Scandalous

Chapter 16

Tuesday arrived with the specific mercy of a day that had decided to be ordinary.

Nathan noticed this in the way you notice the absence of something that has been present — the absence of the particular tension yesterday had carried, the way the school moved through its morning routines without incident, without the cafeteria energy, without the specific charged quality of a building in which something has just happened. The corridors were corridors. The bells rang at their scheduled intervals. People went where they were supposed to go.

He arrived at Room 214 at seven fifty-five, which was later than yesterday and earlier than most of his colleagues, and set up his desk with the lesson he'd prepared and the stack of reading schedule reminders he'd printed for the class, and told himself it was a normal Tuesday.

When second period filed in, he kept his eyes on the papers he was reviewing.

He noticed, despite this, that Sloane Hartley arrived with considerably more makeup than she had worn on any previous occasion. The kind of makeup that requires significant time and effort and still cannot quite accomplish what it is attempting to accomplish — the concealer too thick at the outer edge of her left eye, the foundation a half-shade off from her natural tone in the way that happens when you're trying to cover rather than blend. The black eye beneath it had not been entirely extinguished. It sat there, persistent and purple, doing precisely what Shae's fist had intended it to do, and Nathan looked at it once and then looked away because looking at it was not professional and noting it with any satisfaction was even less so.

He noted it with a small amount of satisfaction and then looked at his papers.

Shae and Claire came in together and went to the back left corner and sat down with the quiet economy of two people who have established their arrangement and see no reason to vary it. Claire had a book open before she'd fully sat down. Shae set her bag on the floor, took out her copy of Wuthering Heights, and placed it on the desk. She did not look at the front of the room.

Nathan looked at his papers.

He looked up three minutes later — a general scan of the class, the routine visual accounting of a teacher establishing that everyone is present and approximately seated. His gaze moved across the front rows, the middle, the back. It passed the back left corner and noted: present, settled, book open.

It was a check. It was the kind of check any teacher would perform. He looked back at his papers.

He did this four more times over the next ten minutes and gave himself the same explanation each time with incrementally less conviction.

He let them read in silence for the first portion of the period — the timer on his desk set for twenty minutes, which he had told them would be the arrangement for the week: twenty minutes of class time to read, which was not enough but was more than nothing, and which had the additional function of allowing him to observe the class's relationship with the text before asking them to articulate it.

When the timer went off he silenced it and looked up.

"Time," he said. "Tell me you've made it through chapters ten and eleven."

A qualified, collective response from the room — the mixture of confident nods and carefully neutral expressions of students who had made it through in varying degrees of completeness.

"Heathcliff is back," Nathan said, standing. "Three years gone, returns transformed, and everyone in the novel has a different response to it. What does his return mean?" He looked at the class. "Not what happens — what does it mean."

The front row engaged first, as it always did. One student offered that Heathcliff's return was about revenge — that he had come back with money and transformed himself specifically to reclaim power over the people who had diminished him. It was a reasonable reading and Nathan acknowledged it without endorsing it, which was his standard move for answers that were on the right road but hadn't arrived yet.

Another student suggested it was about Cathy — that everything Heathcliff had done in the intervening years was entirely directed at returning to her. Also reasonable. Also not quite the thing.

He pushed. He asked what the difference was between returning for revenge and returning for Cathy, and whether those two things could be cleanly separated in Heathcliff's case, and whether Brontë wanted you to separate them or wanted you to sit with the discomfort of them being the same impulse.

The room chewed on this. Several students offered variations on the same answer that circled the territory without landing. He waited. He was patient with this — he had learned that sometimes the right answer was in the room and simply needed enough silence to surface.

From the back left corner:

"He didn't come back for either of those things. Not really."

Nathan did not visibly react. He looked at Shae with the same expression he gave any student who was speaking. "Go on," he said.

She looked at him. "He came back because leaving didn't work. He thought if he got far enough away from her it would stop — whatever it was. And it didn't. So he came back, because at least being near her was something. Revenge and love are just the justifications he built around the fact that he couldn't stay away." She paused. "The transformation — the money, the bearing — that's not about power over Hindley. That's about making himself into someone she might be able to choose without it costing her everything. He made himself into what Edgar Linton was." A beat. "And it still doesn't work, because he already knows she's chosen, and making himself acceptable doesn't unmake the choice."

The room was quiet in that specific way again.

Nathan looked at her. He was aware, with a precision he did not particularly welcome, of what his face was doing — the smile that had arrived on it without authorization, the kind that was not the professional acknowledgment smile but the other one, the involuntary one, the one that happened when something was genuinely, unexpectedly right.

"That," he said, "is correct."

From somewhere in the middle of the room, barely audible, the particular mumbled two words of a girl who had run out of more sophisticated responses:

"Teacher's pet."

He heard it. The room heard it. A few people went carefully still in the way people go still when something has been said that everyone is now deciding whether to acknowledge.

Nathan pushed off the edge of his desk. He reached for the marker and turned to the board and said, in a tone that was entirely level and addressed no one in particular: "Your essays are due tomorrow. If you've finished and you're confident — good. If you have questions or you're not where you need to be, I'll be staying after school today." He wrote ESSAY DUE WEDNESDAY on the board with a deliberateness that communicated it was going up there and staying. "Use the time if you need it."

The chime rang.

The afternoon moved with the particular drag of days whose meaningful events have already occurred. Nathan taught his remaining periods, attended a brief and unproductive conversation with the head of the department about assessment formatting, and returned to Room 214 at three-fifteen to find it empty and his desk exactly as he'd left it.

He marked papers. He read three chapters of his current book. He refilled his thermos.

At three-forty Sloane Hartley appeared in the doorway.

She had touched up the concealer since this morning — the effect was marginally more convincing in the lower light of a late afternoon classroom, the purple at the edge of her eye now more suggestion than announcement. She came in with the particular energy she deployed in small-audience situations, the performance adjusted for one viewer — lower, more deliberate, the studied casualness of someone who has decided how they want to be seen and is executing accordingly.

"Mr. Kingston." She set her bag on a desk in the front row — the one closest to his, which was not accidental. "I had some questions about the essay."

"Of course," Nathan said. He set down his pen and folded his hands on the desk and looked at her with the expression of a teacher who is ready to help a student with their essay. "What specifically are you working on?"

What followed was approximately forty minutes in which Sloane's essay questions were adjacent to the essay and primarily adjacent to him — the slight forward lean when she was ostensibly looking at the paper he'd indicated, the laugh introduced at moments that did not quite earn a laugh, the way her pen moved to the edge of his desk and stayed there. He answered the essay questions directly and clearly and thoroughly. He maintained the physical geometry of a teacher at his desk and a student at a desk nearby. He did not shift toward her, did not mirror any of the small adjustments she made in his direction, did not acknowledge through any inflection or expression or extended eye contact that he had registered anything beyond the stated subject of the conversation.

He had encountered this before. He had been a teacher for a few years and an objectively presentable man for longer than that and he knew the shape of it — the particular, uncomfortable situation of a student who had mistaken the professional interest of a teacher for something else, or who had decided to test whether it was something else. The correct response was what it had always been: clear, warm, professionally bounded, and entirely impervious.

Sloane Hartley was not accustomed to being impervious to. He could see the recalibrations happening in real time — the small adjustments as each approach found no purchase, the narrowing of options. By four-thirty she had reached the end of her available material and gathered it together with the composed dignity of a girl who was not going to show that she had walked into a room expecting something and was walking out without it.

"Thanks for the help," she said, at the door.

"Good luck with the essay," Nathan said, with complete sincerity.

She left.

Nathan sat in the quiet of the classroom and looked at the place on his desk where her pen had rested and felt, primarily, tired. He began gathering his things. It was just past five, which was later than he'd intended but not unreasonable, and the light through the south windows had gone the deep amber of early evening.

He had his bag on his shoulder and his thermos in hand when the door opened.

The flutter in his chest arrived before he had processed what he was seeing. Involuntary, immediate, the specific interior motion of a thing that has been locked in a room and has found the door marginally ajar — he felt it and pushed it back down and locked it with more force than the first time.

Shae Madison stood in the doorway of Room 214.

She was in her uniform now — the school's navy and white, which was somehow no less — her hair down, the messy aftermath of a day at the end of itself. She looked down the corridor in both directions before looking into the room, the careful instinct of someone who has been thinking about whether to do this.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. He kept his voice at the register of ordinary inquiry. "It's past five."

She stepped just inside the doorway, one shoulder against the frame. "After-school suspension," she said. "Mr. Dawner was only available today. So." She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Here I was."

He nodded.

A moment. She looked at him — shyly was the word, though it sat oddly with everything he knew about the way she usually occupied space. A different kind of quiet than her usual one. She took a small step further into the room.

"I saw your light was still on," she said. "I figured you were still here." A pause. "I just wanted to stop by and say — thank you. For yesterday. In the headmaster's office."

He leaned back against his desk, hands going into his pockets. The posture of someone who is comfortable and unhurried and is not going to make anything of this. "It was nothing," he said.

She looked down. Her thumb moved against the strap of her bag. "It wasn't, though," she said quietly. "No one's really — " a brief pause, something being selected carefully " — stood up for me like that. Not in that way. Claire does, and Gwen, but that's — " she chuckled, the small sound of someone who knows that what they're about to say is true and is slightly embarrassed that it's true " — that's different."

He watched her. Said nothing.

She raised her eyes to his and when she did there was nothing shy in them anymore — the green direct and clear and entirely present. "Thank you," she said. Firmly. No qualification around it.

He held her gaze. "You're welcome," he said.

The room was quiet. The amber evening light held everything in it warm and still.

Shae cleared her throat.

She reached into her bag with the efficiency of someone completing an errand she has reminded herself to complete, and produced what Nathan's eyes registered as a folded amount of cash — not large, but deliberate. She crossed the room and held it out to him.

He looked at it. He looked at her. "What is this?"

"I wrote in the book," she said. "The school copy of Wuthering Heights." She said it with the flat delivery of someone making a confession they consider straightforward. "I do it without thinking. It's a habit — I write in the margins. I was reading and I just — " she made a small gesture with her free hand " — started annotating. I'll pay for the copy."

Nathan looked at the cash in her outstretched hand for a moment. Then he looked at her. Then he did something he had not entirely planned, which was that he smiled — not the professional one, the other one, the one that had been making unauthorized appearances since approximately the second week of term.

He took the cash, looked at it once, and held it back out to her.

"Keep it," he said.

She blinked. "I wrote in a school book—"

"I know." He set the money on the desk between them rather than pressing it into her hand, which would have required a proximity he was not going to engineer. "I annotate every book I own. Have since I was about twelve. The margins are half the book."

She looked at the money on the desk. Then at him. "The school's books aren't mine to annotate."

"No," he agreed. "But the instinct is correct, so I find it difficult to take it seriously as an offense." He tilted his head slightly. "What did you write?"

A pause. She looked at him with the expression of someone deciding something. "Questions, mostly. Arguments with the narrator." She glanced down. "I told Lockwood he was an i***t in the margin of chapter two."

"He is," Nathan said. "It's one of the more accurate things you could write in that margin."

She laughed — quietly, genuine, the laugh that wasn't the polished version but the real one. "I use different colors for different things. Blue for things I agree with, red for things I don't, pencil for questions I don't have an answer to yet."

He looked at her. "I use pen for everything. Which is irreversible and I've never once regretted it."

"What if you change your mind about something you wrote?"

"I bracket it and write the revision next to it. So you can see both. The original position and the one it became." He paused. "It's more honest. You can see the argument the book had with you over time."

She was looking at him with the expression she wore when something had landed where she hadn't been expecting it to land. "I've never thought about it that way," she said. "I usually just cross out the wrong ones."

"The wrong ones are interesting, though," Nathan said. "The things you thought before you understood the thing better — they tell you something about how you read."

She was quiet for a moment. Thinking — he could see the thinking, the specific quality of it, the way it moved across her features in the barely-perceptible way of someone who is doing it genuinely rather than performing it.

"Mine are in different colors so I can see where my head was at a given point," she said slowly. "But your way — keeping the original, writing alongside it — that's like a record of the whole conversation."

"That's exactly what it is," he said. "A book you've read properly is a record of every version of you that sat down with it."

She looked at him. Something in her expression had gone very still — not guarded, not performing anything, just present in the particular way she was present sometimes, when the rest of it dropped away and it was simply her and the thought.

"That's the best thing I've ever heard anyone say about reading," she said.

He didn't have a response for that. So he didn't offer one.

The money sat on the desk between them. Neither of them moved to take it.