Chapter 10
DARCY
The library on a Sunday afternoon is my favorite place in the world, and today I'm hiding in it, which at least is traditional.
My creative-writing workshop meets in the back corner by the tall windows.
Eight teenagers, a circle of mismatched chairs, and a folding table holding the good snacks, which is to say the snacks I buy myself because the Friends of the Library budget believes teenagers can be sustained on butterscotch discs.
Eight regulars today—Lisa, Dee, Michael, two of my fourth-period sophomores, the Oakley twins, and Joshua Cline, who joined three weeks ago and has spoken aloud in the circle exactly twice.
We're in the last half hour, the share circle, where everyone who wants to can read a page of what they wrote this week to the rest of the class.
I am being an entirely adequate teacher and an absolutely terrible listener.
Lisa is reading a piece about her grandmother's kitchen that deserves my whole attention and is getting maybe sixty percent, because the other forty is still in a red Ferrari at my curb, listening to myself go off like something I'd been storing in a sealed jar since middle school.
I meant every word. That's not the problem. The problem is the look on Finn’s face when I said them, which was not the look of a man being told something he already knew.
And the problem underneath that problem is the morning itself—four hours of Finn Bardot bleeding for a cat's approval and being a chew toy for a herd of puppies and not quitting on a job that has made grown men surrender both their stomachs and their pride.
I mean this sincerely. What am I supposed to do with a villain who is an otherwise amazing person, except, apparently, when it comes to me?
"Ms. Gable?" Lisa has finished. The circle of students is looking at me.
"Good work, Lisa. The sentence about the steam on the window," I say, because sixty percent of me is still a professional. "Read it again, please. Everyone listen to what the verb is doing."
We're two readers from done for the day when the lobby door opens outside our makeshift classroom. Slow footsteps walking carefully, the air seeming to hold a charge. I know before I look. I feel him the way I feel a storm gathering. Eight teenagers swivel like weathervanes.
Finn Bardot, showered, changed, is standing at the edge of the stacks looking like he rehearsed a speech the whole drive over and lost every word of it crossing the parking lot.
"Sorry." He half-raises a hand. "Mr. Albrecht from the bookshop said you'd be... Never mind. I can wait. Or go. I should probably go."
"Oh my God," whispers one of my sophomores, with the volume control native to her species. "That's the guy from the auction. That's the billionaire."
The circle detonates into murmurs. And then Joshua Cline, who eleven days ago could not return a library book without rehearsing the transaction, stands up out of his chair.
"Mr. Bardot! We're doing share circle. You can come listen. There's snacks."
I watch Finn take in Joshua, the circle, me. Whatever he came here to say folds itself up and goes into a pocket. "I don't want to interrupt."
"You're not," Joshua says, with the new authority of yesterday's archway behind him, and drags a ninth chair into the circle.
And that is how Finn Bardot ends up sitting between a sophomore who keeps photographing him with her eyes and a folding table of off-brand cookies, in my library, in my student circle, two rows of shelves from where I used to hide from him.
The anger I feel toward him is still in the jar on the counter where I left it. I'm aware of it the whole time, a kettle that hasn't whistled yet.
Michael reads his piece about the ferry.
A girl named Dee reads a poem she disclaims four times before starting, and Finn listens to all of it with that total attention I watched him spend on Joshua's drill grip yesterday.
Afterward he asks Dee which line came to her first when she wrote it, which happens to be the exact right question, and I hate how much I notice that it's the exact right question.
Dee, who disclaims everything she's ever written, sits up like a plant getting water.
I hate, more specifically, the warmth doing slow laps under my sternum.
Nursing a grudge requires the grudge to hold still, and he keeps picking mine up and handing it back to me as something else.
This morning I emptied a sealed jar of accusation over his head and he took every word of it.
Now he's sitting in a folding chair asking shy teenagers the right questions about their writing, and the part of me that is not angry—the part I keep declining to acknowledge—is leaning toward him across the circle like a sunflower with no self-respect.
Then Joshua opens his folder.
"I finished this story," he tells the circle, and then, hesitantly, turns to Finn. "It's got engineering in it. There's a bridge." He pulls out two typed pages and holds them across the circle. "Will you read it out loud for me, Mr. Bardot? You'd do the voices right."
The room goes warm and agreeable. I try not to feel the small pang of jealousy over the fact that my students evidently love him.
Why wouldn’t they? He’s the fun adult, the hero of the archway, the hometown celebrity sitting in the ninth chair.
Two of the kids start a quiet chant of "read it, read it" that I should probably stop before it gets out of hand.
I wait for Finn to seize the spotlight. That’s his natural habitat, after all. Eyes on him. Center of attention. Class clown, with no regard for who becomes his punchline.
But Finn doesn't take the pages.
"Nah. That's your story, man." His voice is easy. The smile is in place. "Author reads his own work. That's the rule, right, Ms. Gable? You don't hand the Super Bowl to a guy off the street."
"You're not off the street," Joshua says. "You built the arch."
"And you wrote that story. Trust me, nobody wants to hear me read."
"I do," Lisa says, which prompts six other nods from the circle. Joshua is still holding the pages there, in the air, in front of Finn.
It’s obvious to me the kids want what they want. And something about the look on Finn’s face—a look that seems to say he’d rather be anywhere but here now—makes the smallest, pettiest part of me lean forward and join the chorus.
"Go ahead, Mr. Bardot. You’re the one who interrupted our class, and this is a sharing circle. That means everyone shares. So, read for us."
He looks at me. The reluctance I saw a moment ago gets replaced with his usual showman’s bravado. Bright flash of a grin. Shoulders square once more. Eyes leaving me to play to the rest of his eager audience.
"Sure," he says. "Okay." And takes the pages.
The first sentence is fine. The second sentence is fine, and then it isn't. He says "bride" where the page must say "bridge," because the kids giggle and Joshua corrects him, friendly, and Finn laughs.
"Right, not bride. That's a different story." And he starts the sentence over. I'm half-smiling along with everyone else.
Then I'm not.
Because I'm a teacher, and I've sat with struggling readers in after-school sessions for eight years, and my body recognizes what's happening before my brain agrees to it.
The pace, too even, word by word, like a man crossing a creek on stones.
The finger he's anchored under the line, dragging.
The skipped line he doesn't notice until the sentence stops making sense and he has to circle back.
The way "through" comes out as "thought" and "felt" arrives as "left. "
Not random errors, the specific ones, the documented ones, the ones I have a folder of strategies for in my classroom filing cabinet.
The sweat at his hairline in a cool room.
The joke after every stumble, deployed faster and faster.
The class clown materializing in a thirty-two-year-old man, and the kids laughing because they think it's a bit—he’s doing a bit, the fun adult is hamming it up.
He's not hamming it up.
My hands have gone cold around Lisa's pages.
There's a pressure building behind my ribs as I listen to him. It’s not pity.
Pity looks down, and what I'm doing is the opposite of looking down.
I'm watching a man sit in the middle of a room and bleed without letting a single drop show—jokes deployed like a tourniquet—and what I feel is closer to awe.
And underneath the awe, arriving completely unexpectedly, I feel a pull from deep inside me.
A true caring that I want to deny, but can’t.
Not now, like this. Especially like this, the honest part of me amends, because the showman I can resist. The showman I can keep under the heading of “enemy” and feel justified.
The Finn I’m seeing right now—for the first time ever—is not the showman.
Everything starts making sense in a way I’ve never considered before.
The boy in the back row of Mrs. Peters' English class who turned every read-aloud into stand-up.
The essays he "lost," three separate times.
The vocabulary quizzes he gummed shut—my quizzes—the ones with all the words spelled correctly, graded A-plus.
The smartest-mouthed boy in school who never, not once, in all the years I can find anywhere in the archive, read so much as a sentence aloud in front of anyone.
The lacrosse captain who never read the morning announcements, when captains always read the morning announcements.
Instead he did push-ups in the booth while his co-captain read them, and the whole school thought it was hilarious—and it was, that was the point—it was designed to be hilarious.
Dictionary Darcy. He didn't hang that name on me because words were my weakness.
He picked it because they were his.
Oh, my God. All these years of evidence, and I graded every page of it wrong.
Finn Bardot is reading aloud to children because a shy boy asked him to, and because I, despite knowing exactly how it feels to be made a spectacle in a room full of laughter, smiled and told him to go ahead.
"...and the cables would hold," Finn reads, one word after another, jaw tight, finger under the line, "as long as the... anchor... points..."
I stand up. "Okay, you know what? My voice is getting jealous."
I cross the circle and slide the pages out of his hands with the smooth classroom efficiency I'd use to confiscate a phone. "I’ll read now. Teacher's privilege. Joshua, this paragraph is excellent. Everyone, listen to what he does with the load-bearing metaphor..."
I read the last page and a half in my read-aloud voice, the good one, and I do the voices right, and the kids applaud Joshua, who glows.
Finn sits very still in the ninth chair with his hands flat on his thighs and a smile on his face that is to his real smile what a photograph of a fire is to heat.
He applauds Joshua with everyone else. I stand there holding two typed pages and understand, with a teacher's whole-body certainty, that I am watching a man perform the hardest physical act of his day, and that hard act is the simple task of sitting still when his entire body must be coiled and itching to run.
I have the inexplicable urge to cross the room and put my hand over his flat hands and tell him what I tell my after-school readers: That the page is not a verdict. That nothing that just happened in this circle is a verdict.
Friday night I bought this man at an auction to humiliate him. None of my tactics worked. He rose above every degrading lesson I tried to teach him. Now, the syllabus has gotten badly away from me.
"That's time," I announce, though it isn't, quite. "Revisions due next Sunday. Take the snacks."
They scatter the way teenagers scatter, in a single loud organism. Joshua stops to pump Finn's hand and say something I can't hear, and Finn answers with something that makes the kid grin, because even now, even like this, he can do that.
And then the organism is gone through the lobby doors, and Finn is up out of the chair, moving for the side exit without looking back at me.
Not running. Men like Finn don't run unless they’re chasing adrenaline.
He’s moving with an implacable mechanical calm—a proud man refusing to be party to a scene he hasn’t approved.
I stand in the wreckage of folding chairs with Joshua's story still in my hand.
The boy who called me Dictionary Darcy couldn't read the dictionary. He could barely read the cafeteria menu. And forty minutes ago, in front of children, I handed him a page and smiled as I pushed him over the ledge.
I drop the story on the table and run.