Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“Oh? How did you manage to come meet me?”

Jack laughed. “I told him I had a group project for English tonight. But during the week you could come over any afternoon before he gets home.”

I felt my crotch seize at the thought of fucking Jack on his own bed with the musky funk of early adolescence rising from his sheets, everything in the room surrounding us related to him in a way that would make his body feel magnified. His home was a better location than I’d ever let myself imagine—I’d been expecting only sex in the outdoors, in my car, perhaps occasionally breaking up the monotony with faraway venues: in darkened out-of-town theaters for a poorly attended movie to which we separately bought tickets. His home meant a bathtub and shower, a pool, a kitchen table, a host of variety. “That would be great but it could be risky. Do any of your classmates live on your street?”

Jack shook his head. “Some of the guys live close in the subdivision, but not on my same street.” There was a pause as his forehead lifted with memory. “Wait, that one kid does live across the street from me. I’m not friends with him or anything. Frank?”

“Frank Pachenko?” He nodded and I fell back against my seat, deflated. “His mother is the nosiest bitch in the world. She can’t see me anywhere near your house.”

“Your car windows are tinted, right?”

“Yeah, but she could see me walking in or out.” I could picture her thin, birdlike lips leveling the accusation now: And what were you doing at a minor’s house when his guardian was not present?

“You can park in our garage. I can have it open for you when you’re coming over, then the second you pull in I’ll shut it. She won’t ever see you get out of your car.”

I knew this wasn’t airtight: she could catch me getting into or out of my car at school and associate it with the mysterious red Corvette seen at the Patricks’ recently; a pinprick of curiosity would be cause enough for her to write down my license plate and wait at home, happy to investigate, ready to match it up. But the treat of Jack in his own bed helped convince me that my paranoia required a long and unlikely chain of events to occur: she’d have to first become suspicious about a car entering another house’s garage. Clearly, the families weren’t close. But even in the worst-case scenario, even if she did determine with certainty that it was absolutely my car, there was no way for her to be certain of motive. What if I was a family friend? A loving relative who just happened to have my third cousin in class this semester? She couldn’t be sure.

I nodded and leaned in to give him a kiss. “Okay, I’ll come over tomorrow around four fifteen. Have the garage open for me. We have to be really careful though… I can only stay an hour, tops.”

His kisses had changed already; now there was an unrestrained eagerness, almost a force. But he was still keeping his eyes wide open; they stayed trained on me the entire time. “Try it one more time with your eyes shut,” I whispered. He closed them and suddenly his hands found my ribs; his thin arms wrapped around me and pulled me tight. Several minutes later we unlocked with swollen lips and glossy faces.

“It’s more intense that way,” he observed.

I gave him one final kiss, then ruffled his hair the way a Little League coach might—I had the urge to impart a sense of normalcy to our good-bye, make it seem casual. “Right,” I said. “Now get lost. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door and shut it too softly, then began walking briskly down the sidewalk. I checked my phone for messages I might’ve missed from Ford but there were none. It had truly been a perfect night. When I looked back up, Jack had crossed the street; by the time I pulled the car back onto the road and headed toward home, I could see in my rearview mirror that he’d broken into a run.

Though I wanted to relish every patch of our mingled odors on my skin, I knew I had to take a precautionary shower before bed. But it seemed like an act of criminal vandalism, like I was taking a sanding belt to a priceless oil painting. As I dried off, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been robbed of a possession of great value; it was so compelling that I actually went to my jewelry chest and looked over its contents as a form of reassurance. I passed out on the bed almost immediately afterward, drunk on my sense of accomplishment. It couldn’t have been later than nine thirty.

When I woke up it was past midnight; I could hear the television blaring in the living room and was seized by hunger—I’d been too excited to eat dinner and hadn’t touched my milkshake, save the cherry. I hadn’t wanted to corrupt Jack’s taste on my tongue.

Ford was in the reclining chair, watching a show that featured junked cars getting blown up by a series of impressive weapons. The TV illuminated a bucket of chicken on the kitchen table; I grabbed a leg, then walked up behind his chair and stood there in naked silence, quietly gnawing the meat. Had he looked up at the mirror on the living room wall, he would’ve seen me, perhaps made a little jump and turned with a laugh to declare that I’d scared him, but he didn’t look. His simple brow was still and waxen, his eyes blinking with the flicker of the television in the dark. I ate until I was holding a clean bone, then watched myself in the mirror, standing behind Ford and holding it in my hand like a weapon.

The screams echoing through Janet’s class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together , I wrote on the evaluation form.

“Kevin!” Janet yelled, her thick fingers surrounding her mouth in an amplifying oval. “You can either park it on your butt right now, or you can practice sitting still after school in detention.” Kevin momentarily stopped jumping, but as soon as Janet turned around to write on the board, he stood and lifted his desk up with him, tiptoeing toward the front of the room until she turned back around, at which point he’d drop it and sit down as though frozen. Mrs. Pachenko, busy waiting on a student riffling through his backpack in a farce of looking to see if he had his homework, was none the wiser. Janet finally noticed when Kevin’s desk had surpassed the front row of students and he sat islanded just inches from the chalkboard. She looked down at him through the bifocals of her thick lenses. “What is with you?” she asked. “Do you have ants in your pants?” The students immediately began to roar as Kevin, nodding, stood up and began spinning around the room pretending to reach into his pants and itch. It was about this time that I noticed the intricacy of Mrs. Pachenko’s embroidered blue vest, which read VOLUNTEER across the back. Usually volunteers just donned the ID card around their necks that she also wore. The vest was a production from her own imagination. I pictured the sad scene of her making it at home one evening, dutifully feeding its fabric into a sewing machine by lamplight as Frank recited an alphabetical list of SAT word definitions in the background with audible zest.

Nonetheless, my write-up of Janet had to be positive yet credible. Though occasional classroom management issues did arise , I continued, Mrs. Feinlog was able to use humor and authority to restore student attention. Mrs. Pachenko, the classroom aide, serves as a clear source of calm assistance and organization . By the time the bell rang, Janet had given up entirely and was sitting at her desk with a look of constipated apathy as Mrs. Pachenko, reading aloud from a revised syllabus that they’d decided to institute once she began helping out, stressed how important it was that the students complete their substantial assigned readings each night at home. “If we don’t get to a discussion of the War of 1812 by Friday,” she threatened, a quaver of panic tingling her voice, “we will not be on schedule for our November unit on the Texas Revolution.”