“Louder,” he says. “I want to be able to hear you from the parking lot.”
One rehearsal, James pulls Tiffany aside and articulates her potential with the kind of mathematical precision she has spent her life yearning to hear, and she has to leave the room. All the girls’ restrooms at St. Philomena resemble bomb shelters: windowless constructions of cinderblocks painted the color of sharks. In the far stall, Tiffany breathes each breath on purpose, because sometimes you have to. He’s just being fatherly, they separately assure themselves, a father to a fatherless girl. But James has misinterpreted Tiffany’s problem: she’s had an overabundance of fathers, not a scarcity.
From her stall, Tiffany hears two girls enter the bathroom.
“See, it’s this medication I’m on,” says one to the other. “It does this to my skin.”
“What?”
“Look at me. It’s like my face is falling off my face.”
It goes like this: as the weather gets colder, Tiffany and James play emotional apocalypse by email, script, art, and eye contact—all talk, no touch. She gets to be the world, which makes him the ending. There is no revelation. He orbits her. She spins. Gradually, they become orphaned from their morals, and they feel that something has died, but also that something’s been born. Among everyone Tiffany’s ever met, James takes the most from her, gives her the most. It’s his fault, it’s hers, he isn’t, it doesn’t matter, it matters most. Fellow students begin to look like children to Tiffany. She believes that she is in the middle of her life. James becomes her friend, despite the odds. She becomes his recreational drug, a bad habit he tries to conceal from others and from himself. They both feel violently understood. For months, Tiffany and James fuck without touching. It’s been done before.
One night after rehearsal, when he thinks the students have left, James sits at the upright piano in the music room and plays the first movement of a Maurice Ravel suite. Tiffany is still there; James’s subconscious knows she is there; James’s subconscious no longer considers Tiffany a student.
She stands several yards away, leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her baggy blue uniform. With her fair skin, white hair, and purple-shadowed eyes, she looks like she’s been dead for days. When the suite ends, James catches Tiffany staring at him, her expression revealing something akin to fear.
“Gaspard de la Nuit,” says James, clearing his throat. “Took me seven years to learn.”
“Gaspard?”
“It means something like ‘treasurer.’ Treasurer of the night.”
“That was long.”
“What?”
“The suite.”
“Oh, yeah. Seven minutes.”
“So you learned a minute a year.”
“Well, that was just the first movement. There are two more, all based on the fantaisies of this French poet named Aloysius Bertrand. Published in the early eighteen hundreds, I think.” He cracks his knuckles. “You’d love the poetry. Surreal as hell. Never succeeded in its time. Never succeeded at all, actually. You take French, right? Or Latin?”
“Les deux. Tum ex illis.”
“My translation has French on one side of the page, English on the other. I’ll lend you my copy.”
“And what was that?”
“What was what?”
“The movement you just played.”
“Oh. It’s called ‘Ondine.’ It’s about a mermaid seducing a mortal.”
Embarrassed by the thematic relevance, which had not occurred to him until he said it out loud, James scrambles to other facts, flexing his music theory degree. He maunders on, louder and louder, but Tiffany says nothing. To get himself to shut up, he retrieves a pair of headphones from his bag and crosses the room to her. It’s something to do.
“Do you have some of these already?” he asks. He knows that she doesn’t.
“Headphones?”
“Yes.”
Tiffany keeps her eyes on the piano, as though she’s afraid it might spring to life. “Why?”
“Rosie spilled juice on my laptop, so I had to get a replacement yesterday,” says James. “They had a deal for teachers. Buy a laptop, get headphones. Take them, I’m serious. I got them for free.”
“What about you?”
“I have others.”
“Better ones?”
“Yes.”
When their hands touch, Tiffany hardly feels it, because it seems to her that they have been touching for weeks. James feels it and withdraws at once. The dog food smells especially like sewage today. For a moment, they hold their breath and study each other in the faulty electricity of St. Philomena. Then James marches to the piano and collects his bag.
“Excuse me,” he says professionally, almost angrily, as he pushes past her. She exits the room as he flicks off the light and locks the door.
For a moment, they hesitate in the dark hallway. After hours, the entire high school feels like a set to Tiffany, insisting on the fraudulence of everything that occurs there. The sports, the calculations, the dissections, the assemblies on drunk driving, the fire drills, the chicken tenders, the virginity gossip, the imitation friendships. Nothing counts. It’s all sudoku, a controlled experiment, a relentless series of practice tests. Tiffany conceives of her peers as baby predators, biting and scratching in the den while their mother hunts. She wants something—anything—to count but is also emboldened by the conviction that nothing possibly can.
James pockets his keys, looking fractious and skinnier than usual. Smudged glasses, beard gleaming with nickel. Tiffany doesn’t fit in his life because his life is too big; she’d slosh around like a hamster in a swimming pool if he let her inside it. He would never let her inside it.
He takes a deep breath and walks purposefully toward the exit. “Drive safe in this weather,” he calls, although he knows she rides her bike. If he were a decent man, the decent thing to do would be to offer Tiffany a lift. As it stands, the decent thing to do is to extract himself from her presence as soon as possible. He marches to the faculty parking lot without looking back.
Tiffany drifts to the student exit like a ghost with nothing to haunt. When she steps outside, the frigid December rain is a relief on her hot skin. Aggressively, Tiffany pedals to the grocery store and does not shiver in the fluorescence, although her clothes are wet and she runs cold. Now she’s pink and sweating and feverish, altogether carnal, like a contestant on a tropical reality show. She can’t remember when she last enjoyed corporeality. Had she ever? She feels exuberant, drugged, libidinous. A man gazes at her as he feels up the avocados, his mouth open, and for the first time in her life, she enjoys the sexual attention of a stranger. Go ahead, she thinks. Look at me. Inside her backpack, the headphones radiate. She can feel them. Tiffany tears leafy greens from their misty perches and thrusts them into her basket, beaming uncontrollably. Bok choy, endives, spinach, kale, baby kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, collard greens, micro greens, beet greens, watercress. Salivating, she concludes that she probably has an iron deficiency, but knows she will never schedule an appointment to find out.
“Oh, my.” The cashier smiles. “Do you keep rabbits?”
The total appears on the screen: two weeks of tips from her job at the diner. Tiffany pays in cash.
“Something like that,” she replies.
Tiffany’s current foster parents are gentle but weary. Treading in debt. It’s her fourth family, and her best family. They have three biological sons, all grown and out of the house. By the time Tiffany reaches Wayne and Stella’s fifties ranch house on Arcadia, they’re asleep, and she is heavy with rain.
Hope you had a good day at school, reads a note in Stella’s writing. Leftovers in the fridge.
With the sharpest knife they own, Tiffany butchers the vegetables, blisters them in olive oil and salt, and prepares enough to fill two salad bowls. In her bedroom, Tiffany opens her laptop, on loan from the school, and finds the suite that James played. The headphones are cordless, futuristic, like a gadget from science fiction. She sheds her damp clothes, replacing them with soccer shorts and a large T-shirt that says blood donor across the chest. She once tried to donate blood but she didn’t meet the weight requirement. As she eats, she listens to Gaspard de la Nuit in its entirety—over twenty minutes. She burns her mouth on the greens but eats ravenously, savoring the bitter taste, the oily slip of the leaves. She finishes one bowl and listens again. In “Ondine,” Tiffany can hear the water flirting, she can hear the peril of desire, she can hear the splash. Someone dies in “Le Gibet”; she senses the end of a life that nobody wanted to conduct or sustain in the first place. “Scarbo” sounds like the panic attack of a genius. She doesn’t know, she’ll look it up later, he’ll lend her his copy. Listens to the suite until her laptop dies. Brushes her teeth until she can’t feel her gums. Showers until she can’t feel her skin. At three in the morning, she screams into her pillow, obscenely alive.