Her Name in the Sky (31 page)

“Please,” Hannah cries, sitting up on her knees and sobbing to the sky. She chokes, shudders, blinks away the tears. “Please, either help me or take this away from me. I don’t want this anymore.”

But her stormy heart does not settle. Her muscles do not relax. She looks at the stars and wonders why God made them so good, so brilliant, but made her so wrong and broken. Her eyes spill over with tears and her throat burns. She pounds her fists into the earth, into the grass and the soil, and emits an animal-like cry from the depths of her body.

“Please,” she sobs, digging her hands into the soil. “
Please.
” 

She wakes Friday morning with a pit in her stomach. She walks to the window and lifts it open, and the humid air collects on her skin. The fragile light of early morning stretches across the sky and the birds sing to each other about its promise. Hannah leaves the window open, though her parents would chide her about letting the air conditioning out, and walks to the bathroom to wash her face. 

She enjoys an easy morning with no exams, and the lack of stress allows her to forget about her venture to Baker’s house and the park the night before. During second block, in Ms. Carpenter’s class, they talk about how the AP Literature exam went for them, but no one dares to hint at Ms. Carpenter’s behavior during Mass the previous day. Hannah relaxes and talks easily with her classmates, for once not distracted by Baker’s presence, as Baker is sitting for her AP Biology exam in the gym. 

Mr. Manceau interrupts with a knock on the door halfway through the class period. Ms. Carpenter steps into the hall and closes the door behind her, and Hannah’s classmates trade knowing looks with each other.

Mr. Manceau shuffles into the room a minute later. He leans against the whiteboard and folds his arms over his protruding stomach. “Ms. Carpenter has to go take care of something,” he says, breathing heavily beneath his black mustache. “I’ll be here with you until the end of the period. So get on back to work now.”

“What does Ms. Carpenter have to take care of?”

“Don’t you be worrying about that, Collins,” Mr. Manceau says. His beady eyes gleam with satisfaction. “Just get on back to work. Well? Why aren’t y’all pullin’ out your workbooks?”

“We don’t have any work to do,” Collins says. “We had our exam yesterday.”

Mr. Manceau huffs and swivels his eyes to the ceiling, as if begging for patience. “Why am I not surprised,” he mutters under his breath. Hannah and her classmates wait on bated breath for him to continue, but he merely claps his hands together and says, “Well, in that case, each one of y’all needs to write me an essay about the things you’ve learned in this class this year.”

“Are you serious?”

“
Yes
, Davies, I’m serious. And watch your mouth.”

“How long does it have to be?”

“Are you kidding me right now? Have you not made it to the 12
th
grade? It needs to be as long as it needs to be.”

Hannah and her classmates roll their eyes and begrudgingly pull out loose-leaf paper and pens. Hannah makes eye contact with a few of the people around her—Emily, Christina, Josh—as if to check with them:
Are we really doing this?

“Are you going to read these?” Christina asks.

Mr. Manceau widens his eyes to signal that she has asked a good question. “I don’t know if I will…” he says slowly, “but there are people who might be interested in reading them, I would think.”

Hannah glares at him from her desk. Mr. Manceau pays no attention: he starts examining his nails, then chewing on them with short, aggressive bites.

Hannah takes pen to paper and writes a title across the top of the page:
A Condensed Summary of the Material* I Have Learned from the Best Teacher in This School.
She then drops her pen to the bottom of the page and writes, below the margin,
*Note that I am limiting this summary to academic material. I could never capture everything Ms. Carpenter has taught me about everything else.

Mr. Manceau stretches his neck against the whiteboard while the classroom of students writes in silence. Hannah’s hand races across her paper, writing
Hurston’s dialect technique in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
and the influence of colonization on “ethnic” literature and the importance of questioning the narrator.

Ms. Carpenter never returns.

The senior courtyard buzzes with talk when Hannah goes to lunch. Joanie intercepts her before she can sit down, pulling her into a spare corner away from the tables.

“Han—” Joanie says. Her expression is frantic; her eyes dart all over the courtyard, checking to make sure no one can overhear them.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you—have you heard what people are saying?”

“No?”

Joanie pulls her lips into her mouth and turns her head to check behind them. In a hushed voice, she asks, “Did you know Ms. Carpenter is in the front office?”

“Yeah, Manceau came to our class and pulled her out—Joanie, what’s wrong? Is she getting fired?”

“Hannah—”

“What? What is it?”

“Did you send her that e-mail?”

“What e-mail?”

“Someone sent Ms. Carpenter an e-mail. And she replied to it.”

“So?”

Joanie swallows. “The e-mail was about—it was about all that stuff Father Simon ranted about yesterday—the person who wrote it said she was confused about her feelings for her friend—”

All the breath goes out of Hannah. Her limbs start to tingle. “How do you know this?”

“Everyone’s talking about it—Michele overheard the front office staff whispering about it during her work study—she got a copy of the e-mail and she’s showing it to people—”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Hannah,” Joanie says tentatively, “you really didn’t—?”

“No,” Hannah says, her head reeling. “No. I really didn’t.”

Joanie’s face looks momentarily relieved, but then her eyebrows crinkle and she voices the fear Hannah has tried to push down for the last minute.

“Han, do you think Baker might have—?”

“Hey,” Wally calls, striding toward them with his lunch tray. “What’s up? Y’all coming to sit?”

Hannah and Joanie freeze. Wally hovers five feet away, his eyebrows lifting as he takes in their expressions.

“We’re coming,” Hannah says. “Sorry. We were just talking about something our mom asked us to do.”

They follow him to their usual lunch table. Hannah sits down next to him and Joanie sits across from them, trying to catch Hannah’s eye. Hannah unpacks her lunch bag and picks the bread off her sandwich, chewing it in small bites that make her feel like she might throw up. Wally stirs the red beans on his lunch tray and says, “So during Econ today—”

Hannah doesn’t listen: Michele has just strutted into the courtyard, her face alight with a power Hannah has never seen on it before, her friends trailing her with satisfied smirks on their faces. Whole tables of students look around to her, and all at once people start calling out to her.

“What’s going on?”

“Is it true?”

“Do you have it with you?”

The ruckus is enough to distract Wally from his story and to quell the other conversations taking place at all the different lunch tables. A hushed silence falls over the courtyard: no one talks, no one eats, no one shifts a lunch tray or crinkles a bag. Michele struts to a table in the middle of the courtyard—the table where Baker and Clay sit—and leans down to whisper to someone. Hannah’s stomach chills; she waits in absolute stillness, unable to breathe or blink.

Wally leans over. “What’s going—?”

His words are cut off by a yell from the middle table.

“—AND GET THE HELL AWAY!”

Hannah cranes her neck to get a better look, but she need not move at all: Clay is half-rising from his seat, his face blotchy red and his eyes narrowed in fury, his shoulders tight with tension.

“Calm down, Clay,” Michele says, her voice carrying around the courtyard. “I’m just saying—”

“Well shut up and move on,” Clay spits. He turns away from her and gazes out over the sea of onlookers. “Go back to your tacos,” he says. “She’s just talking out of her ass, like usual.”

“Why don’t you let Baker speak for herself?” Michele retorts, her voice dangerous.

The whole courtyard balances on a pin.

“Great, Clay, you’ve gone and alerted our whole class,” Michele says, crossing her arms. “I was trying to be discrete. This is a sensitive issue. Although…it’s probably fair that everyone should know who’s responsible for getting Ms. Carpenter in trouble. Right, Baker?” 

Hannah’s stomach turns over.

“She has nothing to do with it,” Clay says. He speaks in a deliberately low voice now, but his voice carries around the silent courtyard anyway.

“Then why do you look so scared, Baker?” Michele says. “If you had nothing to do with the e-mail, then why did I see you crying in Ms. Carpenter’s room before school this morning?”

Hannah shifts down the bench, straining her eyes. Then she sees her: Baker sits as still as a statue, her face flushed red, her eyes stretched with fear.

“Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?” Michele continues, shrugging a shoulder. “I mean, the writer mentioned that she had been trying to cover up her feelings by dating a guy. She said she worried about hurting her tight-knit group of friends. Yes, Clay,
the Six-Pack
. She said she was drunk and had started drinking a lot more lately. And we all know that has to be you, Baker, right? I mean, you had that embarrassing episode at Liz’s party last weekend—”

“Shut your mouth!” Clay yells, jumping up from his bench.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to help? If she’s the one who wrote the e-mail, then she obviously needs our support as she tries to figure out these difficult feelings. We’re her friends. We’re all a family. You’re the one who always says that, Clay, right? Maybe if we had known about this sooner, then she wouldn’t have had to send that e-mail that got Ms. Carpenter in trouble….”

Hannah scans the faces of everyone in the courtyard. Nearly all of them wear the same expression: a mixture between shock and confusion.

“So?” Michele says, speaking down to Baker. “Was it you, or what?”

Baker opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. 

“I’m not trying to accuse you,” Michele says. “I just think whoever got Carpenter in trouble owes us all an apology. Don’t you think that’s fair, Baker?”

“I didn’t write it,” Baker says, her voice weaker than Hannah’s ever heard it.

“I don’t understand why you’re acting so funny, then,” Michele says, peering down at her. She hangs her head, like the whole encounter is causing her pain, and sighs. “It was you, Baker. Right?”

There is a long, pressured silence, and Hannah’s heart hammers inside her chest.

“You’re supposed to be our
president
, remember?” Michele sneers. “You’re not supposed to go getting our favorite teacher fired. Or, you know, decide to be a
lesbian
.”

Baker breathes very fast; even though she sits yards away, Hannah can see her shaking.

“Well, since you’re not saying anything,” Michele says, “I guess we can take that as a yes.”

Hannah stands up without thinking and knows what she’s about to do before she actually processes it.

“It wasn’t her,” Hannah says. Her voice spreads out around the courtyard, and she hears it echo in her head, almost like it isn’t hers. Every face in the vicinity turns to look at her.

“What are you doing?!” Joanie whispers. “Sit down!”

“She didn’t write it,” Hannah says, making eye contact with as many people as she can, but hardly seeing them at all. “I wrote it.”

“Stop trying to cover for her, Hannah,” Michele says.

“I’m not. She was trying to cover for me.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Hannah, just sit down—”

“I sent the e-mail last night,” Hannah says, her mind working furiously to keep up with her words. “I was drunk—and panicking—I had been feeling that way for a really long time—” her voice starts to break—“and Ms. Carpenter has always been my favorite teacher, and I saw how she acted at Mass yesterday…” She shakes her head with genuine tears in her eyes. “I sent her the e-mail without thinking about it.”

“Then why did I see Baker crying to Ms. Carpenter this morning?” Michele says angrily.

Hannah swallows down the tears in her throat. “I called Baker in the middle of the night and told her everything. She said she would try to help. She told me everything would be okay. She promised she’d talk to Ms. Carpenter for me and explain everything so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. I was worried that I—I might jeopardize my acceptance to Emory. I begged her to go talk to Ms. Carpenter first thing this morning.”

“Oh, this is a bunch of crap,” Michele says, but Hannah looks around at her peers’ faces and knows that they believe her—that they are desperate to believe her.