“I don’t teach that stuff,” I reminded her. “I don’t believe in anything at all.”
“You think you don’t, but you would if you pulled your head out of the Steiner sandbox long enough to consider the possibility. You would have handled it a lot better when your best friend died if you’d had some kind of context to put it in, but instead you fell apart like wet toilet paper.”
“Thank you.”
“My point is, Christmas is about a miracle. And I want to spend it celebrating that miracle. I hope you can honor that.”
My lips pressed into a brittle smile. “I understand better than you might think.”
“Good.” Her voice sounded assertive but a little confused. “Merry Christmas, then.”
“To you, too.” A pregnant silence hung across the low static of the phone line. “And when the trap snaps closed, I’ll understand that, too. You can cry on my shoulder then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your ideas. Your miracles. They’re just peanut butter on some fucked-up cosmic mousetrap. I’ve been there. I’ve wanted that, too. And what I’ve learned is, seek out what’s beautiful and love it before it rots. Because there’s not a damn thing in this world that doesn’t.”
For a long moment she said nothing. Then she said, “I hope you’re not teaching that to the kids, either.”
“No need,” I told her. “They’ll learn it on their own.”
He felt ashamed after the afternoon with Judy, displeased with himself for his lack of self-discipline. After the day of the holiday bazaar, when he had puked by the Dumpster and she consoled him with her version of chicken soup for his morally conflicted soul, he had told himself they needed to break things off. The dreadful conversation with Temple only steeled his resolve, not just to end it but to erase it, to bend his eleventh-grade year into an arc that, as far as it mattered, had never included Judy in the first place. It helped to focus on the negative: the time he was feverish, the slap to his face, the sickening guilt, and, of course, the times he’d turned in a lousy performance and felt himself revealed as a hopeless amateur.
And then—every once in a while—there was a rip in the fabric. Monday afternoon, for example: when his desire did not feel like a backburn to her wildfire, when everything flowed, and at the end he rubbed his eyes and felt restored. He could almost convince himself they were two normal people doing what normal people do, until he peeked between the blinds before she opened the door and he was reminded that everything he took he was stealing.
When the temperature reached sixty-seven degrees one December day, Fairen cornered him after Main Lesson and suggested they cut out early. She had twenty dollars from babysitting. She wanted to get a pizza.
They slipped out as if going to the workshop, then hustled into the woods. The trees were bare gray skeletons against the sky, but the air had a springtime headiness to it, fragrant and brisk. Once on the sidewalk, Fairen reached for his hand. It was a friendly, tentative sort of hand-holding, fingertips loosely intertwined, but it gave Zach hope. She had invited him, after all.
The pizza place was not far away, in a minimall with a barbershop and variety store. Signs plastered to the brick advertised an upcoming festival at the lake. Fairen ordered a mushroom-and-green-pepper, size large, and two giant Cokes.
“Because I know you eat like there’s no tomorrow,” she said.
“There isn’t.”
She gave him a strange look and he said, “Carpe diem.”
She smiled approvingly. As they waited on the bench, she played footsie with him. There were no tables or chairs, so when their pizza was ready, they carried the box to a small underpass beneath the street, built like a stone bridge to shelter a sidewalk. It was cozy and relatively private, and Zach felt a little saddened to realize that he enjoyed her chaste company as much as the non-chaste. Had he realized that months ago, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble.
“We need to go on another choir trip when the weather’s like this,” she said as she wiped her hands on a napkin. “So I can have another excuse to corrupt you.”
“Who needs an excuse?” he asked. She smiled, and he ventured, “I thought you were done with me since I tried to scalp you.”
“I wasn’t in love with that. But the rest was really great.”
“You thought so, seriously?”
She nodded. “Really great.”
“I’m sorry I pulled your hair,” he admitted. “I just got carried away, but I didn’t mean to hurt you. I really had no idea what I was doing.”
She looked uneasy at his apology. “I think I blew that out of proportion. I just felt uncomfortable that it happened at all, because I hadn’t planned it. I got caught up in the moment and…” She shrugged.
“Yeah, me too.”
“But I felt even worse after, when you lost interest so fast. I figured you’d moved on to somebody else, and that made me feel pretty awful.”
He tipped his head. “Why did you think that?”
She smirked. “Because you lost that desperate vibe. There’s only one explanation when a straight guy starts acting like he doesn’t care if girls like him or not. He must be getting laid on a regular basis. It made me jealous.”
Zach laughed. “That’s goofy.”
“It’s true. And I couldn’t figure out who, and it was driving me crazy. I know every girl at Sylvania. It’s not any of them. So who is it?”
He grinned. “It’s Ms. Valera.”
She broke into laughter. “Oh, no! That’s why she called you out of class last week, huh? So she could molest you in her supply closet?”
“Yep.”
Her laugh carried the music of her lovely soprano. She rested her elbows against her knees, leaning toward him. He looked at her: at her silver-trimmed ears with her pale blond hair tucked behind them, at her broad beautiful smile, at the way her crystal necklace dangled above the dark shadow of her cleavage. He didn’t want her jealousy; he didn’t want her to know at all. The way she leaned toward him, he suspected she would welcome it if he kissed her. But he couldn’t do it. He would be cheating on her before they even got started. She was too beautiful to be led into the muck he had made out of his sex life in the short time since she had introduced him to that pleasure. And so he tossed a piece of ice into her cleavage and made her scream.
“Any day now,” said Rhianne, patting Zach’s mother on the stomach and slinging her stethoscope around her neck. She helped her to sit up, and Zach had to smile at his mother’s cumbersome movements. All his life she had been lithe and graceful, but now she was in full waddle mode, swaybacked half the time from her burgeoning stomach.
“Pregnancy is a beautiful thing,” said his mother, “but I can’t wait for it to be over.”
“You’re not the first woman I’ve heard say that. Take it easy, all right? Make this one treat you like a queen.” She gestured to Zach and winked. “I’ll see you in a week, or less if you’re lucky.”
He followed Rhianne to the foyer, opening the door immediately to let her out. She looked amused by his rudeness, but he rallied by trailing her out the door and closing it behind them. The porch light shone bright above their heads, a white moth beating against it in looping arcs.
He asked, “Are you in a hurry?”
“Of course not. What’s up?” Over her coveralls she wore a thick down vest, forest green. Her breath came out in clouds.
With a deep exhale of his own he pointed toward the driveway, indicating they should walk. She took the cue, pulling her knit cap from her pocket and tugging it over her short low pigtails. They stuck out like the ends of paintbrushes when she turned to him again, hands crammed deep into the pockets of her vest.