On another plane of her existence, she had normal feelings. Her romantic life was abysmal, and not just because of her reputation. Nothing was as gawky and unwholesome as an eighth-grade boy, and the ninth graders weren’t much better, and she was not about to trust a high school boy again. But Amos Forell was another matter. He was her science teacher, marvelously handsome, authoritative and mature, and he knew everything. Maybe he could tell her whether hypnotism could enable a person to seal off part of her mind. Maybe he could tell her of the most convenient, painless, sanitary way to die. More important, maybe he would.
The more she thought about it, the better she liked the notion of asking him. But she couldn’t just blurt it out. She would have to be indirect. How could she get herself into a situation in which she could get the information she wanted, without arousing his suspicion? Because even the nice teachers were part of the administrative conspiracy, bound to blab anything private they learned, causing endless mischief.
Somewhere along the way, as she considered Forell, he became Amos in her mind, and she realized that she had a crush on him. This was girlishly foolish, of course; he was a married man, and distressingly straight. There were stories about certain male teachers who gave better grades to physically mature girls who sat up front in short skirts, especially if they forgot to keep their knees together, but Amos was clean. Either he had no interest, or he was highly disciplined. This was known, because one especially well-developed girl had an absolute flair for stupidity in science, and she had put on a show that should have melted his horn-rims. He had merely murmured in her ear, as he returned her F paper, that perhaps she would be more comfortable in slacks. She had turned on him her loveliest do-what-you-will-with-me wide-eyed stare. Prompted by that, he had explained that perhaps the drafty air-conditioning was distracting her from her classwork. So much for seduction; he had noticed her exposure and demonstrated his immunity. That earned him points.
Of course that didn’t stop the girls from trying. Some who didn’t need better grades considered it a challenge. Amos never missed a beat; he was the perfect science teacher, ardent about the wonders of his subject, and his grades showed no sign of deviance. No one could figure it out. Was he a closet gay? Then how to account for his wife and two children? Exactly what was his game?
Then Colene deciphered it: he was a contrarian! He scored by pretending not to notice. That way, not only was he technically innocent, he got more and deeper glimpses than would ever otherwise have been offered. What a scheme! He was smart about more than science. She liked that. So she didn’t blab his secret. In fact, maybe that secret was what had tipped her into her typical teen crush. It would pass in about two months—they always did—but it added urgency to her quest. She had to get a chance to ask him her questions while she remained smitten, because the experience would be so much more meaningful then.
Then her opportunity came: Spring Break. Students could get spot bonus points by coming in on one of the off days to help the teachers clean up, so she signed up for work on the science lab. She was in luck: no one else signed. She was alone with Amos for four solid hours. He would even have to drive her home, after; it was part of the deal, because the school didn’t want to get sued for putting innocent students out on the street when the crossing guards weren’t on duty, and maybe fostering an accident. The administration didn’t care if it lost a student, of course, but lawsuits were expensive.
She was careful about it: she wore a skirt that came down well below her knees, and a blouse that was fully opaque, and no makeup or fancy hairdo. She was there to get the work done, and she looked exactly the part. Two could play the contrarian game; she would make her impression on him by seeming not to be trying. Her skirt and blouse, though decorous, were quite well fitted, and much depended on the positions a girl had to assume in order to clean under counters or to pick up lab equipment. She didn’t have as much body as she could have wished for, but the decorous clothing helped there, accenting implication rather than exposure. She was innocuous and naïvely attractive, she hoped.
And she did work. She made a point of throwing herself into it, doing the best job she could. When there was something to be moved, she tackled it immediately, so that if it was heavy he had to jump to help before she strained some innocent little bone or tendon. Even so, she managed to work into some legitimate heaving of bosom with the effort of the work. She had tied her hair back, but soon it worked its way loose and flopped around her face exactly as she had intended. She was the epitome of the enthusiastic, hardworking, guileless, innocently sexy, sweet little girl.
What did she get for her effort? Not what she had hoped. Amos was a creature of his profession, and he loved his subject. He maintained a constant monologue about the things they were handling, as if it were just another class. He never seemed to look at her; she was nothing next to Science. She was a mere audience for his true passion.
So as they cleaned and put away the astronomy charts she suffered through an extemporaneous lecture on the nature of the universe, and how fascinating it was to see the cracks developing in the Big Bang theory. “I was an advocate of the Steady State theory,” he said—god only knew what that was, and she knew better than to inquire. “There was such an elegance to it, both mathematically and philosophically. But as our observations improved, we discovered that the universe conformed to the Big Bang theory, seeming to be a monstrous explosion of matter and energy perhaps fifteen billion years ago. The question became whether it was open or closed—that is, whether it would expand forever, or whether there was enough matter to enable gravity eventually to halt its expansion and draw it back together. I supported the closed model, but it seemed that there was not enough matter in the universe to achieve closure. However, then came the indications of dark matter—”
Colene found herself getting interested despite herself. She had heard of dark matter. It appealed to her sense of the morbid: the idea that the universe was dominated by unseen force. That there was no way to detect the great majority of the matter that existed, except for its gravitational effect. She wished she could invent a telescope that could see dark matter. Maybe it would form the shape of giant animals in space, chasing one another. Maybe Earth and the Solar System and the Milky Way Galaxy were all just fuzz on the tip of a hair growing from a wart on the nose of a Dark Matter Monster.
“So it seems there is enough matter to close the universe,” Amos concluded with satisfaction. “We can’t see it, but we do know it’s there, and that’s what counts.” He glanced at her. “Am I boring you?”
“Never,” she said immediately. Indeed he wasn’t, because she was helping him roll the big astronomy charts so they could be fitted into their casings, and in the process their heads got almost close enough for a kiss. She was developing this fantasy of him glancing up, meeting her gaze, so close to his face, losing control and pressing his lips to hers and then being terribly apologetic and embarrassed and out of sorts until she had to calm him by kissing him again. ‘But it’s wrong’ he would protest. ‘You’re only a student and I’m a married man.’ And she would say ‘There is no wrong in love,’ and smile, and kiss him once more. ‘But an eighth-grade girl—’ ‘That’s all right, Amos; I’ve had experience.’
That popped her out of it. Indeed she had had experience—of exactly the wrong kind. She could never be innocent again. She was unclean, unvirginal, undesirable. Damn those freaks! They had left her a mere shell of appearance with the core debased, like an oak tree with a rotten heart. Her thrill of first love had been gutted before it flowered. Seduce Amos? If he knew her nature, he would be disgusted.