Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

  —11—

  St. Louis was still sleepy with winter, the grass like frosted straw, the sky an anemic blue and the Mississippi muddy green, sluggish but unstoppable. Skyscrapers glinted harshly, mirroring the cold white sun.

  Park took us to a club that let under-21s in and his bartender friend looked the other way when I drank from Evan’s glass. We watched Park flirt with a gorgeous mixed-race girl, cinnamon skin and laughing eyes, but he left her with a frown and came back to us, saying she wanted Evan’s number. I nearly choked. When I kissed Evan I tasted the whiskey and cola we were sharing. He took me out on the floor and Park joined us. They both danced with me, Evan’s eyes hypnotic and his smile slow and our bodies edging closer and closer until Park wrapped a ridiculously muscular arm around my waist and picked me up, spinning me away. Evan laughed and let me go, and I danced with strangers for a while until he slipped behind me, his mouth at my ear, his erection pressed against my ass, saying, “Everyone’s in love with you.” Guys were staring at me, and so was a cute pixie-haired girl, and I smiled. Cones of hot colored light flashed in my face, scarlet, violet, indigo. I was drunk as much on whiskey as on the liquor of sweat and cologne. We caught our own cab to the loft. Evan pressed me into the soft leather seat and put his hand between my legs until I gasped and the cabbie threatened to kick us out. I tipped him double and we rushed upstairs. The elevator made me shriek with surprise, forgetting the haunting, and Evan laughed and kissed me and once we got inside he picked me up, turning with me in his arms. “What are you doing?” I said, and he said, “Being in love,” and I started kissing him again and he let me down to focus on the kiss. We broke apart and moved around the loft aimlessly, picking things up, flipping switches with a restless, agitated happiness. It’s all still here, I thought. All the things we touched and all the things we felt. It was too intense, being near each other, and we orbited from across the room, keeping large objects between us.

  “What if this is it?” he said in front of the windows. Beyond him the night sky was an oil painting of deep, swirling blues, starless, the bright streets sketching a map of light across the city.

  I sat on the arm of the sofa, ankles crossed.

  “What if this is all we have?” he said, coming closer. “What if you go to California, and I never see you again?”

  “Then I’ll make movies about it for the rest of my life. About a girl who falls in love with her teacher, and loses him tragically, and never loves again.”

  He looked at my hand on the couch: the Claddagh ring on my finger again, its heart turned toward me.

  “Why won’t you come to LA?” I said in a hushed voice.

  He took a deep breath. He kept looking at the ring. “Your life is just beginning, Maise. You have so much ahead of you, so many new things. And you’re already way too damn cynical. Don’t argue, it’s true.”

  I closed my mouth. Then I said, “I wasn’t.”

  He smiled. “I don’t want to take that from you. The thrill of discovering things for yourself. Of feeling like the world is new and made just for you.”

  “That’s the exact opposite of how it is.” I was shivering suddenly, shaking. I felt an understanding building in me after a long, arduous unveiling. Revelation. “You’re right, I was cynical. I thought I knew everything, I thought the world was vulgar and crude, all cheap thrills. You couldn’t make me any more jaded than I was when we met.” I let my arms fall, let my spine hold me, a slender fin of bone. How had it borne the weight of so much cynicism all these years? “You changed that. You’re the one who made it new for me. If I hadn’t met you, I would’ve gone off to college thinking everything was the same. I would’ve become hardened and walled up and—” Just like my mother. “—empty. A perfect shell, protecting nothing.”

  “Maise,” Evan said.

  “Don’t you see how different I am now? Didn’t you see it in my film, and every day we spent together, and apart? The world is new when I’m with you.” I took his hands in mine. “And I’ve seen you, I’ve seen how you light up when you’re with me. It’s the same for you. We’re both kids with each other, and this world is made just for us. So that can’t be your reason for saying no.”

  “Am I saying no?”

  “You’re not saying yes.” I pulled him toward me. “Do you really want to teach high school in Southern fucking Illinois the rest of your life?”

  He gave me that patented furrowed brow.

  “And,” I said, pulling him closer, my voice lowering, “do you really not want to fuck me, every day, in our house full of sunlight and Santa Ana winds, in Southern fucking California?”

  He put his mouth on my neck, his stubble raking my throat. “I want to fuck you now.”

  Do it, I told him with my eyes. Please, please do it.

  He took my clothes off, and his own, and laid me on the bed on the icy silk sheets, and the gravity that had threatened to throw us into collision finally did. I held him close as he moved inside me, hard and deep and with an urgency that felt somehow final, and we gave ourselves to it, fully, without reservation. No future and no past, only an endless now. Afterward, as we lay with our limbs tangled and stared at the pipes on the ceiling, his words ran through me. What if this is all we have? This closeness, this space between breaths, holding each other like air in our lungs, the oxygen metabolizing into our blood in a thrilling, ephemeral rush?

  How could it ever, ever be enough?

  #

  “How was your spring break?” Hiyam said, dropping her Cheshire grin on me.

  “Best I’ve ever had,” I said, smiling back. “You?”

  She rolled her eyes, tossed her hair, bared her smooth coppery neck to me. She laughed at the ceiling. Kids sitting nearby stared.

  “In-fucking-describable,” she said.

  Translation: coked out of her mind.

  I kept smiling, but she didn’t see the way it deepened in my eyes, the dark flash.

  “Hey,” I said. “What do you have next period?”

  “American History.”

  “Ditch and meet me in 209.”

  She lowered her face, curious. “Why?”

  “I’ve got something for you,” I said, and patted my pocket.

  Hiyam laughed her rich, sultry laugh. “You freak.”

  Green light, I texted Wesley after class.

  Hiyam caught up with me on the stairs to the second floor, where I’d unknowingly made my way to the class that would change my life. Part of me still expected to open his door and catch him glancing up from his desk, smiling. I’d kissed him in here like I meant to devour him, let him push me against the whiteboard and fuck me with his fingers. God, I thought. Was that really my life? It seemed like a dream now. A movie.

  There was no Evan inside the dark class. There was, however, a Wesley, sitting with his laptop on the dais at the back. The projector was on, its lamp burning hot as a quasar.

  Hiyam’s eyes drifted from him to me. Intrigue, suspicion, but no fear.

  Not yet.

  “I didn’t know you nerds were into this,” she said.

  “Into what?” I said, waiting for her to walk in so I could stealthily lock the door.

  “Getting high.”

  “We’re not,” Wesley said, moving the mouse cursor over a video.

  “We’re into revenge,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  Hiyam was so fucking confident, so used to getting away with everything, that she laughed and sat at her old desk, crossing her legs as if we were back in Film Studies, vying for Mr. Wilke’s attention. Now she knew it had always been mine. I took the teacher’s chair, propping my feet on the desk.

  “And now for our final victim,” I said, echoing Evan, “Hiyam Farhoudi.”

  Wesley clicked play.

  I’d seen this a dozen times, so I mostly watched Hiyam’s face. She shook her head knowingly, a smirk curling in the corners of her mouth, when the first frame came up:

  Farhoudi residence. New Year’s Eve. Hiyam snorts c
oke off a mirror in her princess bedroom.

  “You little shit,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen.

  The scene cuts to black, and the title comes up in caps, just like Wesley’s first film. This one, though, is called ADDICTION.

  Hiyam’s burgeoning smirk faded.

  There is no soundtrack, only live audio. Hiyam’s laughter. The click of a credit card against glass. Her hard snort and the delicate sniffs that follow. She smiles at the camera, high as fuck, not realizing why we’re recording her. I get her to show me the thirty grand in her secret account. The pills and weed she has stashed all over her room. She loves the attention. She admits to Wesley that she’s blackmailing me. I watch her lick her finger and stick it in her nostril to get all the white. She looks at the camera and says dully, “Ever sucked coke off a guy’s dick? It’s called a blowjob.” She bursts out laughing.

  Then, finally, my pièce de résistance.

  Hiyam smiles at Gary Rivero in the restaurant, oblivious to Wesley and his hidden camera, and the mic in my sleeve captures the deal for a half-kilo of cocaine.

  The film ends. There are no credits.

  “So,” I said, rocking my feet side to side, “class? Thoughts?”

  Hiyam scooted her chair back with a metallic screech.

  “Sit down,” Wesley said. “We’re not done yet.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said.

  I spun my chair to face her. “I’d like to hear what the star thinks about her film debut.”

  “You dumb cunt,” she said, moving toward me. “You can’t do shit. My father will destroy you.”

  I stood, waiting calmly for her to reach me. I felt so much like the teacher, all the knowledge and power in my hands.

  “I doubt it,” I said, my voice light. “Because we sent him the same video an hour ago. You gave me the idea yourself, with your semester project. Your dad seemed to really care about you. He wouldn’t want you throwing your life away on drugs. You should be getting a call from him very soon.”

  “You,” she said. Just that: pronoun, no epithet.

  “Let me guess. ‘You won’t get away with this. You’ll regret this.’”

  She leaned closer. Her breath smelled like wintergreen. “You will regret it. I’ll make sure of that.”

  I leaned close, too. “You know, I feel sorry for you, Hiyam. You have everything, all this money and opportunity, and you’re miserable. You want to live without feeling anything. Why even bother living if you’re just going to numb yourself? I’ve had it way worse than you ever will, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

  She had the dignity to keep her mouth shut. She stared at me with dark, murderous eyes, then whirled and stalked to the door. It took her a moment to realize it was locked. Wesley muffled a snort.

  Hiyam shot a glance back at me and said, “Did you even fuck him in here that day?”

  I smiled at her, pityingly.

  She slammed the door.

  “God,” Wesley said, heaving a huge sigh. “Did it work?”

  I was shaking. I wasn’t sure when that had started.

  I sat back down and said, “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”

  All I really wanted was for her to leave me and Evan the fuck alone. She could buy her coke direct from Gary and scrub her brain blank with it for all I cared. I’d told her dad I just wanted this to be over—I wanted to move on, go to college, not live with this sword hanging over my head.

  I prayed he’d understand.

  “At least the hard part’s over,” Wesley said.

  But this wasn’t the hard part. Confronting this junkie was easy. There was one more I had to face, and she wouldn’t surrender before drawing blood.

  #

  I sat in the kitchen waiting like I had so many nights when I was little, hungry, bored, alone in the house. When I thought of my so-called childhood, that’s what I pictured above all: a sylvan girl with bramble hair and spooky green eyes, kicking her bare, dirty feet on a kitchen chair, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. That girl should have been running in the woods with a boy, scratching secrets into the walls of an old wolf den, howling, chasing each other, wild and free. Not sitting in a room that smelled of marijuana and drain cleaner, her belly growling. On good nights Mom came home with food, a bag glistening and transparent with French fry grease, smelling like heaven, and I’d go to bed with salty-sweet lips and sleep like the dead. On bad nights she came home stoned, or with a man, or not at all. Those nights I didn’t sleep much. I listened for her key in the lock, or grunting and the bed knocking against the wall downstairs. Once a pair of heavy footsteps came to my door. I lay in bed, terrified, paralyzed. I thought they’d finally gone when the door creaked open, and I screamed, and Mom came running, still drunk, hitting the guy in the back until he left.

  I always locked my room after that.

  You, I thought, timing it with the ticking clock. You. You. You.

  She walked in at midnight. My ass was numb, and my heart, too. I looked at her woodenly. You have my face, I thought. What have you done to it? It’s so old and sad.

  “What’s going on, babe?” she said, pulling a tallboy from the fridge.

  “Sit down, Mom. Please.”

  Hiss, crack, fizz. I could hear her swallowing, working that dry, burned throat. She sat across from me.

  “Gary says you took care of things,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “How the hell’d you manage that?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s my business.”

  “Your business is my business, babe.”

  “No.” I leaned forward, looking her in the eyes. “It’s mine.”

  For a minute I thought she’d pick a fight, but I guess clearing her debt temporarily cowed her. She picked at the tab on her can instead.

  “Mom.” I waited till she met my gaze. “I got into college in Los Angeles. I’m leaving the second week of June.”

  She said nothing. Her eyes were flat, unblinking. She took a swig.

  For the first time I realized my mother might be jealous of me. Of my unspoiled life, all the possibilities I still had to make something of myself.

  Deep breath.

  “I saved some money. Enough to replace what Nan gave me.” I opened the folded paper on the table and slid it over to her. Until a second ago it had been mere junk.

  Mom’s eyes bounced off the paper to my face. “What is this?”

  “Read it.”

  She mouthed the words. She stopped at Rehabilitation Center.

  “It cost every penny I had, but I got you in for sixty days. It’s a good clinic, Mom. They’re willing to take you June 1st.”

  She looked at me like I was a potted plant that had just started talking. “What the hell is this?”

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said, my voice straining.

  She pushed the paper at me, pushed her chair back. “This’s some intervention shit.”

  “It’s voluntary.”

  “You ain’t making me do nothing, little girl. I call the shots. I’m your mother.”

  My palm hit the table, the ring making a sharp clack. “You lost the right to call yourself that years ago. This is not a negotiation. This is your last chance to fix your fucking life before you’re too old and brain-damaged to remember it was ever different.” I stood, glowering down at her. Somehow this woman always brought my accent out, and I let it take the reins of my voice. “This is my offer, Mom. Take it or leave it. You complete the program, you stay clean, and I’ll come see you for Christmas. If you don’t, I’m out of your life forever.” I hit the table again, softer. “Do you understand me? You will never see me again.”

  She was breathing shallowly, fast. She stared at some central point on my face, not quite my eyes. “This how I raised you? To make fuckin’ threats about disowning me?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “This is how I raised me.”

  #

  Green slowly crept back into the world,
reawakening it as my own body reawakened. I spent spring weekends in St. Louis with Evan, walking along the cobblestoned wharf, listening to the world thaw. If this was all we had, then I would love it unreservedly. When we stopped to watch the boats I leaned back against his body, my neck arching over his shoulder, my face to the sun. I could feel it kindling in my bones. A cold breeze whipped off the water, smelling of mud and fish, and gulls shrieked and their cries echoed eerily under the stone arches of the Eads Bridge. We walked through sun and shadow and sun again. Our own shadows were long and thin, stretching far down the wharf.

  I didn’t ask about LA. My cards were on the table. His move.

  #

  The sky was a crisp azure on graduation day. They held the ceremony on the football field, the grass lush and emitting a rainy perfume, our royal blue gowns gleaming in the sun.

  Hiyam wasn’t there. She’d been pulled from school, finishing her year with a private tutor. Mom wasn’t there, either, as I’d expected. But the Browns were, all of them—Siobhan, Natalie, and Jack the professor, a man in his sixties, still handsome in a Clint Eastwood way, straight brow and deep-set eyes beneath a wing of silver hair. He sat next to Siobhan, and they chuckled together over private jokes. Once I saw Jack touching the small of her back, looking at her with an old, smoldering fondness.

  “Dad’s current girlfriend is twenty-two,” Wesley whispered to me as we sat through the valedictorian speech. “Please tell me you’ll never date a dinosaur like him.”

  I flicked his ear, hard.

  Evan was there, at the back of the crowd. When they called us to the stage for our diplomas I screamed my head off for Wesley, and on my turn the Browns cheered wildly, but the only person I saw was Evan, standing at the back, the sun slanting in his hair and outlining him in gold, clapping so hard he drowned out everyone else.

  Afterward we ran the usual gauntlet of family hugs. When we slipped away and reached Evan, he was surrounded by half our old Film Studies class, eagerly telling him their plans. Rebecca was going to art school in Georgia. A few kids were heading to NYC for theater. Everyone was impressed when we said we were going to LA, and Wesley basked in the attention while I met Evan’s gaze, something twisting in my chest, a strangling vine. The boys shook his hand and the girls hugged him, and when it was my turn I breathed in his ear, “You changed my life, Mr. Wilke.”