“Are you proposing?” She covered her discomfort with coyness.
“Not yet. But I will, you can count on it.” He kissed her forehead and slapped her bottom with his free hand, walked away laughing, to take the baby back to his mother now that it was calm and gurgling. She followed him in, found the mother at the table, her hair tucked back into place, smiling, nursing a glass of wine. The woman fawned all over Nate and he let her, winking at Alecia the whole time. “See?” He whispered later as they danced, his arms crushing her against him, stealing the air from her lungs until she felt like she would burst. “Everyone loves me.”
Even ten years later, she wondered how much of Nate’s smile, his seemingly wide-open heart, was real. She would have thought she’d know by now.
Alecia pulled back the covers and quietly crept from the bed. There was no reason to take such care to be quiet. Nate slept hard, his breathing slow and even, often waking in the same position he’d fallen asleep in. On his side of the bed, she detached his phone from the cord with a quick flick of her thumb and took it into the bathroom. Sitting on the closed toilet seat, she clicked through his Facebook. She’d resisted social media—who had the time?—until a year or so ago. When Alecia had first joined, she was assaulted by pictures from high school friends: kids with gap teeth, climbing onto school buses for the first time, shopping, eating at restaurants, gourmet meals they made at home, stylized with photo filters. All the glossy facade breaking her heart slowly, immeasurably, a hairline crack at a time. She unfollowed all of them and her feed had become a carefully culled collection of parenting websites, autism communities, special-needs moms groups.
Nate’s newsfeed was old college buddies, colleagues from the high school, students, coaches, parents, his cousins. It was loud, like a virtual fraternity party. So little of it represented his actual life. One slightly grainy, blurry picture of Gabe that she had tagged him in a few months ago.
She clicked on his messages and scrolled through quickly. Parents, coaches, a few students here and there asking homework questions. His Twitter was all Philadelphia sports. Alecia knew that Nate used social media to keep an eye on the students. The drama that played out in school was set up the night before, he always said. He knew where to be to break up a fight, when to intervene, and when to let it play out.
She opened Snapchat but he had no stories, no pictures. His account looked vacant. Which seemed weird. Why have the account?
She clicked the Instagram icon and scrolled through the feed. Stylized perfection seemed so far out of reach, so unattainable, that even thinking about it made Alecia tired. The girls were oversexualized, tinted yellow or blue or with the right amount of blur to appear “artsy,” all this manufactured beauty in a perfectly cropped pixelated square. Long legs and newly painted toenails (#pedi!) announced the excitement of spring; girls trying on prom dresses (#prom, #spring, #seniors) and taking diagonal selfies in dressing room mirrors; kissing photos, the boys appropriately stubbled and the girls heavy lidded with half-parted lips (#bae, #love!). Out of curiosity, she clicked on Andrew Evans’s profile. A few unsmiling selfies; him and a tall, bony boy she recognized as a Tempest at a baseball game; a group shot: Andrew, two boys she didn’t know, smiling, glossy girls, thrown together on a couch, their legs intertwined. One of the girls was Jennifer Lawson’s daughter. Taylor, was it?
She barely understood what it all meant, her mouth woolly and dry. What did Nate think about when he looked through these pictures? These girls, barely eighteen, some even younger, with their big glossy mouths and long hair, edited and cropped and filtered to perfection. Tan and tight squares of flat tummies (#abworkout!), perfect little bodies, twisting around each other, tangles of arms and legs. How could anyone live up to this? How could Alecia?
Alecia studied the feed, a dark black heart under each picture to indicate likes (117 likes for the blonde with the gauzy cleavage in a meadow (a meadow!). She wondered if Nate interacted, if he commented or hashtagged (#teacher4life!) or even liked any of his students’ pictures. She wondered how she could know so little about his online world, thriving and thick with life. Alecia tapped the heart under a picture, an innocuous cup of coffee. She watched it turn red, tapped it again, and it returned to white.
Alecia opened his account settings and saw it: Posts You’ve Liked. She clicked it. There was nothing, only a blank screen, white. Innocent.
She clicked to his profile. No pictures. Nothing posted of his own.
She closed his apps, absently opened his photo gallery, scrolled through his pictures. Nothing but baseball images: games, a cracked bench in the dugout, practical, economical things. She imagined him texting the cracked bench to the athletic director, angry, demanding repairs.
She opened his Facebook account. Nothing posted on his own profile. No profile pictures, just the white outline of a man, like a ghost. This is how he watched them: ethereal and fleeting.
In his gallery, something caught her eye: Screenshots. It was a folder, the Instagram logo barely visible, but a glimmery flash of peach and cream. She opened it, her hands clammy.
The girl with the white hair, the girl he helped. The troubled girl. Red lace, bursting cleavage, blur to cover the rest. Her white hair cascading down over even whiter breasts. Her face turned down, her lips dark as blood. What was her name? Lucia.
And Nate’s solid red heart, stuck there, long after it was undone, frozen in time.
When I think of childhood, it’s shiny, like a new penny. When Jimmy still worked at the mill. We were seven? Eight maybe? Everything was good. Not perfect, but not terrible. You were there, remember? We rode our bikes from my house to Mr. Tibbs’s store, all our quarters weighing down the pockets of our jeans. If you got there on a Friday afternoon, you could snag those giant deli pickles just as they replaced the jar. We used all our quarters for that, right? You were still hungry, so you, you idiot, tried to get away with stealing chips, like a whole bag. All that crinkly foil. Mrs. Tibbs knew right away and she grabbed your arm so fast. No one stole from Mrs. Tibbs. You got all the money in the world, she said. Remember? She was right. That was so stupid. You could have just run home, asked your mom and rode back. Easy peasy. But no. You spit at her! Spit at her. Do you remember this? Who does that? Anyway, she was such a bitchy old hen. She said, I’ll tell your mama, I know just who you are! You said, Then who are we? Did you really think she was lying? She called you out so fast. Taylor Lawson, she said, and then she looked at me, like she’d never seen me before. Lulu something, she said. You nearly died laughing.
You’ve called me that ever since. Sometimes I still think about that.
CHAPTER 9