Tampa Read online

  The lobby of the plastic surgeon’s office had a clinical asceticism to it; with its white pillar columns and brushed chrome accents, it seemed to be part church and part laboratory. I suppose that was the message they were trying to convey: staving off decrepitude combined the miracles of religion with the progressive advancements of medicine. Yet the elderly patients in the waiting room made it clear what a pseudoscience the whole thing was. They’d often look up at me, raising vast draperies of throat skin that hung above their crepe chests like crumpled ascots. Knowing the miseries of my future body, most of them couldn’t help but give me a smile filled with sadistic delight. “You have beautiful skin,” one told me once. She seemed to squirm with relish as she said the words; it was no different from kicking me in the ribs and saying, Everything on you will one day sag. But for now, every inch of my flesh was perfectly taut—if I were to run out to the lobby midtreatment and shed my bathrobe, the sight of my immaculate abdomen would likely have caused these withered creatures to fall to their knees crying and break a hip.

  Spa days were usually paired with shopping sprees. These were a necessary cushion against the realities of my pretend marriage: buying nice things helped me temporarily forget the vulgar angle to which Ford’s stubbled jaw hung open while he was snoring, the moist smacks his tongue made when he chewed a steak, and even my rare though inescapable duties in the bedroom. But they certainly couldn’t help divert my thoughts from Jack. Lately I’d begun packing my closet with body-clinging tailored suits and silk shells with low-cut backs: this way I could wear a jacket into the classroom, then remove it so only the students could see my exposed flesh, never the other teachers; occasionally I also wore long sateen scarves that covered my chest. Only upon entering the class would I wrap them up around my neck or sling them back across my shoulders so the air conditioner paired with my open-nipple bra could put on a show. Until I was engaging in true contact with Jack or another student, I needed the boys’ hungry stares for sustenance: these young men were so new to life, they didn’t yet know how to mask the direction in which their eyes were peeking nor their wonder and delight at what they were looking at.

  Even in this competition of the involuntary gaze, Jack proved himself to be far superior to his peers. While others looked upon my chest with a gleeful smirk or pleasant shock, Jack stared in the way one might watch a waterfall—there was something profoundly hopeful in his glance, an optimism that the world held more wonder than he’d ever thought to guess. It was a feeling I tried to encourage in him with an affirmative glance or a nod, one that told him, simply and plainly, You’re seeing exactly what you think you’re seeing.

  *

  In retrospect perhaps it was also his name that set me on his trail—I hoped Jack Patrick’s two first names meant he was two boys in one: public Patrick, a regular fourteen-year-old schoolboy, and private Jack, who might willfully submit to every smutty thing I wanted to do to him.

  His behavior in the classroom was promising: self-doubtful but alert; laughing when I or one of his classmates made a joke, but not making them himself or asking for the class’s attention. Each day he wore a T-shirt and sportlike mesh shorts that fell just below his knees, but his lower calves suggested that his upper thighs were covered in a thin layer of blond hair. In the light these tufts seemed like a gossamer confection; if licked, I imagined they would dissolve on my tongue.

  The reading list for the nonadvanced eighth-grade English classes was preselected and not to be deviated from: Romeo and Juliet began the fall semester, then we would be moving into The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. To begin I had students draw names from a bucket: in each class, we’d read Shakespeare’s play aloud to kill time. Jack drew the character of Paris, and visibly blushed when Marissa Talbet, an annoyingly theatrical redhead who on the first day of class asked if she could, from time to time, make pertinent student council announcements, spoke of Paris’s legendary attractiveness in her role as Nurse. Marissa was the first student to modulate her voice for the part, raising it several octaves higher and attempting a British accent. Her classmates found this hilarious, but Jack never doubled over with sugar-induced laughter. Instead he simply smiled, all the while looking at the text of the play, hardly ever raising his virginal brown eyes—but when he did glance up, he found me watching him, and we’d lock into a stare for the briefest second before his head lowered back toward the safety of the book.

  Reading aloud, his voice was steady overall, though he stumbled a bit between antiquated words and spoke with the misplaced stressors of one who doesn’t fully grasp a line’s context. “Thou wrong … sit … wrongs … it … more than tears … with that report,” he spoke to Juliet, whose name happened to be drawn from the bucket by the exacting Frank Pachenko (when the teasing about this role immediately began, Frank was quick to remind his peers that in Shakespeare’s time Juliet and all of the female characters would have indeed been played by male actors). In general Frank’s appearance and organized demeanor bucked the stereotype of the typical fourteen-year-old male: his hand always went straight up in the air when a question was asked, and his glasses had lenses too large and too circular for his age. Occasionally I saw him speaking with Jack, usually a quick question or two that Jack answered with a low, short phrase, but there was a familiarity between them that suggested they’d known one another since childhood despite the different paths the social jungle of adolescence was beginning to put them on: Jack was an accepted outlier in the circle of the popular jocks, while Frank took geeky solace in social failure by channeling his energy into academics. Frank wasn’t an outstanding mind—his response papers formed simplistic arguments with an average vocabulary—but he looked the part of the young academic: his shirt tucked into his slightly too-high-waisted shorts, his bulky white sneakers that somehow didn’t appear to ever have been worn.

  Since lunch directly followed Jack’s third-period class, I made it a habit to drop into the lunchroom and take note of his whereabouts, even watch him eat if the opportunity presented itself. Less than a month after school started, I’d already begun to shut his peers out with the myopic blindness a focused goal brings. I’ve no doubt there were others, throngs of students not in any of my classes, who were watching me as I stood in the humid fog of the cafeteria and sipped a carton of chocolate milk through a straw, placing myself in front of one of the large industrial fans positioned at each corner of the cafeteria and letting it lift stray hairs from the gathered bun at the base of my neck. A sound-based traffic light at the cafeteria’s front entrance registered how loud the collective sound in the room was: green meant the students were talking at an acceptable volume, yellow was an intermediate warning, and red would sound a bell that meant a punishment of total silence would be invoked—once the light turned red, a staff member sounded three whistles, and anyone caught talking afterward was given detention. But I stared into the green light—The Great Gatsby was assigned to the ninth graders but not the eighth—and thought about being inside my convertible with Jack, the top down, both of us completely undressed, me flooring the gas and letting the wind hit our bodies as a type of foreplay.

  Janet liked to ruin these daydreams—I could’ve wrung her neck the day that Jack brought a pack of Twizzlers in his lunch. I had a clear view of him, framed between the hunched shoulder blades of two small girls, likely sixth graders, who were sitting at the table in front of Jack’s. One at a time, he bit down onto the red rope of the candy, pulling a little, revealing just a bit of aggressive tooth, and then he would slowly chew, his lips flushing with wetness. I was so fixated I didn’t even hear her until she was right next to me, her respirator-like breathing falling upon my ear.

  “Rosen is on a goddamn witch hunt,” she declared. I came out of my trance, suddenly vulnerable to all the room’s wretched smells and sounds. It was chili day, and massive yellow trash bins around the room were brimming with garlicky waste. Janet began a series of wet coughs, reaching into the pocket of her wide elastic pants to
bring out a stained handkerchief. “He dropped by in the middle of my class this morning. Totally unannounced. I’d given them a group assignment and the little punks were all over the room. A few were climbing on the desks like baboons.”

  “Hello, Janet.” I looked back up and felt a bolt of panic in my stomach; suddenly I couldn’t see Jack. I desperately began a right-to-left scan of the room; I had to swallow repeatedly to avoid the urge to yell out his name.

  “I’d like to see Rosen try and teach them about the former USSR. It’s not exactly flies to honey. He sits in his big air-conditioned office half the day, never has to manage a classroom. He couldn’t walk a mile in my shoes.”

  I nodded, solemnly looking at her feet. If I gifted her a pair that weren’t Velcro, would she wear them? Likely not. She frequently removed her shoes in the teacher’s lounge—“Letting the dogs breathe,” as she called it—and when she put them back on there was no need to bend down and tie anything. She simply latched the Velcro back up by running the opposing foot’s callused heel along the straps.

  When she stood in front of the industrial fan, Janet’s sacklike clothing pressed against outlying regions of her body normally hidden by baggy fabric. “Just play his game for a little bit, Janet. Let him see what he wants to see, get him to stop breathing down your neck.” The charcoal frizz of her perm hovered above her scalp like a rising cloud of smog. With one eye open farther than the other, she looked like a stoic survivor: pillaged by the elements but still here against all odds.

  “Says he wants me to ‘foster an environment of mutual respect.’ What a bag of horseshit. These feral little dogs wouldn’t know respect if it bit them on the privates.”

  “Would respect really bite them on the privates?” I asked.

  “Just look at them out there. It’s like National Geographic. The future is hopeless.” Janet’s caustic remarks were drawing the attention of a husky student eating alone at a nearby table. A chili dog rested limply in the side of his mouth, his mastication paused so he could stare straight ahead at Janet.

  “Perhaps this conversation is best reserved for after hours,” I whispered. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a familiar blip of gray shirt and turned—Jack and his buddies had moved outside to the courtyard and were now sitting along the edge of a brick planter. The guys in the center were talking to two girls in short-shorts, saying something that was making the girls slap them on the forearms with pretend outrage as they all laughed. Jack sat at the corner, not speaking to the girls directly but in on the conversation. “Excuse me, Janet.” She was still talking, still continued to talk as I walked away and unbuttoned another button on the front of my shirt. Heading through the doorway out to the courtyard and looking straight ahead, I did my best strut, veering as close to Jack as I could without brushing against him on my walk by. His crowd of friends grew silent; I could feel all their eyes transfer to me as I passed. When I was several feet away, I heard one of his friends whistle. “She is smoking hot,” he said. There were laughs; next came the overenunciated voice of one of the girls. “Oh my god, Craig,” she chided. “She’s a teacher.” This was the attitude I knew I had to conquer in Jack’s mind: he had to be convinced that I was more like him than like his mother.

  In my afternoon classes I sat as close to the window AC unit as possible in an attempt to stop the electricity circulating in my body, so close that one side of my face grew nearly numb. I knew it wasn’t good to be hung up on one specific student so early on, that I shouldn’t feel a sense of desperation just for him. My obsessing over Jack meant I was growing increasingly willing to try to speed up contact. These urges might blind me to warning signs or cause me to engage in unnecessary risks. I needed to stay objective, but it seemed like a losing battle.

  Hearing the first acts of Romeo and Juliet read aloud for the fifth time that day, my head began to slump back in my chair. The AC was icing down my scalp but failing to cool the incessant tingle that caused me to cross and uncross and recross my legs again and again. At times, I wished that my genitals were prosthetic, something I could slip out of. They were a constant drone of stimulation; their requests hummed aloud throughout my life like a never-ending soundtrack. And everywhere I looked there were young male bodies. I had to watch their fingers idly drum on desktops, their nascent biceps flex as they raised a hand to their ear for a scratch, the pink buds of their tongues emerge to wet the corners of their mouths. By the end of the day, the stink of pheromones clung to the walls of the classroom like wet paint and made me dizzy.

  But despite the pleasant view, I saw few real options. Goody-goodies like Frank would deny me, and the overly confident type would find it impossible not to brag. There was only Jack—my second choice, Trevor Bodin, had a vast assortment of imperfections; deciding between the two of them was like being asked to pick a dance partner and given the option of a trained choreographer or an epileptic with a wooden leg. Trevor was an artsy sort whose hair was a wiggish crop of curls. A pensive journaler, he’d already asked if I’d look at some of his poetry. Since he walked home from school and didn’t have to rush to catch a bus, he often came up to talk books and writing with me after class. But he had a girlfriend; most of his poetry was devoted to professing his love for her—Abby Fischer in my second period, memorable for her chunk of dyed purple hair. Being the romantic type, if Trevor ever did stray, he’d undoubtedly confess to her minutes after the act, likely through a series of frantic text messages that peppered statements of regret with frown-faced emoticons. He also came off as clingy, which could prove to be downright toxic. Trevor seemed like the type who would be ever more demanding, who would accept nothing less than symbiosis. Plus, based on his clothing, his parents were extremely lenient. He had no fear of authority, which meant he wouldn’t be worried enough about getting caught and wouldn’t act with the necessary level of caution. Trevor was too outspoken, tried too hard to impress. But he kept tempting me—he loved staying to talk to me alone in the classroom after everyone else had left. That afternoon as soon as the final bell rang, he came straight up to my desk. I suppose it took a while to get my attention; I was looking through a slit in the window blinds, seeing if I could identify Jack amidst the horde of students pouring from the main building out to the bus lot. As they kept coming it seemed like they were multiplying, splitting off and begetting others in a mass act of asexual reproduction.

  “Mrs. Price?”

  I answered but didn’t break my gaze out the window. “Go ahead, Trevor, I’m listening.”

  “Don’t you think Romeo and Juliet is unrealistic? I mean, how they kill themselves? Why would they kill themselves if they’re actually in love?”

  Suddenly I spied two boys beginning to wrestle on the lawn in front of the bus line. They clenched one another’s waists until one finally began to reach around and take the other in a hold, pulling his shirt up above his ribs; I could make out the movements of his bare chest panting with exertion. I brought my lips closer to the window, feeling the sun’s intensified heat through the glass. Wasn’t it possible, as their fighting escalated, that they might remove their shirts entirely? My mind began to entertain the fantasy that they weren’t on the grass of the school grounds at all but the dirt floor of a Roman coliseum, fighting to the death so I could copulate with the winner.

  “I doubt they’re really in love anyway. I mean, they hardly know each other, right?” Trevor mussed his cropped hair, awaiting a response that lauded his insight and maturity.

  “Probably not, Trevor.” I had a brief urge to suggest to Trevor that he and I play a copycat game of sorts, watching the boys’ movements, then repeating them. If I lunged at Trevor and wrapped my arms around his waist, would I be able to stop myself from going further once I felt his sides contract in a fit of nervous giggling?

  In a matter of seconds the outdoor scuffle turned from light-hearted to serious; the two had toppled over in the grass. The boy on top was trying to pin down the other’s arms; kids on the nearest bus were n
ow hanging out its opened windows and cheering them on. I had to get myself in the middle of their brawl—I’d be able to touch the hot, moist skin of the top student’s arm as I pulled at him in a phony attempt to stop the fight, to smell the boys’ pungent musk of hormones, and possibly more. Anything could happen—I could get pulled to the ground and sandwiched between their squirming torsos; my clothes might be ripped from my body in the fray.

  “Two guys out there are going at one another like idiots,” I said, turning to reach for my purse. I hurried toward the door as Trevor followed alongside me in a running walk.

  “Hey!” I called out to them as loudly as I could while still sounding friendly. The top boy looked over and the bottom boy took advantage of his hesitation, lunging upright and managing to grab the kid’s neck. “Okay, guys, enough already.” I ran up and grabbed both arms of the choker, letting my hands roam upward into the damp pits of his T-shirt.

  I expected them to pull me into their mix of interlocking limbs and continue fighting but they didn’t—the choked student backed away and stood immediately, rubbing his neck. Perhaps he feared getting suspended. “We weren’t fighting for real,” he explained, catching his breath. His friend began to stand as well, twisting too soon from my grasp. No! I wanted to hiss at them, Don’t stop touching each other! When it became clear that there would be no further physical contact between any of us, my disappointment was so intense that I experienced it as a shift in gravity; I squatted down to the grass for a moment to catch my breath.

  “Yeah,” the second boy added, his voice slightly deeper. “We were just messing around.” There was a tense pause of silence as I closed my eyes and raised a steadying hand to my forehead; the feel of the boys’ eyes looking down upon me was as intense as the sunlight on my neck. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded and cautiously took my time standing back up. I looked over the body of each one with a longing for what might’ve been if I’d had to insert myself between them as they rolled together on the ground—the sharp chin of the top boy could’ve painfully buried itself in my shoulder; the flexed hand of the other could’ve slid across my ass in a feverish search for leverage as he tried to escape. “I get it,” I said, placing my hand along the red exposed skin of the choked boy’s upper shoulder. The collar of his T-shirt had been stretched out. My fingers drifted a few inches across his slick skin until they felt sufficiently wet; I hoped the wind wouldn’t dry them before I had a chance to take a quick taste. “Now get out of here before the AP sees you.”