I’d bought a headlight to see the road and its beams bounced jarringly over the rocks. I ran in the middle of the gravel, passing farmhouses that glowed like tiny ships on a rolling, frozen sea. Trees loomed at the edges of the road, their naked branches ghostly in the moonlight, but I barely noticed them.
She was dating Tommy as a cover.
In the three hours since she’d sauntered out of my classroom, I’d been incapable of thinking about anything else. She’d told me at the barn that she would become the last girl in the world who would be having an affair with her English teacher and apparently this massive deceit was her plan. Tommy was a convenience, nothing more to her than a prop. I’d stumbled through the rest of the afternoon and dinner, trying to digest the magnitude of what she had done. She had multiple personalities; it was the only explanation. She was dangerous, calculating, diabolical, and . . . brilliant. She was fucking brilliant.
After that night at the barn, I severed any connection with her, refusing to engage or ignore her in class, because ignoring her would single her out and I couldn’t afford to differentiate her in any way. I slipped up once during lunch, though. Carl had caught me looking at her in the cafeteria.
“Trouble?” he asked. Nothing else. Carl was nothing if not succinct.
He glanced in Hattie’s direction. Even though we were supposed to be monitoring the students for fights and other inappropriate conduct, Carl and I usually just ate and kept to ourselves.
“No.” I looked away quickly, stuffing a bite into my mouth.
“Should be illegal for them to wear sweaters like that until they’re eighteen.”
It was suddenly hard to swallow.
“Some of them don’t even seem like kids. The boys do, of course. Boys don’t become men real fast anymore. These girls, though . . .”
“I know.” I kept myself from looking at Hattie again, but I felt like it was written all over my face. I stared down at my sandwich, as engrossed as it was possible to be with egg salad.
“Out here they sometimes still get married right out of high school,” Carl kept on, feeling conversational that day for some reason. He added that—“out here”—occasionally when he talked to me, like he was my reluctant tour guide to rural southern Minnesota.
“You’ve got to be careful,” he said.
I didn’t respond or even look up and we spent the rest of the lunch period lost in our own heads. If he suspected anything about me and Hattie, he didn’t say so and I never made the mistake of glancing in her direction after that day.
The only interaction we’d had in the last month was through her homework assignments. I read them upstairs in the computer room, ashamed of how much I reacted to her words on the page. Regardless of anything else that had happened, she was still one of the brightest, most agile-minded students I had known. She introduced argument after argument, defeating her own points and turning on a dime to embrace some entirely new theory that she later questioned and half-hung at the end of her paper like both a prize and a warning. She clearly didn’t draft her essays, but I loved that she didn’t. It was like watching her think out loud, as if the page itself was breathing. I didn’t give her anything less than an A, even when her narrative structure obviously needed some improvement, because I knew she would challenge me on the grade and I couldn’t risk any chance of having to talk to her one-on-one.
And after all of that careful distance she ambushed me anyway, just when I’d started to relax and think she’d moved on. She handed me that piece of paper and tossed me right back into the fucking fire.
Turning into the parking lot for Lake Crosby, I passed an empty pickup. There was no one around; the truck looked like it could have been left for dead weeks ago. I slowed my pace as I reached the uneven terrain on the trail that circled the lake. Soften your stride, I’d told the boys. Tense your core.
Then I didn’t need any reminders. My gut clenched as I jogged around the far side of the empty barn and spotted a small glow coming from the window under the oak tree.
No. It couldn’t be.
I stopped, not nearly as winded as I’d tried to make myself. The nightly runs—supposed to be both punishment and escape—had only made me stronger, but apparently not strong enough to keep running.
It was just kids, I tried to reason even as I clicked off my head lamp. Just a couple of kids having beers or smoking pot. I crept closer, tempering my breathing, all the while calling myself a damn idiot for not turning away and sprinting for the woods.
I got close enough to see inside and there she was.
She had a blanket spread out on the floor and a camp lantern next to her. She sat cross-legged with a book in her lap and a bottle of water nearby. Her long hair was tucked away in her hood and her cheeks gleamed orange in the lantern light. Despite the recent warmth, I could see small puffs of her breath against her jacket. Something about her straight posture or the tilt of her head reminded me of Alice in Wonderland and a vertigo came over me, like I was the one tumbling down the rabbit hole.
I turned and walked silently to where the trail picked up again. I could just make out the line of trees that marked the border of Elsa’s land. All I had to do was click the light on again and run. My calves were cooling off and stiffening up. It was time to move, but I couldn’t.
I looked back at the barn and the empty horizon behind it. She was alone, exposed, and suddenly all my anger vaulted toward her with a stunning satisfaction. I crossed the clearing in five paces and shoved open the creaking door. She looked up, startled at the intrusion.