“Why can’t you ever make time for me anymore?”
Swiveling back toward me, she pulled the covers toward her side of the bed. “Are you kidding? You ask me the night before and expect me to drop everything?”
“I thought it would be fun. Excuse me for wanting to have fun with my wife.”
She shook her head and jabbed a finger at my chest. “No, you just said you were nervous to go by yourself. Don’t try to pretend like you were thinking about us. If you want to take me out, ask me when you don’t have twenty teenagers tagging along.”
She tossed herself as far away from me as possible on the bed and fell asleep a few minutes later while I lay awake, staring at her back in the darkness.
The next day I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I made all my morning classes work in small groups. I had no appetite at lunch, and when Carl asked me what was wrong I mumbled something about a cold or my sinuses. On the bus, one of the kids had to remind me to take attendance and only then did I remember that Hattie Hoffman, my favorite student in that class, was out with an excused absence. The drive to Rochester was short and before I was ready we filed into a small two hundred–seat theater with faded red velvet chairs. The room was over half-full and I scanned the crowd as subtly as I could, but no one was wearing a gray dress. Even after the lights dimmed and the play started I kept watching that damn door. HollyG would show up, I knew it. She might show up late, though, just to be perverse. I had no idea what was happening onstage until the student sitting on my left gasped and elbowed me in the ribs. “It’s Hattie!”
“What?” I whispered and she pointed at the stage.
I focused on the play and saw Hattie Hoffman in center stage, exchanging lines with an older woman sporting a severe bun. Flipping through the program I saw her name listed at the top of the page in the title role. The little shit. She didn’t mention a word about it when I passed the permission slips around. I had assumed she’d say something about the field trip, because Hattie always had an opinion on everything, but she’d kept silent with her head buried in a notebook. Had she been embarrassed about being in the play?
I paid attention for a few lines, enough to realize Hattie was actually good. She didn’t try for the English accent, which was smart, and she delivered her lines cautiously, with the exact trepidation Jane would have shown when she announced her decision to leave Lowood School for Girls and seek out her destiny at Thornfield Hall. The longer I watched her the more eerie it got. Hattie usually moved with a deliberate grace; I’d always noticed it because it set her apart from the rest of the kids. On stage that assurance disappeared; she’d become Jane completely. As the scene drew out, the back of my neck tingled. I held my breath when Hattie held hers, looked to the places where her eyes strayed. I was captivated to a point I didn’t totally understand. Maybe it was because she was my student and I felt a sense of pride. Except it didn’t feel like pride, not completely. It was more intense and nagging, like I should know something I didn’t. The other kids and I exchanged smiles, bound in the hushed excitement of discovering a secret about one of our own.
Now Mrs. Fairfax was telling her to put on her best dress to meet Mr. Rochester, and Hattie stood solemnly, smoothing the pleats of her gray dress and nervously straightening the bright cuffs. “This is my best dress, Mrs. Fairfax.”
Her dress. Oh. Holy. Fuck.
The nagging sensation in the back of my head exploded and everything blurred. I swayed forward and when I could see again, the two women were crossing the stage into the adjoining set. The back of Hattie’s hips receded calmly, covered in gray, gray, gray. Oh, God.
No. I wrenched around and searched every single body in the crowd, desperate to find someone else. Anyone else. I was not having an affair with one of my students, for the love of Christ. But there was no one. No one else in the entire theater that could be HollyG. And I knew there wouldn’t be. Subconsciously, I’d known it since I first laid eyes on Hattie on that stage.
The rest of the play passed in a fog. I slid down in my seat until one of the kids asked if I was all right and then I used the excuse to go to the bathroom. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there; run through the front doors and never fucking stop.
I splashed a gallon of water on my face and sat on the toilet for ten minutes, trying to figure out what I was going to do. It wasn’t until the second act that I realized I still had an out. HollyG didn’t know who LitGeek was—I hadn’t given her any clues to pick me out of the crowd. And why would she suspect me? I was providing a field trip, for God’s sake. She was expecting our whole class to be there.