She was holding the cap from graduation in her hands, playing with the tassel to help calm her nerves. When all the other students had thrown their caps into the air, she’d held on to hers for reasons she couldn’t understand other than her inability to ever fully celebrate around other people. Happiness, she believed, was small and quiet and you expressed it when no one else was around. She had not, in fact, experienced enough of the emotion to support this firm belief that she held as fact.
Mr. Jackson had been her favorite teacher; he was in his thirties, had not yet entered into that phase of teaching when every other sentence was sarcastic and without genuine emotion. Before he’d come to Coalfield High School two years before, he’d been an actual artist, with an exhibition in Europe, and had the slightest degree of fame. He came from one of the richest families in the state. And, yet, here he was teaching dumbass kids at a nowhere high school, which made Izzy confused as to whether he was noble or stupid or, perhaps most important, damaged goods.
On the first day of Advanced Art, her senior year, he put an empty vase on a stepladder and asked the class if this vase was art. Most people said no. Then he put some flowers in it. “How about now?” he asked. Fewer people said no. He removed the flowers and then said, “What about if I urinated into the vase?” Nobody, including Izzy, said a word, but they certainly paid more attention to their teacher, who was wearing paint-spattered khakis and a worn, faded-blue chambray shirt, a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket. His face looked like an old-time movie star cowboy, lean and rugged but not from actual hard living. His close-cut hair was prematurely gray and made him seem even wiser. “The answer,” he said to them, smiling, “is that everything is a work of art, kids.” He then let the students offer examples to see if it passed his test. “What if you smashed it to pieces?” someone asked, and Mr. Jackson said that this was art. “What if you fucked it?” one of the stoner kids said, his friends making that awful “huh-huh-huh” sound that passed as laughter. “Especially then,” Mr. Jackson replied.
Izzy, before she could even think about it, asked, “What if you didn’t want it to be a work of art?”
He turned to her, his face open and inviting. “What do you mean?” he asked her, and she felt the embarrassment of having the entire class waiting for her to respond.
“What if you specifically told people that the vase was just a vase and not a work of art?”
Mr. Jackson’s eyes seemed touched with sorrow, as if he understood exactly what she meant, and he seemed reluctant to say what came next. He continued to look at her, the silence growing palpable. “Even then, Izzy,” he finally said, his shoulders softly shrugging, “I’m sorry to say that it would still be art.”
It was then that she fell in love with him, the tenderness of his answer. In that moment, the future spilled out around her: she would become his secret lover; they would spend most of the entire year wrapped around each other; she would now be pregnant with his child.
“I’m pregnant,” she said to Mr. Jackson, who had been sipping from a nostalgic glass bottle of grape soda. He went out of his way to find things that tasted better because they were rare. In response, he took the half-full bottle of soda and hurled it into the grass in front of them, the bottle breaking heavily into two pieces.
“That’s not good, Izzy,” he said, his head twisting to the side as if suddenly embarrassed, one of the warning signs that intense anger might follow.
“I know it’s not good,” Izzy told him, a little angry at his response. She had expected this, but she had hoped, deep down, that he would embrace her, tell her it would all be okay, and that they would be a happy family, the three of them. Hope, goddamn, she hated it, that tiny sliver of light that you believed could fill your heart. “I know it’s not good,” she repeated, “which is why I’m telling you, because the two of us made this happen, and now we need to figure out what to do.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. The desperation and the cliché of it.
“I’m as sure as you can be without getting other people involved,” she said. Five pregnancy tests, all stolen from the drugstore because they were more expensive than anything that depressing should ever be. Let the people who wanted a baby pay for them.
He was twitching like a cornered animal. Even now she felt a tenderness for him. She touched his shoulder, and with that, the slightest pressure against his body, he cracked open and began to cry, deep sobs like someone had dropped a boulder onto his chest. Izzy dropped her graduation cap and placed her hands on his face, willing him the strength to recover. It was confusing, she decided, which one of them needed more help. The point, she had realized quite some time ago, was that both of them needed help and how wonderful and lucky it would be if each could be the one who could save the other.
Mr. Jackson composed himself. His moods were a constantly shifting weather pattern. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m making this about me, I understand that.”
“It’s okay, Hal,” she said. “I understand.”