Rainey Royal (5 page)

When she has slid the flask right in front of her, she dips her hand into her pack, finds her lunch, and slips the peeled
hard-boiled egg out of its Baggie, never taking her gaze off Honor Brennan.

She balances the egg on the lip of the flask, where it nests, ovoid and shiny, stuck on the neck of the bottle like a fat stopper.

Miss Brennan radars onto her. “Absolutely not,” she says. “What lab are
you
doing?” In that moment—Rainey can feel it—Miss Brennan loses Andy Sakellarios, who looks at the egg and laughs hoarsely. She loses Tina, separated by four lab tables but communicating mischief telepathically. She loses Mary Gage, who peers over the collar of her rabbit-fur jacket with wide eyes.

“Egg,” says Miss Brennan, pointing at it. “Trash,” pointing near her desk. “Immediately.” She loses Leah Levinson, who glances only at the base of the flask, and Rainey knows why: she’s afraid to look Rainey in the eye.

Hard to handle, Rainey thinks. That’s what they say when they talk about me.

She flips her hair over her shoulder, a long, sensuous gesture involving a dramatic arm flourish, because her hair comes down past her waist.

“Miss Brennan?” she says sweetly. “I really, really want to make this egg go down this hole. It’ll just take a minute. Please? It’s science.”

Rainey keeps her voice low and says
hole
as if she were blowing a smoke ring, or a kiss, which makes the boys grin.

“It’s third-grade science,” says Miss Brennan, “and there
is no food in my class. Throw it out, now, Rainey, I’m not kidding.”

Rainey is busy. It’s this thing she does with her hair, combing it with her fingers, looking around, catching her friends’ eyes and laughing—she has it down. “But I
like
third-grade science,” she says in a little-girl voice. She thrusts her shoulders back. If Miss Brennan is having sex with a male teacher, she wants her to think about that teacher trying not to look at Rainey’s bust in class. Miss B doesn’t have that kind of bust, the kind her own father has special words for. “I have a lighter,” Rainey entreats—her way of announcing that she smokes, in case there is still someone who doesn’t know—and she tears a thin strip of paper out of her notebook. “Please? Can I? It’ll take ten seconds.”

She flicks the lighter and waits. The flame wavers near her thumb. The class is mesmerized.

“You are this close to detention. But ten seconds, yes,” says Miss Brennan, and Rainey knows she is thinking:
Abandoned girl, confused girl, give her a little rope
.

Rainey is running the class now. “Oooh,” she says, “thank you,” and squirms on her stool. She takes the egg off the neck of the Erlenmeyer flask. She lights the strip of paper on fire, drops it into the flask, and sets the egg on top again.

It takes only a moment for the air pressure inside to decrease and for the flask to suck in the egg—for the egg to stretch and narrow itself into the neck of the flask. The egg plops down
inside with a tiny bounce, lands on the charred paper, and puts out the flame.

“Oh, my God, I love that,” cries Rainey. “Thank you, Miss Brennan.”

Miss Brennan thrusts her hand out and says, “Flask, Rainey. That happened because the air pressure inside did what? Andy?”

But Andy Sak has his back to her and is looking directly at Rainey. When it’s clear he won’t turn away, Rainey lifts the flask, joggles it till the egg is in position, and blows into the opening.

Not one eye is on Miss Brennan.

“Rainey, get up here. Bring the flask.” Miss Brennan slaps the edge of the desk. “At the board, Rainey, now. I want the formula for pressure versus temperature if a gas is at constant volume. Now.”

“I have to get it out,” says Rainey helplessly, and holds the flask upended over her palm. The egg narrows again, slithers into the neck of the flask, and drops neatly, warmly, wetly, into her hand.

“Lunch,” she sings.

“Five points off your grade,” says Miss Brennan. “Throw out the egg out and write the formula.”

“It’s got
p
’s and
t
’s,” says Rainey. “But I forget it exactly. I’m sorry.” She looks contrite. Then she takes a slow bite out of the egg.
This is for you, Tina
.

“Ten points off. Throw out the egg,” says Miss Brennan.
“I know why you are doing this, Rainey. But just because you have trouble at home doesn’t mean you get to inflict it on us.”

The silence in the room creaks and shifts. Someone coughs. Rainey stares into the eyes of Miss Brennan as if to drill a hole in her skull.

“It’s. My. Lunch,” she says softly. She extends the tip of her tongue, which she knows is pretty because she has studied it in the mirror, and licks a bit of ash off the egg. The heads of boys lock almost audibly into position.

Miss Brennan picks up her wastebasket, walks over to Rainey, and slams it on the floor. “Drop it,” she says through her teeth.

“I’m hungry.” Rainey knows she is going too far, but Miss Brennan went farther, and besides, she no longer knows how to throw out the egg.

Across the aisle Angeline Yost whispers, “Fight, fight.” Leah laughs, but when Rainey angles her a look she goes to work on a fingernail with her teeth. Miss Brennan’s eyes are bright as glass. “In addition to the ten points,” Miss Brennan says, “you have detention.”

Rainey mouths a word that is silent but unmistakable and takes another bite of the egg. Leah emits a tiny gasp.

“Detention’s Mr. Moreno today, isn’t it, Miss Brennan?” says Rainey. “You know his schedule, right?”

She holds the half-eaten egg high above the trash can and waits, watching Miss Brennan’s face until color flows into it.
“Thought so,” she says. She drops the egg into the trash. It thumps.

Earlier that semester Rainey went to the library, her second-favorite place, and looked up the name. She held the word close till she needed it.

“
Brennan
,” she says musically, deciding that today, even as she loses, she wins. “That means ‘sorrow’ in Irish, right?”

M
R
. M
ORENO
’
S CLASSROOM HAS
pictures of the authors around the room. George Eliot, who was a woman. Fitzgerald, whose wife was crazy. There is no keeping up with English lit; you could read and read and never get through it, whereas one day she will have seen every painting in every museum in New York City.

“Can I sketch?” says Rainey from the doorway.

“You can do homework, in silence, Rainey.”

She bites her lower lip as if a camera were trained on her, but Mr. Moreno just sits at his desk reading student essays. He has his aviator glasses on, and his hair is as dark and lush as Miss Brennan’s. Sometimes they share a Thermos—they
have
to be having sex, Rainey thinks. Their
hair
has to be having sex.

She takes a seat in the front row where she will be maximally distracting and watches his pupils dart back and forth, tracking the handwriting.
Her
handwriting. He makes notes with a red Bic pen.

“Mr. Moreno,” she says softly. “I have a problem.”

“You do,” he says, without looking up. “You’re talking.”

“That’s not it,” she whispers. She has no idea what she is going to say next. She is all out of hard-boiled eggs.

“You have a problem with this essay,” he says. He looks up and seems to realize, suddenly, that he has a chance to connect with her. “This could be a good time to work on it, actually. You don’t fully support your thesis. Here, where you talk about the relationship between wealth and honor—”

Honor Brennan. Dishonor Brennan.

“I don’t remember what I wrote,” says Rainey, and rises from her chair. “I have to see.”

“Stay right there,” says Mr. Moreno. His voice is a closed door.

“I just need to see,” she says in her little-girl voice. She plants her palms on the front of his desk and leans forward. And then Mr. Moreno says something that doesn’t make sense.

“I’m bulletproof, Rainey.” He looks directly into her eyes. “Are you?”

At that moment Honor Brennan knocks and steps into the classroom with textbooks in her arms. She looks from Zach Moreno to Rainey’s chest and says drily, “Am I interrupting?”

Rainey scuffs back to her seat but turns it sideways. She opens her knees wide, like Mr. Bellange’s Mary, and sprawls.

“I thought I’d take over, Zack,” Miss Brennan says. “Rainey and I have a few things to iron out.”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Rainey.

“I’ll meet you in the lounge,” Mr. Moreno tells Miss Brennan. To Rainey he gives a small, courteous nod.

“Leave me a ciggie, Zach,” says Rainey, but he doesn’t even smile. When the door closes, Miss Brennan perches on the edge of the desk. Rainey bobs out of the chair and starts pacing. “I need a smoke,” she says.

Miss Brennan keeps the textbooks on her lap.
Shield
, thinks Rainey. “Once again I find myself asking you to sit,” says Miss Brennan.

“I’m done sitting. I’m done
talking
.” At the back of the classroom, Rainey looks out the window over East Eighty-Seventh Street, where kids leave school and stream down the block as if they had all the time in the world. “I need a cigarette,” she says.

When she turns and sees Miss Brennan, though, she realizes she is wrong. The cigarette is nothing. Miss Brennan, gazing at her and fingering her hidden crucifix, is the one with the need. She needs to fix Rainey Royal.

Rainey stares at the dagger’s point of hair on her teacher’s forehead, opens and closes her mouth a few times, and says, “Miss Brennan.” Then she falters.

She is
so good
.

“Yes, Rainey?”

“I want—” She looks at the floor.

“What is it, Rainey? What’s troubling you?”

She hesitates. “It’s embarrassing.”

Miss Brennan leans forward. “You can tell me anything, Rainey.”

In a voice not much above a whisper, Rainey says to the floor, “I just need to be held.”

“You—oh, I knew there was something under all that behavior.”

Rainey holds her ground and waits.

Miss Brennan puts her books on the desk. She walks all the way down the aisle. She wears black trousers with low heels and a white cotton blouse buttoned to her neck and a gold cross where Rainey can’t see it. She clasps Rainey’s upper arms, looks at her searchingly for a moment, and then enfolds her.

She smells of perfume, deodorant soap, and a tiny bit of sweat. Rainey likes it. It is the smell of Wonder Woman. Miss Brennan hugs her the way women hug, shoulders touching but with a natural distance between the chests. Rainey counts to five, then slowly begins to melt into the shape of that distance. When she inhales, her breasts press into Miss Brennan’s breasts. When she exhales, her breath washes over Miss Brennan’s neck and disturbs her thick, dark hair.

Miss Brennan seems to have stopped breathing.

“Oh, my God,” says Rainey, her arms around Miss Brennan’s waist. She is alive, she is incredibly alive, she is running the class. “Miss Brennan,” she whispers, “will you do something for me?”

Miss Brennan begins to disengage from the hug like a cat that has been held too long. “What is it, Rainey,” she says.

“Will you kiss me?”

Miss Brennan steps abruptly back, though they are still, in some way, interlocked. Rainey feels herself scrutinized. She turns her face away and bites the side of her thumbnail.
She gives Miss Brennan time to recollect how an abandoned girl would be—troubled, shy, desperate for affection.

Miss Brennan hesitates, then swiftly leans in and kisses Rainey on the cheek.

Rainey touches her fingertips to the side of Miss Brennan’s face.

Then she touches her lips to Miss Brennan’s mouth.

For one second, two seconds, there is only shock.

Then Rainey could swear Miss Brennan moves her mouth, or perhaps it is just her head, ever so slightly.

And for a second or two after that it’s as if their hair is kissing. But already Rainey’s brain is working on another problem. She tips her head back, exposing the tiny bowl between her collarbones. She ignores the little cry of disgust, or is it despair, from Miss Brennan, and the firm shove, and she thinks about what is wrong with Jacques Bellange’s pietà—what’s wrong, in fact, with every pietà in the Met, right?

“I gotta go,” she says, and she stalks to the front of the room to grab her pack. She barely notices Miss Brennan wiping her mouth on her sleeve, barely hears her calling, “Rainey. Don’t you dare walk out on this.” Studio Art II has oil pastel crayons; maybe the door isn’t locked. In
her
pietà, the person draped between the Virgin’s knees will be Mary Magdalene, very much alive, a loose, dreamy chick who doesn’t like to read; and the Virgin Mother’s face will be lit not by sorrow but by rapture and the fiercest love.

TRUST