Chapter Thirty-Eight
Esha: do you want me to fight her for you
Esha: I am not above that
Nova: you are absolutely above that
Nova: and if one of us is getting kicked out of school, it should be me
Esha: no it shouldn’t.
I have to psych myself up to walk into the building.
I sat in my car until the last possible moment, and when I finally got up and headed inside, I pretended I was going anywhere else.
The crumbling, oversized welcome mat under my feet was sand between my toes.
The whoosh of the automatic doors was the sound of an elevator taking me to the top of a New York City skyscraper.
The overfilled garbage can that should’ve been emptied last week was …
well. It was still a garbage can. My imagination isn’t powerful enough to will away that smell.
I make it into the building, and I’m still looking at my feet. Counting the speckles in the linoleum. Most of them are black, but every tenth one or so is a fun purple.
Only … there are too many sets of feet clustering around me, suddenly. I look up, but only because I recognize one pair of those brown leather Chelsea boots.
“What’s going on?” I ask Hayes. He’s almost ruthlessly calm. He doesn’t answer my question, but I see determination in the set of his shoulders. In the furrow of his eyebrows.
Everyone’s looking at me, because everyone’s here. I meet each and every gaze. That same determination is present in all of them, and I’m beginning to feel like I’m not in on the joke. (It’s not an unusual feeling for me, but I don’t love it.)
Professor Lowry comes out of her office down the hall.
My gut drops at the sight of her. Such a small woman.
And yet, she eviscerated me two days ago.
My heart was butter, and she held a hot knife.
As she steps closer, I try to feel something other than my intense heartbreak.
Some shred of anger. Some morsel of indignity.
Lowry stops abruptly. Her zebra-print chiffon skirt swishes around her ankles. She’s a whole zoo. It should be so unbelievably ridiculous to be intimidated by someone who looks like this. Like a cartoon Disney villain.
“What’s going on here?” she asks, only meeting my eyes. I wish I had an answer for her.
Olivia’s expression as she looks at the professor is menacing in a way that’s mildly terrifying. I reach out for Hayes. It’s a reflex. My fingers land on his elbow. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
“None of us are going back to your class,” she says. I gasp, because that was the absolute last thing I thought she’d say.
The pieces start to fall together into a horrible picture where this is all about me.
“Not until you apologize to Nova.” Brittany joins Olivia, shoulder to shoulder. Arms crossed. Feet planted.
“Yeah, we all know that you said some awful stuff to her,” Kelsey adds, her eyes blazing. “We’re thinking about complaining to the dean.”
The whole class has closed ranks in front of me. I can’t see Lowry’s expression from where I stand, not through the wall of humanity and hair bows. Hayes squeezes my hand.
Lowry laughs. It’s bitter and dark. This is just unreal.
She takes a couple of steps closer to us all.
I can see her now. Her eyes are glassy, as if she’s been taken over by a kind of anger I don’t think I’ve ever seen.
Somewhere deep in my chest, the remnants of my heart shatter again.
Shards flutter down to the pit of my stomach and leave my insides bleeding in their wake.
I don’t know what I did that made her hate me this much.
“You—” She points at me.
I hear footsteps. Heels on linoleum. Lowry does too, and she stops talking. I know those footfalls; the cadence of those clacks is familiar.
Hayes smiles. We’re standing so close that I can physically feel the victory rolling off of him in waves, and time seems to slow down.
“Dr. Lowry,” I hear Mrs. Jacobs say.
Hayes winks at me. I still don’t know what’s happening here, but I suddenly feel a thousand times better about it. Some of the shards of my heart start to sparkle.
“If you have anything more to say to my student, I suggest you say it to me first. In your office. Now.” Her heels continue to clack all the way to Lowry’s door, and as if compelled by magic, Lowry follows.
I nearly sag to the floor in relief. My body feels like it’s held together with wet cement. As the door to Lowry’s office slams, a cheer goes through our little circle.
“What the fuck just happened?” I ask no one in particular.
Hayes chuckles, and I feel myself smile in response.
“I called for backup.” His hands move to my shoulders, and he turns me to face the rest of the class.
Olivia comes up to me first, and I shock us both.
I hug her. I’m not sure what possessed me to do that, but I don’t really have words for how grateful I am for what she just did.
So this seemed like the next best thing.
I hug her and Kelsey and Brittany, and I thank everyone else with as much sincerity as I have left in what feels like the hollowed-out hull of my soul.
After that, everyone drifts away, smiling, since, obviously, there won’t be class.
Finally, it’s just me and Hayes in a silent, empty hallway. He tugs on my hand, and I follow him into the equally silent, empty classroom.
“Did you really organize the troops?” I ask, even though I know he did. There’s no other plausible explanation, plus his pride in his scheming is obvious. He is beaming. I almost regret how I’ve contributed to inflating his ego, but I’m pretty sure it was worth it.
“Yeah.” We sit down in our regular seats, and I throw my legs over his lap, resting my heels on the edge of his chair.
“Yeah? That’s it?” I use my heels to scoot him closer to me. “Care to elaborate?”
“I told you, I called for backup. She can’t talk to you like that.” He shrugs. Everything always seems so simple when he explains it. I bet he could try to teach me the general theory of relativity and I’d get it.
“But … everyone was willing to go to bat for me? Just like that?” I look down at my hands and start picking at my cuticles again.
“I barely even had to ask.” He covers his hands with mine so I’ll stop peeling away my own skin. “Because they barely had to ask you for help.”
“What about Mrs. Jacobs?” I ask.
“Well,” he starts, pushing my bangs behind my ears. “You have one English teacher scared enough to want you out of her class forever and another who would probably fight an eighteenth-century duel for you if it was legal.”
“It wasn’t legal in the eighteenth century, either.” I giggle.
He rolls his eyes, and then his hand stills on my cheek, stray waves threaded through his fingers. I wrap my fingers around his wrist. Just to keep him there.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
My mind races through the past few months, all those times I expected him to be harsh when he was kind. When I’d expect sarcasm and he gave me sincerity. When I expected a brush-off and he gave me his undivided attention.
He runs his thumb back and forth over my eyebrow. My lowered lashes brush against his palm.
“I massively fucked up once. I caused a scene at your expense just because I didn’t know how to handle my own shit. Least I could do was cause a scene for your benefit this time.”
His hands fall from my face, and they wrap underneath my knees. He hauls me closer, until I’m almost sitting in his lap. He leans in, and my lips brush against his. It’s the faintest pressure and the most heightened sense of awareness.
“Wait.” I pull away, just far enough to breathe. “You always take care of me. When I have a migraine or a meltdown or …” I think of how to describe the situation we’re currently in. “Or when I cause an academic incident.“
He laughs, a hiss of a chuckle that I feel on my lower lip.
“But I want to take care of you too. Coming up with a paper topic is just the start, okay? I can do more. I know you’re …
distant with your family, and when you’re here, you have this cool persona like nothing bothers you and it doesn’t matter.
But things do matter, Hayes. You, for instance.
You matter to me. And I want you to tell me things. ”
Hayes leans forward barely an inch. Just enough to sigh into my mouth and put his hand on the back of my neck. Those sparkling shards of my heart burst into flames. Fire is a chemical reaction, he’d say. It makes irrevocable change. Shards to ashes to … something brand new.
“Does the sanctity of this classroom mean nothing to you?” Mrs. Jacobs says from the doorway. Oh my God. This is the most embarrassing moment of my life.
We spring apart like repelling magnets. My chair slides across the floor so fast that it nearly leaves my butt behind. I almost hit the linoleum.
“There’s no sanctity left in this classroom,” I tell her.
She quirks an eyebrow, and I realize how that sounds. I think I hear Hayes choke on his own spit.
“Not because of … us. Because of her.” I gesture to the front of the room, like that desk is contaminated forever by Lowry’s horrible energy. It wouldn’t surprise me if she haunted the room like the ghost of a pissed off Victorian child.
Mrs. Jacobs nods.
“Nova.” She’s a gun and my name is a bullet.
It’s a center-mass hit, and she hasn’t even fired yet.
“You should’ve come to me with this. You have come to me for everything over the years.
I have watched you cry and celebrate and figure out so much about yourself and the world, and I am so proud of you. You’re smart and talented and generous.
“But you have to ask for help sometimes. Of all the things in the world, your English class is arguably the thing I’m best prepared to help with. And instead of asking me for that help, you picked up the weight of the world and walked around for weeks with it on your shoulders.”
She’s mad at me, but I try not to think like that. If I do, it’ll crush me, and I can’t withstand any more crushing pressure. I try to just listen.
“I’m sorry,” I admit, finally meeting her eyes.
“Trying to salvage everyone’s understanding of American literature by managing their projects yourself was basically the last thing you should’ve done in this situation, but you did a bang-up job.
You’re going to be an incredible teacher someday, Nova.
You just have to promise me you’ll learn how to ask for help before then. ”
“I will.” It’s a promise, and she knows it. Hayes squeezes my hand. I don’t even remember when he grabbed hold of it again.
Mrs. Jacobs turns and moves toward the door. I want to ask her what’s going to happen to Lowry, and to our grades, and to our class. But it doesn’t seem like the time for that now. She turns back to look over her shoulder at the last second, one hand on the doorframe.
“You should’ve come to me after the first Jane Austen movie. You know we can’t trust an English teacher who prefers the wrong version of P-and-P.”
Those heel-clacks lead her out of the building, and then it’s just me and Hayes again. He stands up, still holding my hand. I follow. My mind is racing, all the guilt and the strange pride and the fierce gratitude and the possibilities of what this could all mean.
Hayes and I stand. I rise up to my tiptoes, my hands twining through the messy curls at the crown of his head. His eyes are dancing, and they’re so shiny I can see my own reflection. Such a deep brown on the outside, golden in the middle.
How he feels about me: it’s right there, in that ring of molten bronze. In the way his fingers grip my waist, his thumbs running back and forth over the worn fabric of my T-shirt.
He’s more than made the past up to me.