Chapter 20
A quick lie to my boss, a speeding drive home, a cloud of perfume, a flurry of clothes, and countless creams, lotions, liquids, and powders later, and now, finally, I’m here, walking toward him, the curdled dread from two hours ago vanished and replaced with a glowy euphoria.
“Hey Waldo, how’s it going?” he asks, his breath white in the cold air.
“I’m good, how are you?”
“Pretty good, pretty good. Happy to see you.”
“Happy to see you too.”
He throws the tail of his flannel scarf over his shoulder and smiles at me.
I debate going in for a hug but the moment passes, and with it my window of opportunity closes.
A disproportionate wave of regret washes over me.
Had he wanted me to initiate the hug? Maybe he expected me to.
Maybe it would’ve been inappropriate for him to initiate.
It was up to me and I failed. Should I do it now? Don’t do it now, it’s been too long.
“Shall we?” he asks, motioning toward the tip of the coastal trail.
We start our walk. He asks me about my future and I ask him about his past, and something in that feels heavy—the assumption that my life is ahead of me and his is behind him. That twenty years is the difference between a life that’s considered yet to be lived and one that’s considered over.
I tell him that I haven’t really thought much about my future, and his eyes fade with disappointment the way Frannie’s did when we were making vision boards last New Year’s Eve (her idea, not mine).
Hers was filled with cutouts from LDS magazines—happy families, cute dogs, the Brigham Young University campus, Book of Mormon passages, pretty white temples, crisp tradwife dresses, and arbitrary quotes meant to evoke positivity but that for me evoke a vague sense of doom: “You’ve got this!
” and “Keep going!” and “You can do anything, but you don’t have to do everything!
” By the time she’d finished her collage, I’d barely glue-sticked the backs of a Lunchables magazine ad and some pictures of Jeff Probst.
“Waldo, you’re not take-een this seriously,” she said. “You oughta care about your future more. You oughta give it some thought.”
I later asked Mom for her point of view, if she thought I should start prepping my college applications and brainstorming career options, or even just not blowing every paycheck on BB cream and pleather jackets that need to off-gas for three days before I can be in their vicinity without gagging.
“Oh, please, Waldo,” she said with a wave of her hand. “College is a trap.”
“You think?”
“For you? Yes. It’s a trap. You’re too you for college.
College is for people who fit molds. Systems. Boring people who can wear uniforms and rehash the same three sentences as water-cooler conversation and be okay with that for the rest of their lives.
Bring a cream cheese ball to the Christmas party, get two drinks deep, grab their co-worker, do a karaoke duet of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and call that wild.
You’re a different kind of wild. An actual wild.
You’ve got a lot in you. You’re bursting at the seams. You’re unique.
You’re creative. An artist, if you ask me.
And an artist sure as hell doesn’t fit into systems or neat little cookie-cutter molds. Nah. College wouldn’t serve you.”
Then she told me that it’s important I live in the present. That I stay young as long as I possibly can.
“And don’t stop buying those fake leather jackets either,” she added. “They look real cute on you, with the boxy fit, you’d never know they were poly-whatever.”
I know both Mom and Frannie meant well, but being told I don’t take things seriously enough by the person who takes everything seriously, or being told to stay young by the person who never grew up, doesn’t quite carry the weight that they want it to.
You can never really believe someone if all they’re telling you is to be the same as they are.
“Well, if you ever wanna talk more about your future with somebody, brainstorm about it, I’m here.” Mr. Korgy smiles.
“Thanks.”
I learn that Mr. Korgy is from Florida, just outside of Orlando. He could see the Disney World fireworks from his backyard. His family even had passes. I ask if he gets back often—he doesn’t—if he’s still close with his parents—he isn’t—and if he has any siblings—he pauses.
“No actually, I, uh, had a little sister.”
I settle into the significance of the “had” as we pass an older woman with gray hair and head-to-toe workout gear, sweatband and all.
She’s smiling right into the sun, like she’s walking straight out of a poster on a doctor’s office wall.
An ad for a pill that’s supposed to make menopausal women feel like themselves again, the name alone doing some heavy lifting with its clinical-yet-breezy nonchalance. Wyestra or Winlevia or Estrozen.
“Have a good day!” she says over her shoulder. Someday, I will try that pill.
I ask Mr. Korgy when his sister died and he tells me he was sixteen and she was fifteen, that she had lots of friends and straight A’s and a bright future.
“Freak accidents never happen to burnouts,” he says. “Always to the promising ones. The photogenic ones.”
He’s the one who found her. He knocked on her bedroom door one night for dinner and she was taking a while to come out.
“I was surprised it was taking her so long cuz Mom had made her favorite—rice bowls with snap peas and water chestnuts. Little bits of pineapple.”
He heard the shower running so he knocked louder, and louder, and louder, then eventually went into her bedroom and started knocking on her bathroom door, and yelled her name, but there was no response. So he opened the door and saw her there, splayed out on the ceramic tiles.
“Mom never made rice bowls again,” he says, “and I still hate water chestnuts.”
He looks up at a tree and pretends to scratch his eye, and says that he shouldn’t have said all that. That it’s not an appropriate thing to tell a student. I tell him it’s fine and that I’m glad he did, I’m glad that he trusted me.
“I do,” he says. “I do trust you.”
He stops to take me in, and I take him in. A pair of overly aggressive cross-country skiers jet past us, trying to prove how tough the workout is with their exaggerated huffs and puffs. And just like that, the moment is lost.
We keep walking and I ask Mr. Korgy why he moved to Alaska. He tells me Gwen’s parents are an hour away, out in Palmer, and she wanted to be close to them.
“Were you nervous about moving to a place so different from home?”
“Honestly, excited. We’d visited Alaska a few times and when we did, we explored the whole state.
Hiked up in Juneau, took a charter plane out to Ketchikan.
I loved the mountain ranges and the northern lights and the whale watching and the glaciers and all the natural wonders.
But then once you move here, it’s no longer a vacation.
It’s your life. And you stop exploring. And you realize, you don’t live in Alaska, you live in Anchorage.
Alaska is a monumental paradise, Anchorage is a sleepy town with no culture and barely a pulse, where the local music is bad and the local art is worse.
The city lights drown out the northern lights, and you have to drive three hours to see a glacier. ”
We walk past a row of houses lining the trail, all with sprawling lawns and big pine trees.
A couple of them already have Christmas lights up.
Mr. Korgy asks which is my favorite and even though I don’t particularly like Christmas decorations I point to one and he says he prefers the one next to it.
“More classic,” he says. “Give me a string of lights, a tastefully decorated tree, and I’m good.”
I try to make a joke about the one I pointed to but I’m secretly flooded with embarrassment.
Of course the girl who shops at Shein and eats frozen dinners six nights a week pointed to the house with the Santa’s Workshop blow-ups.
I love that he knows better, but I wish I did too.
I wish I knew how to be tasteful. To not have the stink of white trashness trailing me wherever I go.
“Something the matter?” he asks.
“I just…wish I knew all the things that you know,” I say.
“Well we’re even then,” he says, “because I wish I knew all the things that you know.”
And then I slip on a patch of ice and he reaches his arm out to grab mine and keep me from falling, and I smell him, and I feel him, and my ears burn, and my heart pounds so fast I feel it in my throat, and before I even know what’s happening I’m leaning toward him, my lips getting closer and closer to his, until finally, they touch.
“Oh my god,” he says, pulling away.
He stands there in front of me, arms at his side, frozen.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I say.
“You kissed me,” he says, stunned.
“I just thought—The way we talk, the things we talk about, I thought—”
“Waldo, you’re seventeen and I’m married and I’m your teacher,” he says sternly.
“I know. I know that. But the way you look at me. The way you look at me is—You look at me like you see me. All of me. I just felt like there was something between us.”
“Oh, Waldo,” he says, a heaviness taking him over. “I do see you. But I’m sorry to tell you, you’re wrong about the nature of this dynamic. You’re very wrong.”
The Christmas lights blur as tears well in my eyes. I swallow them back down. It’s not that he’s telling me I’m wrong, it’s that I know I’m not.
“I know you feel something too,” I say. “We don’t have to do anything about it, just don’t lie to me. Tell me the truth. That’s what you value, right? The truth?”
“I’m really sorry, Waldo, but I am telling you the truth. I know it’s not the thing you’d like to hear, but it’s the truth.”
A ringing in my ears. It grows louder and louder until it screams. I see my parked car up ahead in the distance and start walking toward it, then as the shame festers it catapults me into a sprint.
As if I can run it off. Run off the shame of being foolish.
And delusional. And unaware. And naive. The shame of my limitations.
My perspective. My desires. I get in my car and shove my key into the ignition. The engine sputters.
“Goddamnit,” I say, giving it another shove. It sputters again. And then it fizzles out.