The Whole Golden World (3 page)

5

R
ain took her time finding her house key as she stood on her back porch, sipping in the cool evening air that already carried the bracing hint of autumn. She felt drained in every kind of way: physically from having to teach yoga all afternoon and then hauling Dog to the vet and back; mentally by having to show around the new girl, Layla. Drained of life that might have been.

She thought she'd beaten back thoughts of her failure at conception until the prenatal yoga class trooped in, belly after happy glowing belly.

Thank God she didn't teach that one, at least.

She finally turned the key to see TJ sprawled on the couch, his tie undone, shirt untucked, the laugh track of a sitcom the only sound in the house. His five o'clock shadow was in full effect, TJ being one of those men whose face seemed determined to grow a full ZZ-Top-style beard. Rain appreciated the rugged look, less so the whisker burn on her cheek.

“Hey, hon,” she said.

“Hi,” he responded with a wan smile. First days could be like that, Rain had learned; depending on the makeup of the classes, he would come home feeling energized or defeated, even on day one.

“That bad?” she said, trying to smile and sound relaxed.

He smirked. “Third hour is gonna be a walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

“Oh, come on,” she replied, and plopped herself down next to him. “They won't kill you. Not with anything sharp, anyway, because that's against school rules, right? What are the school rules on large blunt objects?”

By way of response, TJ leaned his head onto her shoulder for a moment.

“Did you eat?” Rain asked.

“I'm not hungry. I grabbed a snack on the way home.”

“Okay, then. I'll have some leftovers.”

She had her back to the living room as she retrieved leftover pasta salad from the Labor Day barbecue, so Rain wasn't sure she heard TJ right when he said, “Greg called.”

“What was that?” she asked, closing the refrigerator and turning back to him.

“Greg called. Alessia sends her love,” he repeated, exasperation turning his voice sour.

“Oh. What did he have to say?”

TJ slumped lower on the couch. “Just that he's still filthy fucking rich and wants to throw a party about it.”

Rain stood in the kitchen, still holding her salad. “And has he registered for gifts? Maybe at Sharper Image? Radio Shack?” She tossed her hair and affected a laugh.

TJ jerked the remote at the TV to shut it off and tossed it to the floor.

Rain abandoned her pasta and came to his side on the couch. “You're still more handsome than your brother. You'll always have that.”

“Till I get old and fat. I'm almost middle-aged.”

“Twenty-nine hardly makes you middle-aged. Anyway, you're not going to get fat. No way,” Rain said, and ran her hand along his waistband to his muscled abdomen under his untucked shirt. “Not you.”

TJ snapped out of his lethargy and turned to her, crushing Rain beneath a sudden, hard kiss, tipping her back on the couch. He moved his mouth to her neck where he sucked and nibbled. His whiskers were scratching her chest, his hands kneading her breasts through her shirt, then moving down to the waistband of her yoga pants.

“TJ,” she whispered. “Today isn't the best . . .”

He sat back just as suddenly as he'd pinned her to the couch. He looked at the floor and ran his hands through his hair. “I'm gonna take a shower,” he blurted, and ran up the steps like he was leaping hurdles.

Rain adjusted her rumpled clothes and then punched a sofa pillow. On another day she would have rallied. She could have ignored her yoga sweat, her muscle soreness, and risen to his passion, letting him take her right there on the couch. She had done as much, any number of times, and usually enjoyed it once they got going.

Rain put the pasta away, no longer hungry.

She tried to imagine the real conversation TJ must have had. Greg probably called to invite them for dinner on the weekend. He did this often. Greg and Alessia had just built a new house with a huge dining area for entertaining and they enjoyed using it. Dr. Gregory Hill and his stunning wife would serve delectable food and amuse their guests with some hilariously disarming story, like when he met her family in Milan and Alessia's mother declared Greg in arch, accented English, to be “fugly and a hot mess” for wearing a shirt without a collar. She'd picked up the expression by reading American magazines in preparation for meeting her daughter's American boyfriend.

Everyone would laugh, and everyone would adore them, including TJ and Greg's parents, who would be as dazzled as anyone, or more so.

Rain walked up the stairs to change her clothes. She peeled off her sweaty outfit and chose a white eyelet nightgown that wouldn't cling to her anywhere. Teaching yoga meant her work clothes couldn't drape anywhere lest they fall over her face; on her off hours she preferred her clothes to swirl around her freely.

She heard the shower turn off and paused in the act of brushing out her hair in front of the vanity mirror over her dresser. The master bathroom door was visible in the mirror behind her.

TJ emerged wearing boxers and nothing else, his deep brown hair spiky-wet, his chest slick from the shower. Rain cursed her period again.

He offered her a shy smile, then a downward glance.

“Sorry, babe. I was a jerk,” he said, then joined her at the mirror. He held her from behind and nuzzled her neck. She could barely hear him as he murmured, “What did I ever do to deserve a girl as great as you?”

She turned in the circle of his arms and tossed away her hairbrush, fitting herself to him.
Lucky girl,
her mother had said the day she got married, and Rain had agreed, that day and every day hence.
I'm a lucky girl indeed.

She reminded herself how exhausting it was for TJ to be the “fun teacher,” the role he had chosen for himself. All day, every day he had to be on, and up, and “dialed all the way up to eleven” as he put it, all the while maintaining a tricky balance between allowing just enough jovial fun without letting the classroom unravel into chaos. She could relate, in fact. A yoga teacher must be wise and serene and believe wholeheartedly in chakras and chanting ancient Sanskrit words, in giving up your stress to the Universe, in the one giving way to the One.

Rain always thought that kind of talk was silly; she just enjoyed the flexibility and strength and grace all twining together in a lovely physical form. She would have to stifle giggles when Beverly said something New Agey, like “lying on the floor with intention” in
savasana.

But her students were paying for the wise, serene yogi, and so she must be, all the time, no matter how she really felt.

TJ kissed the top of her head and patted her hip in a “we're done here” dismissal. “You know, I am kind of hungry after all.”

Rain's appetite was still long gone, her abdomen ached, her back cramped. But she smiled to see her husband climb out of the pit of his dark mood. “Rain's famous fajitas. Coming right up.”

6

B
ritney leaned on the locker next to Morgan, fluffing her strawberry blond hair and slicking on shiny pink lip gloss.

“So what have you got next?”

Morgan groaned and leaned her head on her just-closed locker. “Calc. With David.”

Britney paused in her glossing, then put away her makeup and stepped closer to Morgan, who was rather enjoying the hard feeling of the metal on her forehead. The sensation seemed to dull the creeping sense of anxiety that had been crawling up her spine this time of day all week, ever since she spotted her ex-boyfriend in her fifth-hour calculus class.

“So what if he's there? Walk in there looking gorgeous, so he realizes what he gave up.”

Britney grabbed Morgan's shoulders, pulled her up square to face her. She reached out and started to fuss with Morgan's hair. “You know what?” She grabbed handfuls of hair and pulled it up behind Morgan's head. “You'd look fabulous with short hair. Your face is stunning but you can hardly see it . . .”

Morgan was already shaking Britney's hands off her. “Let go of me. I'm not your . . . house pet.” Morgan pushed her hair back in front of her shoulders; more to the point, in front of her scar.

“I just wish you wouldn't hide yourself behind your hair.”

“I like it long. Anyway, I've gotta go, we're gonna be late.”

Britney shrugged and snapped her gum. “Later, then. Give my love to Mr. Hill . . .” She said this last with a wink. Morgan rolled her eyes, but smiled, too. The consolation prize for having to suffer through a postlunch advanced math class with her arrogant ex-boyfriend was her favorite teacher. Mr. Hill had taught Morgan's freshman algebra class, and his charm and enthusiasm had won over even the most cynical of kids. He was the type of teacher to high-five kids in the halls and joke around about Snooki and
Jersey Shore,
instead of acting like the kids today are on a fast train to hell, like some of the older teachers who walked around scowling most of the time. He'd been visibly nervous the first few days of calc, seeming to cringe when a student asked him a difficult question, which made her feel oddly protective of him. She wanted to cheer him on:
You can do it, Mr. Hill!
If only to see his smile, which was one of those smiles that could melt polar ice when it was big and true.

Morgan bounced around like a pinball between the larger, more brash students as she fought her way to the math hallway. She thought she felt a hand brush her ass but it might have been the edge of someone's bag, or jacket, and she didn't have time to care. The noise in the halls seemed to turn up like someone was cranking the volume knob as she approached the math corridor, and a headache started to throb behind her forehead. Sleeplessness was taking its toll; the dreams had been back in force last night, and she woke up feeling so sore and sleepy she questioned if she should bother getting into bed at all.

She edged into class as the bell chimed, slipping into her assigned seat that was not far enough away from David.

“Hey,” he'd said to her the first day when she'd walked in. “How was your summer?”

Like there was nothing to it. Like they hadn't been dating all junior year and like they hadn't broken up just before prom and she had to watch him take Ashley instead.

Britney had said that clearly meant it was nothing to him, therefore he was a rat bastard and better forgotten. But Britney draped herself across the lap of every guy she ran across, so what would she know about her and David?

Morgan looked up and cut her eyes sideways, two rows over, to David. He was tapping his pencil on his notebook and looked half asleep.

Mr. Hill was taking attendance, and he had to call her name twice before she reacted, and only then because the jerkface football jock behind her poked her in the back with his pencil.

Morgan had pressed David for a reason why he broke up with her—he did this at the mall, in the food court, over a soggy eggroll and fried rice—and he would only say he didn't “feel the same” anymore. Finally he blurted, “You're so serious all the time. I want to have a little fun once in a while.”

She blurted back the first thing that sprang to mind. “Sex is fun.”

Morgan cringed to replay that moment. She wished with every cell in her body she'd said that flirtatiously, or at least with a smile, but instead she'd been offering it as a serious piece of evidence.
Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen, is that we had sex at least twice a week since winter break and Mr. David Archer demonstrated and verbalized his enjoyment.

He'd had the nerve to blush. He blushed! Morgan was still fixated on that. He was the one who urged her to get on the pill, who persuaded, reasoned, begged in fact, to have sex. He was the one who asked for oral sex and always had the courtesy to make sure he was all clean and fresh first, which at the time she took as a form of gallantry.

And there he was, blushing into his fried rice because she said sex was fun?

This was all over in about two heartbeats, because by then Morgan realized what he meant by this line of thinking: He would just have sex with other girls, who would also be fun when fully clothed.

After the initial moping and the drama of the breakup, once summer vacation started, Morgan found she didn't miss David that much. What she missed was feeling selected and favored, that out of the whole Arbor Valley High, he'd wanted to spend time with her, and hold her hand in the halls, and have her sit on his lap in the cafeteria while they joked with friends.

She hung out with Ethan and Britney all summer instead and thought she was over David. And then she walked into calculus on Tuesday and felt like someone had punched her in the chest.

Mr. Hill had been talking and her pencil had been taking notes, but she knew she'd have to reteach herself the lesson later. No big deal, as long as she had time to do so before helping one or both of the twins.

Her phone buzzed in her backpack's zipper pocket. Probably Britney texting her about plans later, though she should know better than to try that from Señora Graham's class.
Cómo se dice
“hard ass”
en Español
?

Another buzz, a few seconds later.

And another.

What the hell . . . ?

Morgan glanced over at David, and he glanced up to look back at her. He even smiled, with one corner of his mouth.

Mr. Hill had his back to the class, working out a problem on the whiteboard. Morgan was nearly at the back of the class and was sitting behind a girl named Marie who was, well, one of the bigger girls in class. Heavyset, her grandmother would say.

She slipped her phone from the backpack and thumbed across the screen.

The texts were from three different people. There was in fact one from David, saying,

glad we're in class hope we're cool ok

but the other two were from her mother and Ethan, time-stamped much earlier. Her phone must have lost service briefly and gotten the messages late.

She answered David's text so she could appear cool and worldly about it all.

Sure. Cool. Nice to see you too.

She didn't notice the shadow over her until it was too late.

Mr. Hill held out his hand for her phone. “Hand it over.”

“Sorry,” she said, and started to put it away. This was a teacher who had thrown paper airplanes on the first day to illustrate a point about parabolas and now he was cracking down on the first phone offense?

“Hand it to me. You can have it back at the end of the day.”

She heard someone titter “Ooooooooh” in the back of the class.

What are we, in third grade?
she groaned to herself before shooting a glare in the direction of the idiot.

She would start on her college applications that very night. She couldn't wait to get away from these childish morons and their stupid little sandbox-level attitudes and self-important teachers who had to act like big shots.

Getting her phone back would also make her late to meet her brothers, and late home, which meant a barrage of questioning from Detective Mom.

She put her head down on her math and wished she had her poetry notebook.

Her headache throbbed like jungle drums, drowning out whatever it was Mr. Hill was trying to tell them.

 

With the slam of her locker door, Ethan's face appeared from behind it, smiling at her, and waggling his eyebrows, inches from her face.

Morgan's gasp sounded disgustingly to her own ears like a mouse squeak, but any irritation dissolved in his smile.

“Student dies of prank-induced startle,” she said. “Film at eleven.”

“Entire school wreathed in black for mourning,” he replied. “Film at eleven.”

Morgan's heart continued to pound unnaturally fast for such a small thing.

“Coming to the Den?” he asked.

Morgan rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Can we not? I'm there enough, thanks.”

Ethan stuck his hands into his pockets and shrugged. They began walking together toward the parking lot. He loped through the after-school crush without seeming to watch where he was going, yet never bumping into anyone. It seemed like he just knew where the crowd would part.

“Nice day,” he said. “Park?”

Morgan nodded, though Ethan was a couple of steps ahead and didn't see her, but then he stopped, looked behind, didn't see her right away. His brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, and his head rotated like a searchlight; then he saw her, and everything relaxed, his smile blossomed.

Ethan held out his hand. “Here. So I don't lose you again.”

Morgan slipped her hand into his and allowed herself to be pulled along, train fashion.

“Oh, crap,” she said, pulling on Ethan's hand to stop him by the math hall. “I forgot, I gotta stop by Mr. Hill's to get my phone. And I can't text my brothers to tell them I'm running late. Will you go find them by the freshman door? I'll drop them off at home and meet you at the park.”

“Sure. How late will you be, you think?”

Morgan rolled her eyes. “I dunno, guess that depends how much I have to grovel to get my phone back. Lame.”

As she approached Mr. Hill's room, she heard voices and stopped just outside the door, allowing the kid ahead of her the dignity of the cell-phone begging, or other after-school scolding, in private. She wedged herself between the side of the adjacent locker and the doorway.

Morgan wasn't trying to eavesdrop, not really. But without her phone to amuse her for a few minutes, she found herself unable not to hear.

One voice was a boy's. It sounded kind of scrapey, like a shovel over asphalt. “I can't do it! I'm an idiot and I'll never get it.”

Mr. Hill's voice, somehow both soothing and firm: “No way. None of that. We don't do ‘never' and we don't call ourselves names. I wouldn't let anyone else call you an idiot, and I don't allow you to do that either.”

Morgan didn't catch the next words, mumbled as they were.

Mr. Hill again. “Dude, did you think I got this the first time? I had to take calculus three times in college. No joke. . . . I swear! Ask Mr. Monetti; I told him in the job interview. It just clicked, finally, because I stuck with it, and I had a teacher who was patient enough to teach it to me three times. The third time I aced it. And I used to run in school, back in my glory days.” Self-deprecating chuckle. “But at first I had skinny chicken legs and got winded after half a lap. I'm just saying, no one starts out brilliant at everything and if anyone seems like they do, they're hiding the effort to seem like a big shot. Don't feel bad, and no more idiot talk. Come back in the morning if you still don't get it tonight, and I'll walk you through it.”

More mumbling, and Morgan turned away as the poor sap skittered out the door. She didn't see who it was, but she had an uncomfortable sense this could be the case of Connor in a few years.

Thinking of Connor reminded her how late and annoyed she was. She stepped into the room.

He looked up from his desk and seemed confused for a moment. He also looked pale, and like he badly needed a shave. His dark hair was spiky and mussed, as if he'd been raking his fingers through it over and over. His physical appearance contrasted so much with his soothing authority she'd heard moments ago, she briefly wondered if she'd imagined that whole exchange.

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Right. The phone.” He unlocked a drawer of his desk and held it out to her. “I assume this one's yours, and not the other in here that's covered in pink rhinestones?” He gave her a weak smile.

“Yeah. Good guess.”

He pulled it back slightly just as she reached out for it. “And . . . will you be texting in my class again?”

Morgan sucked in a breath and exhaled. “No, sir, Mr. Hill,” she replied, letting sarcasm slip out.

Her smart-off had a surprising effect. He handed over the phone but looked utterly defeated, like that time her sophomore year when she'd told a pimply freshman she'd never heard of that she didn't want to go out with him.

Morgan accepted the phone and glanced at it for messages. A few, none important. She stowed it in her pocket. “Hey, sorry. I had a tough day.”

Mr. Hill rubbed one hand over his face. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“My ex is in your class.”

Morgan felt a flush climb up her face. Why had she said that?

Mr. Hill looked up, and what looked like genuine concern was written in the furrow of his brow. “Oh. That sucks. Who . . . ? No, don't tell me. None of my business.”

Morgan was already answering. “David Archer.”

Now Mr. Hill seemed to be studying her.

“What?”

“Huh. I wouldn't have guessed that.”

“Yeah, well, since we broke up, apparently you're right to not guess it.”

Morgan knew she should leave. Her brothers would be getting antsy, her mom would be wondering why they were late.