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Conner rolled his eyes at that. “So, Sam’s a teacher, huh? What does that do to your serial killer theory?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Equating an occupation’s projected societal ethos with an individual’s personal morality is one reason why our police force is so fucked in this country.”
“So in other words, neighbor threatnotneutralized.”
I shrugged. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of Sam standing in another group, facing us, but I didn’t dare turn my head. I didn’t know why it even mattered to me, to know if he was paying attention, if he was as attuned to where I was in the room as I couldn’t help but be of him.
“But okay,” I said grudgingly. “Maybe he does actually play that piano.”
?BARBARA TURNED OUTto be the fifth grade language arts teacher I wished I’d had, and once Josue had introduced us, we spent an enjoyable twenty minutes talking about the Harry Potter books and what a shame it was that the author was such aTERF. I congratulated Barbara on her retirement, and she showed me pictures of the grandkids she was moving to Indiana to be closer to.
We were in the middle of an energized conversation about the three-paragraph essay when suddenly the never-ending Beach Boys were turned way down. I glanced up to see Sam standing at the front of the room, tapping a plastic fork uselessly against the side of his beer bottle.
“Uh,” he said, and someone in the crowd encouraged him to climb up on a chair to give a speech. To my surprise, he did. No way would you ever catch me trusting all my weight and balance to a regular old dining chair, much less in front of a roomful of people.
Now I had to crane my neck to see Sam, but I liked this arrangement—where I could feel free to observe as openly as I wanted, because everyone’s attention was supposed to be focused on him. He shouldn’t be that attractive, objectively speaking. His nose was crooked and a little too big for his face, his hair skated a fine line between bedhead and bedraggled, and the hot pink of his shirt gave me corneal flash burns.
And yet there was something about him that made me want to figure him out.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said now. “And thank you, Terry, for tenting your house just in time to force the location change.”
A few chuckles and titters from the crowd, and an older dude I assumed to be Terry raised his plastic pineapple cup in acknowledgment. Barbara leaned in toward me. “For the best,” she said. “The only reason Terry hosts in the first place is to show offhis latest renovation project. We’re lucky this current undertaking precludes anyone from entering the house.”
“Anyway,” Sam continued, “we’re all here of course to celebrate our favorite champion with a red pen, a gifted reader-alouder whose British accent isalmostBBC ready, the only one of us who could get eighty fifth-graders to stand still for a group photo, the keeper of the teachers’ lounge Diet Cokes”—here Sam pointed at someone in the audience—“abandon all faith, ye who drink what’s clearly labeled in Sharpie. So give it up for a lovely person and colleague who will be missed... Barbara!”
And I hadn’t thought this through, because I was standing right next to Barbara, which meant that Sam was now gesturing right at me. Notme, obviously, but I felt conspicuous as all eyes turned in my general direction. I tried to step subtly away from Barbara, out of the metaphorical spotlight, as I clapped along with everyone else.
Only when I glanced back at Sam, he’d jumped down off the chair, his chest rising and falling. He went to take a sip of his beer, before seeming to realize that it was empty. He had barely set it down before Barbara crossed over to him and enveloped him in a big hug.
“That was a wonderful tribute,” she said. “I’m going to miss working with all of you.”
From my vantage point, I could see his arms go around her, could see the way the tips of his ears went pink as she said more to him that I couldn’t hear. He squeezed her shoulder, glancing around the room until his gaze landed on me. I startled, turning on my heel to find wherever Conner and Shani had gotten off to. Suddenly, I was desperate to leave.
SEVEN
CONNER CAME THROUGHon the dumpster and boxes that weekend, which was almost a shame. I’d half expected him to forget or order the wrong thing, and then I’d have an excuse to spend the whole time hunched over my Edgar Allan Poe desk, typing away on my analysis ofIn Cold Blood.
Which was basically all I’d done since Sam’s party earlier in the week. Despite normally having a strong constitution for the stuff, I had to admit that it was hard to read Capote’s true crime classic late at night when I was in a house all by myself. I’d shifted my work schedule to do more during the day, leaving my nights free to wander from room to room and think—arguably, a more frightening place to be than with Dick and Perry on their way to the Clutters’ home in Holcomb, Kansas.
My dad had never been a super-demonstrative guy, and there hadn’t been a lot of evidence around the house that he even had kids even when we were young. No school pictures hanging onthe wall, no artwork on the fridge, no pantry door marked with our heights throughout the years. My mom was more sentimental, but appearances were also important to her, so she’d cultivated a very chic and sophisticated look to our living spaces after the divorce that didn’t allow for mismatched tchotchkes or DIY decorations. Every Christmas now that she and my stepdad, Bill, were together, she decorated her fake silver tree with only white and silver ornaments, a Waterford crystal star at the top. I didn’t even know where stuff like Conner’s clay handprint ornament from kindergarten would be at this point.
I didn’t consider myself a very sentimental or demonstrative person, either. Like that one episode ofThe Office, where Jim hosted a silly version of the Olympics and made everyone medals out of yogurt lids? At the end, Ryan the Temp throws his away, and gives a talking head about how he could either throw it away then or wait two months, but either way what was he supposed to do with a medal made from trash. Ryan the Temp is clearly the worst, but in that moment, I felt seen.
Back in North Carolina, the small office in the English Department I shared with another graduate student for our teaching assignments looked like a decorator’s version of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, one where Jekyll lovedStranger Things, Funko Pops, and artistically desaturated wedding photos, and Hyde loved death row cinder block walls. I’d never bothered to put up anything, because I always thought the job was temporary, anyway, over once I graduated. Except I’d been teaching there for the last four years now, longer than I’d ever held down any other job.
So it wasn’t necessarily a hardship formeto start tossing stuff from the house. Conner, on the other hand, was struggling.
“Dude,” he said, “check this out. Mysobresalienteaward from eighth grade Spanish. I have to keep this. It’s so sick.”
I hurled another box of old appliance parts, who knew what they belonged to, into the dumpster. We’d only been at it for an hour and already I was drenched with sweat. God, I hated Florida.
“Saysickin Spanish,” I said.
“Uh.” He turned over the trophy in his hand, as if the answer might be engraved somewhere on the bottom. “Well, in this case I meansicklikeexcellent, so...excelente.”
“Put it in your car to take home if you want,” I said. “It just can’t go back in the house.”
He bounced it in the air, letting it spin before catching it again. The corner of the statuette caught him on the palm. “Ow,” he said and, as if mortally offended now by the trophy’s very existence, threw it in the dumpster.
