“You’re holding on, right?” she said.
“Yeah, I’m holding on. Now pedal.”
I was holding on, but very loosely, and I lifted my hand as soon as she gained momentum. She kept going, and I stopped, and she rode away from me. “Lee!” she called. “You let go! I can tell!”
“I know, but you’re okay. Look at you.”
“I’m stopping. Okay? I’m stopping.” She stopped and turned around as she always did, sliding off the seat and dragging the bike sideways.
“Now come back to me,” I called. She was about twenty yards away, and I thought that people might hear us yelling. Then I thought, Oh, who cares?
“I just start?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like when I’m there.”
Even from that distance, I could see her inhale and exhale several times, then square her shoulders.
“You can do it,” I shouted.
And then she was riding toward me; she was beaming. The wind pushed back her dark hair, and her knuckles, I observed as she came closer, were white. I began to clap. “Hooray,” I cried. “You’re doing it! You’re on fire!”
She sailed right past me.
“Look at her go!” I called. “Who can catch Conchita Maxwell?”
She lifted her right hand, to wave at me perhaps, and the bike wobbled, and she quickly set her hand back down. I held my breath, but she regained her balance. She was fine, better than fine; she was great. As I watched her hunched back grow smaller and smaller, I felt as happy for myself as I did for her. I had taught Conchita to ride a bike-it was incredible. And this was a feeling, perhaps the only one from our brief friendship, that never went sour.
4. Cipher
SOPHOMORE FALL
I n idle moments during sophomore English, I used to look at Ms. Moray’s pin and speculate about how she’d acquired it. It was silver, shaped to resemble an open hardcover book, the pages stacked fatly like wavy hair falling on either side of a part. She wore the pin three or four days a week, and I wondered if there was any logic to when she did. I could imagine the pin having been a gift from her parents-from a mother, especially-or perhaps from a professor or high school teacher who wanted to wish her luck as she entered this tough, worthy profession. Or maybe it was from an old neighbor, or a relative. It wasn’t from a friend or a boyfriend, I was nearly sure-when she came for a year to teach at Ault as an intern, Ms. Moray was twenty-two, which didn’t seem all that young to me because I was fifteen, but it definitely seemed too young to be receiving a frumpy accessory from a peer. Pins were okay for women in their forties, maybe for women in their thirties, but before that it seemed they ought to stick to earrings and necklaces.
When I entered Ms. Moray’s classroom in September, the first thing I noticed was that Cross Sugarman, whom over the summer I’d spent hours and hours thinking about, wasn’t there. Because I had English during the last period of the day and because Cross hadn’t been in any of my other classes so far, his absence exacerbated my fear that I’d never see him this year, that we’d probably never talk, and that he definitely wouldn’t fall in love with me. The second thing I noticed after entering the classroom was that printed in chalk across the blackboard, it said, “Literature is an ax for the frozen sea within us.”-Franz Kafka. The third thing I noticed was that some sort of chaos was occurring in the back of the classroom, near one of the open, screenless Palladian windows. Darden Pittard was holding aloft a running shoe, and several other students seated at the long rectangular table were loudly offering advice.
“Just whack it,” Aspeth Montgomery said, and my freshman roommate Dede said, “But you’ll make it mad,” and Aspeth said, “Who cares? It’ll be dead.”
Norie Cleehan, who was a pale skinny girl from Colorado with long limp brown hair and a soft voice, said, “Leave it alone, Darden. It’s not bothering anyone.” I took the empty seat next to Norie. It was a bee, I saw-that was the source of all the chaos.
Across the table, Dede, who had twisted around in her chair to watch Darden, glanced over her shoulder, and our eyes met. “Hi, Lee,” she said. “How was your summer?”
I hesitated, searching the question for sarcasm or hostility. “It was good,” I said slowly. “How was yours?”
“Awesome. I was-eek! Get it away! Get it away!” The bee had just whizzed by Dede’s right ear, and she was pawing the air around her head. The bee flew behind her, and she shouted, “Where is it? Where’d it go?”
Beside her, Aspeth laughed hysterically.
“I got it,” Darden said, but as he stepped forward, the bee shot away from him and toward me. It was a blur zooming at my face. Without thinking, I clapped my hands together in front of my nose, and when I felt a sting and then a stickiness, I knew I’d gotten it. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I’d meant to. The room was silent.
After several seconds, Darden said, “Holy shit, Fiora. Not bad,” and at the same time, the teacher walked through the doorway.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said, and then she grinned, and you could feel the impression she was making sink over the room, all of us seeing her in the same way: She’s cool, we thought. We got the cool intern for English! She wasn’t exactly pretty-she had an upturned, vaguely piggish nose, and brown eyebrows that looked even thicker and darker than they were because her chin-length hair was blond-but she was pulled together, kind of sporty. She wore a short-sleeved oxford shirt, a wraparound denim skirt, no stockings, and clogs. Her calves were tan and muscular, the legs of someone who’d played field hockey at Dartmouth. Every fall, Ault had three or four new interns, recent college graduates who came for a year to teach and coach.
She approached the head of the table and pulled a folder from a pale blue suede satchel. “I’m Ms. Moray,” she said. “And don’t even think of calling me Mrs. Moray because that’s my mother.”
People laughed.
“I’m here to teach sophomore English,” she continued. “So if you’re not here to take sophomore English, then I recommend that you use this opportunity to make a quick getaway.”
Darden stood, and there was more laughter, and then he sat down again.
Ms. Moray cocked her head. “Okay, wise guy. You’re the first person whose name I want to know.”
“My name’s Darden Pittard.”
She scanned the class list. “Gotcha. That’s a very assonant name. Who knows what assonance is?”
Dede raised her hand. “Is it like the red robin, or the big balloon?”
“Close. But that’s alliteration, which is consonants. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, like Darden Pittard. In short, Mr. Pittard, you bring poetry wherever you go.”
“I’ve got an assonant name,” Darden said. “I like that, man.”
I wondered if establishing a rapport with Darden was a strategic move on Ms. Moray’s part-Darden was one of the most popular guys in the sophomore class. People genuinely liked him, and on top of that they liked the fact that they genuinely liked a big black guy from the Bronx.
“Okay,” Ms. Moray said. “Now as for the rest of you-”
I couldn’t bear it any longer. I half-stood, my hands still clamped together, and said, “Sorry, but may I go to the bathroom?”
“Why didn’t you go before?”
“I just want to wash my hands,” I said, and the class started laughing. I didn’t think they were laughing at me, not exactly, and I wasn’t actively embarrassed but I could feel embarrassment hovering in the air. Killing a bee with your bare hands could be considered, by my classmates, gross or weird-like spreading cream cheese on your pancakes in the dining hall, or carrying around your used maxi pads in the schoolhouse during the day and then throwing them away at night in your own dorm room, both of which were things a girl named Audrey Flaherty, a junior who played the cello, was rumored to do. I didn’t want to become my class’s version of Audrey.