“Bonjour, la classe,” Mr. Belrose says from the front of the classroom. He is holding a stack of papers loosely in one arm, and smiles at his students as they file in.
There’s something about his voice.
Something different from everyone else.
Something about him.
The something gives me shivers just under my skin.
I give my head a little shake.
Thea Arnold, a senior with a penchant for wearing entirely too much jewelry, pauses at the front of the classroom. “Bonjour, Monsieur Belrose,” she drawls, her words drawn out and slow and deliberately flirty. Her friends giggle beside her and all choose seats in the front row, nearest to his desk, where they cross and uncross their legs and make pouty faces and apply shiny lip gloss.
“Bonjour, Thea.” He nods at her and she slides into her customary seat right in front of his desk.
Mr. Belrose is cool like that. He lets everyone choose their seats every day. He isn’t like one of those teachers who has assigned seating. Of course, most of the girls choose seats in the front row. Except me. I think it’s a little desperate. I do get it. They all know that they’re never going to actually be with a beautiful married teacher, so they’re just in it for the best view possible, but even so—I’m perfectly happy with the third row. Close enough that I can still see what’s going on, but not so far back that I look like a total slacker.
As soon as most of the class is seated, Mr. Belrose begins handing out papers.
“What is this?” Thea asks immediately, her voice slightly accusatory. She might like Mr. Belrose, but she’s not the most academic girl around. I’ve heard rumors, though, that her grades are strictly on account of laziness and she’s been tested and is secretly a Mensa-level genius, which is how she made it into honors senior French.
“En français,” Mr. Belrose says. His voice is—interesting. He’s demanding it, and we all know it, but it’s sort of . . . well, soft. And inviting. And . . .
I am not into Mr. Belrose. I am not. I am into studies. And responsibility. And maybe a couple of celebs. Not teachers. Not educators. Not men who wear smart button-ups and have rich, clever voices and—
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Thea says, very slowly.
Mr. Belrose grins. “Une interrogation surprise!”
I perk up. I own at surprise quizzes. In fact, I’ve aced every single pop quiz that Belrose has ever thrown my way.
Garrett, a star baseball player behind me, pretends to choke.
His buddy Cay hits him in the arm. “Dude! Come on! En français! ”
The whole class bursts out laughing. “Un crédit supplementaire pour Monsieur Burke!” Mr. Belrose grins and makes a flourish at Cay Burke.
That’s just another reason why everyone loves Mr. Belrose. He’s got a great sense of humor. Every other teacher probably would have been annoyed at Cay’s joke, but Mr. Belrose actually gave him extra credit. Sure, it’ll probably be only one point, but how cool is that?
A piece of paper lands on my desk and I glance over it. It looks pretty easy . . . just a review of verbs. Old ones too. Sometimes Belrose does this. He throws weeks-old stuff at us, just so we remember it. He doesn’t want us to recall the language long enough for a test and then clear it out as soon as new material comes along. He wants us to retain French. He wants us to learn it as he has learned it, so we can stroll along the streets of Paris and order macarons and ride bicycles around with baguettes perched jauntily on our shoulders. Typical French activities.
I fill in the verbs quickly as Belrose walks up and down the aisles of desks and tsks at some papers and whispers, “Très bien!” over people’s shoulders. He’s rather distracting, all in all, during test taking. I finish with mine first and walk my paper up to his desk. He catches my eye as he leans over Teri Von Millhouse’s desk and winks at me.
Pursing my lips, I turn my back to him and saunter back to my seat, keeping my shoulders square and tall. My eyes stray to the photos of the Seine he has on the walls; copies of the paintings hung in the Louvre; lovely aerial photos of the French Riviera, and one tiny, cliché photo of the Eiffel Tower, which is a requirement in any respectable French classroom. I do not look back at Mr. Belrose.
I do not care about my French teacher.
I don’t. Not like that. It takes more than a pretty face and an infallible French accent to sway me. It does not matter that he winks at me and pays more attention to me than to other students.
I do, of course, care about my grade. And I care about Les Mis.
Speaking of which.
I sit back down at my desk and pull my copy of Les Misérables out of my backpack. I try to read, but my eyes stray back to Mr. Belrose as he returns to his desk to grade the quizzes. He doesn’t get to mine right away, because it was the first one turned in, and therefore on the bottom of the pile, so he makes a lot of strikes with his red pen before he reaches my paper, where he makes one mark: an A.
It’s not like I can see it from here. But I recognize the three sharp strokes, like the Eiffel Tower.
I smile tightly to myself and bite on the cap of my pen.
A few minutes later, Mr. Belrose rises from his desk and passes copies of the tests back to the class.
“Classe, I’m going to switch to English for a few minutes while we review the quiz together, and you’re going to tell me the verbs in French. Let’s start with, ah, Thea.”
Thea glows.
“ ‘To make.’ ”
“Faire,” Thea recites. Her accent is far from on point, but she does tend to have her French down.
I wonder why.
“Correct.” Mr. Belrose rewards her with a smile, and she lights up like fireworks. He moves to the second word. “Uh, let’s go with . . . Riley. Riley, how do you say ‘to kiss’?”
Suddenly, I feel redness in my cheeks. Of course the word “kiss” is incredibly close to the word “embarrass,” which he is currently doing. To me. “Embrasser.”
“No one’s surprised that Riley’s correct!” He smiles even bigger at me than he did at Thea and then moves on to someone else, and my cheeks heat up even brighter. I duck my head, letting my hair fall in front of my face, praying that no one is looking at me.
I do not care about Mr. Belrose. I do not.
“You okay under there, Stone?” Garrett asks, poking me in the soft space just below my shoulder with the eraser end of his pencil.
I ignore him. I ignore everyone, even after the crimson in my cheeks has gone away and the bell rings and I’ve ignored about fourteen questions I definitely could have answered better than anyone else in the class. I shove my books into my backpack quickly and start toward the door, using my blond hair as a nice, effective curtain in front of my face.
“Mademoiselle Stone? S’il vous plaît, attendez.”
He wants me to wait. Mr. Belrose wants me to wait.
I think about the monks in Asia or somewhere who can control their bodies to a point where they can slow down their pulse simply by concentrating. I wish for that power now.
I turn slowly toward Mr. Belrose. “Oui?”
His faces softens from the normal teacher expression he wears—all the stern planes and angles smoothed out into something almost friendly. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. Do you have a moment?”
I shift my backpack. I didn’t position my books right, and the corner of my French book digs into the back of my right hip. “Yes?” My heart is beating unevenly with him so close. I am attracted to him.
I think of his hands on me.
My God. I need to get it together.
His eyes shift behind me. “Uh, actually, you know, I’ll just catch up with you next class, okay? Great job on the quiz, though, Riley. You’ve retained a lot of information this year.”
I squint at him, but he’s still looking behind me. I turn—and see one of the new basketball players, a transfer from across town, waiting behind me to talk to Mr. Belrose.
Huh.
Whatever Belrose was going to say to me . . . he didn’t want to say it in front of someone else.
Something in my stomach does an odd little jump, but I tamp it down.
Whatever he was going to say . . . it doesn’t matter.
I square my shoulders and walk out of the classroom.
I wouldn’t flirt with him. And he couldn’t flirt with me. I’m not like Thea. It’s different with Mr. Belrose and me. We have . . . a history.
He is, after all, the same age as my brother.
I walk down the hallway to my locker, where I spin the combination without thinking and change out my books, which are all lined up neatly and have color-coded book covers for each class.
Mr. Belrose has helped me before.
He hasn’t always been a teacher.
There was a time when he was just my brother’s friend and I knew him as Alex and he was just the cute youth counselor helping out at the church, where we raised money each year to donate to domestic violence shelters. There was a time when I didn’t think too much about talking to him, when his hair wasn’t brushed so carefully and he didn’t wear neatly buttoned shirts and khakis and he cursed a lot more. It was before he’d studied abroad in France his senior year of college and met Jacqueline and gotten married to someone who looked like she’d been painted by an impressionist.
I remember one time in particular.
With Alex. Not Mr. Belrose. Not then, at least.
I was volunteering. Because volunteering is part of me. It’s more than just a résumé; if I really listed all my charity work on my CV, I’d have to cut down a good portion of a forest just for the paper.
That day, I was collecting clothes for domestic violence victims. My mother and I had gone through her overcrowded closet the night before, and I’d had fun trying on her high heels while she sorted through her old shirts and made startled noises about how she used to dress.
“Are you sure the women will even want these?” she had asked me, holding up a sweater with a tiny robin sewn onto the pocket. She wrinkled her nose. “We don’t want to insult them.”
And I wobbled over on a pair of her highest stilettos that she refused to donate but also swore were too uncomfortable to wear and added the robin sweater to her Donate pile. “It’s fine.”
It had taken hours, but I’d ended up struggling with a giant black trash bag of clothing. Mr. Belrose (Alex at the time) had seen me come through the door with it, my legs nearly buckling under the weight of it all. He tried to take the bag from me, but I held my hand out. “I got it.” I walked unsteadily back to the booth we were both assigned to and heaved the bag behind the table.
He grinned at me the whole way, and I wasn’t sure if he thought I was being silly by refusing the help or if he was sort of impressed, but I chose to believe the latter, and that I was one of those plucky sort of independent girls who people admired. It wasn’t until I turned around and wiped my sweaty hair out of my eyes (I had some truly ill-advised bangs at that stage of my life) that his smile hit a false note.
“Looking a little rough there, Riley.”
His eyes held mine—my left one, specifically, which was a messy watercolor of purple and black.
I let myself smile as much as my face allowed. The pain wasn’t terrible, but it was always there, a constant reminder. The previous night, during a basketball game, I’d gotten elbowed by a girl who looked more like a female Thor than an eighth grader.
So I hadn’t made the layup.
And only one of the two free throws, because I couldn’t see through my eye for the second one.
(Shortly after, I’d decided cheerleading full time was more my speed.)
“Bad night,” I muttered, pulling open the trash bag. “How are we sorting these, anyway?”
“Uh, shoes, pants, shirts. And then by size. What sizes do you have here?”
I pulled out a pink turtleneck. “This is a medium. I think my mom was, like, a six back then, though.”
“Okay.” Alex bent down to grab an armful of clothes from the garbage bag and began going through them, tossing them into piles without folding them.
A woman with an oversize banana clip clamped into her hair came to the table with a musty box. “I got clothes,” she said. “Can I drop these here?”
“You’re at the right place.” I tried to smile at her, but she just sort of chewed her gum in my direction.
“Can you give me a receipt for my taxes?”
I stared at her. “Uh—”
“If you can’t, I’ll just take ’em back home.” She put her arms around the box. “There’s lots of good stuff in here.”
Alex popped up beside me, one of my mother’s paisley sweaters still draped over his arm. “I can take care of that.” He tossed the sweater at me. “Riley, you’re on sort duty.” He grinned at me and pulled a pad of paper out of his back pocket.
I turned to my mom’s garbage bag, and a minute later, Alex was back with the musty box. He opened it, and a puff of dust came off the top. “So,” he said very quietly, so that no one at the booths on either side of us would hear, “can I ask you something really serious?”
I looked up at him and nodded, and for some reason, my pulse was going crazy. I could hear thudding in my ears, like pulling up beside a car with the bass turned up too high.
“Sure.” My voice was barely above a whisper.
He reached down and grabbed an airy lavender silk scarf. He wrapped it around his neck and put his hand on my shoulder. “Is this—is this my color?” His lip quivered with a held-back smirk.
I cracked up. Pain shot through my face, but I couldn’t help it. “Nope,” I said, yanking the scarf away. It left his neck with a sharp snick sound as the fabric slid across his skin.
“What’s going on here?” A familiar voice cut through my laughter, and we both turned.
Ethan.
Ethan, looking . . . all too familiar. His untidy hair was sticking up on one side like he had fallen asleep against something, and from the smell emanating off him . . . he had been drinking. Again.
A lot.
“You’re early.” My voice was frosty but calm. Very calm. “You weren’t supposed to pick me up for another hour.”
“Hey, man.” Alex and Ethan did the sort of half-hug-and-hit thing that guys do. Only Ethan’s half was wobbly. “You okay?”
Ethan shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Uh, yeah. You got a chair or something?”
Alex and I exchanged a quick look. We couldn’t really have a drunk dude hanging out at a domestic violence table. “Uh, yeah. Listen, how about you lie down back here for a minute?” Alex grabbed my brother’s arm and guided him back, behind the largest piles of clothes, and put a couple of hoodies on the floor. Ethan stretched out on top of them and balled up a flowery blouse as a pillow.
“Think he’ll pass out?” Alex whispered as he climbed from behind the piles of clothes.
I nodded. “He probably already has. Unless he snores, we’re golden.”
An older man with a cane approached the table, and Alex helped him while I snuck a look at my brother. His eyes were already closed, and his mouth had the slightly open look of sleep.
I grabbed a body spray from my purse and misted it in his direction, hoping no one close could smell the alcohol on him. I didn’t want anyone to see my brother like that. Think of him like that.
He was better. He deserved better. Something was just going on with him lately, and I didn’t understand. No one did. He came home late and he slept in late and he didn’t talk to me anymore. But this wasn’t him.
Still, he was definitely not going to be sober in an hour. Or anytime tonight. I was going to have to find another way home. And it wasn’t just like I could call my parents. They were already pissed at Ethan. I didn’t want to make it worse.
I sank down in a chair and slumped over, sighing. A few minutes later, Alex joined me, sitting cross-legged on the floor, below me. He looked up through his unkempt hair. “You okay?”
“Yep.” The response was automatic and came out before I could think about how much of a complete lie it was. Maybe always was. It’s one of those questions you’re never really supposed to answer. Maybe it didn’t count as a lie if you weren’t ever supposed to tell the truth.
“Your eye—” He started to reach up, but then pulled his hand away, as if thinking better of it.
I nodded. “I know. It doesn’t look good.” I hesitated. “Things aren’t . . . great.”
I was misleading him and I knew it. He thought I was talking about my eye and I wasn’t. I was talking about everything. Everything else. “I mean, this is fine,” I amended, pointing at my eye. “Someone got a little aggressive with me during yesterday’s game.”
Alex just looked at me, the question in his face. But he was patient. He didn’t push or prod, but he was still asking. I saw him asking.
“Things aren’t always good at home.” I looked back toward Ethan to make sure he wasn’t stirring. “Ethan is always coming home blitzed. And my parents, they’re angry, but he’s just trying to make things easier. It’s not like my dad doesn’t drink too.”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “Your dad?”
I gave a tiny nod. “It gets a little scary. Sometimes I worry . . . he’s not going to wake up. And my mom . . . she’s just empty. She’s hollow, like she’s this perfect person on the outside and on the inside she’s, I don’t know, not even a person anymore. None of us really are. We’re like these plastic people and we look so perfect as long as you don’t see where we’ve been molded together so carefully.” I stopped suddenly, aware of how bitter I sounded. I glanced at the booth to the right, where there were three women working, to make sure they weren’t paying attention. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
I was laying it on a little thick, but I relished his attention.
He reached up and linked his pinkie with mine, like we were girls together at a sleepover, sharing secrets. “No.”
I gave him a smile with the side of my face that didn’t hurt. “Thanks.”
We were quiet for a while, and no one paid attention to us, set up in a booth in the big gymnasium, his hand linked with mine.
“I know it sounds stupid and everyone always says it,” he said finally, “but it’s going to be okay.”
And even though it did sound a little stupid, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I let myself believe him.
So I let Alex hold my hand, and at the end of the night, he helped Ethan to his car. On the way home, with Ethan stretched out across his backseat, he took my hand again and squeezed it, and even though he didn’t say it, I could feel it when he touched me.
Everything was going to be all right.