Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

He shook his head. “I can’t talk to you. My lawyer said.”

The handle turned from the other side, and the door flew open. He spun away, back into the office, just as Kate walked out.

She looked between him and me and gave me a quizzical look as she passed. I shook off the moment, joined her walking down the hall.

“I see you’re in as big a rush as I am today,” she said, pretending she hadn’t noticed what she’d just seen.

“Ugh,” I said.

“Well. To Friday,” she said. “Any chance you’re up for going out again?”

“I want to,” I said, “but I can’t tonight.” There was too much up in the air, too much I couldn’t get a grasp on.

She slowed her steps. “I feel like you’re avoiding me. Is this a friend breakup? Because if it is, I can take it. I’m a big girl. I just don’t want to keep asking you if you don’t want to hang out.”

“I do.” I grabbed her arm, pausing in the hall. “The week has been a disaster,” I said, and then, to appeal to something deeper, “I let the police search my house a few days ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “ Oh . How did it go?”

“They haven’t found her yet,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Leah,” she said, a hand on my arm. We parted in the middle of the hall as the warning bell rang and the students started filing down the hall behind us.

IZZY WAS ALREADY ATher seat, and I felt a sinking sensation, thinking that maybe she had been here waiting for me. Waiting to tell me something, and I had missed it. Molly and Theo came in right after me, and I couldn’t get a moment alone with her.

I tried not to look directly at Izzy, so she wouldn’t feel the weight of being watched. I wished for an empty classroom, a fire drill, a reason to pull her aside and tell her: I’m listening.

But moments did not create themselves; fate did not line itself up at one’s whim. There was no vodka, or dart, or map pinned to the wall. There was only a girl I didn’t know whom I followed to a place I didn’t belong, for reasons I didn’t understand.

At the end of class, I almost asked Izzy to stay, but she took off in the first stream of students. She didn’t make eye contact as she walked out the door.

I looked up her class schedule on our computer system, saw that she had art history during fourth period, my free block. I had to make the effort – had to let her see that I was meeting her halfway. That I’d noticed her sitting here early, waiting for me. That I was listening.

Mitch caught me in the atrium on my way to the history wing after the bell for last period. “Hey,” he called. “You’re not heading out early, are you?” But he was smiling, trying to make a joke of it.

“No, sir,” I said, emphasis on sir, also a joke. “Off to schedule a research day in the media center for my students.” The quickest excuse I could come up with, since we were standing just outside the library doors.

Mitch stepped closer, checked over his shoulder to make sure no one was near. Our voices carried through the empty atrium. “Coach Cobb was here this morning with his paperwork.”

“I know, I saw.”

“He’ll be back any moment now. I was on my way to see you. Didn’t want you to run into him on your own in the hall.” He lowered his voice again. “He’s not going to bother you.”

Mitch’s words felt too thick and cloying, and I wanted to extricate myself. “Thanks, Mitch. I’ll be fine.”

“I’d feel better if I accompanied you to the library. You can call me from your classroom whenever you need, and I’ll come. I’ll walk with you, just until this is all sorted out. Until everything’s back to normal.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” I said. “Besides, there are cameras in the halls.”

Mitch tilted his head. “There are no cameras in the halls. Those are motion sensors for the lights. That’s just what we tell the students, Leah.”

“Oh,” I said. Oh. “Listen, thanks for the offer, but I don’t want anyone to make a big deal of it. A bigger deal of it, at least. I don’t want people to think I need the escort. I have a hard enough time getting my students to take me seriously as it is.”

He smiled at that. “Don’t take it personally. It’s all in the reputation, and you don’t have one yet. It’ll come.” Just like in my last job. Reputation is everything, everywhere.

I waited outside the library until Mitch disappeared around the corner, and then I switched direction and walked down the history wing, where the classroom doors were open, the teachers’ voices resounding down the hall. I peered inside until I saw Izzy, sitting at the desk beside the window, looking out.

I angled myself so the other students wouldn’t turn to see, and then I coughed once in the hall. She turned her head at the noise, and she blinked when she saw me, her face frozen as if I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

I stared at her until she turned back around and raised her hand. “Bathroom,” she said, and then she picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. I heard her footsteps following as I walked down the hall, veering into the alcove just inside the women’s bathroom.

I did a quick check of the stalls, throwing open the doors, but I was alone. And then I wasn’t. Izzy stood just behind me at the entrance, her body stiff, and I didn’t know what to say, what to ask, after all. But she was here, and that was proof.

“Whatever you’re trying to tell me, I need to know,” I whispered. To hell with protocol.

She looked panicked, cornered. “It can’t come from me.”

“What can’t come from you?” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please, Izzy.”

Her eyes darted around the bathroom, trailing over our reflections in the distorted mirrors. “Ms. Stevens, please. Please, you can’t say it was me. I know you won’t, right? You have to protect the source, right? I read your old articles, I saw how you do nameless sources. Can you do that for me?”

I froze, reimagining the scene. My paper showing up on my porch. A question. Can I be a girl like this? I have something to say. Watching me, seeing if I was someone to be trusted, because she had reached that point and she didn’t yet know.

“Yes, Izzy. I’ll never tell.” But she looked unconvinced. You have to give to get. “You know why I’m here, Izzy? Why I’m no longer there, being a journalist? Because I protected a source. Because I wouldn’t give her name. A girl not much older than you are now. You saw that in the paper you left for me, didn’t you?”

Her fingers raised to her mouth, her brown eyes growing shiny with tears.

“It’s okay,” I said.

And then she spoke, in a voice just above a whisper. “We ride together to school sometimes because we’re neighbors. Some days I have to come in early to finish work. So we hang out at the library. I saw an email screen once. I only read it because of the name. Because it said TeachingLeahStevens, and I thought that you were, you know, having some affair or something.” She looked to the side, to the mirror. “That’s what I thought.”

She thought I was messing around with a student. That aura of I have one over on you that I could always feel coming off her. The way she’d bait me, as if to say I dare you to say something to me –because she thought she had me beat.

All those emails I thought had come from Cobb. I saw them all in a different light now. Theo sitting at the library computer, breathing heavily at the screen. Typing vigorously, knowingly, waiting to see my reaction.

“Everyone thinks Coach Cobb is stalking you, right? That’s why the police called you down to the office that day? Why they arrested him? Only it’s not him .” IT WASN’T COBB.