“Maise,” he said. “I’m worried about the kind of relationship we’re developing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to be your teacher if it’s all that’s driving this.”
“It’s not,” I said immediately, but his hands tightened on my wrists.
“It is, to some degree. Be honest.”
“Don’t act like it’s all me. You liked telling me what to do when you were f**king me in class.”
He breathed deeply. Lamplight ran up one side of his body, gilding the rungs of muscle over his ribs, his roped arms. “I did. And that scares me a little. We had something real before we became teacher and student.”
“This isn’t real?” I said.
“It is. Of course it is.” He squeezed my hand, pressing the ring. “But even if everything goes perfectly, it won’t last forever. It’s over in June, one way or another. And I don’t want it to end. I want to keep you. I want to hold on and never let you go.”
No one in my life had ever said anything like this to me. I felt disembodied again, but this time because my body was too full to contain me, too crowded with light and stars and shimmering galaxies like pinwheels studded with diamonds, spinning their brilliance into the void without caring whether it would ever be seen, just needing to shine. The bed beneath me was cloud, my skin a sheet of moonlight lying atop it. And this man, this amazing, impossible man, was the sun.
“You can’t, though,” I said, trying to defuse the intensity. “Remember? You can’t hold on to a shooting star.”
He smiled, looked away. Released me.
“Besides,” I said in as light a voice as I could manage, “you can’t dump me as your student yet. You still haven’t shown me Casablanca.”
“Promise not to mock me if I cry?”
“Nope.”
“Heartless.”
I blew on my nails and rubbed them on the sheet.
Evan laughed, and tackled me, and wrestled me still and kissed me and started the entire cycle all over again, my numb and tired body somehow rekindling, quickening, giving itself up to him.
And the whole time I wondered, If you weren’t my teacher, who would you be?
In his class on Halloween that Thursday, I felt hot, feverish. Not in a good way, but with a curl of nausea in my stomach, a feeling like my body was moving too fast, about to slam into something. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at the whiteboard where he’d held me and put his fingers inside of me. I couldn’t look at Hiyam, her smug eyes glazed with knowing. So I spent the period staring out the windows. Everything was flame shades of tangerine and pomegranate, ripeness on the brink of decay, and when the wind rippled the leaves they looked like a mosaic of fire, like the walls of the Cathedral Basilica. The bell rang and I sighed in relief, following Wesley out.
“You’re actually coming to lunch?” he said.
Cortana and Master Chief walked past, stopping for a group pic with Spock and Kirk. We were allowed to wear costumes as long as they weren’t “disruptive.”
I held Wesley’s gaze. For a moment I could imagine not being in Evan’s class anymore as a good thing. As freedom. “What are you doing tonight?” I said.
He shrugged. “There’s a party I’m thinking of hitting up.”
“Where?”
He glanced at me briefly, then away.
“Hiyam’s?” I said, my voice rising.
“So?” He looked so ridiculous when he was embarrassed. Too much landmass to be self-effacing. “She invited me.”
“She invited you,” I repeated. “She didn’t invite me.”
“I guess you pissed her off.”
“Well, have fun,” I said, turning away.
He followed me down the hall. “Maise, come on. I just thought, since you’re always busy at night…”
He trailed off. Neither of us looked at each other.
“What are you doing tonight?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“This is the last night of the fair. Want to go?”
My turn to shrug.
“You should,” he said. “And I’ll show up and accidentally run into you. We can do a meet-cute.”
I glanced at him, amused, and also feeling a cold frisson of unease. Paranoia. Secrecy. It was bleeding into every part of my life, staining everything.
“You’d ditch the Princess of Persia for me?” I said.
He grinned his friendly wolf grin, and I thought, You are a better friend than I am.
It was cold that night, the sky layered with clouds, sheets of cirrus shifting and moving in parallax and occasionally opening like a lens to expose the stars. Siobhan drove us and I insisted she come with, which almost killed Wesley. The truth was that seeing the carnival up close again set off demolition charges in my chest, and I needed all the distraction I could get from the crumbling, collapsing feeling inside me.
It should have been us coming back here. Me and Evan.
In the autumn chill, there was less drunken glee. The laughter that rang around us was crisp and dry. I wore skinny jeans and a hoodie, and whether I was too covered up or because they thought Siobhan was my mom, no man tried to eye-fuck me. I felt very young. We rode the merry-go-round together, and I half-heartedly played tag with Wesley while Siobhan sat on a white tiger, laughing her chiming, melodious laugh. I could see a glimpse of the girl she’d been, savvy and self-possessed, full of mysterious humor. She caught me staring at her and smiled.
“Let’s ride the rollercoaster,” Wesley said as he leapt off the platform.
I froze in my tracks. “No way.”
“Why not?” Then he saw my face. “Is the fearless Maise O’Malley actually scared?”
I’m not scared, I thought. It’s sacred.
“Bullying is grounds for disinheritance,” Siobhan said.
“Mom, this is not bullying. It’s friendly concern.”
“I’m afraid of heights,” I lied. It was the easiest way to shut him up.
But he gave me a funny look, and I thought of swinging out from the crow’s nest. Shit.
Siobhan came to my rescue. “I feel a strong desire to be used as a human canvas. You’re welcome to join me.”
We all sat down, mercifully spared from talking as the face painters worked on us. Wesley got snake fangs at the corners of his mouth, and a freckling of scales. I got a feline rim of kohl around my eyes and abstract whiskery scrolls on my cheeks. But Siobhan went full-out: a feathered mask across the bridge of her nose, complete with stick-on rhinestones and black lipstick. Wesley shook his head, embarrassed, but I beamed at her.
“You’re beautiful,” I said sincerely.
Her fingers grazed my ear. “Sweet child.”
As we walked through the game stalls, Wesley leaned close and whispered, “Do you have a crush on my mom?”
I elbowed him in the ribs, hard. But after a moment I whispered back, “Platonically. You’re so lucky, and you don’t even appreciate it.”
He scowled and walked ahead. But he knew I was right.
The distraction didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. In the funhouse, my reflection stretched out like taffy, a pale girl with haunted black-rimmed eyes and long empty hands. I thought about how I was pulled between two selves: the normal one who went to school and hung out with her friend and his mom, and the secret one who conspired with drug dealers and slept with her teacher. I found a broken mirror that split my face into Picasso shards and lingered there, unable to look away. He’d warned me. He’d said it would be hard to deal with the secrecy. And it wasn’t the secrecy itself that was difficult—it was that not talking about it made me question whether it was even real. I was still a teenager, and part of being a teenager was constantly checking your answers against everyone else’s. What did you get for number four? Is falling in love with someone twice your age gross, weird, amazing, or all of the above? The secrecy insulated me in a vacuum-sealed bubble. I could only ask myself, How does this feel? Is this good? Is this right? And the only answer I ever got was my own echo.
Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d Google things. Is it wrong to have sex with your teacher? The answers were useless to me. I wasn’t a minor. I wasn’t being abused. It had started before we ever set foot in school together, and it was technically legal. What I really wanted was to read other people’s stories. Other girls and boys who’d fallen for a teacher, and how it ended. Depressingly common tropes: power imbalance, surrogate parent figure, midlife crisis. Worse were the ones that ended when the parties realized taboo was all that held them together. That was what we’d finally been forced to confront: if our relationship was based on forbiddenness, what would happen when it was no longer forbidden?
Wesley and Siobhan bought hot dogs loaded with ketchup and onions and relish, and I told them I had to hit the restroom. Really what I needed was a moment alone. I wandered toward Deathsnake, leaning on the railing and watching the cars click-clack up the track, hair whipping off the sides, voices carrying on the wind. I hadn’t felt this lonely since the night I first met him.
“Maise,” a warm voice said.
At first I thought I was hallucinating. How the hell could he be here? But he walked up to me, squinting, smiling in surprise, a beautiful thing emerging from the blur of neon and smoke. He wore a sweater with the sleeves rolled up, his hair raking messily above his forehead.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
We stared at each other. His surprise was brightening into happiness.
“It’s the last night,” he said. “I had to come.”
“Me too.”
We couldn’t have shown up together, but here we were anyway. It was in the script.
Evan peered at me strangely. “What is on your face? Are those whiskers?”
“I’m a lion.”
He laughed. “You are, aren’t you? My little lioness.”
All the loneliness and confusion I’d felt minutes ago evaporated. “Well, I am a Leo.”
“You’re adorable.” He put a hand against my neck, slid it through my hair. His voice dropped. “I missed you so much today.”
Too late, I said, “Evan, Wesley’s here.”
Siobhan stepped up to the railing a few feet down from us, gorgeous and enigmatic in her painted mask, her dark crepe dress flowing around her like an extension of the night. What was that expression? Surprise? Intrigue? “Hello,” she said pleasantly. “Maise, who’s your friend?”
Evan turned, not knowing who she was, not getting enough distance from me. And Wesley appeared right on cue, gnawing on a giant pretzel and raising his eyebrows.
“Mr. Wilke. What are you doing here?”
I took a step away from him and knelt smoothly to tie a shoe that didn’t need tying.
Siobhan glided forward, smiling. “So this is the famous Mr. Wilke.”
“Famous?” Evan said.
Wesley groaned. “Mom.”
I stood up and her eyes swiveled from him to me. They paused on me a moment. I wasn’t imagining it. Fuck.