Chapter 24 #2
“Don’t use people,” another one calls out.
Dallas nods, agreeing with their answers. We don’t usually go to prison for breaking a moral rule, but there still might be consequences. As he’s well learning.
Dallas moves around the back of the desk in front of me, ignoring my eyes. “Has anyone ever stolen anything and gotten away with it?” he prompts.
The students exchange glances, trying to hide their smiles.
When no one offers to out themselves, Dallas’s hand rises into the air.
Slowly, hands start to pop up, hesitant kids admitting they’re not angels.
“Would we steal more if we knew there’d be no consequences?” Dallas asks them. “And if the wrong people wouldn’t find out?”
I tilt my head. What is he getting at?
Again, no one wants to take a chance answering him.
He goes on, “Okay, how many of you have a crush on someone you’re not dating right now?”
“You can’t ask that!” the Martinez girl scolds him.
He shrugs, turning back around and returning to the front of the class. “I have to curate my lessons to interest my audience.” He gestures to her with his hand. “Look how interested you are.”
Giggles go off.
“So come on,” he tells them. “How many of you?”
Slow, Atlas Wade raises his hand, followed by the Patton kid. Whitney, I think?
A couple more hands rise in the air, and I lock eyes with Dallas, seeing the amusement there. Does he think I’m going to raise my hand, too?
“If they liked you but weren’t available,” he continues, pacing. “Their boyfriend or girlfriend had a death in the family and they didn’t feel right adding more stress or something. Would you steal away with them for a few minutes in a bathroom stall or out in your car in the parking lot?”
The kids shift in their seats, stealing glances at one another, because no one wants to admit the dark side of our character. We all have one.
“Maybe,” Dallas answers for them, letting them off the hook. “Maybe not.” He meets my gaze, drifting down the aisle toward me. “Maybe we don’t know ourselves as well as we think until something happens that makes us reexamine how we see ourselves.”
Is he insinuating my behavior is a reaction to his? Took him long enough to figure it out. I wouldn’t just impose a curfew for this long without that motivation. It would seriously hurt businesses and people’s livelihoods. He, on the other hand, famously dumps his fucks once he’s done with him.
My shittiness is circumstantial. His is a personality trait.
“So you’re online,” he tells his class, “you see what happens in the world, the awful things people do. Why are they doing it when it’s wrong?”
“Poverty,” Mason Kenmont yells.
Ginny shrugs. “Wealth?”
“Two very different groups of people,” Dallas points out.
Just like him and me.
“One knows they could get caught,” Whitney says. “The other knows nothing will happen if they do.”
“Like Sanoa Bay and St. Carmen,” Sophia chimes in.
I jerk my head, seeing her glance from Dallas to me.
“Right?” she asks.
I keep silent, not appreciating the insinuation that we’re evil and any crimes happening in Sanoa Bay are simply out of necessity.
But she’d know more than anyone, so I keep my mouth shut.
“True.” Dallas nods. “We aren’t angels, either, but when it’s for the common good, it makes our behavior righteous.”
He grins, his class already laughing.
“So you share resources?” Martinez asks.
He replies, “Our wealth is community property, yes.”
Wealth? Does he mean they’re rich in love? Poetry isn’t Dallas’s style.
“So for some,” he calls out, “virtue is a luxury they can’t afford.
But you can.” He looks around at his class.
“The question for you is, do you submit to virtue because it’s demanded of you…
or would you choose virtue even if it weren’t an expectation, and why?
” He nods to Sophia, and she hops off the sill, passing out sheets of paper.
“Are there exceptions to consider? Any special circumstances that would make a difference?”
He pulls up the screen in front of his whiteboard, the question he just asked written behind it.
Wealth…
“No names on your papers,” he drones on. “You have the rest of class.”
Community property…The wheels in my head turn.
“Anna-Katherine,” he prompts, and I watch my stepsister flash me another smile just before she turns on some music.
Rising, I leave the classroom, fisting my keys in my pocket.
The community won’t like it…Jerome had said.
Community property.
Wealth.
The history…Jerome had said.
Cemeteries are protected lands. Laws prohibit disruption of the grave sites, and to move a burial ground is…
I charge out of the school, rushing to my car.
Moving a burial ground takes a shitload of bureaucracy, especially if those fucking graves are historically significant.
Passing a cop, I speed over to the Bay in six minutes, turning left at Mariette’s and coasting down the dirt road. Stopping at the Bay’s only cemetery, I get out of my car, the morning wind sweeping through my hair.
The new construction is visible immediately, and I step up to the massive Jaeger family tomb, three steps leading up to a wrought iron double door.
The weather has already cast a haunting decay over the angels on both sides and ivy climbs the side.
Plaques sit posted on both sides of the door, waiting for more names to be engraved.
Only two are written there now.
Axel John Jaeger
Trysta Eva Jaeger
His parents weren’t here before. I remember seeing their graves when we came to fuck around that night back in high school and search for the treasure rumored to be buried in the graves.
Of course, no one believed there was real treasure, but I looked for any excuse to run into Dallas after he ended our fling.
Traipsing through the overgrown grass and weeds, I move for the far corner, near the woods, keeping an eye out for snakes. I pass old headstones, some cracked, some broken, some in the dirt, half-buried.
I read the names. Perez, Batista, Castillo, Lopez…
When I come to the end, a small bouquet of short-stemmed lavender roses lies on a patch of grass. Fresh flowers, still sprinkled with whatever rain came in last night. I look over to the tomb again and back down to the land with no headstone, the space beside it empty of a marker, too.
It doesn’t look dug up. It’s possible they could’ve exhumed them years ago while I was at school, and the earth settled, the grass grew back.
But the flowers…
I glance at the tomb again, my heart starting to race. His parents are still here, in the ground.
What’s in the tomb?
As I look around the graveyard, the ground appears different in front of certain headstones. Some of the oldest ones, in fact.
Rather than being covered with overgrown grass, the soil appears rounded, the sprouting grass sporadic.
As if the burials haven’t settled yet, but they’re hundreds of years old.
Why do they look…
I turn my head to the tomb and back to the graves. Dropping my eyes to the flowers, I start to smile, understanding dawning.
Tipping my head back, I laugh. “Oh, you motherfucker.”