Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

  “It could have been anyone,” I said. “All the women who look at you when we go out. Ms. Bisette at school. God, even Hiyam. Why me?”

  He stared at the coffee table, the reflection of snow like confectioner’s sugar sifting down.

  “It couldn’t have been anyone,” he said softly. “For a long time before I met you, I felt my life was this kind of test. I was in deep, cold water, swimming for shore, and my arms were getting tired, my skin numb. On the shore was everything I thought I wanted: a better job, a house, a family.” He swallowed, his throat cording with tension. “But I could barely keep my head above water. Eventually I stopped seeing the shore. Only cold dark blue, in all directions. I know it’s cliché, but when I met you, my eyes opened. I looked around, and realized I could stand up whenever I wanted. There was firm ground under my feet. That shore in the distance was an illusion. I was already somewhere beautiful.”

  I stared at him, my lungs not seeming to be doing anything vital to my survival.

  “You are so alive, Maise. You are so here, so present in the moment. You’ve taught me that happiness is possible now, not in some distant future. You’ll scale a mountain without a second thought, face your fears, throw yourself into danger, and you’re not reckless, but bold, proud. You have a lion’s heart. You aren’t afraid to live.”

  I was shivering, even under the blanket. Wesley had called it self-destructive. Evan understood. It wasn’t about flirting with death, like Mom. It was about wanting to live all the way to the seams of life.

  But how he could feel that way, when he’d made me feel that way? How could two zombies bring each other to life? I wasn’t brave before I met him, and I definitely wasn’t happy. Cockiness and not caring aren’t boldness or pride—they’re coping mechanisms. When you’re a wounded animal in the company of jackals, you can either cower and submit, or feign strength. Wear your blood like a red badge of courage. That’s all I was doing.

  “Let’s watch something,” I said finally.

  Evan glanced at me.

  “Show me Casablanca.”

  He was quiet as he turned on the TV. A nervous energy buzzed between us, a revelation building up. It hummed in my marrow, the roots of my teeth, electric and tense, and I knew something was coming, something that would change me.

  He sat beside me on the couch and seemed about to speak. Then he hit play.

  Bandshell orchestra blares. Credits come up over a map of Africa. The countries are bigger and simpler, before all our modern wars and genocides. It’s a complicated story: two refugees from Nazi Germany are trying to book passage to Lisbon via Casablanca, which is part of unoccupied France. The Nazis want to prevent resistance leader Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, from leaving. At the heart of Casablanca is Rick’s Café, where Rick himself makes money off desperate refugees and corrupt authorities alike, playing everyone. Rick’s friend scores some priceless letters of transit that will get anyone out of Casablanca, no questions asked. Even a resistance leader wanted by the Nazis. The friend entrusts the letters with Rick and is then assassinated by the cops, which sends Laszlo and Ilsa looking for help from Rick, now the only guy who can get them out of the country. Of course, it turns out that Rick knows Ilsa. They were lovers in Paris. She left him on a train platform with a broken heart and a goodbye letter, its ink bleeding in the rain.

  I was intrigued at first, and as the story went on I got totally caught up in it, grabbing Evan’s arm at tense moments, laughing at the whip-smart dialogue, becoming completely absorbed against all of my twenty-first century ironic instincts. I disdained the moral simplicity of old movies, the clear-cut villainy and heroics. But this movie was all about gray areas and moral ambiguity. Rick helped people, but he profited from their desperation, too. Ilsa tried to use Rick’s love to save herself and her husband. The French police captain took advantage of powerless girls, yet let Rick shepherd them to freedom. There was good and evil in everyone.

  When Rick remembered his days with Ilsa in Paris, that humming in me became keening, sharp and poignant. I couldn’t help seeing the parallels. A forbidden love blossoming while dark forces surrounded them. The dread of the encroaching end. I knew what was coming, the inevitable parting—the repercussions of that parting had been rippling through cinema for decades. But when it happened on the runway at night, Ilsa getting into that plane with Laszlo as Rick stayed behind, I started to cry. Jesus Christ, I had not cried at a movie since I was a kid. But I couldn’t stop.

  Evan turned the TV off. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I said, laughing at myself. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  I couldn’t see him too clearly, but his eyes shone in the snow-shrouded gloom, and his voice was thick. “What are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know.” I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t he ask her to stay? He still loved her.”

  “That’s why. He let her go because he loved her.”

  Stupidly, this made me cry harder. My tears were so bewildering that I kept laughing, too, and I probably seemed like a total headcase, my nerves wound so tightly I felt like I was tearing apart from the inside, and over what? A stupid old movie? If I’d watched it a year ago I would have had intelligent things to say about the lighting, the cinematography, the pacing. Instead I was dissolving into human goo. Evan looked at me with wonder, the way he had when I got dead drunk on homecoming.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “I never cry at movies.”

  “Because you’ve never been in love,” he said.

  The keening in my blood reached its highest point, and then it stopped. I felt every beat of my heart tolling in the silence. I blinked until my eyes were clear and I could see him, looking at me steadily, his lips parted and his warm breath reaching me, the wonder still in his face. The snowglobe world spun outside, all glittering crystal and frost. I felt a thrill run along my skin, the sense of a shiver coming, and I knew as I saw him swallow and breathe and shape the words I’d been waiting for that this was something that could only happen once in my life and it was happening here, right here, right now.

  “Maise,” he said, “I love you.”

  The shiver came, and everything in me turned to the same sparkling whiteness that fell outside and drifted, weightless, evanescent, catching the light for a heartbeat and melting the instant it landed. I couldn’t speak. My head was full of snow and static. He touched my face and I touched his and we didn’t kiss, just looked at each other. I love you, I thought. If I was the only person truly alive that night, it was because of you. You made the world come alive for me and I love you, I love you, I love you. But it was so hard to get the air out of my lungs, and then he kissed me, and I stopped trying.

  I didn’t feel completely corporeal. My body felt like layers of tulle, gauzy approximations of a girl. Air moved through me and drenched me with oxygen. I kissed him, the roughness of his face making mine tingle. And as I kissed him the icy tissue of my body flooded with fire and blood and then I was the one cupping his face, looking down at him, taking his hand in mine and pulling him across the cold concrete. I was the one pushing him to the bed and holding his face still so I could kiss him, my tongue in his mouth. I unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and he sat there, letting me touch him, the heavy bone yoke of his shoulders, his light gold skin, the softly chiseled slabs of muscle fitting over him like breathing stone, solid and warm. I pressed my face to his collarbone, inhaling the smell of him like a drug. I’m in love with this man, I thought. I’m in love with my teacher. I’m in love with Evan Wilke. It felt so crazily good to think it, accept it at last. But my mouth wouldn’t say it. I could only put my lips to his skin, heat to heat, and imagine that somehow it was communicated through our blood. I closed my eyes. Pushed my senses to the tips of my fingers and toes, and felt like I held the world in my hands, a luminous sapphire veined with light and revolving slowly in the sun, ridiculously, absurdly beautiful.

  This is what being in love feels
like, Wesley. Gratitude. Gratitude that you exist in this fucked up, beautiful universe.

  #

  Movies tend to follow classical Greek dramatic structure. You begin with exposition: who, when, where. Then you’re off, and it’s Rising Action (plans, hijinks, find the MacGuffin) until you get to the Climax (explosions, bad guys die, acquire MacGuffin) and then you coast through Denouement (girl gets guy, MacGuffin restored) to the ending credits (terrible pop song). The basic shape of drama is a pyramid.

  Greek tragedies take it one step farther. The Climax can also contain a moment called peripeteia. A tragic reversal. A sudden change of circumstance or fortune. This reversal is often precipitated by anagnorisis, a critical revelation. Everything seems to be heading in a certain direction until boom, a plot IED detonates and it’s all thrown off course. Aristotle’s famous example is Oedipus discovering he’s murdered his father and married his mother and ruined his life. My famous example is Donnie Darko realizing he must let the jet engine crush him to save the world and everyone he loves.

  Revelation. Reversal. The essence of tragedy.

  These concepts will be important, class.

  #

  It snowed all during the last week of school. I pelted Wesley with snowballs in the parking lot and walked around wearing fingerless gloves and a big dopey smile and when I saw Evan in class I was calm, content, simply happy. In love. The town turned into the tiny plastic village inside a snowglobe, the sky full of glitter and the streets layered with cake frosting. It was too snowy to ride my bike, so Evan would pick me up and take me to his apartment, where we’d set up a small Christmas tree and hung rainbow lights on the balcony, the air sweet with cranberry potpourri. The snow and our winter coats were camouflage, emboldening us. I didn’t glance over my shoulder constantly. I saved my glances for him. Mom left town for a few days and I brought him over to see my room. We made out on my bed but he didn’t want to have sex in the house because I’d grown up there, been a little girl there. I told him that made it even hotter and ran my tongue in the seashell of his ear, but he just laughed and called me incorrigible. “How do I become corrigible?” I said. “Teach me.” He laughed again and said he couldn’t, because I was also unteachable.

  Wesley and I were scheduled to show our films on the last Friday before break, so we got to see everyone else’s first. Some of them were surprisingly good. Hiyam’s was a documentary on her Iranian parents and the discrimination they faced here. Another girl did an amazing stop-motion animation with Lego about a kid who decided to become a superhero. Someone else made a sci-fi murder mystery that took place in 2030 on Mars, among the first colonists. I was impressed at the breadth of imagination.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked Wesley at lunch on Thursday.

  He shrugged. He was uncharacteristically quiet that week, and I figured it was about his project.

  I flicked his ear. “Don’t be so glum. I’m still coming for your birthday. And tell your mom not to get me anything for Christmas. Seriously.”

  Wesley stared at his mashed potatoes, raking them into a wispy mountain. “Maise.”

  “What?”

  He raised his face. “You’re my best friend. Did you know that?”

  My heart gave a little hiccup, but I said, cockily, “No shit, Captain Obvious. I’m your only friend.”

  He locked eyes with me, not saying anything. Wesley was so infrequently emotional that I had no idea what I was looking at. Being a boy, he probably didn’t know what he was feeling, either. The silence stretched.

  “You’re my best friend too,” I said quietly.

  He dropped his gaze to his plate. I glanced out the window, feeling inexplicable unease. The snow came down in a soft rush, erasing the world over and over, struggling to wipe out all of our mistakes.

  #

  Don’t treat me any differently than the others, I’d told Evan, and on Friday, he didn’t.

  “Maise O’Malley,” he called.

  My hands shook as I plugged my USB stick into the laptop connected to the projector. When we showed our films, we got to sit in the back of the room like we were the teacher. Evan was down in the audience with the rest of the class. Good, because facing him now was something I wasn’t sure I could do.

  I’d skipped my fear confrontation in November. December was going to count double. Actually, it was going to count for the whole fucking year.

  We weren’t allowed to explain or qualify our films before we showed them. We could only give a brief intro.

  “I’m Maise O’Malley,” I said, my voice surprising me with its steadiness, “and my film is titled Dear You.”

  Evan’s head turned ever so slightly. I clicked play.

  We begin facing a rollercoaster track, a steel spine arcing up into the night, its vertebrae painted neon red and moon white. The camera lurches forward with a metallic squeal. We’re moving up the track. My voice says, I’m not going to do the whole rollercoaster-slash-falling in love metaphor. I didn’t fall in love with you up there. It’s Halloween and I’m sitting next to Wesley, pretending to be terrified, while he films this for me, an unknowing aide. The shot jumps to golden lights in a parking lot and a little boy kicking pebbles. Then to the carnival from the crow’s nest at the water tower, a cloud of fireflies. Then to the derelict gas station, where my shadow kicks her leg off the side of the cooler, waiting. As we move from scene to scene, I tell the story that I’ve been telling you. The songs I mentioned swirl in and out. These words pop up, type themselves, backspace, vanish. You didn’t always see the camera in my hand, but it was there. People are so used to cell phones that they don’t even notice when they’re being filmed anymore—or when they’re filming. Paul’s scarecrow shadow looming across the porch. Gary’s hand on my wrist as I pretend to text someone. Wesley’s silhouette by the illuminated pool, waiting to kiss me. And Evan, over and over, his hands moving hungrily over my skin, the boyish way he rocks on his toes, his wonder at life filling me with wonder, too. Never anything identifiable. No faces or voices, just allusions, obliquities. I caught all these little moments while I was pretending to live them. I did live them, but I’m not sure where I was when they happened, if I was the lens watching or the skin being touched. That’s the whole point. We don’t know anymore. And there are scenes from my private education, too, spliced in with my real life. Hal 9000’s eerie unblinking red eye (paranoia). Velociraptors stalking through a kitchen, their claws clicking on the tile, while Lex and Tim hide under a counter (secrecy). Rick drunkenly yelling at Sam to play “As Time Goes By” (obsession).

  As the stream-of-consciousness goes on, it grows more crowded and chaotic. Images and words flash past too fast to parse, like the cliché dying moment in film, when life flashes before someone’s eyes. Except that isn’t what happens when you die—it’s what happens when you live. It all flashes past. You barely have time to feel it before it’s gone. The images slow down toward the end and we’re back at the top of the rollercoaster track, the world below a pinball machine full of noise and light, and my voice says, I guess I’m trying to say what I couldn’t say that night. You can call it love, or you can call it freefall. They’re pretty much the same thing. And I love you.

  Car drops. Lights rush up. Cut to black. Roll credits.

  Mr. Wilke didn’t move. Someone got up and switched on the light. Heads turned to look at me. Not Wesley, I noticed.

  Evan cleared his throat. “Class? Thoughts?”

  “That was really intense,” Rebecca, the stop-motion girl, said.

  “I don’t get it,” a boy said.

  “It’s a love letter,” someone else said.

  “Oh.”

  “I thought it was like, she was dying, and her life flashed before her eyes.”

  Laughter.

  “She died on the rollercoaster?”

  “Maybe it crashed.”

  “It’s a metaphor, genius.”

  “It had parts of other movies in it. Is that even legal?”

 
“Fair use. Like a remix.”

  “I think those parts were what she was feeling. Like, the dinosaurs were about being afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Being found out.” This from Hiyam.

  “Found out about what?”

  Hiyam glanced at me and didn’t say anything.

  “What do you think about the collage technique?” Evan said.

  “It was kind of like a music video,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah,” someone agreed. “It made me think how when I walk around with headphones on, my whole life becomes this music video.”

  Laughter again, appreciative.

  “I’m in a band,” a skater guy said. “If you ever want to do one for real. We’ll pay.”

  I shrugged and smiled coolly. Translation: hell yes.

  The discussion continued for a while, but I lost track. I couldn’t stop staring at Evan and Wesley. Neither had looked my way even once, and Wesley hadn’t said a word about my project. Did he think it was awful? Was he jealous of what I’d confessed? Jesus, what?

  Evan stood up and went to the board. He graded tougher than I expected, but as long as you showed a modicum of understanding about something he’d taught, you passed. There were only two A’s so far: Hiyam’s Yellow Dust and Rebecca’s When I Learn To Fly. I watched Evan write Dear You and pause with the marker hovering and then write something fast, decisively. He turned around and finally looked at me.

  Grade: A.

  “Beautiful work, Ms. O’Malley,” he said. “You have a true passion for this. Hold on to it, cultivate it, and it’ll take you far.”

  His voice only quavered slightly, not enough for anyone else to notice. But I glowed ultraviolet inside.