“I can’t remember the exact passages right now, but I’ve got them marked.”
He sat up straighter in his chair while I made a show of flipping through the book and making thinking noises. Tommy kept shooting me looks, confused, until I sent him a small grin and a wink to give him the idea I was here for him. It worked. He put a hand over his mouth to hide his smile and went back to work, probably turning all his commas into periods or capitalizing random words.
“Here it is.” I found a page where I’d written all over the margins, venting about how depressing the whole thing was. I do that a lot. I like to add my words to a book, as if I’m talking to the author and we’re having a conversation that makes the story come alive in a way that it wasn’t before I started reading it.
“You know this is school property, Hattie. You can’t deface it.”
“So bill me.” Tommy and the other student laughed, then both tried to pass it off as coughing.
“Like here. I don’t get this guy’s through line at all. He hangs himself after he gets home? He survived a war and then decides to kill himself? He should’ve just walked toward the Vietcong with a big white flag over his head.”
“Think about all the flashbacks he keeps having, the guilt he feels over his friend’s death. Maybe if he truly had survived the war, he would have been able to move on. The truth O’Brien wants us to feel in this story is that some part of the character did die in Vietnam and he just didn’t realize it yet.”
“But look at how long this story is.” I moved to flip the pages and accidentally brushed my fingers over his hand.
The touch was electric. It shot through my entire arm and I froze for a second, unprepared. I glanced at Tommy, but Peter’s computer hid our hands and the book. We were in plain sight in the middle of the school, twenty feet from my boyfriend, yet no one could see us.
My heart started racing and my breath sped up. Peter hadn’t moved a muscle. It seemed like he was stunned, too.
Carefully, so carefully, I paged back to the beginning of the story, staring at his hand. It was a beautiful hand, with long fingers and blunt nails and a dusting of hair on his knuckles and wrists.
“It’s at least twenty pages long,” I said, low and kind of breathlessly. I didn’t think Tommy could hear me. “And nothing happens in it.”
“The character can’t move forward. That’s why he keeps circling the lake. If he only did it once, you wouldn’t fully appreciate his impotence.”
His voice fell, too, although neither of us looked at each other. We both stared at the desk and the book in front of us.
“If he can’t move forward”—I swallowed and reached out, deliberately this time, and set my hand next to his, barely touching him—“then what’s the point?”
His skin was tough, not like Tommy’s babyish skin, and I felt the warmth radiate from his pinky finger into mine and through my whole body. I wanted to slip my palm over his and thread our fingers together, but I didn’t dare. Tommy could stand up and see us at any moment. Someone could walk by in the hallway and glance through the window in the door. A second ticked by, then two, while Peter left his hand next to mine and I thrilled at this tiny, forbidden contact.
Peter took a deep breath and spoke, carefully and deliberately. “The character made his choices already. That’s the point of the story. He has to face the consequences of his decisions.
“Read this section again.” He picked up the book, breaking contact, and my heart sank. He found the paragraph he wanted and gave it to me, then scooted a safe distance away.
The words swam around on the page. I had no idea what any of it said. I remembered my first date with Tommy, how he’d held my hand and twirled me around so sweetly and I didn’t feel anything, not even a single drop of the reaction I’d just had to the barest touch of Peter’s skin. If I was a normal girl with normal dreams, I would have been giddy about Tommy Kinakis’s hesitant touch. I would have giggled over him with all my girlfriends and pulled him closer instead of ducking my head and turning away. It would have been so much simpler and I took a moment to mourn for what I could never be. No matter how well I played the part, I would never become the role.
So it was time to pull back the curtain and take a bow.
“Okay, I think I see your point.” I closed the book and put it away.
“I hope you’ll at least think about what I’ve said before you write the essay.”
“Of course.” I added, in a softer voice, “I always do.” Before he could say anything, I pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote something, then stood up and pulled on my coat and book bag. I positioned myself between the guys and Peter, so they couldn’t see him, and handed him the piece of paper with the note in the middle of the page.