The Journey Prize Stories 24 (3 page)

He dialled the numbers just as quickly. I let the telephone ring four times, fanning myself madly with my copy of
Beowulf
, the mesh face fluttering forwards and backwards as I wondered whether to answer the phone. But then I realized if I didn’t answer, the call would go to voicemail. Ronald would leave a message accessible to anybody in my family, because this was our landline and not my cell phone since my parents for some reason won’t get me a cell phone. Also, my parents were not out at work or at the store or at a baseball game or wherever it is parents go when strangers call the house. While a weird man preyed on their child, my parents prayed in the basement, singing light religious tunes in their atonal voices and clanging finger cymbals that clashed with the ringing phone. My parents might put down their photocopied Sanskrit mantras at any time and unfold their piously curled bodies to get up and answer it. I wondered if Ronald would pretend to be a salesman, and then I thought, if my parents pick up the phone, Ronald will probably never speak to me again. So I answered it.

There was no pause at all, and I heard a soft, wheedling voice say, “You didn’t think I’d call, did you?” And then the door to my bedroom opened, and I saw a man standing there, peering around the doorframe at me and grinning this slow grin and saying, “What do you want for dinner?” because the man was my father, so then I immediately hung up the phone and told my dad rice was fine as always for dinner, and when he asked what I’d been doing the past hour, I said (very convincingly, I think) that I’d been researching the incarnations of all the various Hindu gods.

In English class, third period, Amy has disengaged herself from me and moved to sit with this new boyfriend of hers. His name
isn’t even worth mentioning, but he was in my fourth grade class and he used to try to join conversations but everybody hated him and ignored him so then he would just give up and stare at the wall. But then one day, he started talking to the wall, and telling it things and asking it questions,
why won’t they talk to me?, all I have is you
, and so on, and I wonder if he and Amy have similar conversations now.

Before Amy started dating him, and before I had fully fallen for Mr. Sears, we would spend all of class laughing silently behind our open notebooks. The first book we read in this class was
Washington Square
, and we both hated it, so we left Post-It notes throughout the pages of our copies, to warn future readers. Our notes said things like, “I hate this book,” and “Don’t read any further,” and “Aunt Penniman is a flat character,” but now I regret writing those Post-Its and wonder if I should retrieve my copy from the library and remove them. I won’t though, because that would be like erasing our history when already I can feel Amy slipping away, and it’s different from that time she bleached her hair orange and became cool for a week and sat on the radiator where all the cool kids sit. It’s different partly because relationships of weird teens last forever. It might never be me and her sitting and laughing together ever again.

Instead of socializing with Amy, I try to imagine Grendel from
Beowulf
and draw pictures of him across my notebook in red pen. I compile monster parts from passages in the book and from generic TV monsters, heads that nearly aren’t there dissolving into the lines of the page, wide white teardrops instead of eyes, teeth protruding through stretching mouths. Their bodies have torsos disproportionate to arms, veins visible
through the surface of skin like the bulging, textured veins of leaves, legs narrowing into a pair of skeletal feet that leave bony, blood-filled footprints, footprints that stalk over the page of notes that I’m supposed to be taking. Instead of grammar exercises, I’ve drawn penciled, mesh-faced men, weaponless, knees curling under them like paperclips.

Mr. Sears goes on with his lesson, and in the background I hear someone call him, “Oh Captain, My Captain,” because he is one of those teachers who tears up textbooks and says there shouldn’t be a rubric for poetry. Mr. Sears delivers an impassioned speech about some Alexander Pope poem and then he asks me a question, but since I’ve been drawing monsters instead of paying attention, I only know that the poem may or may not have something to do with haircuts. I curse myself for not listening and wonder if this is karma for the time I invented a Hindu holiday as an excuse for skipping gym.

“Disappointing,” Mr. Sears says, and his head tilts sadly sideways under the weight of his disappointment. “You have to do the reading,” he tells me, “or there’s no point in coming to class.”

I want to tell him that I have done the reading, I’ve done more reading than any of these other fools, but he turns away and makes a joke about how his wife never reads any books either, with the exception of Harlequin romances.

In the romance corner of the room, when Mr. Sears turns to the board, Amy and her boyfriend caress each other’s faces. In an online article, I read that if a boy touches your face, it means it’s true love. The boyfriend bends his head and lays it onto Amy’s shoulder, and he looks almost handsome. It’s the only time I’ve seen him look anything other than stupid. The
only person I can remember being that close to me is my mother, and I find it painful to try not to yearn for that strange, solid, intimate warmth of a human head. Amy sighs her chin into the boyfriend’s palm. She pulls at his nose and he embeds his fingertips into her cheeks, and I worry that they will accidentally gouge each other’s eyes out.

I wait for Amy after school as I always do, but she doesn’t show up. I duck into the library. Nobody’s using the computers, so I sign into my account and find Ronald online.

“What a terrible day,” I type.

“You’re early,” he replies, and then, “What happened?”

“My friend ditched me for her boyfriend,” I type, and then, because it’s not like I’m in a committed relationship with this Internet pedophile, I tell him that I have a crush on my middle-aged English teacher and about my moment of embarrassing inattention in class.

There’s a pause, and then Ronald types, “Pretend I’m him.”

I suppose what Ronald wants me to do is to lean into my screen and enact an elaborate sexual fantasy I have about Mr. Sears via the Internet. It’s true that I spend much of class time and much of my own time fantasizing about my English teacher. I imagine us in a warm fireplaced room with burgundy wallpaper and clawfooted furniture, but we’ve disdained this furniture to sit on the floor. We read to each other from a shared copy of
Beowulf
. Mr. Sears holds the book and I turn its pages. Our heads are pressed together, my hair over his shoulders. For some reason in this fantasy I have flaxen hair, despite being Indian, and I’m wearing an empire-waist gown and a wreath of flowers, and Mr. Sears is dressed similarly in
eighteenth-century garb, like maybe a navy waistcoat and white pantaloons. We’re sipping from glasses of wine, no, goblets of wine, no, chalices of wine, and we’re uttering guttural words to each other in Middle English, as the fireplace flashes at us like an unanswered chat window.

The problem with these fantasies is that I never actually get past the reading part, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to describe to Ronald, and so, to diffuse the situation, I type the letters LOL.

“What’s so funny?” Ronald asks.

I try to think of something provocative to ask him. I type, “How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

There’s a long pause and then Ronald types, “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” which doesn’t make sense because Ronald and I have certainly never had this conversation before, or even this type of conversation, since our imaginary dates have remained pretty tame and educational, and it occurs to me that I am not the only teenager with whom Ronald regularly speaks on the Internet.

Ronald starts typing long strings of text, full of typos, and I realize that he’s describing all the things he’s going to do to me, except I don’t understand most of the terms so I open up a separate window to look them up on Urban Dictionary.

He begs for a response. I’m thinking of his Facebook pictures and how he could be a guy that works at my dad’s office. My dad could be right there in an adjacent cubicle, entering numbers into his computer with the Lord Ganesha desktop wallpaper, working overtime for the money to send his daughter to medical school, because I haven’t yet told him that I plan to get an English degree and concentrate in pre-1800 literature.
I humour my parents, because they are pious and kind and easily deluded, and if you try to have a serious discussion with my father, he will always bring God into it.

Ronald’s words become more garbled and he’s used the F-word at least four times. He waits for me to say something. I consider the keyboard and then type the letter “M” repeatedly so it seems as though I am moaning, and I follow it with exactly seven exclamation points.

“You are so beautiful,” Ronald types, though he spells beautiful wrong, and I assume he’s looking at my pictures, and then he says, “Are you still having a terrible day? Let me come there and comfort you.”

Through the library door, I see Amy and her boyfriend walking through the hallway. They are peeling the floor together, in one unbroken strip. They walk slowly, as not to tear it, focused on the piece of varnish that passes through their collaborating hands and curls and trails behind them.

It’s possible that Ronald is talking to four different girls right now, four different fourteen-year-olds typing covertly in their high school libraries before catching the school bus home. One by one they must sign off, until he’s left with a single girl who does what? Answers the phone and talks to him? Invites him home?

“Okay,” I type to Ronald, “I can be home in fifteen minutes.” I give him my address, 53 Pickett Crescent, near the intersection of Elgin Mills and Yonge, and I send him a link to the Google Map. “I can’t wait to see you,” he types, and I don’t let myself wonder what he means by the word
see
.

I leave the library, and see the shapes of Amy and the boyfriend’s bodies as they turn the corner at the end of the hall.
I head in the other direction, towards my locker, and on the way I notice the door of the English office is partway open, and spot Mr. Sears.

When I knock on the door, he tells me to come inside. I shut the door behind me and begin speaking without making eye contact. I count the posters of authors that line the top third of the room’s walls.

“I just wanted to apologize for class today,” I say. He’s wearing the lightest of his blue shirts and standing, half resting on the desk. The other English teachers have all left, and I realize I’ve never been alone in a room with Mr. Sears.

“That’s all right,” he says in his infinitely understanding way. “You’ve just got to stop being distracted in class. I know you love this stuff.”

I almost drop my backpack at hearing him use the word “love,” and I walk up to him tell him, “I do love this stuff. I love books. I’m even trying to get through
Beowulf
, though I admit it’s going a little slowly …”

Mr. Sears has chalk on the pocket of his shirt and I reach my arm across the arms’ length between us and brush the chalk off his shirt with my fingers. He grabs my hand and holds it in place. He frowns in a way I haven’t seen on him before, the skin of his eyebrows pulling together and downward.

First he glances at the door, perhaps double-checking that it has no window on it. Then he kisses me. It’s unfamiliar because I have never imagined this far. He picks up the straps of my backpack and slides them off my arms. He lifts me up as the backpack drops on the floor with the thumping, cluttering sound of books and pencils, and he places me on the edge of the desk. The lights in the room are white rectangles in lines across
the ceiling, and I look at them because I’m not sure if I’m supposed to look at Mr. Sears, whose head I want to hold in my hands, but I have this awful feeling that the second I place my hands on his face, his features will turn to mesh, the metal cutting the tips of my fingers. He pushes his head next to my neck and when he breathes, he smells like coffee, like cough drops, like an old man. On the pocket of his shirt is a tiny embroidered penguin; a clothing detail I have already memorized and written down in my Moleskin notebook, where I also keep track of my friends’ birthdays and my better homework grades, and where I record it when a day is particularly beautiful. He moves one hand to grip my spine like it’s the spine of a
Norton Anthology
, and I think of five things: Thought number one is of all the times I’ve seen him pick up a book in class and slam it face-down, pages spread open on the table. Two, I consider Amy and her boyfriend, and wonder how far around the school hallways they’ve gotten, hand-in-hand and laughing. Three, I think of Ronald searching the houses for number 53, parking in my empty driveway, pressing the round yellow doorbell, thinking he’s about to rape some stupid little girl. Four, I hope my parents arrive home from work fairly soon, so when this is over, I can phone them to pick me up. And five, I remember the time I overheard Mr. Sears speaking to another male teacher and saying, “What a dog,” in reference to a girl, an expression I didn’t know people still used, and it had taken me a moment to realize what he meant, before I convinced myself that I must have misheard him, before I pictured the head of a dog on a female human body, sad-faced and teeth bared.

T
hey came out of the house with the risen sun beating down on the weather-worn porch. The summer had come early this year. The heat burnt the grass brown and took the nearby river down a foot by June, the high watermark lying naked on the granite banks. Paul went down the porch steps with a plastic cooler that had their lunch inside. He stopped on the gravel driveway and had to squint to see. There were waves of heat trembling atop the hot black mastic of the bordering concession road, the air fat with humidity and hard to draw in. It felt as if his nose and throat and very insides ran hotter with every breath he took. He shook his head and stood there, tall and thin, his dark hair flattened down by the dampness of his scalp.