Chapter 4 Dirty #3
The classroom breaks into shocked, fractured laughter. The boys pound their desks with their fists, and the girls’ mouths go wide with delighted disbelief.
“No ladies for Father Simon?” Jackson says, his expression gleeful.
“No dudes, more like,” Hannah says, scathingly. “You know how half these priests are.”
The laughter reaches a fever pitch. People are howling, stomping their feet, doubling over with peals of laughter.
Why did she say that? What is happening? Why can’t she feel her own body?
Hannah’s face burns. She doesn’t know where to direct her eyeline. She cannot bear to look at Baker.
The laughter dies when Ms. Carpenter stands abruptly from her stool, her eyes searing into Hannah’s. “This discussion is over. Hannah, I will speak to you after class.”
Hannah withers in her seat. She has never felt so ashamed.
“We’ll spend the rest of the hour on Their Eyes,” Ms. Carpenter says in a hard, decisive voice. “Take out your books.”
The class follows suit immediately. They have never seen Ms. Carpenter like this, and nobody wants to push her further. Hannah digs her novel out of her book sack with her body still burning hot. She feels like her skin has been turned inside out.
“Someone tell me,” Ms. Carpenter says, clearing her throat, “what is Hurston trying to do with the scenes of Janie beneath the pear tree?”
Ellie Thomas raises her hand to answer the question, and Marty Carothers speaks after that, and after a little while, the classroom returns to its normal, humming state.
But Hannah sits with her shoulders hunched and her throat full of bile, and next to her, at the edge of her peripheral vision, Baker spreads her fingers over her book as if she can draw strength from its leaves.
Ms. Carpenter meets Hannah’s eyes when the bell rings for lunch. “My desk,” she says, pointing to the back of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah says before Ms. Carpenter can sit down.
“I’m not interested in a thoughtless apology,” Ms. Carpenter says tersely. She settles herself in her desk chair and burns Hannah with her eyes. “I’d rather hear the why behind what happened.”
Hannah struggles to keep her face neutral. The seconds crawl by while she reaches for something—anything—to say.
“I just … don’t like Father Simon.”
Ms. Carpenter gives her an impatient, expectant look, almost like she knows Hannah is failing a test on purpose. Her eyes bore into Hannah’s, searching for the real answer, but Hannah can’t risk being transparent right now. She clenches her jaw and affects the mean, hard edge she had an hour ago.
“Liking and respecting are two different things,” Ms. Carpenter says finally.
“Well, I don’t respect him, either. Him or his religion or his faith. Any of it. It’s all just a huge fabrication that’s been used to oppress people for ages.”
“Cynicism doesn’t look good on you, Hannah.”
“I’m not being cynical, I’m being truthful.”
Ms. Carpenter gives her that long, knowing look again. “Whatever you are being, it’s not truthful.”
Hannah inhales from her stomach.
“I don’t know what’s bothering you,” Ms. Carpenter goes on, “and I don’t need you to tell me. But I do need you to understand that words mean something, and the words you used just now were very damaging.”
Hannah’s heart hammers in her chest. “I wasn’t being damaging, I was just speculating. Besides, so what if I’m right about him? How is that damaging? Because he’s not supposed to be that way?”
She winces at the slight crack in her voice, but Ms. Carpenter doesn’t acknowledge it. “Damaging because you insinuated it would be a bad thing.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You weren’t going for the laugh? You weren’t trying to wound?
Your words were meant to hurt. Not just Father Simon, but anyone who could have been listening.
What if one of the boys in class has feelings for another boy?
You just told him you think that option is laughable at best and perverse at worst.”
“But—but that’s not what I—”
“Just answer this question: What was the purpose behind what you said? Was it to wound? Was it to hurt? Did your words come from a place of hatred?”
Hatred. It’s a word Hannah has never associated with herself before. To her horror, her eyes start to sting with tears.
“I wasn’t—” she croaks. “I wasn’t trying to—”
“I know,” Ms. Carpenter says, her voice much softer now.
“And I know you weren’t acting like yourself.
I’ve known you for four years and I’ve never heard you say anything like that.
But, Hannah, we have to take ownership of our words.
Words are powerful. They can breathe life, or they can devastate.
And when your words carry hatred, or shame, or when they make people question whether they’re loved—Hannah, you don’t want to own words like that. ”
Hannah’s tears are falling freely now. She watches one splash onto her hand, her face burning with embarrassment again. Ms. Carpenter offers her the box of tissues on the corner of her desk, but Hannah ignores it. She swallows down the bad things and asks, “Can I go?”
Ms. Carpenter watches her for a moment, but then she nods. “Go ahead.”
Hannah hurries out of the room and into the empty hallway. She pushes into the bathroom and checks beneath the stalls for any saddle-shoed feet, but thankfully there are none. Then she shuts herself into the farthest stall, leans her head against the cool tiled wall, and breathes.
“I heard you got in trouble in Ms. Carpenter’s class today,” Joanie says after school. She stands across from Hannah in their mother’s yellow kitchen, snapping pretzels in her mouth. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing.”
“I heard you said some shit about Father Simon.”
“Everyone’s been saying shit about Father Simon.”
“So did Ms. Carpenter give you detention?”
“No.”
Joanie snaps hard on a pretzel. “What’d she do?”
Hannah turns her back on Joanie to heat a bowl of leftover rice in the microwave. “She just talked to me.”
“Talked to you? What, like, lectured you?”
“Yeah. Kind of.”
“Ms. Carpenter’s so cool,” Joanie says. “I can’t wait to have her next year.”
“She’s all right.”
“She’s awesome. You’ve been saying that for years.”
Hannah shrugs.
“Jeez, what’d she do, shout in your face?” Joanie says. “I thought you loved her.”
Hannah pushes the microwave to stop it from beeping. “She just spewed a lot of bullshit.”
“Bullshit,” Joanie repeats. “What kind of bullshit?”
“Jesus, stop being so nosy. She just irritated me, okay?”
Joanie bites a large pretzel in half and stares Hannah down. “You’re probably just pissed because she was right about whatever she said.”
“Shut up, Joanie.”
Hannah takes the rice up to her bedroom and shuts the door with her foot.
She sits on the end of her bed and stares across the room at her bookshelf.
A Separate Peace. To Kill a Mockingbird.
The House on Mango Street. All the books she read as a freshman in Ms. Carpenter’s English 1 Honors class—back when Ms. Carpenter still taught freshmen, before she switched wholly to seniors—stand side by side on the top shelf.
They are small and unassuming, their spines crinkled in a way that makes Hannah nostalgic for the fourteen-year-old girl who had not yet opened them.
The other books Ms. Carpenter gave Hannah to read outside of class—The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bell Jar, A Lesson Before Dying—books that Hannah then passed on to Baker—stand next to them.
Hannah sets her rice bowl on the bed and walks over to the shelf, running her fingers across the tops of the books, touching the dust that proves just how long ago she read them, just how long ago she was that bright-eyed freshman girl.
She trails her finger down the spine of A Separate Peace and remembers, with the soft coloring of memory, the first moment Baker existed in her world.
She can still see the configuration of the classroom—the plastic-topped desks separated into two rectangular formations, each one facing the center of the room.
She can still see Ms. Carpenter, the first teacher to show them that high school would not be scary, sitting on her wooden stool in the middle of the tiled floor.
And she can still see the back of the head of the girl in front of her—the girl with the thin yellow headband over her long dark hair—who, on the third day of class, when they were taking notes on Ms. Carpenter’s discussion of A Separate Peace, turned around and looked at Hannah with big, anxious eyes.
“Can I borrow a piece of paper?” she had whispered, her voice nervous. “I gave my last piece of loose-leaf to someone in first block. I can just use, like, a torn-off piece of your paper”—she had pointed at Hannah’s sheet—“if you want.”
“Sure,” Hannah had said, sliding her paper forward, “but are you sure you don’t want a separate piece?”
Baker had faltered for the briefest second, not getting the joke, but then she had smiled as if she’d stumbled upon the best surprise in the world.
Hannah had given her a fresh sheet of paper, and after class they had walked to the cafeteria and waited for each other in the lunch line, and by the end of the day Hannah couldn’t remember what life had been like before her.
Hannah smiles at the memory, pressing her forehead against the bookshelf. But then, like a flash of lightning, a newer memory lights up her brain: Baker’s blazing eyes, her ragged breathing, her wet mouth on Hannah’s in the bathroom.
“No,” she whispers through gritted teeth. She weaves her hands into her hair and tugs hard. “Stop it.”
She abandons the bowl of rice and tears her skirt, blouse, and knee socks off her body. She turns the shower on as hot as it can go and waits for the steam to hide the mirror. Then she steps into the near-scalding water and sucks air over her teeth until the pain stops.
There is an ache in her chest, stretching from the left side of her torso to the right. It’s heavy and it hurts and the pressure is only getting worse. She wants to rip it open and sob until everything comes out, but she can’t.
All she can do is grab the soap—lather her hands—scrub at her heart, her stomach, her inner thighs, eradicating earliest evil from her body.
Things go back to normal with Baker. They talk at their lockers and laugh at inside jokes during lunch.
They work together in Ms. Carpenter’s class and hang around each other’s cars in the parking lot.
They spend the last day of February writing papers at Garden District Coffee, and when Hannah looks up and sees Baker mouthing words at her laptop, a large mug of dark roast clutched in her hand, she has a hard time remembering the girl from the bathroom: All she sees is her best friend.
The only thing that’s not normal is the unspoken new rule: They can never talk about it.