Alissa Nutting - Tampa

In the middle of the night I woke to the soft buzz of Jack’s cell phone going off inside my purse beside the bed. Ford was snoring and didn’t hear it. For a moment I looked at him as I held the glowing device in my hands—his slack jaw was open with a troutish indifference; his left arm was buried beneath his head to reveal the gaping maw of his armpit and its garden of long hairs that rose out from his body like visible fumes. I shut the phone’s vibration alert completely off, then sat for nearly an hour watching Jack’s repeated calls light it up again and again and again, its green glow sounding a panicked alarm that only I could hear. Ford seemed securely unconscious; I was half tempted to go out to the pool patio and actually pick up, to whisper my devotion to Jack in hushed tones and calm him down. Thinking about the very hormones that coursed through Jack’s veins and made his reaction so drastic was itself a turn on—he was out of control in all the right ways, a mind steered by his body. It was almost enough to tempt me to sneak from the house and go to his window in earnest, but getting caught by Buck a second time in one night might be more than sexual bribery—no matter how enthusiastically delivered—could make him overlook.

I barely registered the first two class periods the next day; I had the students all do freewriting about their holiday break. Most of them worked for ten minutes, then began to rampantly text message. I certainly didn’t care. The first class was half-asleep, used to the up-all-night schedules they’d established the past three weeks playing the video games they’d gotten for Christmas and having sleepovers with friends. The second class was a bit more alert.

“When are we going to talk about Lord of the Flies ?” one girl asked.

“Talk away,” I said. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered the feel of Buck’s sausagelike fingers upon my shoulder. An acidic stripe of vomit moved up my throat in a way that made me picture mercury rising inside a thermometer.

“None of that stuff would’ve happened on an island of girls. Spearing a pig in the… butthole?” She made a visceral “no thank you” face, as though the act were a party game we were actually playing and she was refusing her turn.

“Yeah right,” said Lambert. He was a dorky kid who wrote long diatribes in his journals about how girls say they want a nice guy but he knew this to be patently false: I am one such fellow, he wrote, and my female peers will not come near me unless they’re trying to copy my homework . “If it were an island of girls they would’ve cannibalized each other in days.”

I sighed, an autopilot recording of base-level literary analysis rattling through my mouth. “It’s an interesting book to help us think about our own barbaric tendencies, given the right circumstances.” I paused, hoping the conversation might turn to sex and lift me out of my depression. “What are some times when you feel out of control?”

“When I go animal style on the dance floor,” one kid offered, standing up to goofily gyrate his pelvis while the class laughed. I sighed; it was always the older-looking students who made public displays of their bodies: his upper lip revealed he’d already started shaving.

Another chimed in. “When I get into a fight with my parents.”

I immediately thought of Jack and Buck. “Say more—what do you want to do, when you get into a fight with your parents?” I asked. “What about that makes you feel like you’ve lost it?”

“I mean,” he said, shrugging, “I’d never, like, actually hurt them or anything. You know? But sometimes…” His fist began to grind against his closed palm with the memory of rage. “Like I just want to beat the crap out of them. I think about choking their lights out.”

“Um, psycho?” one girl joked.

“It’s not psycho,” another said, “unless you actually do it.”

The thought sent a cold pang of fear down my center. Not once before last night had Jack ever called me so repeatedly, especially when he knew Ford would be home. Had his fury at what he’d seen me do with his father turned into an actual, physical argument? Had Jack done something terrible after I’d gone? I now remembered the stark image of his socked foot as his father’s pleasured grunts had filled the bedroom. If he’d murdered Buck and said I’d driven him to do it, would I be considered an accessory to murder? I wondered if that charge would bring more jail time than sex with a minor. How twisted it all would be if it turned out I’d slept with Buck for nothing—I was going to jail for one thing or another anyway. For a moment my stomach wrenched at the thought of a father/son conspiracy: Maybe Buck was smarter than I’d given him credit for. Perhaps he’d figured out what Jack and I were up to and Buck realized that if he caught us together I’d seduce him to keep him quiet. So he made a deal with Jack, bribing him with the promise of a top-of-the-line gaming system, or a new car as soon as he got his learner’s permit: arrange it so I walk in on you two and let me have her once before I call the cops. But then the guilt and envy had been too much for Jack’s teenage brain, and in a heated argument late last night he’d taken his father’s life.

I had to get my mind into a better place. We were having a classroom discussion about lack of restraint—why wasn’t anyone bringing up libido? “So we understand a loss of control due to anger,” I summarized. “What are other times you feel out of control? Do any of you not trust your actions, say, when you’re alone with your boyfriend or girlfriend?” This caused the room to fill with nervous laughter.

“I know if I ever met my favorite singer, I would do anything he wanted,” one girl confessed.

“Yeah, that’s illegal,” her friend joked.

“Whatever.” She laughed. “I’d make it worth the jail time for him.”

This made me wonder—if things did all fall apart today, had Jack made the jail time worth it for me? He had done everything I’d wanted him to do, and as far as I knew had kept quiet. But no memory seemed enough to adequately sustain me through a boyless incarceration. When the bell rang, I remained frozen in place imagining the starch-heavy cafeteria meals, the formless jumpsuits whose color resembled traffic cones.

I quickly took inventory of the worst-case scenario: Jack not showing up to class. I pictured him at home, weeping next to his father’s sheet-covered corpse, trying to think of how to dispose of the body. But an abnormal break from my daily routine would seem suspect: I couldn’t suddenly go home during the same class when Jack was absent. No matter how difficult, I’d have to make it through the school day, and only then, at the day’s very end in the privacy of my own car, could I call Jack’s phone (which might easily have a police tap on it now, if Buck had been found dead) and begin the conversation in a very straitlaced manner. I’d ask only why he hadn’t been in class today, nothing more. Such a call and a question wasn’t out of bounds for any caring teacher. And no one could prove I’d given him the cell phone.

But Jack did stumble in. He had the near-black eyes of someone who’d been up all night interrogating himself. “Jack,” I called to him from behind my desk when he entered, a bit perturbed at how needy I sounded—I didn’t like depending on him for resolution. He refused to stop or turn toward me and wore a crumpled shirt and sweatpants that he’d likely slept in. I made a mental note to ready the tin of mints from my purse when we spoke—he’d certainly forgotten to brush his teeth.

Jack went straight to his usual seat in the back and stared at the ground with a scowl. In some ways, this tantrum made him seem more juvenile, and I allowed myself the pleasure of pausing to take in his sour expression: he looked like a child who’d been forced to share a toy. His outrage, I figured, was a good sign—if he’d gotten on the bus this morning after leaving behind his father’s dead body, he would likely have been antsy, guilt-stricken, wanting to talk with me immediately in private. Instead he was ignoring me. He wanted me punished for having given up a conciliatory offering to Buck. Finally I stood and very calmly walked over to his desk. “I have the essay you handed in before break graded,” I told him. “Can you stay after class and discuss it?” He gave a near-imperceptible nod, then further exaggerated his scowl in a way that seemed like a challenge. I was happy to take him up on it. As soon as class ended, I would fuck that pout right off his face.