Page 22 of The Academy
“How are you planning on getting the alcohol?” Charley asks.
“I’ll find a connection.”
Charley laughs. Her night is turning out to be way more interesting than going to First Dance. “Aconnection?”
“It’s going to work.” He gazes around the room. “We’ll make it really nice. Highbrow. Like Saint Tuesday in the city.”
Charley has no idea what he’s talking about. She has been to New York only once, on a school trip: Museum of Natural History, Statue of Liberty.
“Why me?” she says. “Why not Davi, or one of the Olivias?”
“Do I really have to answer that?” East says. “They’re a hive mind. I need an independent thinker to partner with me on this.” He pauses and squeezes her hand. “That’s you. You’re the only one I would ask.”
At that moment, Charley hears… footsteps? Then a faraway voice calling out,Hello? Charley?
“Shit,” East says. He ushers Charley out the north-side door. “You go this way, down the tunnel, up the stairs, out the door of ClassicNorth, and back around to your dorm. I’ll go deal with this. I don’t want anyone to see the room. Once they know it’s here, it’s all over. Go.”
Charley goes.
Simone creeps down the stairs like the doomed heroine in a horror film. She stops halfway to text Rhode.I’m in the basement of Classic South in case I never return and people are looking for my body, LOL.She hits send, but the service is sluggish. Yeah, no shit, she’s on a journey to the center of the earth.
At the bottom of the stairs is what can only be described as a tunnel, and from what Simone’s weak phone light can show her, it looks pretty cool. There’s a cement floor, a bricked barrel ceiling. Simone moves tentatively forward, aware that she could come face-to-face with the boogeyman at any second. She calls out for Charley; her voice bounces off the walls, back into her face. She feels ridiculous. There’s no way Charley is down here.
When Simone’s phone illuminates the torso of a live person, she screams.
“Miss Bergeron?” the person says. “It’s me, East.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god.Simone bends over in order not to faint. She can’t speak, she can’t breathe, and a trickle of urine runs down her leg into her sneaker. She has never, in her life, been so frightened.
“What,” she says, “thehellare you doing down here?”
East laughs and reaches out to touch Simone’s bare shoulder. “Relax,” he says. “I’m sorry I scared you.” He leaves his hand on her shoulder. Men are crossing all kinds of boundaries with her tonight, but now Simone doesn’t move.
“Wow,” he says, and he gives a low whistle. “You lookreallyhot in that dress. Maybe I should have come to the dance after all.”
Simone knows it’s time to step away and admonish him, but whenshe hears his words,You lookreallyhot,her heart revs like an engine. East is so cute with his floppy dark hair, his dark eyes, that brooding expression, that for a second, Simone feels helpless.
She revisits Rhode’s question.Do you have any students who stand out?
Simone noticed East the instant he loped into her classroom. She thought he was in the wrong place: He seemed so much older than the other students, more mature, a man among boys and girls, which makes sense now that she knows he’s nineteen. He didn’t lift a pen or open his laptop to take a single note, but she felt the pressure of his undivided attention; every time she checked, he was staring at her. It was like some teacher-student fantasy. Simone imagined unbuttoning her blouse for him.
When he left the first day, he stopped by her desk and said, “I get the feeling this is going to be my favorite class.”
Simone cleared her throat. She needed to get a grip. “Why, thank you, Andrew. I hope so.”
“East,” he said. “Everyone just calls me East.”
After a week and a half of classes, East has yet to raise his hand in discussion, and he hasn’t turned in a single response to the reading. The one time Simone called on him, asking his thoughts on Thomas Morton’s reflections on the Native Americans, he’d given her a smoldering smile and said, “You know, I haven’t formed an opinion one way or the other on the topic.” A hoot escaped from one of the Madisons while Charley Hicks scribbled something in her notebook. Both reactions let Simone know that she should press the point—either expose East publicly for not doing the reading or ask him to stay after—but both choices felt sticky, so Simone let it slide.
“East,” she says now. She means her tone to be a reprimand, but it comes out sounding like an invitation. East slides his hand up to the curve of Simone’s neck. Before she knows what’s happening, he bends down and kisses her.
She will push him away, she thinks. She will tell him there’s no world where a kiss between teacher and student is okay. But for just a second, she lets it happen. This moment issoforbidden—and for that reason, irresistible. She allows his lips to linger on her lips, his tongue to seek out her tongue.
Then she hears a voice. “Simone?”
Simone pushes East away. She spins around, holding her phone up. She sees a pinpoint of light moving toward her from the direction of the stairs. It’s Rhode, with his own phone, striding down the tunnel.
“Hey,” she says. She’s caught, she thinks. Busted. Do they subject faculty to the Honor Board? No, Simone thinks. She’ll just be fired and deported, sent back to Canada to make café au lait for the rest of her life. She’ll never teach again. That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case is ending up like that teacher who went to jail for sleeping with her student.
