Going the Distance (7 page)

“Do you want me to?”

“Wrong question, dumb ass.” She didn’t sound angry, but she didn’t look back when she walked away, either.

“W
ELL
. G
OOD
T
HING
we built it on a dolly.”

Ritchie looked up from his spot crouched on the floor and looked doubtful. “It’s bigger than we talked about.”

Olivia gnawed her lower lip. “Yeah. A bit. But it looks real.”

She took a step back, a wet strip of newspaper hanging from the tips of her fingers, and studied the papier mâché tree she’d roped Ritchie into helping her design and build. It was a prototype for the forest of trees she planned to create for her class’s performance of
Little Red Riding Hood
at the end of the year. She wasn’t in any way, shape or form qualified to stage something like this, but the school had given her an assignment and she had nothing better to do, so she’d taken it on with gusto. And papier mâché paste.

“You’re making a mess.” Ritchie pointed at the pool of paste on the floor for the seventeenth time.

“I’ll clean it later.”

He rose and came to stand beside her, peering at the monstrosity they’d spent the better part of two hours creating. Her students had music class before lunch on Tuesdays, and they’d agreed that he would come by then to help her with the trial run of the first of many trees.

“It’ll look better when it’s painted,” Olivia said, slapping on the soggy strip of paper with no finesse whatsoever.

“You don’t think it’s…enormous?”

“Um, maybe.” She glanced over at him and tried not to laugh. Ritchie was an architect and he was extraordinarily uncomfortable when things did not go according to plan. The original intent had been for the tree to be approximately five feet tall—including the leaves, which she’d already constructed by tying together roughly one hundred large green feathers she’d found at the crowded indoor market. This particular…thing…was all trunk, about a foot and a half in diameter, more than double the measurements he’d given her, and stood about seven feet tall. It was just a giant, lilting, soggy newspaper covered…thing.

“Let’s wheel it outside to dry,” she suggested. Olivia steadied the “tree” as Ritchie maneuvered the dolly through her classroom and out the door into the courtyard to sit in the sun. “I think it’ll be good,” she tried.

“Yeah.”

She laughed and hit him in the arm with her dirty fingers. “Shut up.”

He trailed her inside and they tidied up as best they could, still twenty minutes left in the lunch break. She had a tiny microwave she used to heat up Styrofoam containers of instant noodles, and they sat at the kids’ tables and ate as they made small talk. Olivia knew he wanted to ask her about Jarek; it was kind of an open secret. She hadn’t been back to the gym trailer in the two weeks since she’d had sex with him on his desk. She hadn’t had to; he met up with her four times a week to run outside, then followed her upstairs to her apartment for an entirely different kind of workout.

“You seem…better,” Ritchie offered. “Less unhappy.”

“Yeah.” She forked too much food into her mouth and chewed. “It’s nice now that it’s warming up. Thank God for spring.”

“Did you figure out how you’re going to make this play work?”

She snorted. “Not a clue.” She’d been told two weeks earlier that she was responsible for helping her class stage an all-English performance
of Little Red Riding Hood
for their kindergarten graduation. The school was the only one in Lazhou with a foreign teacher, and the parents of Olivia’s students paid extra for them to be in her class. They needed to be wowed. More important, however, was the fact that they were supposed to have performed something at the Christmas pageant, but the Australian teacher hadn’t managed to cobble anything together. The kids had eventually sung an entirely garbled version of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer,” which no one had understood. They were incredibly excited to have a second chance in June.

The problem was, Olivia knew
Little Red Riding Hood
. It didn’t have thirty characters. The school principal had chosen it because it had “red” in the title and Chinese people
loved
the color red. Beyond that, they needed some changes to the story. It couldn’t be scary, grandma couldn’t be kidnapped, the wolf couldn’t eat anybody, couldn’t, in fact, be a wolf, and everyone had to be happy and speaking English in the end. Olivia prided herself on thinking outside the box, but she hadn’t quite figured out a way to make this performance anything other than a hugely embarrassing debacle. So she’d made an enormous tree instead.

“Hello, Olivia?”

She and Ritchie turned to see Honor standing in the doorway, the sunlight silhouetting her slight shape, the flare of her dress around her knees. She still wore a long sleeve shirt and thick tights, but somehow managed to look pretty and dainty at the same time.

“Hi, Honor. Come on in. We’re just having lunch.”

Honor took a tentative step into the room, sniffing. “What…What is that?” she asked, gesturing out the window at the trunk basking in the sunlight. A few strips of newspaper had already come free and hung off like dripping gray moss.

Olivia stood to join her to study the tree. “It’s a tree. Or it will be. For my class.”

“A tree?”

“It’s not finished yet.”

“Hmm. Yes.”

A few more teachers trailed out of the mah-jongg room and studied the tree, looking dubious, amused, and alarmed. More than a few snickered, though not all maliciously. Olivia pursed her lips. They’d see. It wasn’t finished yet.

“This is Ritchie,” she said, gesturing between Honor and the architect. “He helped design it. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Ritchie?” Honor echoed, looking at him for the first time.

Ritchie cleared his throat and stuck out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Honor hesitated, then grasped his fingers. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Olivia tried not to laugh. She’d taught her students how to introduce themselves in January, and their practice dialogues had gone a lot like this. Only…not quite like this. Because Ritchie and Honor were gazing at each other with more than the strained discomfort and amusement her students had displayed. They looked…interested.

“Ritchie is an architect,” she said. “He works at the project down the road.”

“Yes,” Honor said, nodding. “I know it.” It was the only project in this part of Lazhou that had foreign workers; everybody knew it.

“You’re a teacher here, Honor?” Ritchie asked, though that was obvious, too.

“Yes. I teach the same year as Olivia. She is a good teacher.”

Olivia glanced up, surprised. No one here had ever complimented her on anything other than her looks.
Your hair, so yellow! Your eyes, so big! Very pretty! Maybe a little fat.

“Thanks, Honor.”

“You are welcome.” She and Ritchie were still flicking shy glances at each other, and now a few of the braver teachers meandered closer, studying both the tree and the strange man. Olivia had a fleeting image of Jarek standing here, towering over everybody, intimidating them with his stern glare. He’d never been to the school but he had learned its name, and her middle name, and a few other things that said he wasn’t
trying
to be an uncaring asshole all the time, it was just his nature. But he staunchly refused to talk much about himself, so she’d settled for him being a decent person who made an effort, and chosen not to dwell on the fact that she regularly slept with a man whose middle name she did not know. Well,
slept
wasn’t the word for it. They didn’t sleep, and he didn’t sleep over. Ever. And he never invited her to his apartment, either, not once. She rather suspected he just didn’t want to schlep her back to her place in the middle of the night, since he remained convinced that she’d fall in love with him and beg to have his babies if they ate breakfast together.

What he did obsess over, however, was how to make her orgasms better, constantly grilling her about what she wanted him to do. He swore up and down that he’d do anything, there was nothing she could ask outside of having him piss on her that he wouldn’t at least consider. She was both flattered and unnerved by his focus, but she didn’t know what the problem was. She liked sex in general, and sex with him in particular. She didn’t have any secret wants or desires she was afraid to express. There were times the build up to orgasm was promising, that she was sure it was leading up to the “big one” Jarek seemed intent to find. And then it didn’t work out. She still came; she wasn’t unsatisfied. But he was. And no matter how many questions he asked, she honestly didn’t have the answer to this one.

She shook her head and tuned back into the conversation. The teachers were asking Honor questions for Ritchie, and she was shyly translating the responses.
How old are you? Twenty-nine. Are you married? No. Where do you live? Down the street. Do you like China? Yes, I do.

Olivia smiled as she watched the interrogation, and thought she’d rather like to bring Jarek here one day, see him fend for himself against these women, and learn a little bit about the man who’d become her second friend in over a year.

There wasn’t time to dwell on this thought, however, because right then the bell rang and seconds later came the telltale roar of the kids racing out of the cafeteria and back to their classes. Ritchie paled and took off, absorbed into the incoming swarm, and everyone returned to their regular routines. Olivia waited at the door to welcome the kids back, explaining patiently that
“what is that thing?”
was a tree, or at least it would be, exhausted by the time Davy trailed in after the others.

“Tree?” he echoed thoughtfully, staring at it.

“It will be,” Olivia told him. “When I’m done.”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “Okay. Very good.”

She smothered a laugh and followed him into the room, ordering everyone into their seats. “How was lunch?” she asked, as she did every day.

She was answered with varied shouts in English and Mandarin, punctuated by Rose’s insistent “Liv! Liv!” Olivia silenced them and fixed Rose with a stare that said she’d heard her, and now she must wait to be called on. The little girl with perpetual grass stains on her pants and tangles in her hair folded her hands and stared straight ahead obediently.

“Okay, Rose,” Olivia said, trying not to smile. “Please put in the CD. We’re going to play song number four today.”

Rose leapt from her seat like a firecracker, and scurried over to the CD player to fumble with the CD she’d been allowed to touch for exactly seven days. Olivia had finally managed to control Rose’s impulses with a tentative reward system—don’t be bad, and you can put in and take out the CD when we sing songs. At six years old, this was the epitome of Rose’s ambition, and she struggled mightily to maintain the privilege.

“Everybody stand up, please,” Olivia called as the now-familiar opening notes of “The Hokey Pokey” rang out. The class absolutely loved this song, particularly because the last verse allowed the participants to choose the action, and they were delighted to stick their heads “in,” or their tongues, or, on several occasions, their butts. More than once Olivia had been shaking her ass “in” and then “out,” only to spot a fellow teacher peering through the window, bewildered.

“Alan!” she shouted, when the last verse was about to begin. “What should we do?” The kids absolutely died to be the one to pick the movement, and Alan, who had studiously hated Olivia and refused to speak to her from the second she’d set foot in the classroom, loved to dance. She’d been trying to get him to participate in this part of the song since they’d first begun learning it, and could see the urge to suggest something warring with his reluctance to speak to her. Again today, as he had for weeks, he folded his arms and shook his head stubbornly.

“Who else?” she tried. Every other hand in the room went up.

Three hours later she waved good-bye, another day over. Alan, of course, ignored her, but everyone else shouted, “See you tomorrow,” before darting out of the room. Olivia waited until the courtyard was clear, then gathered the feather “treetop” she’d made at lunch the day before, and shuffled out to the trunk that had been drying all afternoon. She set down the bundle of feathers and stared at the monstrosity. It would look better with paint, definitely. She returned to the class to fetch a chair and the length of rope she’d gotten from Ritchie, and was working hard at fixing the treetop to the tree when she heard a tiny voice.

“O-liv-ya?”

She glanced down to see Davy standing a few feet away, watching. “Hey, buddy. What are you doing here?”

He replied in Mandarin and she didn’t understand a word. Davy thought for a second, then put his hands on his hips and said, “The tree is green and brown.” He pointed accusingly at the trunk. “No brown.”

“I know,” Olivia replied. “I’m going to paint it now.” The newspaper felt dry to the touch, and she’d fastened it around a tall metal post Ritchie had rescued from the trash pile at the site, then covered in cardboard. She ducked into the class and returned with a bottle of brown paint, a paper plate, and two brushes. “Want to help?”

Davy nodded and they got to work. It took nearly an hour to get the trunk painted, and when they were done they stepped back—then farther back—to truly appreciate it. It looked like a tree. Like a tree from a Dr. Seuss book that had been in a storm and barely made it out the other side. But Davy was beaming.

“Very good, Davy.”

A voice called out in Mandarin and they both turned as one of the older Chinese teachers entered the courtyard. She addressed Davy and snapped her fingers, and Davy handed her the brush and waved good-bye before running off. Olivia tidied up and collected her things, then contemplated rolling the tree into her classroom for the night before deciding against it. The sky was clear blue, not a cloud in sight, and she didn’t want the paint and paste fumes to permeate the room.

“Hello, Olivia.”

For the second time that day, she turned to see Honor watching from the doorway. “Hi, Honor.” Three other Chinese teachers hovered behind their friend, looking on. “Is everything okay?” She didn’t want to hear another word about the tree. Really. She could see it.