I held on to that and went back to my seat, but nothing suppressed the insanity raging in my head for very long. It wasn’t until Mr. Rochester proposed to Jane that I snapped back to reality.
“Do you doubt me, Jane?” The actor grabbed Hattie by the arms and drew her close.
“Utterly and completely.”
When he caught her in an embrace my pulse started jumping. He was older than me, maybe in his early thirties, so not as old as Mr. Rochester was supposed to be, but close enough. And Hattie was almost exactly Jane’s age, the young innocent who captured the world-weary Rochester’s heart. As Jane realized Mr. Rochester was serious and accepted his offer of marriage, several things happened at once in my head. The detached academic in me thought they’d done a good job casting, except for the fact that Hattie was too pretty to play Jane. The teacher in me observed the two of them embrace, her delicate pink cheek brushed up against his grizzly five-o’clock shadow, and felt uncomfortable and protective. And the rest of me just watched her lithe frame wrap around a man twice her age and took a long, hard swallow.
And that reaction was going to stop right now. Jesus, how many headlines had I read about some teacher having an affair with a student? It was usually female teachers, all desperate, insecure, unevolved women who deluded themselves into thinking they loved these idiots. I never blamed the kids. Teenage boys would have sex with a banana peel, but the teachers had no justification worth the breath it took to say. They should have done what I was going to do right now. End it. Stop it before it even began, or at least before it knowingly began. There was no way I could’ve known HollyG was Hattie. HollyG was Hattie was Jane. Her identities shifted in front of me, none of them quite capturing the girl on stage who was now running away from Mr. Rochester in her wedding dress. Their definitions couldn’t hold her any more than the actor could make her marry him. At least she was running away from an already married man. It was the only flash of comfort as I waited for the torture to end, that at least some version of her was doing the right thing.
When it was finally over, the cast filed out in front of the curtain and we all stood and clapped. The actor who played Mr. Rochester pushed Hattie out in front of the line and the applause multiplied as she took a bow. Then, in the middle of the ovation, she looked directly at me and slowly, deliberately, ran her hand down the arm of her dress to her cuff. The corners of her mouth crept up and her eyes lit with a hundred meanings. I felt the obligatory return smile fall off my face and my hands froze in mid-clap.
She knew.
She cornered me after the play when the cast was mingling with the audience in the theater lobby, knowing I couldn’t run away while we were surrounded, our roles as clearly cast as the actors’ had been only minutes ago.
“Hello, Mr. Lund.”
“Hattie.” I clung to the name, a little girl’s name, and tried to force myself to speak to that person alone. “That was a wonderful performance. I didn’t know you were in theater.”
“This was my first production.” If she could tell how uncomfortable I was, she didn’t show it. If anything, her smile only grew wider.
“You’re a natural. It’s like you’ve been acting your whole life.”
She laughed at that and was twirled away by another student before she could torment me further.
Before I deleted my account at Pulse that night, I reread every message we’d sent each other. I’d saved them all and it was mortifying to realize what should have been obvious from the beginning. She was leaving for New York in less than a year. Of course, because she had to graduate high school first. I’d been so impressed about the books she’d read, but that was because I was assigning them to her. It would have been funny if it weren’t happening to me. After debating half the night over it, I decided to send her one last message. It was better to be absolutely clear about what had to happen. I agonized over the diction, wanting to tell her how much she’d meant to me, but I knew I couldn’t give her a single encouraging word.
Over the next week I could tell Hattie was trying to find a way to talk to me and I did everything possible to prevent it. As soon as the bell rang to dismiss Advanced English, I would shoot out the door and play hall monitor or find a reason to run to the main office. I became paranoid about being alone in the school and invented excuses to see Carl during my off-periods. I asked Mary out for a proper date that Friday, but the cardiologist had confirmed Elsa’s heart only had a year left at best and Mary was too depressed to want to do anything. When I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she just shrugged and turned away.