Chapter 53
THEN
Mere seconds after I asked for Mr. Loukas, he appeared in the hallway. At first, I felt relief—after the shock of the unfamiliar woman at the door, it was comforting to see a familiar face. But the feeling didn’t last. Not once I saw the way the woman was looking at him.
“Jim, what’s going on?” she said, her voice oddly high-pitched. “Why is this girl coming here?”
I understood that I’d done the wrong thing by coming to Mr. Loukas’s house, even if I didn’t understand why. I assumed that Mr. Loukas would do the explaining, but instead he looked at me, as if confused himself, and waited for me to answer. My cheeks burned.
“I … I …”
“Mabel is one of my history students,” Mr. Loukas said finally. “Mabel, are you all right? Why are you covered in dirt?”
Mr. Loukas and the woman looked at me expectantly. I felt like I’d been caught shoplifting. Except the person I’d been shoplifting with now seemed to be an undercover cop.
“I … I was playing hide-and-seek,” I said finally. “There was a great hiding spot in one of the garden beds. Anyway, I lost track of time and I … I knew this was your house and I thought you might have a phone. I wanted to call my aunt and let her know I’m okay and I’ll be home soon.”
The woman looked unconvinced.
“We don’t have a phone,” she said, her gaze flicking between Mr. Loukas and me.
“No,” Mr. Loukas said. “Sorry about that, Mabel, we don’t.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking everywhere but at me. I wanted him to look at me, to communicate something with his eyes. Something that said that this woman was no one and that he would explain it all later. Why didn’t he communicate that? It made me hate him a little.
From the way the woman was looking at him, I suspected she hated him too.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll just make my way home myself then.”
I expected Mr. Loukas to come after me, to offer to drive me home.
His car was parked in the driveway. Surely that would have been the right thing to do, given the darkness and the late hour?
In the car he’d explain himself and I’d pretend I wasn’t going to accept his explanation, but after he groveled I probably would.
But none of that happened. Instead, I made my way back down his front path.
“Wait!”
I stopped. But it wasn’t Mr. Loukas coming after me, it was the woman. She charged down the path and grabbed my arm. “What’s going on between you and my fiancé?”
Her French manicured nails dug into the flesh of my arm. It hurt a lot, but I didn’t cry out. It gave me a noble feeling to endure it stoically.
“Tessa!” Mr. Loukas started, but she lifted her other hand, palm toward him, even as she dug her nails farther into me.
“Well?”
I wanted to respond, if only to get her to let go of my arm, but the word “fiancé” had short-circuited my brain.
“Right,” she said finally. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
She exhaled, rolled her eyes. “Not his youngest, at least. Though the last girl was much prettier than you.”
She let go of my arm and waited for the hurt and shock to appear on my face before continuing.
“He said he was in love with her. That he couldn’t help himself. He left the school in Adelaide and moved here, and like a fool, I followed. But clearly it wasn’t a one-off. And if he went for someone like you, he isn’t picky. I guess it’s an illness. A fetish.”
She turned and walked back to the house. The door slammed. And I remained there in the darkness.
I needed to leave; Cess would be worried. But …
He had a fiancée.
He had had a relationship with another student. One who was much prettier than me.
He wasn’t my Gilbert. I wasn’t Anne.
He was my teacher. I was an illness. A fetish.
I hated him, I realized. Or maybe … maybe it was something worse than hate. Something darker. Something heavier.
I walked past his Datsun, canary yellow, in the driveway, and found myself giving it an almighty kick.
The impact of my shoe against the rubber was wonderfully soundless, so I did it again.
And again. Unfortunately, as well as being soundless, it was ineffective at causing damage.
So I retrieved my compass from my bag and stuck the needle deep into the tire until I heard the hiss of the air releasing.
It felt good. I wanted to puncture something else.
I pulled out the needle and looked for a moment at its sharp end.
She may have been prettier. But I was Mad Mabel.
I ran all the way home. When I got there, Cess was not happy.
“Where in heaven’s name have you been, child?” she cried. “Look at the state of you! What have you been doing, crawling in the dirt?”
She hugged me roughly, as if she couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or angry. Ostensibly, she was both.
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time.”
“Doing what?”
She’d forgotten herself. Normally Cess was at pains not to comment on the fact that I was socially inept, not the kind of child who got caught up with the neighborhood children, but this comment revealed her true understanding.
“I went to the library,” I said. “And … I tripped over a garden bed as I left.”
I noticed her looking at the marks on my arm where Mr. Loukas’s fiancée had dug in her nails. “That’s how I hurt my arm.”
She looked up at my face. She didn’t believe me. But she didn’t push it.
“Well, get in the bath. Your dinner is cold and don’t think I’ll be heating it up.”
I apologized again and went upstairs for my bath. I scrubbed myself clean. And when I emerged, I found my meal on a tray outside my bedroom door. It was piping hot.