Pointe (11 page)

“I know.” Of course I should have expected him to pull away. Of
course
we can't keep going. I kissed him and he doesn't belong to me and I liked it. I'm not special, but I
am
That Girl.

He looks at my mouth, brushes his fingers against my lips one last time before he pulls away completely. He reaches into the console for his pack of cloves. I sit back in my seat, buckle my seat belt, and pull my phone from my bag so I'll have something to do.

Hosea pinches a clove between his lips and pulls out onto the street again, en route to Casablanca's. Neither of us says another word and we don't look at each other for the rest of the ride, but longing melts through me in a thousand waves.

Hot and slow and bittersweet to the core.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ONCE,
SARA-KATE AND I PLAYED FUCK/MARRY/KILL: TEACHERS
Edition
and I ended up marrying Mr. Jacobsen.

Kill was easy enough—Mr. Gellar is the biggest waste of space in the school and not just because he teaches chemistry. The Fuck part was a no-brainer because we had a really hot student teacher in English that year. His name was—no joke—Grant Fineman. But Jacobsen was the only real option for Marry, so it flew out of my mouth too easily and Sara-Kate teased me for weeks.

So maybe his hair
is
thinning. And his belly isn't getting any smaller, but I can tell Jacobsen used to be cute back in the day. Or “kind of a fox, in a retro way,” according to Sara-Kate. Whatever. He has a nice smile. And he's a good teacher. He doesn't have to think up gimmicks or games to interest us in the justice system. He simply talks like he's telling us a really good story.

He finds me in the atrium the Thursday before Halloween. I'm standing with Sara-Kate and Phil before homeroom and nobody blinks an eye when Jacobsen pops his head into our circle and asks if he can talk to me for a minute. It's never anything bad with him. I don't think I've ever heard him raise his voice, not even last week when he kicked Leo Watson out of class for texting.

We walk over to an empty part of the hallway, a little sliver of space between the custodian's closet and a water fountain I've never seen anyone use. They paint the walls every summer, but someone has already scuffed the latest coat of beige with the heel of their shoe.

“I've been meaning to ask how you're doing, Theo. Everything all right?” Jacobsen looks relaxed in a polo and khakis with a brown belt that matches his shoes. His tone is easy, like he makes a special point to check in with me every couple of weeks or so.

“Everything's great, Mr. Jacobsen.” I push my shoulders back and stand tall, make direct eye contact to assure him this is true.

Because what would he say if I told him how everything is
really
going? What would he do if I said my ex-boyfriend is sitting in a jail cell, awaiting arraignment? Or about the fact that I'm the type of person who kisses other people's boyfriends and likes it?

“Theo, Principal Detz is asking the faculty to help out as much as we can in . . . the wake of Donovan Pratt's return,” he says, nudging the base of the water fountain with his toe.

And?

“And,” he says, reading my mind, “I wanted to give you a heads-up that I've planned my lesson today around Stockholm syndrome.”

“Stockholm syndrome.”

“Yes, it's—”

“I know what it is.”

When the victim sympathizes with their captor. Like people who have been abducted and don't hate their kidnapper. Maybe they even like them a little bit, start to feel like their abductor cares for them. Everyone talks about Patty Hearst, but that was a million years ago and she can't be the only one.

“I think it could be helpful.” Jacobsen is talking again. “An open discussion. But it's your call whether or not you want to be there. I can write you a pass to the library. Or maybe you could talk to Mrs. Crumbaugh. I'm sure she'd be happy to make time for—”

“I'll be there.”

Why not? It's all hypothetical at this point. Chris is just a suspect, and maybe everyone else thinks they know what he did, but I won't know for sure until I talk to Donovan.

What would Jacobsen do if I raised my hand today and asked,
How do you know if your best friend and boyfriend ran away together?
Or,
Could you find a way to be happy, even if you'd been kidnapped?
Because I know he saw the video. Everyone saw the video.

Jacobsen pauses long enough to look surprised by my answer, then says, “I'm sorry we're able to tie the lesson to something that hits so close to home, but I'm glad your friend is back, Theo.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Me too.”

And then he pats me on the shoulder and I smile as I walk back to Sara-Kate and Phil because otherwise he'll know something is off and I can't risk that. Besides, world gov only lasts an hour. I can put up with anything for an hour.

Until that hour arrives and suddenly it's like everyone in class has everything in the world to say about Stockholm syndrome.

“Okay, but here's the thing.” Klein Anderson is talking. He sits two rows ahead of me. I watch him chew on the eraser of his pencil, which is about the most action that thing has gotten all semester. “We're not talking about a few months with some militant kook. He was gone
four years.
”

“Yeah, and imagine what he went through for that long,” says Phil. He's sitting in the row between Klein and me, sliding his pen lazily across a blank sheet of notebook paper.

This is the only class I have with both him and Sara-Kate, and I've always loved that until today. Today—right now—I want everyone to shut the fuck up. Including him. They don't know everything about this case. They don't know
anything.

“What about the video?” Klein counters. I think he would have stopped if he wasn't arguing with Phil, but their friendship is so tenuous. The line between hatred and respect is thin enough for them to enjoy testing it. They push and pull and poke at each other until one of them is seconds away from snapping.

“What about it?” Phil's voice is calm but when I look over, his mouth is holding so much tension, I think his lips might crack from the pressure.

“It's not like he was some little kid who couldn't figure out how to get away,” Klein says, his head darting around the room for support like a pastor looking for an
Amen.
“He was thirteen. You know what I was doing at thirteen? Not running off with strangers.”

Thirteen. I learned how to put a condom on a guy when I was that age. Not every time. Only when Chris felt like it. Which wasn't often.

“Don't you think that's a little disingenuous?” Phil shoots back at Klein. “The guy didn't see him on the street and randomly pick him up. People are saying he worked at the convenience store. He was probably talking to him for weeks before the whole thing went down. The guy was setting him up—grooming him.”

Grooming. It sounds so textbook, like Chris opened up a manual on how to abduct a child and followed the steps one by one. It's hard for me to think of him as a predator, when all I can see is Donovan laughing in the video.

“Good point, Mr. Muñoz.” Jacobsen brings the attention to the front of the room again. He stands in front of the whiteboard, to the side of his desk. “The fact that the victim knew the defendant puts a different spin on the case. Is the extent of the victim's danger diminished when we learn that he had a seemingly normal relationship with the defendant prior to the abduction?”

Bingo. Is it? I will give one million dollars to whoever can answer that question right now. I'd also come up with one million dollars if it meant Donovan would answer his phone.

“Absolutely not. He was brainwashed,” says a voice from behind me.

Sara-Kate.

“We don't know what it's like to be kidnapped,” she says, her soft voice growing stronger as she continues. “Or how hard it would be to get away. None of us do. Lots of times . . .” She pauses and I feel her eyes on me before she goes on. “Lots of times they're threatened. Maybe he thought he would be killed if he ran away. Or that someone in his family would be killed. He has a little sister . . .”

Killed? That's extreme. Chris may not be the person I thought he was, but he'd never kill someone.

But who
was
the real Chris? Was it the one who offered sweet words and sweet sex, the guy who traced figure eights on my back, told me he loved me? Did he say and do those things with Donovan, tell him they belonged together? Or is the real Chris just a sociopath?

I wish I could tell Sara-Kate the
good
things about Chris. Like the way he told a story. He had hundreds of them. About growing up in Michigan playing Little League, and learning how to fish with his older brother, and cutting class to sneak into Detroit for the day, looking for trouble. It didn't matter who or what he was talking about. The way he gestured and looked at you when he talked, the way his amber-colored eyes danced, made you feel as if you'd been right there with him. I could have listened to those stories forever. Now I don't know if any part of them was true.

“Yeah, and the fact that he may have known him doesn't mean he wanted to run away with him,” says Phil. He's really doodling now, the pen crosshatching furiously across the page as he talks. He looks at Klein as he says this next part. “How do you know he wasn't just trying to stay alive?”

“Okay, fine.” Klein again. “Maybe I don't know what it's like to be kidnapped, but I
think
if some dude was trying to fuck me every night, I'd find a way to get out of that situation a little faster than he did.”

The room falls completely silent.

It's not because of Klein's language. Jacobsen doesn't care how we talk, so long as we pay attention to the lesson. I've only seen him flinch once, and it involved the c-word. It's not for everyone.

But what the
fuck,
Klein? His revelation is hardly new and yet the way he said it—so loudly, so matter-of-factly—makes me feel like someone drove their knuckles square into my stomach.

“Let's reel it in a little, Mr. Anderson,” Jacobsen says evenly.

He's looked about five seconds away from shitting his pants the entire time we've been talking about this, and now he's afraid Klein has said the thing that will break me. I don't move. I keep my eyes on the whiteboard behind Jacobsen, on the part where he's scrawled
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
in red and underlined it twice.

Klein shrugs and leans back in his seat, slings his arm over the back of his chair. “I'm just saying what everyone's thinking.”

The room rustles uncomfortably. In the front corner of the room, Lark Pearson does one of those awkwardly obvious cough-laughs. Directly in front of me, the back of Leo Watson's neck turns red from the collar up, and next to me, Joey Thompson drops his pencil, which is quickly followed by his notebook. My eyes travel up to Jacobsen, who's gripping the edge of his desk so tightly, his knuckles have turned white.

“And I'm just reminding you that this is a sensitive subject,” he says. “Honesty isn't an excuse for you to shoot off at the mouth.”

His gaze flickers over me briefly, but it's long enough for Klein to make the association.

For
everyone
to make the association.

Klein whips around in his seat to catch my eye, to silently mouth,
Sorry, Legs,
even though the whole class can see him and knows what he's saying.

I look away instantly. He doesn't know as much as he thinks he does.

No one is all bad or all good.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT'S
IMPOSSIBLE TO PRETEND HOSEA ISN'T IN THE ROOM AS I
dance.

Hard to forget that he's behind the piano in the corner, that with a few piqué turns, I could be standing beside him. That a few seconds after that I could sink down into his lap, tuck that stray piece of hair behind his ear and feel his hands travel across the small of my back.

But it's as if we have some kind of unspoken agreement. Our eyes can meet in the mirror but not across the room. A nod is okay, but never a smile.

We've been texting since the night we kissed. We exchanged numbers when he dropped me off at my car; he asked for mine first, said I should have his, too, in case I ever needed to talk. We only text every few days and never about anything important—usually it's just about school or something funny that happened at ballet or to simply say hello—but I smile when my phone dings with a new message and a little thrill goes through me every time I see it's from him.

Last night I locked myself in my bedroom and stood naked in front of my full-length mirror and pictured his arms wrapped around me from behind. Keeping me warm. Safe. I twisted and turned and stretched in slow motion as I wondered how he would see me. If my breasts are too small for him or if he likes my nearly nonexistent hips the way Chris did.

Ellie probably takes everything about him for granted. Like how it feels to run her fingers through his hair, or how his kisses are the perfect combination of soft and warm and wanting. I wouldn't take him for granted if he were truly mine. Not a single part of him.

I think about Hosea much more than I should, but when I'm dancing, all I think about is Chris.

I stand in first position next to Ruthie as Marisa guides us through plié, demi, and grand. We bend at the knee, halfway and then deeper, lifting our heels and pushing down on the balls of our feet. Perfectly synchronized because these movements are ingrained in our memory. Plié is so soothing, so methodical; it's easy to let my mind wander. To think about him.

I'll never forget Donovan's face the first time he caught us behind the store. There was an old picnic bench in back, to the right and down a few feet when you walked out the door. Chris and I would sit out there on his breaks, him puffing on a cigarette and me leaning in for the occasional drag. He would straddle the bench and sit close enough for his knees to touch the side of my leg. Sometimes he would rest his big hand on my thigh; squeeze my knee and tickle me until I begged him to stop, sprinkled tiny little kisses on his stubble-covered chin.

The day Donovan caught us, Chris was practically all over me as soon as we stepped outside. We didn't even make it to the picnic table.

He pushed me up against the wall and shoved his tongue in my mouth and I thought it was sexy. It was the way high school girls kissed their boyfriends. It was passionate and it meant he really wanted me because he was brave enough to do it where someone could walk down the alley and see us.

He had just slipped his hand under my shirt when the back door to the store creaked open. I knew without looking that it was Donovan. Chris didn't stop right away. He kept going, kept moving his hand beneath my shirt, kept pushing his tongue around in my mouth until I pulled away. I'd turned my head to look at Donovan and immediately wished I hadn't. His face was a blend of confusion and horror and something else I couldn't quite place at the time, but what I later recognized as unease.

“Oh, hey, man,” Chris said, looking over at the same time he disengaged his hand from under my shirt. “What's up?”

“Someone needs to pay for gas.” Donovan's voice cracked as he said this, and I couldn't tell if he was more humiliated by the fact that it happened in front of Chris or that it happened right after he'd caught us in the middle of second base.

Chris made a little clicking sound from the side of his mouth and said, “Nice work. Thanks for keeping an eye out, man.”

He gave my waist a hard squeeze, patted Donovan on the shoulder before he walked back inside. Donovan stared at me for a long, heavy moment before he followed.

Maybe I should have apologized but it's hard to say you're sorry when you're not sure why you're saying it. Donovan looked so concerned, like I was in over my head or something. But Chris was my
boyfriend.
And they were friends. Donovan didn't need to worry about me. Or maybe he was just worried that having Chris around was changing our friendship.

I readjusted my shirt and smoothed down my hair and when I went inside, the store was empty again. Chris was helping Donovan choose a comic book. Any comic he wanted, on the house.

We were silent the whole way home that day. Once, I glanced over and caught him smiling and I pretended it was because he was happy for Chris and me and not because of the X-Men comic tucked under his arm. We never spoke of the incident again, never even hinted at it, but it was clear something had changed between us.

After ballet I walk back to the dressing room alongside Ruthie. She dabs at her neck and chest with the sleeve of her shrug.

“What are you doing this weekend?” I ask.

Ruthie kind of laughs and when I look over, she's rolling her eyes. “I'm on lockdown.”

Again? Ruthie is probably grounded more than anyone I know. It's the status quo around Chez Pathman.

“What happened this time?” I stretch my arms above my head, roll my shoulders back as we walk down the corridor of exposed-brick walls. The windows to our left look out over the bustling city sidewalks below.

“A week of in-school suspension.” Ruthie folds her shrug into a tiny square as we're walking, so it fits neatly into her palm. “Which is so not a big deal. I mean, I sit in a room alone and finish all my work before lunch and they act like it's punishment.”

Lainie McBride has been walking behind us this whole time. You can always tell when she's near; she's basically allergic to the world, so she's constantly sneezing or wheezing or popping an allergy pill. It's disgusting.

She catches up to us, hovering over our shoulders, and sniffs right in my ear. “In trouble again, Pathman? Don't they take that kind of thing into consideration for summer intensives?”

“Fuck off, McBride.” Ruthie's eyes are the iciest shade of blue, probably similar to what they look like before her fists start talking. “It's about the dancing. Which I guess you wouldn't know, since you weren't supposed to be here in the first place.”

It's true. Lainie tries hard, but she's the weakest in our class, and only joined the senior company when Meridith Bryant moved to New Jersey and Marisa had to fill a spot quickly.

Lainie pushes ahead of us and through the dressing room door just in time to let it slam in Ruthie's face. Not the smartest move, but she knows Ruthie wouldn't do anything to jeopardize her place here at the studio—and especially not her possible spot in a summer program.

“
Such
a fucking bitch,” she mutters as we pass Lainie's locker.

Lainie pretends not to hear her, but she scoots a little farther back on the bench.

“Forget her,” I say as we sit down on the opposite side of the room. I lower my voice. “Why'd you get suspended?”

She turns away from me as she tugs down the straps of her leotard. “Same reason as always. People are assholes, and I'm not going to sit there and take it while someone talks shit about me.”

Ruthie's parents send her to a really good, expensive private school. They support her dream. They're kind and patient and they put up with her mean streak. I guess that's what you do when you love someone—take all of the bad even when it outweighs the good.

Sort of like being with Chris. I loved the gentle version of him, but to be with him, I also had to put up with the Chris who wasn't gentle—who made me feel ashamed as I slipped on my underwear when we were finished.

“Well, your parents can't ground you forever, right?” I say as I toss my tights into my bag.

She pulls a sweater down hard over her curls. “It's going to take them a while to forgive me for this one. The girl I got into it with is sort of a family friend. Her parents gave my school a letter of recommendation . . . I'm pretty sure they're the only reason I got in.”

“Shit, Ruthie.” I stand up from the bench to slide on my yoga pants as I think about what it's like to be her.

“Yeah, well.” Ruthie looks away from me before I can make eye contact. Bends over to knot the laces on her black Converse. “It's kind of a big deal and everyone blames me because I'm the one with the record or whatever.”

She doesn't sound angry. She doesn't look it, either.

Even with her head down—even when I can't see her face—she just looks tired. And maybe a little bit sad.