Chapter Thirty-Nine Bram
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bram
Take a seat, Mr. Loe,” she says, looking over at me.
Longing rips through me, followed by empty, cramping pain. I haven’t seen her in two weeks, and my memory has played me false, because she’s more beautiful than I remembered, more arresting. Just her eyes on mine is enough to make me want to drop to my knees. And beg. Beg beg beg.
But there is some animal sense of self-preservation buried in me yet, and I don’t move.
It hurt enough to muster all that polite grace when we had to share the twins’ afternoon and evening routine—I don’t know that I can endure being told again that I’m an impediment to her future, that I’m a decent fuck and nothing else.
It’s so much easier to be dormant, frozen, the structure of myself and nothing more, than be here and present and looking at her.
Then Maddie taps her finger on the desk, angling her chin so that she’s looking at me with a cool sort of impatience. “Don’t keep us waiting.”
I—I don’t know what to make of this, but there’s something about the way she regards me, with the authority I taught her to wield, in clothes nothing like her focus-grouped florals, that has me obeying like I am indeed a sheepish first-year late to class.
I close and lock the door behind me and then walk between the desks.
“Good boy,” she says, and I feel the tips of my ears heat as I pause in the middle of the classroom to take a seat. “No, no, not there. At the front. So you can show me that you’re eager to learn. Excellent.”
I carefully remove my coat and scarf and drape them over a chair.
And then I take a seat at the front, my frame barely fitting in the desk-chair combo, and fold my hands together on the desk.
They’re shaking a little. She’s so close.
She’s so close and I don’t know if I can handle whatever this is, but right now, she’s looking at me like she’ll follow me if I leave.
Like she’s already got a taste for my blood.
“I know you’re used to seeing me teach political science, but today, I’m teaching anatomy,” she says crisply, walking over to the dry erase board and uncapping a marker.
“Maddie—”
She looks over her shoulder at me, the long lashes and upturned nose and carmine lips in profile. She doesn’t speak, but the curve of her eyebrow says it all.
“Professor Kowalczk,” I correct myself. “We don’t have to—I don’t want to—” I stop, because I don’t actually know what I want to say next. I don’t want to autopsy our relationship on a cold Friday night; I don’t want to have my unwanted love dragged out in the open like Exhibit A.
I also want to spend the next thirty-seven hours committing the dimples above her exposed knee to memory.
“I think we do have to,” Maddie says, turning back to the board. “And I thank you for not interrupting me again, Mr. Loe.”
Her voice is smooth and emotionless and immovable—she’s an extension of the building itself now, made of limestone for how affected she is by my interjection.
If I weren’t so nervous, I’d feel a little bubble of teacherly delight at that.
If nothing else, she has this now, this strength in commanding a room.
“So,” she says, drawing a little circle with a smaller circle inside it. “Our anatomy class starts with this.” Two stick figures are drawn above the circle, one with a dress and the other comically larger.
I shift in the tiny chair, the wood creaking ominously under my ass, trying to reach for the calm everyone says I’m famous for. I’m nearly frantic with the terror that this lesson is going to leave me in the corner of a room again, trying to coax the comfort of a hug out of the walls themselves.
Maddie ignores the creaking. “First, we have me. The half-orphaned girl who spent her adolescence watching money disappear out of her brother’s hands like it was leprechaun gold.
The girl who thought the biggest way she could change the world was by marrying one of the changers.
And then was kicked out of her own life and had to build a new one with no notice, with no idea who she wanted to be or how.
“Next,” she says, tapping the marker next to the giant stick figure, “we have you. The divorced professor who loves his babies and moss. The good guy with a secret bad guy past. The orphan who never felt at home.” She turns to face me.
“I talked to my landlord about you this week. Do you know what she told me?”
I shake my head. I have no idea what Sloane would have said about me to Maddie.
“She told me that your grandparents sucked. Really bad. She told me that when she first met you, you still slept with a night-light on, even though you were the biggest guy she’d ever met. She told me that sometimes you’d cry when people hugged you.”
I look away, at the windows, my throat hurting and my jaw tight.
I’m not upset that Sloane told Maddie these things—it’s knowledge in the public domain—but it’s still not easy to have it all reflected back to me.
It wasn’t easy as a kid and as a teen, when it was bullies like Leo doing the reflecting, and it isn’t now, when I’ve finally had enough therapy and internal security to be able to do things like sleep in the dark, like exchange a hug without the oxytocin taking me out at the knees.
I’m not that Bram anymore, and it’s embarrassing to know I used to be.
“Bram,” says Maddie softly. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t turn my head, but I move my eyes to where she stands at the board.
“When you grow up without a lot of money, it’s easy to think that anyone who had it better than you must have been universally blessed, that they must have had everything.
I assumed because you grew up comfortably that you must have grown up happily, and I’m sorry for that, because it led me to unfair conclusions about you. ”
“Don’t,” I start, and then pause to swallow, because my voice sounds like how I feel. “Don’t be sorry. Please. My childhood wasn’t that bad, and also it wasn’t your fault.”
“No, but this is my fault: I misunderstood you. Everything about the way you live your life. I thought you didn’t know what it meant to want, to have to scrape and scrap and claw out just the tiniest piece of happiness; I thought you grew up with happiness in the air and soil and so it was a part of your DNA.
I didn’t see what I should have, which is that you were only able to make a house full of plants and daughters, full of cuddles and mess, a home because you did have to fight for it.
Because you had to choose it. And you were trying to choose it with me. ”
There’s the faintest flicker of movement in her throat, just under the ruched collar of her sheer blouse, but before I can observe it again, she’s turned back to the board.
“Next part of the lesson,” she says, drawing two little bean shapes. “What fuels us. I want to change the world.” She labels one of the little beans and then moves to the next one. “What fuels you, Mr. Loe?”
The answer is immediate. “The kids. My job. Watching you change the world.”
A slight tremor in her hand as she labels the second bean. Then she draws a couple ovals with squiggles inside. I’m starting to see what’s happening, I think.
“Now to what we actually need,” she says quietly.
So quietly that I barely hear her. “Because I thought that I wanted complete autonomy, unfiltered progress. I thought I wanted to be exactly where Gentry is now. I thought if I could stomp my way to the center of everything and just fix it, then I’d have anything I’d ever wanted.
But I ran into Penelope Pike at LAX, and together we watched the news cycle about Gentry’s peccadilloes, and it made me realize that I don’t need to be Gentry.
I need to be the person who makes sure there are better options than Gentry, and that there are better options not just in one district but several. And I need . . .”
A pause. She looks down and to the side, so I just make out her profile beyond her near-onyx curtain of hair. Her eyes are almost closed and her jaw is taut with some kind of misery.
I want to get up and leave before she can say whatever she’s about to say next. I want to stand up and take the marker out of her hand and scrawl I love you all over the board.
“You,” she says after a deep inhale. “I need you.”
My heart beats once, hard enough to shake my ribs, and then collapses into a frantic arrhythmia.
“But,” she says raggedly, “there’s this.
” A big oval smashing against everything else she’s drawn.
No squiggles, but she tilts her hand sideways and starts writing without stopping.
What if I’m wrong what if I’m making the same mistake what if I’m weak for falling in love right after a breakup what if this ruins my future what will people say what if I love you more than you love me—
I push out of my desk chair, my skin made of sparks, my heart both doing too much of its job and not enough, and I walk to the board. She doesn’t move, one arm still lifted to her badly sketched vacuole, her shoulders moving with every breath.
Even in her heels, she’s so much shorter than me, and it’s too easy to take the marker from her.
I start drawing something like a ribbon folded unevenly on itself, with little circles around it.
She stays frozen, but frozen in a way where I think she feels—as I do—the vanquishing gravity of the single inch between us.
The way that every movement of my hand, every deep breath, shrinks the space between us to almost nothing.
I finish drawing. The Golgi apparatus. The processing and shipping department of the cell. “What if you’re wrong?” I ask her.
“What?” she whispers, sounding dazed. I wish I could see her face.
“What you wrote in the vacuole—I’m asking you to answer the question because that’s what a classroom is for. Answering questions. So what happens if you’re wrong about needing me?”
“Then I—” A breath. “I’ll be okay. It’ll hurt a lot, but I’ll be okay.”