Scandalous

Chapter 19

She floated through the rest of the day.

There was no more precise way to describe it. The quality of her movement through the afternoon — from second period to the corridor to third period to the lunch she ate without tasting to the final two classes she attended with her body while her mind was consistently somewhere else — had the specific, slightly unmoored quality of someone whose interior weather has shifted in a way that hasn't settled yet. She took notes. She answered a question in AP History that she knew the answer to. She walked through the hallways and the quad and the parking lot and the path through the trees with the competent, automatic function of a person whose muscle memory is doing the work while the rest of her is occupied.

She kept coming back to the same moment.

Not the whole presentation — she knew the presentation had been good, she had known it would be, she had spent three evenings with his book taking it apart and a fourth evening putting her argument together and she had stood in front of the class with the calm confidence of someone who has done their work. That part she could look at directly without disruption.

It was the second after she'd finished.

The way he'd looked at her from the front of the room, arms folded, completely still — not the composed stillness of a teacher managing a classroom moment, but the particular quality of stillness that belongs to a person who has been caught off guard at a deep enough level that the composure hasn't re-engaged yet. She had stood there in the back corner and looked back at him and the room had ceased to function as a room in any meaningful sense, it had simply been the two of them across the distance of twenty feet and whatever that distance contained.

And then the word. Barely there, not quite under his breath, not quite in the room — existing in the ambiguous register between internal and spoken, the kind of thing that happens when the filter between a thought and a voice doesn't close in time.

Brilliant.

Her stomach did the thing.

She told herself, for the fourteenth time since this morning, that it was a teacher complimenting a student. This was a category of event that happened regularly in educational institutions and carried no weight beyond its stated content. She had received compliments from teachers before. She had not, on any previous occasion, spent the subsequent eight hours reconstructing them in exact sensory detail.

She walked through the front door of the house, set the alarm, dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs, and went up.

Her room held the particular quality of a space that has been inhabited for long enough to carry someone's frequency — the bookshelves dense with their organized, annotated collection, the reading chair in the corner with its lamp and the stack of current reading on the table beside it, the window seat running the length of the far wall where the last of the evening light was coming through the glass in long, warm strips. The Texas King took up the center of the room with the democratic generosity of a piece of furniture that understood it was going to be used for sleeping approximately forty percent of the time and everything else the rest.

Shae sat on the edge of it. Pulled one leg up, let the other hang, and leaned back on her hands and looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling had nothing useful to offer. It was a very high ceiling — she'd always appreciated the height of it, the way it gave the room room — and it maintained its characteristic silence on the subject of Mr. Kingston.

She lay back fully. Stared at it.

The presentation had been three weeks in the making, technically. She had found the book by accident in the summer — Where The Winds Take Us in the library, tucked between two larger volumes, the small press paperback with its unassuming cover. She had turned it over, read the back, read the first paragraph standing in the corridor outside the adult section on a Tuesday afternoon, and then read the first chapter on the stairs and the second in the car and the rest in the reading chair between nine and one in the morning with the lamp on and the woods outside the window perfectly dark.

She had read it again two weeks later.

She hadn't told Claire about it until she'd decided to do it for the presentation. Claire had said you're doing your teacher's book for the book report in a tone that contained a question she was choosing not to ask directly, and Shae had said it was the most intellectually interesting thing she'd been given to work with, and Claire had given her the look she gave when she was filing a piece of information for later.

The bedroom door opened without knocking, which was Claire, and only Claire.

She came in trailing her jacket and her bag and the end of what had clearly been a phone call she was wrapping up — "yeah, I'll text you later, I'm at Shae's" — and dropped everything on the chair by the door that had, by some organic process of repeated use, become Claire's chair, and then crossed the room and dropped herself onto the far side of the Texas King with the complete physical confidence of someone who has been making herself at home in this room for two years.

She was already fishing in her jacket pocket.

Shae turned her head to look at her without lifting it from the bed. "Hi."

"Hi." Claire produced a pre-rolled joint with the easy familiarity of someone who has performed this specific act in this specific room a number of times and expects no commentary. She examined it briefly, satisfied, and reached for the lighter that lived, by convention, in the drawer of the bedside table on Claire's side. She sparked it, took a long, careful drag, held it with the focused patience of someone who has learned the difference between doing this correctly and doing it fast, and then exhaled in a slow, controlled stream toward the ceiling.

She held the joint out toward Shae without looking at her.

Shae took it. Dragged, felt the warm, familiar bloom of it, coughed once — lightly, the cough of someone who does this occasionally rather than regularly — and handed it back.

Claire was looking at the ceiling with the comfortable, lidded expression of someone settling in.

Then she turned her head toward Shae with the expression that meant she'd been thinking about something since before she walked in the door and was now, having completed the social preamble, going to say it.

"He's got a thing for you," she said. "You know that, right."

Shae turned her head. "What?"

"You heard me."

"I heard you say something that made no sense." Shae reclaimed the joint for another drag, held, exhaled, handed it back. "What the f**k are you talking about."

Claire grinned. It was her specific grin — the one that arrived when she had information she was enjoying having. "Mr. Kingston," she said, drawing the syllables out with the air of someone presenting an obvious answer to someone who has been looking in the wrong place.

Shae rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "Claire—"

"I'm serious."

"You're always serious about things that aren't serious."

"That is incorrect and you know it." Claire took a drag and bounced slightly on the bed — a contained, single bounce, the physical expression of someone who has been waiting to say a thing and is now saying it. "I've been watching him since like the third week of school. The man looks at you like—" she gestured with the joint, a small, searching wave, looking for the word.

"Don't," Shae said.

"I'm finding the right description, give me a second." Another small bounce. "Okay. You know how you can tell when someone's been somewhere really dark for a really long time, like actually dark, not metaphor dark, actual dark — and then they step into light? That thing that happens to their face? That involuntary—" she made a gesture that was apparently meant to indicate an involuntary physiological response "—that thing?"

Shae looked at her.

"That's his face," Claire said. "Every time he looks at you. It's like he's been walking around in the dark for his whole life and you're the light and he doesn't know what to do about it and it's making him slightly insane."

The silence that followed had a particular quality.

Shae looked at the ceiling. She felt the joint reappear in her periphery and took it and dragged and held and did not say anything while she held it. She exhaled slowly.

She handed the joint back.

"You don't read books," she said. "You read people."

"Books are fictional," Claire said, simply. "People are standing in front of me. It's a better use of my time." She dragged, considered, exhaled. "I know I'm right."

Shae was quiet.

The evening light through the window had gone the deep amber of the last twenty minutes before it gave up entirely, coming in at a low angle across the foot of the bed and warming the wood of the floor and the spines of the books on the shelves. The joint moved between them in its easy rotation. The room was the room it always was — her things, her light, the trees visible through the glass, the familiar geography of a space that belonged to her.

She was thinking about a classroom at half past six in the evening, with the banker's lamp making everything warm and the sound of their voices the only sound in the building. She was thinking about the parking lot and a torn piece of notepad paper. She was thinking about two words on a phone screen: Goodnight Shae.

She was thinking, if she was honest — and in this room, with Claire, she was usually honest, or at least in the vicinity of it — about all of the moments she'd been telling herself were nothing and the specific, cumulative weight of all those nothings arranged in a row.

She knew something was there. She'd known it for a while, in the way you know things you haven't decided to examine yet — present at the edge of awareness, waiting with the patience of things that are true and do not need to be named to continue being true.

She hadn't named it.

She looked at Claire. Claire looked back at her with the open, uncomplicated expression of a person who has said the thing she came to say and is now simply waiting to see what happens next, and whose expression said also, quietly, that she was not going to push, that she would wait however long she needed to wait, that this was Shae's and she would follow Shae's lead.

Something in Shae's chest went warm in the uncomplicated way it went warm around Claire — the specific warmth of being known, of not having to explain.

She reached for the joint.

And then, because she was here and it was Claire and the light was doing the thing it did at this hour and her stomach had been performing its involuntary acrobatics all day and she was tired of holding it by herself:

She giggled.

It started small and became less small and Claire's face split into the full grin that was her best one — the completely unguarded one, all her teeth, the laugh that came from somewhere genuine — and they were both laughing then, properly, the room filling with it, the joint held carefully at arm's length so nothing went wrong, both of them on the Texas King with their shoulders shaking and the last of the amber light coming through the window.

"Don't," Shae managed, which communicated nothing and meant everything.

"I'm not saying anything," Claire said, which was demonstrably false and which made Shae laugh harder.

The evening settled around them. The joint moved between them. Outside the window the trees had gone from amber to shadow, and somewhere in the woods the owl was in its tree, and the house held them both in its familiar quiet.

Shae lay back and looked at the ceiling and let herself, just for this specific hour, in this specific room, not explain anything to herself.

She thought about the word brilliant in a British accent.

She pressed her lips together against the smile that was coming whether she authorized it or not.

"I hate you," she said, to Claire.

"No you don't," Claire said.

"No," Shae agreed. "I don't."