“Of course.” Lucia stepped toward the rows of desks, her back straight with feigned formality. She cocked her head mockingly and Nate rolled his eyes slightly, his chin jutting out. He shook his head a little, laughed, and looked back at Bridget. “Watch that one,” he teased, bringing Bridget in on the joke. Lucia watched him leave; her hand shot out to grab his sleeve, a quick tease for fun. He swatted her hand away, laughing.
As the students filled into their chairs, Bridget passed out last week’s graded exams. She gave only a few exams a year; the point was to get the students writing, thinking, imagining, not to quiz them on the particulars of grammar and sentence structure. She did, however, instruct them on the craft of storytelling: inciting incident, rising action, subplots, climax, denouement. The tests were easy, for the most part. She paused at Lucia’s chair, setting the D paper flat in front of her, her fingertips tented, pressing down on the desk until her knuckles whitened. She leaned close to Lucia’s ear, “Stay after a bit, okay?”
“Why?” Lucia’s voice was loud, confrontational, and Bridget faltered, surprised. Not that students didn’t challenge the teachers. They did. But they didn’t usually challenge Bridget. She was too nice, too sad.
Bridget kept her voice soft. “Because you don’t usually do this poorly, and this test was fairly easy. Let’s just talk.” She hesitated, and against her better judgment added, “See if there’s a way you can bring it up.”
“Not interested,” Lucia said, her voice cut with acid, and Bridget stepped away, to the next student, the next test fluttering in her fingertips. But she paused.
“That’s your choice,” Bridget said nonchalantly, but her voice wobbled, and Lucia raised an eyebrow.
Bridget took her usual spot, on a stool in the front of the classroom, the vibe being that of a poetry slam or an improv class. It had always been successful, but today the air in the room crackled, hot with electricity. The students shifted in their seats. She smiled, a quick bright beat, a nervous twitch to her lips. “Today’s topic? Anyone?”
The students always suggested the topics for a twenty-minute writing session. Some would then read their entries out loud followed by a discussion, and that was the class, three days a week. The other two days were craft. Bridget liked the flexibility of her days. It was fluid and she felt the palpable relief of the overachievers, allowed for once to slump their shoulders. Close their eyes. Daydream.
“How about change?” Ashlee Williams raised her hand in the back of class. “I’ve been thinking about this, because we’re graduating soon . . .” Her voice drifted off, hesitant. Ashlee was quiet, a good girl. Her journals were all about her boyfriend and fumbling attempts at sex in the dark while her parents watched Wheel of Fortune a floor below.
“I like that, anyone else?” Bridget shifted, crossing her feet at her ankles. Her crinkle skirt made a whoosh sound and it seemed unreasonably loud. The kids thought she was a fuddy-duddy with her long dresses, but with bare legs, she’d felt so exposed, so raw, a purplish spider vein winding around the hot crook of her knee.
“What about family?” Josh Tempest, a senior, piped up. Josh was baseball jock with a surprising interest in poetry—Bridget knew so many of their secret sides. “We haven’t done something on family in a while.”
Bridget nodded. The seniors were starting to lose their adolescence, staring down the barrel of college and independence, both exhilarating and terrifying. Their future stood, shiny as a beacon, but far in the black, fuzzy distance, and they looked at their parents with a new measure of humanity.
“What about reincarnation?” The room got very quiet; even the fidgeters stopped and Bridget felt the hair on her neck stand up.
Lucia chewed on the end of her pen, the black plastic between her teeth reminding Bridget of a cat with a bird. Her smile was sideways, her eyes narrowed.
“Interesting suggestion, Lucia. Care to elaborate?” Bridget picked imaginary lint off her skirt and waited. Someone in the back coughed and tittered nervously.
“When you die, what will you come back as?” Lucia challenged her, never wavering, never blinking, those black-rimmed eyes, flat and dry, outlined with that bright blue eyeshadow. And that hair, wild around her face. Her lips, painted with foundation, moved slightly, as if she was whispering.
“Do you think you have a choice?” Bridget asked, clasping her trembling fingers together. It’s not that she was unable to think about death, she just seemed unable to do it objectively anymore, and Lucia seemed to enjoy prodding the wound with a hot poker. The idea that her student, this eighteen-year-old girl, could so casually exploit her weaknesses and enjoy it made her sick and slightly sweaty. Everyone waited, Ashlee smiling kindly and Josh Tempest averting his eyes, feigning interest in something out the window.
“I’ll come back as a blackbird. I already know that.” Lucia shrugged, and Bridget thought of her tarot card drawings and her poem. From the back, Josh coughed the word witch. A titter went through the room. Lucia ignored them, her eyes narrowed. “Not everyone comes back. I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.” Her voice lowered to a whisper, a hoarse rumble. “Good people come back. Teachers, nurses . . . doctors.”
Bridget felt hot, then cold. She cleared her throat. “I think,” her voice came out strangled, and she tried again. “I think we should do the family one.” Everyone began to open their journals, but Lucia just stared that blank stare, her lips moving ever so slightly.
Bridget stood up, dusting her hands off on her knees, official and businesslike, and avoided Lucia, who hadn’t moved. Bridget wrote on the whiteboard: Free Writing Topic: Family, 20 minutes. Some of the kids stared off out the window or into the hallway, looking for the words that Bridget always hoped would come—although sometimes they didn’t—while others hunkered down, furiously scribbling. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Lucia watching her. She didn’t open her journal, never took that pen out of her mouth; she just stared. Bridget avoided eye contact and sat at her desk, clicking through emails and pretending to read but watching the clock.
Lucia never moved.
When the bell finally rang and all the students filed out, Lucia stayed. Bridget followed the group out the door, leaving Lucia there in the classroom, feigning a bathroom break, scrolling distractedly through her phone, just to leave.
Just to get away from that girl.
CHAPTER 6
Alecia, Saturday, April 25, 2015
The breakdown of a marriage happens in phases, almost imperceptibly, Alecia had discovered.