Dan smiled. “And we have that playhouse you built for us, Zach. That’ll bring in some excellent bids. It’s a wonderful job you did.”
“Thanks. My dad’s a carpenter. I’ve been doing that stuff, like, forever.”
Dan nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. “Very good. Keep up the good work.”
He departed, leaving my classroom door ajar. As soon as he was out of earshot I turned to Zach and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”
He widened his eyes and grimaced, shoulders twitching uneasily, the body language teenagers always use to let an adult know she’s crazy. “Asking you for my next job,” he told me.
“I told you I was going to sign off on all your service hours.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you
I closed my eyes and tried to gather my flagging patience. “Zachary, I thought we agreed we were going to forget all about that.”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. But, like, if I expected you to sign off on me when I didn’t do all the work, then I wouldn’t be forgetting about it, right? I really would be whoring myself out.”
“I’m just saying.” He caught my pleading gaze and shrugged again. “I’m showing character and integrity.”
I sighed. “Don’t come to my classroom, all right? I’ll give you the work, but you can come by my house to talk to me about it. When you come waltzing in here when Dr. Beckett’s speaking with me, it looks suspicious.”
His laughter mocked me. “And me coming over to your house wouldn’t? C’mon. He knows I’m working with you. He’s the one who set the whole thing up. Don’t be paranoid.”
I considered his reasoning for only a second, then shook my head. “Sorry. I don’t feel very reassured.”
“That’s because you’re paranoid.”
He looked at me from under those shaggy bangs, and the impishness in his gaze was the same as the first time I’d looked at him in my rearview mirror, chastising him for his dirty joke. Now I took in the irreverence in his eyes, the mild humor in his smile, and considered the curious nature of his draw to me. In Ohio, secure at the end of Fairen’s invisible leash, he had seemed so young that I wondered at my sanity for ever having engaged with him. But there would come the moments, as now, when his eyes would snap sharply, knowingly, or he would stretch his lean body with that peculiar confident grace, that
“I don’t think this is the right place to discuss this,” I told him. “Do you mind if we finish this conversation somewhere else?”
“Depends,” he parried. “Are you going to buy me coffee?”
In Judy’s car he slid the seat back, ostensibly to make more legroom, but really so he could watch her in a covert way. Thinking about Fairen, about Ohio, brought on a gloomy, cloudy feeling, yet a quick segue to the memory of his return-trip conversation with Judy lightened his mind. In the days that followed he had spent a fair amount of time teasing out the subtext of their “Mrs. Robinson” conversation, weighing it against his memories of her response in the playhouse, and concluding that, for all her uptight frowning and prissy apologies, she didn’t regret it at all and would eagerly do it again given the opportunity. The concept was, at once, both dangerous and delectable. It was a rush.
At Starbucks he leaned against the rounded counter of the service area, watching Judy as she paid, and tried to gain some measure of how his theories might find root in reality. Not for the first time, he felt doubtful. Her face— wide at the cheekbones, tapering to a small childlike chin—had a youthful quality to its shape, but around her eyes and forehead she was unmistakably forty-something, unimpressed with the world and a little tired. Her long dark hair was interspersed with coarser gray strands. She was not the sort of middle-aged woman with bleached hair and a push-up bra, staking out the pool boy in a loose towel. And yet there was something about her—in her slim body, perhaps, or the tight mouselike way she moved—that spoke of a keyed-up part of her, a hair trigger that, by chance, hadn’t been knocked in a while.
He wondered, in an idle way, how many lovers she had had. How long it had been for her, or, for that matter, how recently.
All the tables were crammed with teens recently released from the public high school; Zach knew there was no chance they could sit and talk, as Judy had planned. The barista handed him his coffee, and Judy, in her efficient way, took hers as she walked past and moved straight out the door.
As they climbed back into her car she shook her hair back and said, “Do I need to just take you home, then? That took longer than I expected.”
“Nah. It’s better if I drink this first. My mom doesn’t like it when I drink coffee. She says the caffeine is bad for my bone development.”
She smiled. “That doesn’t surprise me, after what you said about my fridge.”
“Yeah. My parents are really big on that stuff. I was a vegetarian until I was fourteen. My folks still are. But once I hit puberty I started craving meat, even though I’d never had it. So I took that as a sign.” He sipped his coffee. “I’ll probably go back to it once I stop growing, though. It’s, like, ingrained.”
“The nutrition part, or the cruelty-to-animals part?”
“Both.” They were parked perpendicular to the storefront, and he watched the people walking in and out, focused only on caffeine. “My parents are major pacifists. They had a hard time with it when I was five and I desperately wanted to take karate. We compromised on judo because the principle is to use your opponent’s force against them. They were okay with that.” He set his knee against the dashboard. “My mom tried to get me into yoga instead, but it didn’t really take. She’s a yoga teacher, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. She’s been taking me with her to her classes since I was born. I’m good at it, it’s just not my thing. But even she’s not doing it right now, since the midwife put her on bed rest.”
