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Alexa
My mom says I have ‘senioritis’ because I haven’t been able to focus on anything this final semester before my high school graduation.
Little does she know I have been focused, very focused, but it’s not on any of my classes. It’s on him.
Alexander Smith, my senior year Russian teacher.
I lean back in the creaky old wooden chair in my room, the one that gives me splinters more often than not, and I pull up my school’s website, heading straight to the Faculty and Staff page.
I scroll down to the language teachers and there he is, those blue-grey eyes piercing right through me, jumping from my screen and into my tiny bedroom that’s not much bigger than a closet.
Just when I’m about to try to do what I’ve tried so many times before, to no avail, the door handle rattles and my mom comes barging into my room.
“Why aren’t you studying?”
Oh, I’m studying all right. It’s just that I’m not studying my course work, but the teacher who instructs it.
“Young lady I’ve made every sacrifice for you for the last eighteen years. You better pass this class and graduate or else you’ll end like your father.”
“How would I know?” I bite back. “I never met him.”
“Lucky you that he drank himself to death before you were old enough to remember.”
My mom’s right. I don’t remember anything about my father, or anyone in my life who filled that role, despite the revolving door my mom has kept on both the front of our run-down apartment and her bedroom.
‘Here today, gone tomorrow,’ seemed to be the mantra most of the gentleman, and am I ever using that term lightly, prescribed to when it came to her. Not to mention most didn’t even stick around until sunrise.
My mom stabs her cigarette into the door jam and throws daggers at me with her glare.
“You will pass that test tomorrow, you hear?”
“Yes, mom,” I exhale, still breathing out the breath as she slams the door and mumbles something under her breath as the doorbell rings. Hopefully tonight’s suitor will be like most of them, bringing over a bottle and before long my mom will be three sheets to the wind and forget I’m in my room, or that I even exist.
Sliding my seat back silently I lift my chair and tilt the back against the knob. My mom refuses to let me have a lock on my door, so this chair will have to do as a makeshift workaround. First, because I don’t want whoever’s over to stumble in here later claiming to be looking for the bathroom, only to decide he wants to suggest the oh-so original idea of a mother-daughter fantasy developing for him…as if I haven’t heard that a hundred times. And second, because I’ve got a fantasy of my own to try and imagine yet again. But hopefully tonight, with mom having already said her peace, she won’t bother me again and I can reach the place I’ve been trying to get to since I first learned exactly what it feels like to put a pillow…there.
Leaving the lights on, so she thinks I’m studying, I take my phone over to my bed, clicking on Mr. Smith’s picture where it takes me to his About Me page…and an even bigger picture of him.
I feel like he’s staring right at me.
Look, Daddy. Look all you want.
Thoughts of this big brute looking man speed through my mind, and I wonder how someone so rough around the edges found himself as a high school Russian teacher. The information about him is basic and bland, almost as if he doesn’t want to attract any attention…but that’s exactly what he’s doing to every girl in our school.
He probably doesn’t even know I exist, just a quiet mousy girl who always sits in the front row to try and get what’s quickly appearing to be an elusive passing grade in his class. I’m trying to pass all right, that threshold which I never have…right here and now, and in a different way.
I slide the pillow underneath my middle, pumping my hips against it, but to no avail. The relief I seek continues to elude me, despite how I move my body over the thin worn-down object encased in polyester. Yet again, I just can’t cure the ache that will surely keep me up yet another night.
I roll over onto my back, wondering what he’s doing right now. Does he think of any of his students, the way the entire female student body thinks of him?
Why is he even here, in our rinky-dink podunk town? Why did he choose to come teach here, just last year, when he has such a specialized skill that he could be teaching in the big city, enjoying all the things to do and fun weekends that city life offers? Sure he looks to be about forty, but life hasn’t aged him one bit, at least not in a bad way.
He has this distinguished, wise look about him that boys my age are years from ever displaying, if they ever happen to acquire the life skills to exude that kind of quiet confidence at all.
He’s taken our language department, and cranked it up to the next level, and my blood pressure along with it. We used to only have Spanish, but due to the overwhelming success of his class, and the amount of students that are on the waiting list for next year, our school has tried to find teachers for other languages like French and possibly even Mandarin.
They don’t seem to understand. Russian is a gruff, abrasive, confrontational language…and it suits this man to a T, and the kind of voice every woman in town imagines in their deepest, darkest fantasies.
The way he stands behind that teacher’s lectern, his deep husky voice booming out words for us to repeat, has me wanting to repeat senior year just to experience the thrill each class gives me all over again.
I sit there in the front row, wondering why he stays locked in place like his feet are buried in wet cement as he refuses to come out from behind that big wooden box that sits about waist high on him and blocks me from getting the full view of this tree-trunk of a man, corded with muscle in all the areas I can see, and surely the areas I can’t.
