He didn’t care.
In passing, I’d heard one of the girls refer to him as Max Vincent, but I’d quit thinking of him as a regular name. In my mind, he was Heathcliff. He was a quiet, young man too large for his desk, his legs always stretched out in front or to the side of his seat to accommodate for his height. Occasionally, his beat-up tennis shoes rested next to mine in the aisle, and I’d stare at them—my foot and his—as if they were more than shoes and feet, as if they represented something larger than that.
Two shoes, my size seven and his much larger undisclosed number.
Hawthorne and Heathcliff.
Two names that didn’t belong to us. Two shoes that did.
I obviously needed a better hobby than baking and philosophy. Last period English class was a sad reminder of that. Six months of sidelong glances and comparing tennis shoes, and sadly it was a Friday afternoon and Sylvia Plath who did me in. There’s a mystery to silence that, once broken, can’t be returned.
Poetry was Mrs. Callahan’s favorite form of senior torture. Poetry is an acquired taste. It’s a deep look at life in an odd, sometimes broken way. It turned life into a puzzle, and puzzles weren’t something my class was interested in solving. Their lives were already bursting with perplexities, and they were too occupied with trying to figure each other out, trying to figure their hormones out. High school was like a zoo packed with predators trying their best to scent out the weak.
Poetry handed them the weak.
The moment Mary Callahan read Mirror by Sylvia Plath, I was riveted. Call it fate, but the poem spoke to me. That was the point of poetry, I guess, but this poem wasn’t about romance or nature or death, it was—
Suddenly, my musings were interrupted by Rebecca Martin.
“I love my mirror,” she teased, her throaty voice enough to enchant a room.
A masculine snort answered her. “I bet you sleep with it, too,” Hunter Green said, his brows wagging. “You know … bow—”
“That’s enough,” Mrs. Callahan called, her short but lithe figure leaning casually against her desk. “We’ll start there. Do you think the poem is about someone’s love for their reflection?”
“No,” Jessica Reeves replied, “it personifies the mirror.”
Mrs. Callahan tapped a pencil against the top of her desk. “Sure, it brings the mirror to life, but what—”
“It’s ridiculous,” Rebecca remarked. “Who cares about a mirror?”
The teacher’s brows rose. “And yet you admitted to loving yours?”
Rebecca shrugged, her highlighted brown hair falling over her shoulder.
Brian Henry whistled. “Well, if it had that to look at every day …”
Rebecca threw him a wink.
Mrs. Callahan smiled. “I wasn’t quite looking to make that point, Mr. Henry, but now that you’ve touched on it, why do you think the mirror is so important in this poem?” She glanced at Rebecca. “Why do you think the woman keeps it? Why does she keep coming back to it over and over again, even when she’s trying to mask what she sees in it? She obviously doesn’t always like what it shows her? So why—”
“It’s honest.”
The room went silent, and for a moment, I was as surprised as the rest of the class. I was surprised because the words were mine.
Mrs. Callahan pushed away from her desk, her eyes squinting at the back of the room. I wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go. I’d never meant to speak. Speaking got you noticed, and I was the master of disguise. Speaking replaced mystery with sad stories.
“Miss, um …” The teacher bent to glance down at the grade book on her desk, but was interrupted by Hunter Green’s quick cough.
“Hawthorne,” he coughed again, “the girl whose mirror should tell her she needs a brush.”
Rumbling laughter filtered through the room. The laughter didn’t bother me. His words didn’t either. It only bothered me that I’d spoken, that I’d broken this strange pact my tennis shoe had made with Heathcliff’s bigger tennis shoe.
Mrs. Callahan crossed her arms. “What’s honest, Ms. Hawthorne?” she asked.
Hawthorne wasn’t my first name, and it wasn’t my last. It just was, but I didn’t correct her.
“The mirror,” I answered. “The mirror is honest. I-it’s what makes a poem about a mirror more than a poem about a mirror.”
There was no laughter now, just scattered coughs and hissed freaks echoing throughout the room. Mrs. Callahan didn’t reprimand anyone. I think she figured, like I did, that it was pointless. You can’t change people’s minds about someone. You can only change how you feel about the title. I was above the words. I’d learned that life was deeper than teasing laughter and whispered names. It was so much deeper.
“And what makes it more?” Mrs. Callahan asked.