Page 39 of Everything You Want Me to Be
“What’s wrong?” Mary asked.
I told her about the field trip. “I guess I’m just nervous about what could happen.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said, yawning.
I flipped around to face her, seized with an idea. “Why don’t you come? You could meet us at the high school and ride along on the bus. It’d be just like Minneapolis, except I get educator rates now.”
Hope leapt in my chest, but she shook her head and fluffed her pillow before settling on her side, facing the wall.
“I’m taking Mom to the cardiologist tomorrow. Remember?”
“Reschedule it.”
“No, Peter. We’ve waited three months to see this guy. You’ll be fine.”
“Why can’t you ever make time for me anymore?”
Swiveling back toward me, she pulled the covers toward her side of the bed. “Are you kidding? You ask me the night before and expect me to drop everything?”
“I thought it would be fun. Excuse me for wanting to have fun with my wife.”
She shook her head and jabbed a finger at my chest. “No, you just said you were nervous to go by yourself. Don’t try to pretend like you were thinking about us. If you want to take me out, ask me when you don’t have twenty teenagers tagging along.”
She tossed herself as far away from me as possible on the bed and fell asleep a few minutes later while I lay awake, staring at her back in the darkness.
The next day I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I made all my morning classes work in small groups. I had no appetite at lunch, and when Carl asked me what was wrong I mumbled something about a cold or my sinuses. On the bus, one of the kids had to remind me to take attendance and only then did I remember that Hattie Hoffman, my favorite student in that class, was out with an excused absence. The drive to Rochester was short and before I was ready we filed into a small two hundred–seat theater with faded red velvet chairs. The room was over half-full and I scanned the crowd as subtly as I could, but no one was wearing a gray dress. Even after the lights dimmed and the play started I kept watching that damn door. HollyG would show up, I knew it. She might show up late, though, just to be perverse. I had no idea what was happening onstage until the student sitting on my left gasped and elbowed me in the ribs. “It’s Hattie!”
“What?” I whispered and she pointed at the stage.
I focused on the play and saw Hattie Hoffman in center stage, exchanging lines with an older woman sporting a severe bun. Flipping through the program I saw her name listed at the top of the page in the title role. The little shit. She didn’t mention a word about it when I passed the permission slips around. I had assumed she’d say something about the field trip, because Hattie always had an opinion on everything, but she’d kept silent with her head buried in a notebook. Had she been embarrassed about being in the play?
I paid attention for a few lines, enough to realize Hattie was actually good. She didn’t try for the English accent, which was smart, and she delivered her lines cautiously, with the exact trepidation Jane would have shown when she announced her decision to leave Lowood School for Girls and seek out her destiny at Thornfield Hall. The longer I watched her the more eerie it got. Hattie usually moved with a deliberate grace; I’d always noticed it because it set her apart from the rest of the kids. On stage that assurance disappeared; she’d become Jane completely. As the scene drew out, the back of my neck tingled. I held my breath when Hattie held hers, looked to the places where her eyes strayed. I was captivated to a point I didn’t totally understand. Maybe it was because she was my student and I felt a sense of pride. Except it didn’t feel like pride, not completely. It was more intense and nagging, like I should know something I didn’t. The other kids and I exchanged smiles, bound in the hushed excitement of discovering a secret about one of our own.
Now Mrs. Fairfax was telling her to put on her best dress to meet Mr. Rochester, and Hattie stood solemnly, smoothing the pleats of her gray dress and nervously straightening the bright cuffs. “This is my best dress, Mrs. Fairfax.”
Her dress. Oh. Holy. Fuck.
The nagging sensation in the back of my head exploded and everything blurred. I swayed forward and when I could see again, the two women were crossing the stage into the adjoining set. The back of Hattie’s hips receded calmly, covered in gray, gray, gray. Oh, God.
No. I wrenched around and searched every single body in the crowd, desperate to find someone else. Anyone else. I was not having an affair with one of my students, for the love of Christ. But there was no one. No one else in the entire theater that could be HollyG. And I knew there wouldn’t be. Subconsciously, I’d known it since I first laid eyes on Hattie on that stage.
The rest of the play passed in a fog. I slid down in my seat until one of the kids asked if I was all right and then I used the excuse to go to the bathroom. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there; run through the front doors and never fucking stop.
I splashed a gallon of water on my face and sat on the toilet for ten minutes, trying to figure out what I was going to do. It wasn’t until the second act that I realized I still had an out. HollyG didn’t know who LitGeek was—I hadn’t given her any clues to pick me out of the crowd. And why would she suspect me? I was providing a field trip, for God’s sake. She was expecting our whole class to be there.
I held on to that and went back to my seat, but nothing suppressed the insanity raging in my head for very long. It wasn’t until Mr. Rochester proposed to Jane that I snapped back to reality.
“Do you doubt me, Jane?” The actor grabbed Hattie by the arms and drew her close.
“Utterly and completely.”
When he caught her in an embrace my pulse started jumping. He was older than me, maybe in his early thirties, so not as old as Mr. Rochester was supposed to be, but close enough. And Hattie was almost exactly Jane’s age, the young innocent who captured the world-weary Rochester’s heart. As Jane realized Mr. Rochester was serious and accepted his offer of marriage, several things happened at once in my head. The detached academic in me thought they’d done a good job casting, except for the fact that Hattie was too pretty to play Jane. The teacher in me observed the two of them embrace, her delicate pink cheek brushed up against his grizzly five-o’clock shadow, and felt uncomfortable and protective. And the rest of me just watched her lithe frame wrap around a man twice her age and took a long, hard swallow.
And that reaction was going to stop right now. Jesus, how many headlines had I read about some teacher having an affair with a student? It was usually female teachers, all desperate, insecure, unevolved women who deluded themselves into thinking they loved these idiots. I never blamed the kids. Teenage boys would have sex with a banana peel, but the teachers had no justification worth the breath it took to say. They should have done what I was going to do right now. End it. Stop it before it even began, or at least before it knowingly began. There was no way I could’ve known HollyG was Hattie. HollyG was Hattie was Jane. Her identities shifted in front of me, none of them quite capturing the girl on stage who was now running away from Mr. Rochester in her wedding dress. Their definitions couldn’t hold her any more than the actor could make her marry him. At least she was running away from an already married man. It was the only flash of comfort as I waited for the torture to end, that at least some version of her was doing the right thing.
When it was finally over, the cast filed out in front of the curtain and we all stood and clapped. The actor who played Mr. Rochester pushed Hattie out in front of the line and the applause multiplied as she took a bow. Then, in the middle of the ovation, she looked directly at me and slowly, deliberately, ran her hand down the arm of her dress to her cuff. The corners of her mouth crept up and her eyes lit with a hundred meanings. I felt the obligatory return smile fall off my face and my hands froze in mid-clap.
She knew.
