1969
Lucy runs away with her high school teacher, William, on a Friday, the last day of school, a June morning shiny with heat. She’s downstairs in the kitchen, and Iris has the TV on. The weather guy, his skin golden as a cashew, is smiling about power outages, urging the elderly and the sick to stay inside, his voice sliding like a trombone, and as soon as she hears the word “elderly,” Lucy glances uneasily at Iris.
“He doesn’t mean me, honey,” Iris says mildly, putting more bacon to snap in the pan. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Good, Lucy thinks, good, because it makes it that much easier for her to do what she’s going to do. Lucy is terrified, but she acts as if everything is ordinary. She eats the bacon, the triangles of rye toast, and the scrambled eggs that Iris leaves her, freckling them with pepper and pushing the lumpy curds around her plate. Lucy drinks the orange juice Iris pours for her and picks up the square multivitamin next to her plate, pretending to swallow it but then spitting it out in her napkin moments later because it has this silty undertaste. She wants to tell Iris to take more vitamins, since she won’t be around to remind her. It’s nearly impossible for her to believe that Iris turned seventy-nine in May. Everyone always says Iris barely looks in her late sixties, and just last week Lucy spotted an old man giving Iris the once-over at a restaurant, his eyes drifting over her body, lingering on her legs. Lucy knows three kids at school whose parents—far younger than Iris—have died suddenly: two fathers felled by heart attacks, a mother who suffered a stroke while walking the dog. Lucy knows that anything can happen and age is the hand at your back, giving you an extra push toward the abyss.
She tells herself Iris will be fine. Iris hasn’t had to work for years, since receiving sizable insurance money from her husband, who died in his sixties. Plus, she has money from Lucy’s parents. Lucy had never heard her parents talk about Iris, but Iris told Lucy and Charlotte it was because she was only very distantly related.
Lucy was only five when her parents died, Charlotte a year and a half older, and she doesn’t remember much about that life, though she’s seen the photos, two big red albums Iris keeps on a high shelf. She’s in more of the photos with her parents than Charlotte is, and she wonders whether that’s because Charlotte didn’t like being photographed then any more than she does now. There are lots of photos of Charlotte and Lucy together, jumping rope, sitting in a circle of dolls, laughing. But the photos of her parents alone! Her mother, winking into the camera, is all banana blond in a printed dress, her legs long and lean as a colt’s. Her father, burly and white-haired, with a mustache so thick it looks like a scrub brush, is kissing her mother’s cheek. They hold hands in the pictures. They smooch over a Thanksgiving turkey. Her dad was much older than her mom, but he didn’t act like it. They were at a supper club, dancing and having dinner, the girls at home with a sitter, when the fire broke out. Later, the news reports said it was someone’s cigarette igniting a curtain into flames so heavy most of the people there never made it out.
When she thinks about her parents, Lucy feels as if there is a mosquito trapped and buzzing in her body. She tells herself the stories Charlotte has told her, the few Charlotte can remember. There was the time their parents took them to Florida and they rode ponies on the beach. The time they all went to New York City to look at the Christmas lights and Lucy cried because the multitude of Santa Clauses confused her. She has told herself all these stories so many times she can almost convince herself that she really remembers them. Iris has no stories about the girls’ parents. “Our lives were all so busy,” Iris says. “We just never got together.”
Lucy glances at Iris bustling around the kitchen, pouring coffee, reaching for the sugar. She looks old, her skin lined, her hands embroidered with blue veins. Iris has never seemed old before, Lucy thinks. Iris took the girls to the park, she threw and sometimes caught Frisbees. The only thing she couldn’t do was take the girls to a movie in the evening, because she didn’t like driving at night. Plus, she preferred to go to bed early. Charlotte was always Iris’s “big-girl helper,” watching Lucy on the swings, running after her, and, a lot of the time, just sitting on one of the benches with Iris, the two of them with their heads dipped together, laughing, so that Lucy would have to stand on the swings and go higher just to blot out the surprise of being the odd person out.
Iris turns the TV to another channel. She shakes her head when she sees the hippies on the news, a sudden influx of them congregated and camping out in Boston Common, spread out on the green lawn like wildflowers, all of them in tie-dyes and striped or polka-dot pants and bare feet, some of the girls in flowing dresses or minis so tiny they barely cover their thighs, but Lucy finds herself glued to the set. “Like sheep!” Iris says, pointing to the way the cops are herding the kids back onto the streets. “Look at how they dress!” Iris marvels.
Lucy sighs. Iris wears jewel-tone silk dresses every day, or blouses and skirts. She’s always in low-heeled, strappy shoes. Her white hair is braided into a fussy ring around her head, like Heidi, and her earrings are always button ones, instead of the long, jangly ones Lucy wears. “Look at that one,” Iris says when the camera focuses on a boy with ringlets skimming his shoulders. “What a world,” Iris marvels, and she shuts the set off. But Lucy loves the way the hippies look, the multitude of rings on their toes and fingers, the clashing clothes. These kids are part of a life glittering just inches away from her, and all she has to do is grab hold, the way she does with William’s hair, thick and shiny as satin. She can almost feel her hands in it, tugging him closer to kiss her.
She wants to tell Iris and Charlotte. She wants to tell someone, but she can’t.
Iris hands Lucy a brown paper bag filled with a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, the same lunch Lucy’s had since elementary school. Iris sits down and pulls out the crossword puzzle from the daily newspaper. This is her favorite part of the day. She picks up a pencil and chews on the end and then glances at Lucy again. “Honey, go find a hairbrush before you go,” Iris says.
Lucy pats down her cap of curls and then sits and finishes her juice. She looks around the kitchen as if she’s memorizing every detail—the oak table and chairs, the braided rug—because until she’s eighteen, just two years from now, when no one can legally stop her from being with William, she won’t see this room again.
She has to leave the house before Charlotte can catch up and ask why her knapsack is so heavy, why Lucy seems so nervous, why she’s in such a hurry. Charlotte worries over Lucy the same way she worries about everything, and though Lucy used to like that, now it’s a burden. She’s taken only what she thinks she’ll need, because William says that the whole idea is to simplify their lives, that people today are too hung up on having stuff. She packed two pairs of bell-bottom jeans, one of them elephant bells, a paisley minidress, her favorite pink felt shift dress —the same one Twiggy wore on the cover of Seventeen —and her Love’s Baby Soft shampoo. She has a brand-new Lanz nightgown with black lace trim and a pair of yellow marabou slippers she found on sale for two dollars, crumpled in a bin at Zayre, the feathers fluffed around the toes. And of course, she has her blue journal, a new one that she’s already started to use.
She wonders whether Charlotte will miss her. Though they go to the same school, Lucy is a sophomore, while Charlotte is a senior, and that makes a big difference. Charlotte loves every stupid brick of Waltham High, but Lucy is in misery. The school is so small minded. Last year, while all the world and other high schools were protesting the Vietnam War, Waltham High had a tiny walkout of just twenty kids, mostly the art and drama students, and by the time everyone spilled onto the blacktop outside, the protest had changed from being against the war to wanting a Coke machine in the cafeteria. “What do we want?” someone screamed. “When do we want it? Coke! Now!”As soon as all the kids came back inside, sweaty from the heat, jazzed up, they all got detention, including Lucy. “The president knows better than you what should be done with the war,” Iris said to her. “What if people did this during World War Two? What if all the soldiers decided they didn’t want to go? We’d all be under Nazi rule.”
The day of the walkout, Charlotte didn’t get detention, because she was taking her SATs for the third time, as if her stellar scores the first two times weren’t high enough. But even if Charlotte had been there, she probably wouldn’t have joined the protest, because she’d have been worrying what would happen, whether getting detention would spoil her chances of landing her choice college. She’d have made a list of every positive and negative, and by the time she was done, the war would have been over and she wouldn’t have had to make a decision at all.
Charlotte has no idea how good she has it. She’s always been in the accelerated honors program. She’s completely gorgeous, with startling eyes, green as limes, and the kind of thick, straight cocoa hair that Lucy yearns for. But instead of growing it to her waist, parting it in the middle, the way Lucy would have, Charlotte chops it to her chin, cutting it herself with scissors in the bathroom because she’s afraid that the hair salons won’t listen to her, that they might give her an artichoke or a pixie style instead. Plus, Charlotte has already decided her whole life. She loves animals and she wants to be a veterinarian, and she got a full scholarship at Brandeis. “It’s only ten minutes away,” Charlotte tells them, but Lucy gets this ache behind her eyes when she thinks about it. Her sister has always been in the house with her. How can she so easily leave Lucy behind?
Ever since Charlotte started worrying about college, the only person she hangs out with is her friend Birdie, another study-all-the-time girl who’s going to be a theater major at Emerson, and when Lucy listens in on their conversations, all they talk about is leaving home.
Charlotte bought saffron-colored Indian bedspreads for her dorm room from the Harvard Coop, and a funny lamp shaped like a pineapple. She’s already written to her roommate, a girl from California named Cherry Mossman, who sent Charlotte a photo of herself and her beagle, both wearing angel wings for Halloween.
Lucy knows from friends of hers how it is, how their brothers or sisters went off to college and made lives there and didn’t come back, and even if they did, the person who returned was different. Just like William told her. “People move on. They change. They go on and make new families.”
“What’s a three-letter word for pies starting with the letter z?” Iris asks, readjusting a white bobby pin in her hair.
“Zas,” Lucy says, and Iris frowns. “Are you sure?” she says. “Is that really a word?”
Lucy has a feeling that if Charlotte answered the question, Iris wouldn’t doubt her. “It means pizza,” she says. She hesitates and then gets up from the table and kisses Iris on the cheek. Iris flushes. “Well, what have I done to deserve something that nice today?” Iris says. “Did you eat enough? Are you taking a jacket? It might get cool later.”
Lucy nods. Sometimes Lucy feels that Iris worries over her more than she does Charlotte, and it makes Lucy feel deficient, as if she can’t take care of herself. She keeps thinking that soon she will be one less thing for Iris to worry about.
Lucy hears Charlotte coming into the kitchen, the rat-a-tat-tat of the green cowboy boots she insists on wearing every day, the heavy way she walks as if she needs to weight herself to the earth or she’ll fly away. There she is, Lucy’s sister, as startling as an exclamation point, in a purple mini and orange tights.
“Morning,” Charlotte says, reaching for a bagel on the counter, brushing close.
Lucy breathes in deeply. “Hey,” she says.
Her sister, who never eats much, takes neat bites out of her bagel. “If you wait a few minutes, I’ll walk to school with you,” Charlotte offers.
The thought scares Lucy. She knows if she has to speak, her plans will be doomed, they will helplessly leak from her. She’s never been able to keep much from her sister.
“I can’t. I have to see the science teacher before class,” Lucy says, and she bolts toward the front door.
“See you later, then,” Charlotte says, waving a hand.
On the way out, Lucy spots the long red silk scarf Charlotte’s taken to wearing, which is hanging on the doorknob. She grabs it. She’s taking this part of Charlotte with her. She has to have something. She wraps it around her neck, lets it flutter to her waist, and races outside.
BEING IN SCHOOL is tricky because Lucy keeps dodging people she knows so she won’t have to talk to them. The less anyone knows, the better. She winds in and out of couples and groups of girls, her heart hammering against her ribs. She ignores the catcalls of the boys, the sly way they take her in, their eyes fastened on her. “Hey, frizzy, you busy?” someone yells, but she pretends not to hear. She’s so not interested in any of them. She hums so that her whole body seems to vibrate, something Mr. Hobert, her science teacher, had told them was actually good for people, because vibrations can heal by the power of sound. She leans against the hallway walls, trying to compose herself. She presses her toes together in her shoes and feels the forty dollars she tucked into her sneakers. Ever since Iris started giving her an allowance, she’s been saving every bit she can, and now she has all of it stuffed in her shoes. She’s walking on money. This waiting is drumming inside her. Every sound makes her flinch. Please, she wants to say out loud. Please let this happen to me.
At second period, she’s in Algebra with Miss Grimes, who wears pop beads and pink lipstick. There’s a smell of stale bubblegum (most of it stuck to the underside of her desk) and sour milk, and Lucy isn’t sure she can stand it another second.
“Homework,” says Miss Grimes, and Lucy can see there is a freckle of lipstick on her front tooth. Everyone passes the papers forward except for Lucy, who tried to do the quadratic equations the night before and got so confused she finally gave up. She tried and tried, but she just didn’t get it. Miss Grimes looks at her. “Really, Lucy, even on the last day of class?” Lucy lowers her head, but she knows she will never have to do this humbling before a teacher again.
At lunch in the cafeteria, Lucy sits at the same table she always does, with Sable and Heather, her friends but not really her friends, girls she’s known since grade school who live conveniently near her. They talk about a party that night, held at some girl’s house. While Lucy picks at the cafeteria pizza, pulling off the gluey cheese, finding the crust, Heather and Sable scope out the boys they have crushes on. The girls twirl their hair and examine their split ends. Lucy knows the boys look at her, and sometimes she thinks that’s the only reason Sable and Heather hang around her, so that they can get the ones Lucy doesn’t want. Lucy’s had dates, but her initial attraction always fades after a week or two, something that worries her a little. “You just haven’t found the right guy,” Sable told her, and now Lucy knows that was true.
“Older kids are supposed to be at this party,” Heather says.
“We’ll pick you up,” Sable confirms.
“No, no. I’ll meet you guys there,” Lucy tells them.
It’s so easy to lie. It’s getting easier all the time.
Then, there it is, after a whole day of staring at the clock, three in the afternoon, and Lucy swears that for a moment all the color has bled out of the school. Every person seems smudged. She leans against her locker, gulping air, averting her whole body so she can’t tell if anyone is looking at her. Luckily she hasn’t run into Charlotte all day, but then she’s been racing out of one class to the next, taking weird routes to get there, hallways where she knows her sister won’t be.
Lucy walks through the school’s main entrance for the last time, keeping her head down. She’ll always remember this day. She’ll never forget it. Worry thumps in her head.
She had debated with herself how to leave, over and over, pulled like elastic. She didn’t want to be cruel, didn’t want anyone to worry. “We need to just go,” William had told her quietly, but she couldn’t do that. Instead she left a note, tucked under her pillow. They won’t think to worry about her until she isn’t there for dinner, and even then they’ll chalk up her absence to her forgetting the time while she’s out carousing after the last day of school. No one will even think to scour her bedroom until Sable or Heather calls, wanting to know where Lucy is, why she isn’t at the party. Then Iris and Charlotte will search her room and they’ll find the note. Then they’ll realize that Lucy’s fine. She’s doing this of her own volition. I love you but I have to do this. I am happy and safe and I will call you soon and explain everything. Please don’t worry.
LUCY LEANS AGAINST the side of the school until she sees Mr. Lallo—William—striding out the door, pulling off his jacket so he’s wearing just a black T-shirt, acting as if it’s ordinary for a teacher to leave at the same time as the kids. All the teachers are expected to stay until four, to make themselves available to the kids, though most of them just end up hanging around in empty classrooms, drumming their fingers on their desks or reading the newspaper. But of course, today is different.
Lucy watches William, admires his graceful lope. He’s thirty years old and he came to the school a year ago from a free school in California called the Paradise School, and he’s different from all the other teachers, full of new ideas. The first thing he did was to take apart the rows and put all the desks in a circle. The kids watched him, astonished, unsure what to do or where to go. “Sit wherever you like,” he told them, and the kids looked so confused he had to repeat it again. “Wherever you want. Claim your space,” he said. “It can be different every day.”
At first, Lucy was anxious in his class. She wanted to do well, but she had always struggled in school. She wondered whether she was all that smart, something so dark and shameful she tried not to think about it too much. Could she really be stupid? Charlotte was worlds smarter. Charlotte could read before she even hit kindergarten, while Lucy was always in the third reading group, the one where all the dummies were. Whenever Lucy got a teacher that Charlotte had had, the teacher was always delighted. “You’re Charlotte’s sister!” they said, as if they’d just discovered a new planet. But then Lucy would start failing, and she would feel their disappointment like a fog settling over her.
Charlotte helped her with her homework, but even so, Lucy brought home Cs and even a few Ds. It wasn’t long before Lucy was stuck in general ed with all the kids whose only possibilities after high school were the armed forces or marriage or being a cashier at Woolworth’s. Lucy felt her heart knot. How many evenings had Charlotte sat with her, patiently explaining quadratic equations and the Magna Carta, not caring if it took all evening, making Lucy laugh, being as excited as Lucy when Lucy brought home Bs? But then Charlotte started worrying about PSATs and then SATS, about colleges and essays. She began studying through the evenings, sometimes even taking her dinner into her room so she wouldn’t waste time. Charlotte looked helplessly at Lucy when Lucy was frowning over her books. “I’m fine. I can do it on my own,” Lucy said, and she saw the relief bloom on her sister’s face. After that, Lucy just stopped asking.
Lucy studied for hours—the history dates, the math theorems, the French verbs—but it all flew out of her head. She tried everything. Flash cards. Repeating facts before she went to sleep like a mantra, because she had heard that information would imprint on your brain almost the way it did under hypnosis. She had gone to her teachers for help after class, but all the teachers did was to give her more take-home worksheets that she still didn’t understand. She knew her PSAT scores were so low she wouldn’t get in anywhere she applied, let alone get a scholarship. Even the guidance counselor had given up on her, telling her, “Not everyone is meant to go to college,” as if that was supposed to make her feel better. Iris told her brightly, “There’s always Katie Gibbs,” and Lucy knew she meant Katherine Gibbs, the secretarial school in the city where you had to wear white gloves and skirts and stockings and the best you could hope for was a boring job typing for some man who looked down on you. “I’m not going to Katie Gibbs,” Lucy insisted.
“It leads to jobs,” Iris said. “I just want you to have a great life. To be able to take care of yourself.” But Lucy wasn’t so sure how great a life that would be. Not then, anyway.
THE FIRST CLASS Lucy ever did well in was William’s English class.
He took the gray Manter Hall vocabulary books and put them in his closet. “You can learn vocabulary by reading.” He had the students underline words they didn’t know in books and look them up. He said that you should write about how a story made you feel rather than parrot what you thought the symbolism was and what the author really meant, because no one really knew that other than the author, and sometimes the author was clueless. “A table can be green just because that’s the first color the writer thought of,” William said. He made them all buy notebooks, which they were to call their journals, and when Lucy stared at the page, paralyzed, he crouched down by her desk. “Write about the thing that scares you the most,” he encouraged. That night, she wrote four pages about how afraid she was of getting stuck in Waltham, having to be a secretary or a cashier, living at home because she couldn’t afford her own place. She wrote about missing her sister, who was always studying now, how it felt as if she had lost her partner in crime. When she read her story over, it surprised her that her writing didn’t seem that bad. That it actually felt honest and even fun, like when she and Charlotte made up stories when they were kids. Later, when William handed it back to her, he was grinning. “I liked this lots, Lucy,” he said, and then she looked from him to her journal and saw the big inky A. She had never received an A, not even in Home Ec, where all you had to do was show up and make sure your apron was ironed and clean. She couldn’t wait to write more in the journal, just to get an A again, maybe on something a little less personal so she could show it to Iris and Charlotte. This is something I can do.
William played movies in class, clips from Fellini and Antonioni. The films were surprising and strange, and while a lot of the kids put their heads on their arms and dozed, Lucy loved them. She even sort of understood them, which made her begin to wonder whether maybe she wasn’t as dim as everyone seemed to think. When William asked what they thought about the imaginary game of tennis at the end of Blow-Up, kids hunkered down in their seats, trying to be invisible, but Lucy hesitantly raised her hand. “Isn’t it about what’s real and what isn’t? How we can’t tell the difference sometimes?” she said. William beamed. “What a good point, Lucy,” he said, and she felt the flush rise up to her cheekbones. He actually thought she was smart, and it made her feel like a light that had just been switched on.
“Ask me anything,” William would say, and slowly, hesitantly, their hands popped up. He had never been married. He had had lots of girlfriends. He had been born in Belmont and gone to college at Tufts. His father was dead, but his mother still lived in the house where he grew up. He’d tried grass, opium, acid, but was completely straight now. Yes, it had felt great, that’s why people got addicted. That was the whole point and why drugs were so dangerous. “And no, none of you should even think of trying any,” he said.
Not only did he support the antiwar movement, but he’d marched in Boston a few months ago and even got to talk to Abbie Hoffman, who was there giving a speech. William wore a Not-So-Silent Spring button on his jacket lapel, a dot of yellow imprinted with an upraised red fist that held a sprig of greenery. “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” he chanted, and then he told them the answer, writing on the board the Vietnam death toll for 1968—16,899—a number so staggeringly high that the kids shifted uneasily in their seats, because they knew there was a draft. The boys could be called up one day. Their lives could end, just like that. “Not if you resist the draft,” William assured them. He drew a map of Canada on the blackboard and tapped the chalk on it. “Or go here,” he said. “What a beautiful country.” His voice was silky as a promise. “It’s possible to live in a perfect world,” he said. “Peace. Love. They aren’t just dreams, but you have to fight for them.”
William believed in civil rights, women’s lib, and progressive education, in teaching to the kids’ own personal level. School curricula were too regimented for him. They killed any desire for what he called never-ending learning. He talked about this school Summerhill in England, where there were no classes at all and you could learn whatever you wanted on whatever day you wanted. Success there was defined not by grades but by what the child himself thought was successful. “What’s a grade?” he said dismissively. “Einstein flunked math. I give grades because the school requires it, but don’t think for a moment that grade is all you are. You’re all so much more.” Lucy thought of the F on her latest French test, all those past-perfect verbs swimming by her like a school of wild fish. She thought of the As and Bs he was giving her, his constant praise.
The kids all loved him (except for Charlotte, who actually dropped out of his class the year before because she said she wasn’t learning enough). The kids all thought he was hip and cool and wonderful. He wore a tie and jacket like the other teachers, but his tie had dancing dogs on it, or words in French that he would teach them. C’est si bon. It’s so good. His suit jacket was sometimes bright purple or paisley, and even though boys were being sent home for having their hair too long, forced to cut it or slick it back with grease, William’s hair dusted his collar.
Lucy saw the way some of the other teachers eyed him suspiciously. She heard that parents had begun to complain about the antiwar articles William handed out in class, taken from love-me-I’m-a-liberal magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. Where were the things these kids really needed to know, like grammar and vocabulary, and the tests to prove they had mastered them? Shouldn’t they be writing research papers? Parents complained that instead of having students in Lucy’s class read Romeo and Juliet, which the other English class was reading, he had handed out paperbacks of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and even though he had paid for the books himself, the principal had made all the kids give them back, standing over William to make sure it was done. “The book is subversive,” Mr. Socker said. “It’s inappropriate. Plus, the author is one of those nut jobs who rides around in a painted bus and takes LSD, and why give these kids ideas?”
“Why not?” William asked. “Isn’t that what school is about, ideas?” Mr. Socker just gave him a pained look and walked away.
The next story William had the class read was taken from the Atlantic Monthly, put on ditto sheets. The kids all put the pages to their faces to inhale the fumes, eyes closed, and then Lucy saw the pages were censored, whole paragraphs blacked out. William refused to meet anyone’s eyes. His mouth was a line. All Lucy could get from the story was that it was about a soldier in Vietnam and he had killed someone and now he was wandering lost in the jungle and everything was rotting: his clothes, his skin, his mind. Too much of the story was gone for her to follow it. She was lost and she began to feel thick and stupid again. One kid complained, “This doesn’t make sense with all these words crossed out,” and William said, “You’re right, it sure doesn’t,” but his voice was weary, his head lowered, when he said it. “Put the story away,” he said finally. “Open up your vocabulary books.”
“But we never use them—” someone said, and then William narrowed his eyes. “Just do it,” he said, and everyone dug out their Manter Halls.
It wasn’t long before it became official, before everyone somehow knew. William had been warned, not just by the principal, but by the school board. There had been too many complaints from parents, and a few from other teachers. There had been meetings with everyone trying to decide what to do. Lucy said nothing about any of this at home, afraid that Iris would think the warning was appropriate, that Charlotte would chime in and agree. William was put on probation for not following the curriculum, for talking about the war, for discussing his personal life, for encouraging the students to call him William, which was not school policy, and which certainly broke the barriers that needed to be there.
One day, William was absent from class. They had a substitute, an older woman in a green suit and tight, dry curls, who scratched her name across the green board in chalk: Mrs. Marmoset. “Like the animal,” she told them, and one of the boys in the back made his hands into claws. “I saw that,” Mrs. Marmoset said. “And my talons leave scars. Just so you know.”
“Let’s get this room in order, shall we?” she said. She made them put the desks back in rows, took attendance so she could seat them alphabetically, and then drilled them on vocabulary words, raising her arms as if she were conducting an orchestra, shocked at how they couldn’t conjugate irregular verbs or diagram a sentence or use the word mendacious in a sentence. She shook her head, clucking her teeth. “This is not good, people,” she said. “What have you been doing all year?”
Halfway through a drill of past-perfect verbs, William showed up in the doorway, his shirt rumpled, his hair askew, his tie like a noose around his neck. As soon as he strode into the room, the air felt charged. “I’ll take over now,” he said to Mrs. Marmoset. He said something to her quietly. Mrs. Marmoset looked at him doubtfully. “Well, I don’t think—” she said in her normal voice, but he murmured something else to her, something more insistent, and then she nodded reluctantly.
“Work hard, people,” she said to the class. Then she left the room.
Everyone waited, rustling in their seats, but William didn’t teach. Instead he surveyed the class, as if he were taking their measure, as if he expected them to do something for him. He looked at all the conjugated verbs on the blackboard, the books open on their desks, all set in fierce rows, and then he sat at his desk and put his head in his hands. “Mr. Lallo?” someone in the back said, but William stayed motionless. “William?” a girl called, and he lifted his head for a moment and then lowered it again. They could see he was crying. Lucy sat frozen at her desk. No one spoke, and then the bell rang and everyone quietly filed out.
After that, William’s classes weren’t as much fun. He stopped showing movies except for one he said he was required to show, which was about the dangers of drugs. A boy in the film went crazy after taking one drag of a joint and was put in a straitjacket and led away by two doctors, while his parents helplessly cried. A girl took a tab of acid and then shouted, “I can fly!” and jumped off a roof, flapping her arms, while her friends cheered. Lucy glanced at William to see whether he thought this film was as moronic as she did, but he was staring at his hands, his face unreadable.
He began using textbooks, and everyone knew it was because the principal kept showing up without notice, sitting at the back of the class, almost as if he were daring William to go ahead, make trouble, and see what would happen.
It made the kids love William more, making him an even greater hero. Everyone swapped William stories as if they were trading cards. This kid, Ronnie Bortman, had called him at two in the morning, wanting to kill himself, and William had stayed on the phone with him until dawn, talking him down. Now, thanks to William’s recommendation letter, Ronnie was headed to Berkeley. There were rumors that he had helped a girl get an abortion, a safe one, even though it was illegal, because William had a doctor friend who owed him a favor. No one even knew who the girl was. That was how good William was at keeping your secrets.
NOW, WALKING OUT of the school, William doesn’t even glance at Lucy. His gaze is a laser, straight ahead. Debbie Polley and Andrea Dickens, two other girls who have crushes on him, are running to talk to him now, and Lucy feels a whip of jealousy, before she reminds herself that the only one he loves is her.
It’s been going on for six months now and they are both very careful. Today they are leaving Waltham and moving to rural Pennsylvania, where he has a new job lined up, where they can be together all the time, where Lucy won’t have to feel that she is about to spontaneously combust if she can’t touch his face, his hand, the slope of his back. Lucy will never feel alone again. No one will ever call her stupid. She can write all she wants—which is all she’s been doing now—and he will help her. But she knows what else could happen. She’s a minor. William could be arrested, especially for taking her over state lines. She shakes the doom-and-gloom feeling off. No one will find them, she tells herself.
As soon as Lucy sees William, she wants to run and kiss him, but instead she sticks to their plan, checking her watch and pretending to be waiting for someone. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him get into his little yellow Bug and peel out. She knows exactly where he’s going.
When the crowd of students has thinned out, when she’s just about the last one left, she walks over to the Star Market, two blocks away. She strides casually across the parking lot, past the silver skeletons of the shopping carts, the occasional shopper wearily getting into a car, probably pondering the price of groceries and not taking any note of Lucy. She remembers the way William looks at her when they are making love (she would never call it balling, the way the other kids do, a coarse, ugly word—that’s not what they do), the way he always says, “I love you so fucking much,” when he comes, as if he is crying it, while she lies quietly underneath him, just watching his face. He tells her not to worry that she hasn’t had an orgasm yet, he will teach her. But she doesn’t really care. What she loves is the feel of his skin against hers, the way he keeps saying, “How did I get so lucky?”
She remembers the day he found her eating lunch in his empty classroom way back in December, because it was the only room that was open all the time, the one place where she might have some privacy. She was crying into her peanut butter sandwich because she had come out of gym class to find that one of the tough girls who didn’t like her—and for no reason at all, as far as Lucy could see—had tied her tights in a knot again, that the silver bracelet she had hidden in her shoe was missing. She walked out of the dressing room to look around, and the girls were watching her, smiling. “You ever hear of one of these?” one girl said, holding up a comb, and the others laughed while Lucy’s face flamed and her hands flew to her hair. Lucy had strode past them to the gym teacher’s office, but the teacher had sighed. “Who wears an expensive silver bracelet to gym class?” she asked Lucy.
“I shouldn’t cry in school,” she sobbed to William, and he shook his head.
“Chemicals in tears release stress. It’s good to cry,” he said. “Plus, you’re in touch with your feelings. I wish I were that open.”
She looked up at him, astonished. “You are. Of course you are,” she said. “You’re the most open person I know.”
He shook his head again. “I try and fail.”
He handed her tissues from a box on his desk. “Keep crying. Let it all out,” he told her. He smelled good, like pine or new wood floors, and it made her stop crying a little. When she was finally finished, snuffling into a bloom of Kleenex, he picked up her journal and browsed through it and she sat frozen, because she had begun to write stories on her own, not just for class. It was fun to write, to be someone else, but she wasn’t sure whether her stories were any good. She wanted to tear the journal out of his hands, but instead she watched his face, his eyes unwavering. He read the first story, about a pregnant waitress whose boyfriend has left her, and the whole time she was terrified he was going to tell her to write about what she knew or to watch her spelling and grammar. Instead he shut the journal. “Well, well. This is really excellent,” he said.
She blushed, looking down at her hands, at her bitten nails, painted red.
“Why didn’t you show this to me before?”
She shrugged, embarrassed.
“You have real talent. You shouldn’t hide that.”
“You think so?” She looked up at him.
“This is really good, but you need to tighten it up.” Casually, as if he were telling her how to put in a kitchen faucet, he pointed out how she didn’t need all the backstory about her main character, how the waitress didn’t have to yell at a nasty customer but should simply slam down the coffee cup instead to show her anger. “I could work with you on your writing,” he told her. “If you want. You could come in during lunchtime. Or after school.” He leaned forward and she felt the heat from his body. “Are you willing to work hard?” he asked. “Are you willing to struggle for greatness?”
Every day after that they ate lunch together and talked about her work. He covered her pages with red marks, like slashes with a razor, but she didn’t mind because she knew he was on her side. “Go deeper. Think harder,” he said. He made her rewrite and rewrite, crossing out her adjectives and adverbs, which he said made you see the writer trying to craft a beautiful flow of words instead of letting the reader get lost in the story. “I want you to disappear,” he told her. “There should be no Lucy on this page.”
When they were done working, they talked. He admitted that the reason this mattered so much to him was that he was actually a writer, too. “You’re kidding!” she said. They had something in common. “You never told us that in class.”
“I don’t share it with everyone,” he said, and she felt herself gleam. He said that he had a novel that was almost finished, that there was real interest from a New York publisher about it, too. “I just need the time to finish it,” he said.
“Can I read it?” she asked. “What’s it about?”
“Let’s focus on you, first,” he told her, which both thrilled and disappointed her.
“Did you have someone who helped you, like you’re helping me?” she asked.
He shook his head. “My father was a CEO of a big business company that made sprockets. He wanted me to come work for him, but I refused. He pulled all these strings to get me into business school, and I wouldn’t go. Every interview he set up for me I deliberately flubbed. As soon as he figured it out, he lost all interest in me. And in my mom.”
“What does he know?” Lucy said. “What a doofus.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think he was right. The truth is that here I am, at a fifth-rate high school with an unfinished novel sitting in my sad, tiny apartment.”
“All the kids love you. I hear them. I know. And you’ll finish your book. I know it’s genius, I just know it. And I bet your apartment’s cool, too.”
“Sometimes I think that the kids love me because I’m their friend. Not because I’m a good teacher.”
“But that’s just not true. You’ve taught me so much. You really helped me. No teacher’s ever taken me seriously before.”
He studied her. “Maybe we should start sending your stories out and get you published. There’s lots of great magazines for young writers.”
She met his eyes. He had a fleck of gold in his left iris and she couldn’t stop staring at it. “Really?” She looked at him in wonder.
IN THE WEEKS that followed, Lucy began to be more careful about how she dressed for school, trying to look older, more sophisticated. She borrowed Iris’s soft silk blouses and rolled the waistbands of her skirts to shorten them as soon as she left the house. (“Don’t you look pretty,” Iris said.) Lucy couldn’t do anything about her hair, so she festooned jeweled clip earrings into her curls like barrettes. She made lists of things she could talk to William about, topics of conversation that might make her seem more interesting, more valuable to be around, more grown up. He had brought a camera to class to snap all their photos. She lied and told him she was learning photography, maybe he could give her pointers. She knew he loved the country, so she spent one evening in the library reading about birds and plants and chickens, and the next time she saw him, she casually mentioned how wild dandelions greens could make a spectacular soup, how brown speckled eggs might not be the prettiest but they were the most nutritious. “You are full of surprises,” he said.
One morning at lunchtime, she walked into William’s room and he was grinning. He waved a letter at her. “Well, would you look at this,” he said, and when she took the paper, her hands were shaking. Honorable mention in Boston Kids magazine, a little journal held together with staples. No money, but still, it was a prize, and she would be published in their next issue. He was smiling at her.
“You did this,” she said.
“I think we can say that we both did.”
She impulsively hugged him, her arms around his ribs, her cheek against his neck. His stubble scratched. He smelled like cigarettes and toothpaste and she couldn’t help it, she kissed his mouth, feeling a shock of heat, her eyes fluttering. “I love you,” she blurted out, and he pushed her away from him, so that she stumbled, bumping into a chair. She felt like an idiot, as if she had ruined everything. He brushed himself off and moved behind his desk.
“No. You don’t,” he said. “You’re a student. I’m a teacher. It’s totally inappropriate.”
She wavered on her heels, blinking back tears. “You like me. I know you like me.” She felt as if she were pleading.
“I like all my students,” he said. His voice was metallic. “But not like that. Never like that.” He shook his head. “I think you had better go, Lucy.”
After that, he kept his distance. He didn’t call on her in class, even when her hand was the only one raised, and when she spoke out anyway, he looked as if he hadn’t heard her. She sat hunched over. When she came to see him at lunchtime, stories gathered under her arm, he said curtly, “I’m busy.” One day she came by and he was talking to Miss Silva, the French teacher, smiling sleepily, and when he touched Miss Silva’s hand, Lucy felt as if she had been sucker punched. “Tonight would be great,” Miss Silva said. “But this time, I’m beating you at pool, buddy.”
“Mr. Lallo,” Lucy said, and then he turned and looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her. Miss Silva took a step back from William. “I have a story. Would you read it?” she asked.
“You can leave it for me on my desk,” he said. He turned back to Miss Silva.
The next day in class, William returned her pages. Her story was covered in red marks, his usual slashes. He crossed out all her adjectives and adverbs. Be more precise, he wrote. She touched the red ink with her fingertips.
SHE WALKED HOME crying. Everything was ruined. How could she have been so stupid? What was wrong with her? She was crying so hard she couldn’t see in front of her. It was cold out, starting to snow, and she was shivering. She swiped at her eyes, at her running nose. A woman walking past gave her a strange look but kept going. Two girls in identical red maxicoats stared at Lucy and then whispered behind their hands.
She didn’t go to school the next day, lying to Iris about a fever. She skipped the day after that as well, sitting in her room, painting watercolors on a card, blue stars and moons floating out of a silver cup. It looked impossibly beautiful to her. She thought about signing it but instead tucked it into an envelope and then looked up William’s address in the white pages. Iris was watching a movie on TV, so engrossed that she didn’t hear Lucy slipping out the front door. Lucy hitchhiked to William’s, and as soon as she got into the foyer of his apartment building, she hit all the buzzers except for his until someone let her in. Then she ran up the stairs and slid the card under his door. Her boots made snowy prints on the hallway rug. By the time she got home, she was feverish with need. She lay on her bed, feeling sick that she had left the card. It was something someone crazy would do. Someone obsessed. At least she hadn’t signed her name. She hadn’t written anything that would give her away.
On the third day, she returned to school and walked into William’s class. “Nice to see you back,” he said shortly, and then she felt his hand on the small of her back, just for a moment, like an electrical current. “Go take a seat,” he said, and, flustered, she did. She sleepwalked through her classes, but the teachers thought she had been sick, so they gave her leeway.
At the end of school, as she was about to walk home, she saw William standing by his car, in the lot, looking at her as if he were waiting for her. He was perfectly still until she was close to him, and then he bent, as if he were going to tell her a secret. “Do you think you could get to Belmont today?” he said finally. His voice splintered.
“What?” The sun was in her eyes and she squinted at him. It looked as if he had a halo shimmering around his head.
“We can’t go there together,” he said. He wrote something on a piece of paper and then folded it like origami and handed it to her. She saw his hands were shaking. She opened the paper. 1214 Winston Drive. Apartment 4B. It was the same address where she had delivered the watercolor. She saw the same elevator she had snuck up to give him the card, his hallway carpeted in blue. She nodded and tucked the paper into her hand.
“I’m suffering, too, Lucy,” he told her.
SHE FOUND A pay phone to call Iris. “I’m hanging with friends,” she said. “Be home later.” Then she hitched a ride from a woman in a purple snow jacket, who was silent the whole time. When they arrived, Lucy practically ran into the apartment building. She rang William’s buzzer and walked up the two flights. She could hear music, an itchy slide of jazz, and when she got to William’s floor, she smelled coffee, and there he was standing in the hall, in jeans and a white shirt, his door open. His hair was loose around his shoulders and she thought she had never seen him more beautiful. He looked away from her, pained.
“Did you change your mind?” she said.
“Yes. No. Come inside.”
His place was small and bright with sun. There was a big painting of a red dog on the wall. She didn’t know what to do, so she waited. “Sit,” he ordered. “We have to talk about this.” She moved gingerly to the edge of his nubby white couch, but he kept moving around the room, pacing.
“You think it’s just you, and it’s not,” he said finally.
“What’s not?”
“I get to school and you’re the only person I want to talk to,” he said. “How insane is that?”
“Me, too—” she said, but he lifted his hand. “Let me finish,” he said. “All day, things happen and I keep thinking, I want to tell Lucy this. I want to show Lucy this article. I wonder what Lucy would think of this piece I heard on the radio, if she likes this song, this dish, this color—”
“I feel like that about you.”
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. This whole situation is ridiculous. All I wanted was to help you get better as a writer, help you shine a little. That was my job as a teacher and I did that.”
He dug his hands into his pockets, his face tense and miserable. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said abruptly. “What’s wrong with me that I can’t?” He shook his head. “You don’t look sixteen. You don’t act sixteen.” He hesitated. “You sent me that card. I know it was you. It was the most shockingly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Who knew you could paint?”
“I can’t. Not really. I sort of mess around—”
“No. No. This wasn’t messing around. This was truly amazing. It spoke to me.”
She flushed.
“I have a friend who met his wife when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five. Everyone told them it would never work, that he was too old for her, that it was wrong. But they didn’t listen. She’s seventy now and he’s eighty. The age difference means nothing. It’s a blink. Can you imagine? Way back then, they just knew. They just recognized something in the other. What’s age, really? Haven’t you known some impossibly immature adults? Some really wise young people?” He finally stopped pacing. “You’re an old soul, Lucy. You don’t think like sixteen.”
“You don’t think like thirty,” she said abruptly, and he laughed, dry as a cough. “How would you know what thirty thinks like?” he said.
“My dad was a lot older than my mom,” Lucy said.
“Well, there you go,” William said.
Lucy stood up and moved toward him and kissed his mouth. His lips were soft and warm and she sighed against them. He pushed her back but she kissed him again and then she felt him kissing her back, gently at first, and then harder, lowering her to the floor as if she were a captive. She had had sex with only one boy before, at a party, in a dark bedroom, when she was drunk, and he had jammed himself into her, finishing in what seemed like seconds, and then, as soon as it was over, he had freaked out at her for getting blood on the sheets.
But William took his time. He traced the curve of her hip with his hand. He touched her hair and she flinched, smoothing her hands over it, but he grabbed at her wrists so that when she tried to move, she couldn’t. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Your hair is beautiful, exotic. It’s all you.” His voice sounded strange and foreign to her, as if he had a fishhook caught in it. He set her hands free and she felt a roaring through her body. She took a breath when he unbuttoned her blouse. He slid her skirt off her hips, down her legs, taking everything off as gently as if it were made of glass. She was naked on the floor and then he moved his hand along her knees, up along her thigh, and then he touched her ass, staying his hand there for a moment, and she tensed, a pulse of fear running along her spine, not sure what he was going to do, whether she’d like it or not, and only knowing that she didn’t want him to stop, that she had to move closer to him. “You’re a beautiful woman, Lucy,” he said, and when she heard that word—“woman”—she shut her eyes. She heard a pulling of plastic—a condom—and then he was inside her and her eyes flew open.
Her head bumped on the floor. Something was digging into her naked hip, but his breath against her face was warm. His hands cupped her ass and then he slid a finger into her, and she gasped and felt a flare of desire. “Look at me,” he said, “please. Look at me,” and when she did, he shuddered inside her. Afterward he held her, sweaty and close against him, rocking her, the two of them sticky and damp. He fell away from her, panting. “It will get better,” he promised. “I’ll show you.” He kissed her nose, her mouth, the curve of her shoulder.
He helped her up. He ran the shower for her, hot the way she liked it, and set out a soft green towel for her, and when she came out, he had cheese and bread and apples for them on the table, though neither one of them could eat. Finally he got up and went into the other room, coming back with money that he pressed into her hands. “For a cab,” he said. He told her why he couldn’t come outside with her to wait for the taxi, that they couldn’t risk anyone’s seeing him with her, because now everything was different. If anyone saw her alone, they’d think she had come to visit a friend. “Get home safe,” he said, cupping her face with his hands, and she thought she had never felt so happy or seen him so sad.
OF COURSE THEY couldn’t tell anyone. “Some people wouldn’t understand this,” William told her. “I’m not sure I understand it myself.” Every time she came to his place, which was at least three times a week, he acted strange at first, as if he wanted her to go, as if he was furious with himself for wanting her there. “It’s my fault, not yours,” he kept saying. He wouldn’t touch her, and he flinched when she touched him. He was curt with her. “You’re a child,” he told her, but then gradually he’d soften. He’d move closer and talk about her being an old soul again.
He gave her cab fare to and from his apartment because he didn’t like her hitching. He didn’t care that everyone did it, he didn’t want her to. In class, he treated her the way he treated everyone else, polite, teasing, respectful, not calling on her more than on anyone else.
Lucy began to feel as if she had a sparkler inside her, glowing and growing. She couldn’t sleep at night but got up and alphabetized her books or rearranged her closet and once did a hundred sit-ups. She leaped out of bed in the morning, her heart jittering as if she had just drunk coffee. Though sneaking around really seemed to disturb William, Lucy had to admit she found it thrilling. Everything seemed heightened. Every color seemed to vibrate, from the grass on the abandoned ski slope near Piety Corner to the way the air drifted against her skin like a swatch of silk. She used to think that Waltham was a stomach cramp of a town, a way station to the more exciting Cambridge and Boston, but now she loved everything about it, the brick library smack in the middle of town, the winding suburban streets, the little fire station down the block—even the terrifying psychiatric hospital, which boomed an air horn when someone escaped. When she was at home, she looked at Charlotte and thought: If you could only be this happy, too. If I could only tell you and share this.
AFTER CLASS, AT his place, they worked on her writing, but he also taught her how to cook a few simple things, spaghetti and sauce, fish sautéed in a pan. He showed her how to put a clean nail inside a baking potato, because it would conduct heat and cook the potato faster, and how to rewire a lamp and fix a leaky faucet. He explained why she should always wear dark colors instead of the pastels she liked because it emphasized her pale skin and hair and made her beauty more extraordinary. He told her how she was going to be a very famous writer if she just listened to him. Then they sprawled out on his bed, and every time, he showed her something new she could do with her body. Something new she could do with his. They made love until it was time for her to go home.
ONE DAY IN April, William was called out of his class again, and when he came back, Mr. Socker was with him. Mr. Socker sat in the back, his arms folded, and William handed out copies of Romeo and Juliet while the kids groaned. “No carrying on,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.
For the next three weeks, all he did in class was Romeo and Juliet, with Mr. Socker sitting in the back. Most of the kids thought it was a big bore, but every time Romeo was barred from seeing Juliet, Lucy sighed. It was like William and her, except their story would have a happy ending.
Even following the curriculum, though, William still couldn’t seem to avoid trouble. Rumors flew again that he was too familiar with his students, that he had skipped a vocabulary lesson. When Lucy went to his apartment, when she tried to talk to him about it, he shook his head. “We can get a petition together,” she said. “Get all the kids to sign it, to fight for you—”
“No,” he said. “Let me handle it.”
She worried. Of course she worried. If William left, what would she do? How could she possibly live? She rubbed William’s back. She told him, “Everything’s going to be fine,” even though she was sick with panic. “Maybe you could get a lawyer,” she said, and he shrugged. “Lawyers cost money,” he said.
But then, two weeks later, when she came over, his apartment was filled with candles and he was beaming at her.
“You’re all right?” she whispered.
“I resigned, Lucy.”
“What?” The room blurred in front of her, flickering with lights. “When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now, honey. This has been a long time coming, and I wanted to do it right.”
“To do what right?”
“You’re looking at the new teacher at Spirit Free School. It’s totally progressive, modeled after Summerhill, and in the sweetest little town in Pennsylvania, where the air’s clean, the food’s fresh, and they’re dying to have me. They even pay their teachers in cash, because they want as little tax money as possible going to the war.”
He was leaving here, leaving her. He was so happy he was vibrating around the room.
“When?” she said.
“I’m teaching out the end of the year. But I don’t want anyone knowing this, Luce. No good-bye party. No gossip. I wouldn’t even tell Socker where I was going. I don’t want him calling the school and souring them on me. I even gave the school a new name, like a fresh start. Billy Lalo. One l. Different enough, yet still me.”
“But don’t you have to tell him?”
“Lucy, it’s a new start. I don’t want anything to ruin this.”
“Pennsylvania.” Tears pricked behind her eyes. There might be trains to the city, but not to a rural town, and how would she be able to see him so far away? He’d be lost to her. He’d meet some beautiful hippie teacher who had long hair and wore those lovely Indian gauze dresses, and Lucy would be back in high school, dragging through the corridors.
He tilted her chin up. “What’s with this sad puss?”
The room was whirling. “I thought you loved me.”
“Of course I love you. What do you think this is about?”
“You’re going away.”
“Would you want to come with me?”
His smile grew. She leaned against the wall, weak with relief. “You’re taking me with you?”
“If you want to.”
“Of course I want to. You’re my life.”
He moved so he was balanced against the wall, too. He told her that as soon as he’d known he had the job, he’d begun looking around for somewhere to live, driving out to Pennsylvania on weekends, not saying a word to anyone, not even Lucy. His excitement about the job kept bumping up against his grief at having to leave Lucy behind. But he was so trapped, and she was a minor. What else could he do? He even told himself that it was for the best to make a clean break, that a girl like Lucy would easily find someone worthy of her.
“Wait—you weren’t going to take me?” Lucy frowned, stung.
“I tried not to, Luce. I really tried.” At first he just looked at studios. He didn’t need very much—and think of the money he would save! But then, in the back of his mind, like a dream, he kept seeing Lucy in the kitchens he looked at, standing by the stove, smiling. He saw her in the bathrooms, wet and silky from her shower, or standing in the woods behind the houses. Stop, he told himself. Stop. He needed to give her up, to move on. She was too young. It was too dangerous. But he couldn’t leave her. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll make it work,” he said.
She rested her head along his shoulder. “You make me feel like I can do anything.”
“It’s our life. But it belongs to us, not to Iris or your sister or anyone else. We have to keep it secret—just for a little while—just until you turn eighteen. That’s not so long, is it?”
There it was. Her future. She thought of Iris’s wanting her to go to secretarial school, and of Charlotte’s already throwing herself into college life before she was even in college. “I could be anywhere with you,” she said. She lifted her head up and kissed his mouth.
NOW, SHE SEES William’s car. He’s sitting in the front seat but he doesn’t look at her. His face is in shadow. She strides over and gets into his car.
Once she’s inside, he finally turns toward her, his smile deepening. Lucy feels as if she were dipped in gold.
She wants to say, I love you. She wants to thank him for rescuing her, but when she does, he shakes his head. “You are the one who rescued me,” he says.
“I’m so ready for this,” she tells him. She buckles herself into the seat belt. Her whole life is ahead of her, thrumming like angel wings.
For a moment, before the car peels out, she wonders whether she’s left anything behind. Whether she’s making the right decision. She feels a pang for Iris, how Iris will be hurt when she discovers that Lucy is gone. How maybe she’ll be frightened. She wonders whether Iris will call the police, and what they’ll do and how they’ll do it. She fingers Charlotte’s red scarf and knows her sister will be angry with her. But she’ll forgive Lucy when she eventually learns the truth. She just has to. Lucy will miss them a lot, but there’s no other way for her. She doesn’t know, can’t yet imagine, what this will do to them. What will happen to her. How it will all end up splashed across the newspapers, but she won’t be around to read it.