, visual mementos that only held meaning for two people. Sunlight rolling off the striped awning at the chocolatier where Evan bought me pralines that he fed to me by hand. The velvet ropes at the Tivoli where I’d kissed him in a crowd, no longer self-conscious. Our bare feet, side by side, after we’d walked across the stepping stones in the Citygarden downtown, the water shockingly cold, drying in the pale autumn sun.
I strung them together without stopping too long to cut or trim. I wanted it to be messy, overlapping, spontaneous. I pasted bits of text here and there, faded in a verse of one song, then another. I was trying to speak in several different languages at once, visual and verbal and musical, and what came out was a babel of color and sound that eventually became incomprehensible, smearing into impressions of feeling, mood.
It was exhausting. I pulled off my headphones and rubbed my sore ears.
You’re so quiet, I IMed Wesley, who sat across the computer lab. We’d decided not to show each other our projects so we wouldn’t cross-pollinate. Are you watching porn?
Ha ha ha, he responded.
How’s it going?
Okay. A pause, then, Want to see? IDK if I like it.
Believe in yourself, I said, and surprise me.
#
October had felt slow, but November ran through my fingers like sand. The only tedious parts were, ironically, in Evan’s class, where I sat watching him act like a teacher, watched the fine spiderweb of cracks growing at the edges of his facade. I ate lunch with Wesley and made myself smile and laugh, no matter how robotic it felt. The weekends weren’t enough anymore. I showed up at Evan’s apartment on school nights and he told me it was a bad idea and let me inside anyway, taking me in his arms as if we hadn’t seen each other in months. Those nights were almost too intense, edged with hysterical urgency, my fists crumpling his bed sheets, his hands pulling me close to fuck me deeper, none of it ever giving us more than a few hours of respite. The weekends in St. Louis were sweeter, more relaxed, the rapid city paradoxically slowing us down, but every Sunday a gradual dread would build, a coil in my chest tightening and choking until it felt like my life was ending when we got in the car. Melodramatic, but in a way, it really was. The life I had with him felt more real than the one I’d lived on my own.
There was one day where it became more real than I wanted.
We were standing on a street corner downtown, waiting to cross, the wind sharp and peppery with ice, and Evan had said something that made me laugh and when I turned to smile at him, I locked gazes with the driver of a sleek gray Benz idling beside us. Face like wood hacked with a blunt hatchet, eyes that never blinked. Quinn. He looked right at me and recognized me instantly, even in my coat and scarf, and he nodded, once, and drove away.
I didn’t say a word about it to Evan. But it ticked in the back of my mind, a clock that would eventually run out.
Looking back, I can barely remember what we did in those weeks. I have videos and photos to prove it happened. I remember the last leaves falling. Rain turning to needles of sleet. The world tinting to grayscale. But when I think of what we did together, all I remember is how I ached. With anxiety, with want, and with loneliness. Even when I was with Evan, I’d think of how little time we had left before we went back to town or school and pretended to be normal, not miserable and apart. I’d think of the semester ending and switching classes and seeing him even less. I’d think, I hate this. I hate that we can’t be together like normal people. I just
want to be with you. And then I’d start thinking about what I was willing to give up for that.
#
I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns.
Natalie came home to visit, an intimidating girl with pin-sharp blue eyes and Wesley’s long, canine grin and her mom’s acerbic wit. She was nice to me, though, and we ganged up on Wesley and took him to task for the assorted Evils of Men until he threatened to call his dad. Then alliances shifted, and Wesley and Nat turned against Siobhan. I sat on the sidelines and listened to family stories. Siobhan taught them not to break curfew by waiting for them in the dark kitchen one night in a white gown, holding a chef’s knife. Nat got arrested for shoplifting a bottle of vodka, which Siobhan said was doubly stupid because they had way nicer stuff to steal at home. Wesley fractured his collarbone when he made a DIY helmet cam and recorded himself trying to jump his bike over a truck (also ruined a $500 camera) (also the reason he never rode bikes).
The house was full of candlelight and the smell of cinnamon and sweet potatoes. Wesley flicked my ear, and Siobhan put her arm around my shoulder, and Nat joked with me like she’d known me for years, and I thought, You are my real family. I made up a fantasy that they’d accidentally lost me as a baby, and I’d been raised by a scheming witch addicted to her own potions, and the truth of my parentage only came to light on my eighteenth birthday, when the curse masking my identity lifted. Now we were finally together again. I drank too much rum punch and got teary and excused myself for some fresh air.
Siobhan followed me onto the back deck, closing the glass door behind her. She tugged an afghan around her shoulders. “Cold?”
I shook my head. The alcohol sent my blood rushing to the surface. I felt like all of me was gathered on the outside of my skin.
Siobhan sat beside me on the wooden rocker. The sky was so clear it made a deep cobalt matte behind the trees, dusted with a scattering of silver stars. The moon was a thin white fang. We hadn’t really been alone since Halloween, and a sober corner of my mind worried about this.
“I’m glad you came tonight,” she said.
“I’m glad you invited me.”
She smiled, her eyes moving frankly over my face. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Oh, shit.
Siobhan turned away. “I love my children more than anything in this world. Even more than I love the alimony payments. And you’re starting to feel like a daughter to me.”
Heart palpitations.
“I know there are things you keep private from everyone.” She glanced at me. “And I want you to know that I will never tell anyone unless you ask me to.”
I exhaled. A weight slid off my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she said.
“I can’t. It’s not what you think. It’s not bad. I just—I can’t.”
She nodded, as if that was the answer she’d expected. Her heavy-lidded eyes caught tiny sickles of moonlight. “Did Wesley ever tell you about his father?”
“No.”
Siobhan smiled, tilting her face to the sky. “When I was twenty, and very stupid, and very pretty, I was utterly in love with my economics professor. It is one of the most unsexy subjects, but the way this man talked about numbers was obscene. It helped that he was fucking gorgeous, too.”
I laughed.
“There was a boy in econ who always sat next to me and found excuses to talk. He’d share his notes if I daydreamed during class—and I did a lot of daydreaming about that professor.” Her smile deepened. “This boy was persistent, so I made a deal with him. If he could ask the professor a question which he answered incorrectly, I’d agree to one date.”
I pulled my knees up and rested my chin atop them, waiting eagerly.
“The boy thought about it for a while, and then he asked, ‘Will Siobhan go out with me tonight?’ And the professor said, very decisively, ‘No.’ So the boy, thinking himself clever, asked me where I’d like to have dinner, and I said I’d tell him later.” Her teeth flashed as she spoke. “After class, I asked the professor why he’d answered ‘no’ with such certainty. Do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Because you’re having dinner with me.’ And that was the night I started dating Professor Brown.”
My jaw dropped.
Siobhan laughed, those low, dulcet tones dropping into the night like orchid petals. She looked me right in the eyes. “Perhaps I understand more than you think.”
Formula for honesty: alcohol + loneliness.
“How long were you with him?” I said.
“Five years.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-one to my twenty.”
My eyebrows rose. “How was it, being together?”
Siobhan tilted her head up again, remembering. “Exquisite,” she said in a throaty voice, and I shivered. “Not perfect, but something that could only happen once in a life. Most people fumble through young adulthood with idiots of equal age and naivete. Youth wasted reinventing the wheel. Being with an older man changed all of that. It shaped me in many, many ways.”
“Good ways?”
Her eyes fixed on me again. “Some good. Some not. There are times when I wonder who I would’ve been if I had gone out with that boy instead. If I had discovered life through trial and error, rather than through Jack.”
“But you’re amazing,” I said, earnest with rum and adoration. “You’re so smart and wise and beautiful. You’re perfect.”
Siobhan gave me a funny look. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek, her lips warm and dry.
“You are a dear thing,” she said. “You deserve happiness.”
I stayed there for a while after she went inside, my palm pressed to my cheek where she’d kissed me, trying to hold in the feeling of being loved.
#
We were in St. Louis for the first snow.
We walked through the white fleece lying over downtown, Evan in a wool coat, me in fur boots and knit stockings and a skirt and parka, like a little girl. I felt like a little girl, laughing at the snowflakes colliding gently with my face. They collected in my eyelashes and when I looked at Evan he said, “You’ve got stars in your eyes,” and I kissed him, his lips warm and sweet in the cold. Our breath wrapped around us in scarves of steam. On the smooth white cloth spread before us, colored lights danced in soft, diaphanous waves, like auroras.
I refused to let myself worry about expensive cars pulling up, men with guns. My heart was too full of beauty to admit fear.
The loft was freezing in winter, so we curled up on the couch with blankets and mugs of peppermint tea. My nose was always cold, and Evan kept kissing it. He’d let his beard grow out a little and I ran my fingers over the bristles, blond and auburn and a few isolated silvers.
“Almost Christmas break,” I said.
We hadn’t decided where to go yet. Chicago, maybe. I’d never been up there. All that really mattered was we’d have two solid weeks together, no school, no sad Sunday goodbyes. It’d be like living together. I was nervous, even after all of this. The removal of all boundaries, all distractions, leaving us with nothing but each other—scary. What kind of people would we be without secrecy and desperation?
“I want to show you something,” Evan said.
I watched him fetch his laptop. The snow falling outside cast shadows over us like rain, and I thought of the raindrops running down the windows of his car a million years ago. Everything had a gunmetal tint, the shadows cool and misty, drifting, filling the loft like a sunken ship. All day I’d had Lana del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” in my head, and now I heard it again and something hot twisted in my throat.
Evan sat beside me and ran a hand over my knee. “I haven’t shown anyone this in a long time. It’s old, and it’s not who I am anymore, but I want you to see it because it was part of me, once.”
He played a video.
There he was, a t
wenty-something college guy, baby-faced, higher-pitched, skinnier. His acting demo reel. The clips were mostly from student films, overly Serious and Meaningful, everyone trying too hard to Act except for him. He didn’t look like he was acting at all. He looked like a sad, lost boy who’d wandered into a shot and knew it was all fake and absurd and embraced it with fatalistic humor. The camera focused magnetically on his eyes, his mouth, the way he conveyed so much in the subtle flicker and shift of a lip, an eyebrow. But the thing that struck me most was how absolutely alone he looked. Even in a group of people, he was apart from them. He’d smile, but his eyes would go elsewhere, to some place inside himself.
I looked up from his laptop.
“Did that lower your opinion of me?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Is it weird seeing me when I was your age?”
“A little.” Would I be so different in ten years? “Evan, you are actually good. Seriously good. Why did you stop?”
He stared off into space. The light waned, the snowfall turning opaque, a muslin sheet flecked with stars.
“It didn’t make me happy,” he said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s everything.”
I put my hand on his wrist, feeling the broad bones, the veins spiraling up his arm. Startling, how real he was. “What makes you happy?”
I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I really wanted to know. But he touched my face and I knew what he was going to say, and suddenly I didn’t want him to say it. I averted my eyes.
“I don’t get you sometimes,” I said.
“What don’t you get?”
“Why me?”
I thought of Siobhan and her professor and all the men who’d been drawn to me, who I’d used and discarded and never felt a twinge of regret over. What did they see in us? Did they see us as girls they could teach about all the things they couldn’t share in their classes or jobs or wherever? Did they just see pretty faces, smooth young bodies? Were they less intimidated because we were young and dumb and not yet hardened by disappointment? Maybe it was more about themselves, about getting a second chance to be the men they hadn’t been when they were young. It hurt when I thought about that. That I might merely be a lesson for Evan to learn something about himself. That I might just be schooling the teacher.
