“I’m Siobhan Brown,” she said, lifting her hand. “Wesley’s mother, much to his dismay.”
Evan laughed graciously and took her hand. “Evan Wilke. Wesley’s teacher.”
“Maise’s teacher too,” Wesley said.
Evan glanced at me and said, “Right.”
Oh my god. I should just make a run for it.
“It’s so weird seeing you here,” Wesley said.
I felt I needed to say something, or my silence would become noticeable. “What, teachers can’t have real lives?”
They all looked at me, and suddenly I wondered whether I’d just blurted out the whole sordid confession. We’re sleeping together. He’s E. Stop f**king staring.
“It’s not much of one,” Evan said, and smiled. The incredible thing was that he could smile like I was just some student, some girl, and yet I saw the brief flare of warmth in his eyes, a secret message just for me.
You really are an actor, I thought.
“Good to see you guys,” he said. “And so nice to meet you, Ms. Brown.”
“Wait,” Wesley said, brandishing the stub of his pretzel, “you’re leaving already?”
I could have decked him.
Siobhan wore an appraising half-smile, the painted mask making it slightly sinister, and for the first time I realized how dangerous a woman she was. “If you don’t have much of a life, you’ll fit right in with us.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
“Seriously,” Wesley agreed.
She piqued an eyebrow at us. “These two think I’m preventing them from having fun because I’m the parent. Such failure of imagination.” Her look turned sly. “A handsome bachelor will remedy this appalling wholesomeness.”
“Mom,” Wesley said, “please do not flirt with our teacher.”
Evan laughed, genuinely, a little shyly. “I’m flattered, really, but I’ve got papers to grade.”
I darted him a warning look. You don’t give out papers, Mr. Wilke. You think papers are bullshit.
“Another time, then,” Siobhan murmured.
Evan smiled at each of us, and when he looked at me his eyes flickered to my hand, then back to my face. You could have clocked him with a stopwatch. He didn’t spend a single extra millisecond on me, yet he’d told me everything. I clenched the ring in my fist.
He walked away. Wesley jammed the end of his pretzel into his mouth and said, “Kinda sad that he comes here for fun.”
“We come here for fun,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’re losers.”
Siobhan clucked her tongue. “One percent of your share is going to your sister.”
“Mom,” he said. “You already said that like five times this week.”
I laughed. “Your sister’s going to be rich, Wesley. Better start being nice to her.”
Siobhan smiled at me. But as we turned back to the carnival, her eyes held mine, and I knew that she knew. Everything.
—8—
The only way to cure an obsession is to become obsessed with something else. So I did: my semester project.
I was infatuated with Terrence Malick those days, especially his latest stuff: Tree of Life and To the Wonder, films that evoked the old silent era of storytelling. They were fragmented, visual, more stream-of-consciousness than stories with clear dramatic arcs. Watching them wasn’t so much like watching a movie as dipping yourself into someone’s memories. Wisps of dialogue floating atop swirling, too-close images. Music drifting in and out like something heard from a passing car. Echoes and shadows.
I had built up a library of clips now, mostly from St. Louis, visual mementos that only held meaning for two people. Sunlight rolling off the striped awning at the chocolatier where Evan bought me pralines that he fed to me by hand. The velvet ropes at the Tivoli where I’d kissed him in a crowd, no longer self-conscious. Our bare feet, side by side, after we’d walked across the stepping stones in the Citygarden downtown, the water shockingly cold, drying in the pale autumn sun.
I strung them together without stopping too long to cut or trim. I wanted it to be messy, overlapping, spontaneous. I pasted bits of text here and there, faded in a verse of one song, then another. I was trying to speak in several different languages at once, visual and verbal and musical, and what came out was a babel of color and sound that eventually became incomprehensible, smearing into impressions of feeling, mood.
It was exhausting. I pulled off my headphones and rubbed my sore ears.
You’re so quiet, I IMed Wesley, who sat across the computer lab. We’d decided not to show each other our projects so we wouldn’t cross-pollinate. Are you watching porn?
Ha ha ha, he responded.
How’s it going?
Okay. A pause, then, Want to see? IDK if I like it.
Believe in yourself, I said, and surprise me.
October had felt slow, but November ran through my fingers like sand. The only tedious parts were, ironically, in Evan’s class, where I sat watching him act like a teacher, watched the fine spiderweb of cracks growing at the edges of his facade. I ate lunch with Wesley and made myself smile and laugh, no matter how robotic it felt. The weekends weren’t enough anymore. I showed up at Evan’s apartment on school nights and he told me it was a bad idea and let me inside anyway, taking me in his arms as if we hadn’t seen each other in months. Those nights were almost too intense, edged with hysterical urgency, my fists crumpling his bed sheets, his hands pulling me close to f**k me deeper, none of it ever giving us more than a few hours of respite. The weekends in St. Louis were sweeter, more relaxed, the rapid city paradoxically slowing us down, but every Sunday a gradual dread would build, a coil in my chest tightening and choking until it felt like my life was ending when we got in the car. Melodramatic, but in a way, it really was. The life I had with him felt more real than the one I’d lived on my own.
There was one day where it became more real than I wanted.
We were standing on a street corner downtown, waiting to cross, the wind sharp and peppery with ice, and Evan had said something that made me laugh and when I turned to smile at him, I locked gazes with the driver of a sleek gray Benz idling beside us. Face like wood hacked with a blunt hatchet, eyes that never blinked. Quinn. He looked right at me and recognized me instantly, even in my coat and scarf, and he nodded, once, and drove away.
I didn’t say a word about it to Evan. But it ticked in the back of my mind, a clock that would eventually run out.
Looking back, I can barely remember what we did in those weeks. I have videos and photos to prove it happened. I remember the last leaves falling. Rain turning to needles of sleet. The world tinting to grayscale. But when I think of what we did together, all I remember is how I ached. With anxiety, with want, and with loneliness. Even when I was with Evan, I’d think of how little time we had left before we went back to town or school and pretended to be normal, not miserable and apart. I’d think of the semester ending and switching classes and seeing him even less. I’d think, I hate this. I hate that we can’t be together like normal people. I just want to be with you. And then I’d start thinking about what I was willing to give up for that.
I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns.
Natalie came home to visit, an intimidating girl with pin-sharp blue eyes and Wesley’s long, canine grin and her mom’s acerbic wit. She was nice to me, though, and we ganged up on Wesley and took him to task for the assorted Evils of Men until he threatened to call his dad. Then alliances shifted, and Wesley and Nat turned against Siobhan. I sat on the sidelines and listened to family stories. Siobhan taught them not to break curfew by waiting for them in the dark kitchen one night in a white gown, holding a chef’s knife. Nat got arrested for shoplifting a bottle of vodka, which Siobhan said was doubly stupid because they had way nicer stuff to steal at home. Wesley fractured his collarbone when he made a DIY helmet cam and recorded himself trying to jump his bike over a truck (also ruined a $500 camera) (also the reason he never rode bikes).
The house was full of candlelight and the smell of cinnamon and sweet potatoes. Wesley flicked my ear, and Siobhan put her arm around my shoulder, and Nat joked with me like she’d known me for years, and I thought, You are my real family. I made up a fantasy that they’d accidentally lost me as a baby, and I’d been raised by a scheming witch addicted to her own potions, and the truth of my parentage only came to light on my eighteenth birthday, when the curse masking my identity lifted. Now we were finally together again. I drank too much rum punch and got teary and excused myself for some fresh air.
Siobhan followed me onto the back deck, closing the glass door behind her. She tugged an afghan around her shoulders. “Cold?”
I shook my head. The alcohol sent my blood rushing to the surface. I felt like all of me was gathered on the outside of my skin.
Siobhan sat beside me on the wooden rocker. The sky was so clear it made a deep cobalt matte behind the trees, dusted with a scattering of silver stars. The moon was a thin white fang. We hadn’t really been alone since Halloween, and a sober corner of my mind worried about this.
“I’m glad you came tonight,” she said.
“I’m glad you invited me.”
She smiled, her eyes moving frankly over my face. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Oh, shit.
Siobhan turned away. “I love my children more than anything in this world. Even more than I love the alimony payments. And you’re starting to feel like a daughter to me.”
Heart palpitations.
“I know there are things you keep private from everyone.” She glanced at me. “And I want you to know that I will never tell anyone unless you ask me to.”
I exhaled. A weight slid off my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she said.
“I can’t. It’s not what you think. It’s not bad. I just—I can’t.”
She nodded, as if that was the answer she’d expected. Her heavy-lidded eyes caught tiny sickles of moonlight. “Did Wesley ever tell you about his father?”
“No.”
Siobhan smiled, tilting her face to the sky. “When I was twenty, and very stupid, and very pretty, I was utterly in love with my economics professor. It is one of the most unsexy subjects, but the way this man talked about numbers was obscene. It helped that he was f**king gorgeous, too.”
I laughed.
“There was a boy in econ who always sat next to me and found excuses to talk. He’d share his notes if I daydreamed during class—and I did a lot of daydreaming about that professor.” Her smile deepened. “This boy was persistent, so I made a deal with him. If he could ask the professor a question which he answered incorrectly, I’d agree to one date.”
I pulled my knees up and rested my chin atop them, waiting eagerly.
“The boy thought about it for a while, and then he asked, ‘Will Siobhan go out with me tonight?’ And the professor said, very decisively, ‘No.’ So the boy, thinking himself clever, asked me where I’d like to have dinner, and I said I’d tell him later.” Her teeth flashed as she spoke. “After class, I asked the professor why he’d answered ‘no’ with such certainty. Do you know what he said?”