Their handwriting was atrocious and they whined incessantly about the assignment. Most of them wrote about what they did, which was boring as all get-out, even documenting what they’d eaten for breakfast. The girls often confessed their weight, a long-held secret, bursting out of them like jelly from a doughnut. They turned them in on Fridays, and Bridget might check to see that they were complete, but didn’t grade what they wrote. Sometimes she gave them topics in class, sometimes it was open-ended.
She grabbed the black leather one; she knew which one it was by heart. Lucia Hamm wrote about death and dying—a lot of them did. But most of them glossed over it, or mused about what it was like to die, what happened or how it would happen to them. Some of them were scared. But Lucia Hamm seemed to fly toward the subject, undeterred by her teacher losing her husband almost a year before to cancer. Lucia tackled pain and death clinically, a biology lab dissection. As if Bridget’s hurt could be pulled apart like little frog’s legs, pinned back to the wax, sliced clean down the middle, and simply exorcised. Bridget had seen it before, a death fascination; that’s not what bothered her. It was almost mundane to be Goth. But Lucia got under her skin.
She flipped through until she found the page. A drawing, three blackbirds along the top, feathered over a wire, three swords pierced through a beating heart. No kings. Huh. She flipped it around to show Nate. He studied it.
“Gotta be, right?”
“I’ve given up trying to figure her out.” She shrugged. “She sees birds.”
Nate cocked his head, moved his hand in a circle, like go on.
She sighed, the idea exhausting her. “She finds dead birds, she says. She’s written about it. She says they come to her and she knows bad things will happen.”
Lucia, on the fringe, but exotically, unsettlingly beautiful. Crazy white hair, black-rimmed eyes and bloodred lips. She’d been held back in kindergarten, something about emotional and social readiness, so she was a full year older than the other seniors. She had a way of speaking, clipped and certain, her gaze level and steady, like she was humoring you. Bridget always looked away first, couldn’t take the directness. Every conversation felt like a confrontation.
She handed the card back to Nate.
“I think there’s something going on. Lately her grades have been tanking. She comes in, looks like shit. No makeup. Haven’t you noticed?” He tapped the card against his knuckles and twisted his mouth. “She’s got that godawful brother, you know?” Bridget vaguely knew. Her brother, Lenny, a dropout, and her father, Jimmy, had skipped town.
Bridget eyed the journal, suddenly ashamed. She hadn’t really been paying attention. This was her job, not just the teaching, but to observe them. In that way, Nate took it more seriously than she did.
Nate had anonymous social media accounts. He never posted anything, just scrolled through the newsfeeds. He followed his students and they followed back, not knowing who he was. So stupid, Bridget thought. Didn’t they know the creeps who were out there? But Nate knew who was fighting whom, where to be, when to be there, who was getting bullied, who was doing the bullying. It made him a better teacher, he defended. He’d never abuse it, she knew that, but still. She told him she didn’t want to know anything. Leave her out of it. She wondered if Alecia knew that when she lay in bed next to her husband at night, he scrolled through his phone, spying on the lives of his students like they were his own personal miniseries. It was a moral gray area, she admitted, but Nate did it for the all the right reasons. In the drama that played out at school each day, the stage was set online the night before.
“I just don’t have it in me. Not this year. Other years, I’ve been with you. Fighting for them. Against the administration, against their parents, against themselves half the time. Not this year. I’m barely hanging in.” She opened Lucia’s journal, fanned through the pages, and realized for the first time how many of the entries were drawings. Half of them, at least. She’d have to talk to her about that. This wasn’t art class.
Then, a glimmer of recognition as she turned the book one way, then the other. She’d known once what it all meant, although her skills felt rusty. Aunt Nadine had taught her how to do a reading when she was barely ten, perched on her lap while a cigarette snaked down to the butt. But that was a long time ago.
The last reading she did nearly ended her marriage.
She pushed the book across the desk and pointed.
“Nate. They’re tarot cards.”
?????
Bridget had a cat. A petite gray-and-white stray that she adopted a month after Holden died, an ill-advised decision. She named her Sunny, after the prostitute in Catcher in the Rye. It was her own simple, obtuse memorial to her husband, but also she loved irony. The cat was both gray and grumpy. So, Sunny she was, or more likely, she wasn’t. No one ever got the joke, but then again, most people didn’t get Bridget’s jokes, with the exception of Holden.
Lord, how she missed him.
It had been less than a year since his death. Two years since his diagnosis, and ten since they married. Bridget liked to imagine her life in timeline form, and sometimes, if she’d had enough to drink and it was late enough at night, she envisioned it hovering there above her head. A single line with dots, like a subway map, green up to the fall of 2012, red and bloody for that year between 2012 and 2013, and muddy-water brown thereafter with a blinking red You Are Here somewhere along the interminable brown. She couldn’t see anything past today.
There was a tiny bit of freedom in being alone. She popped a frozen dinner into the microwave, waited the requisite two minutes, and pulled it out with two fingers, dropping it onto a paper plate. She poured white zinfandel into a red Solo cup because she hated doing dishes, and took her dinner to the living room. Holden would have died, had he been alive. He liked expensive cabernet, from certain regions in France—she had no idea which ones. He was also a particular eater and had specific, bizarre notions of what could and should not be eaten together. Steak and potatoes. Pasta and pork. Chicken and rice. Only in those two combinations. In restaurants, she’d feel endlessly irritated at his requests: whole potatoes, not mashed, no garlic, extra pepper.
Now she could eat whatever she wanted. Strange how she’d welcome back in a heartbeat all the things she used to wish away. When she talked to him, which she did sometimes, not enough to be called often, she didn’t look at his picture or up to the ceiling. She talked as though he was right there next to her.
“Tomorrow I’ll cook something, H. I promise. Maybe.”
You never make promises to the dead that you don’t intend to keep. She wasn’t religious, but Mama’s voice often floated up from the swamps of Georgia just to smack her in the head.