Only as I keep reading, something about it bothers me. It’s like as the guy goes on he gets more and more dramatic. But buried in all the lines reiterating exactly how he would die for her (fire, water, crime, disgrace, he tries to hit all the ways possible) is this line: “what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.” Why do guys do that? Rather than just say how they feel, they act like the girl is seducing them or something. It’s ridiculous.
On my right, Alice Han and Vince Le are both bent over their papers and scribbling annotations. On my left, Ben is leaning back in his chair, his passage seemingly untouched. He notices me looking at him and gives me another half smile.
I turn back to the passage and read it again.
“And stop,” Poblete says. “Pencils down. Someone tell me about the passage.” Hands go up around the room. “Miss Zhou, what persuasive devices is the speaker using?”
“He focuses directly on his audience—on her,” Margaret begins.
“Thank you,” Poblete says. “Who can tell us something else?” Several hands shoot up. “Mr. Le?”
“It’s all pathos appeals—appealing to her emotions.”
“Not entirely true; the first half is an emotional appeal, and the logos appeals are in the second half.”
“Yeah, but that’s only because this is the nineteenth century. Every guy has to say he can take care of his wife.”
Poblete raises a hand, and everyone about to launch into a discussion shuts up. “We need to go back to the text,” she says. “Ah, Mr. Trechter, go ahead.”
I smile and glance back at Alex, who’s never shied away from anything academic in his life. “Well, the opening line, ‘You know what I am going to say. I love you,’ gives the reader context. The woman he’s talking to knows he loves her and that love, not reputation, is the basis for his declaration. He lists all the influences she has on him—she could draw him to water, to fire, to the gallows, to death. It’s the ultimate romantic declaration of devotion.”
And because it’s Alex, I feel free to interrupt him. “But you don’t think that’s creepy?”
“Whatever do you mean, Miss Tenner?” Poblete asks with a smile, the only indication that I’m right.
“‘You could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death.’ That’s just like saying, ‘Hey,
you
could make me commit crimes punishable by death.’ That’s morbid.”
“You don’t think it’s romantic?” Ben asks.
I turn to look at him to see if he’s serious, and he appears to be. “No, not at all. He says she could be the death of him—what’s romantic about that?”
“He says she
could
be,” Ben agrees. “Because he loves her
that
much. He’s essentially confessing she has this power over him that he can’t control.”
“Textual evidence?” Poblete says.
Ben sighs and leans forward, the front legs of his chair coming back to the floor as he looks down at his paper. “He refers to it as the ‘confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing,’ which essentially means he’s so torn up over what he feels for her that he’s just walking around like he has no brain.”
A couple of guys in class laugh like they know the feeling. I’m pretty sure whatever is muddling their thoughts stems from an organ south of their hearts.
“But that doesn’t mean he should declare that she’s the death of him,” I say. “The best thing about love is…” I stop and change tactics, because I’m not sure what the heck I’m trying to say. I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to romance. “Okay, so two people who are in love—they are who they are when they’re apart, but when they’re
together
, the fact that they’re in love is supposed to make them better. Love and relationships are supposed to make people better.”
It’s one of my lamest arguments ever, and I can hear Alex laughing at me a few rows back. I have an urge to turn around and throw my pen at him.
But Ben has an answer for even my lameness. “But he says she could draw him ‘to any good—every good—with equal force.’ So obviously he’s thinking he would be a better guy if they were together.”
“Yeah, once his feelings overmastered him and he couldn’t resist in vain anymore.”
“So this isn’t a marriage proposal you would say yes to?” Ben says. He’s giving me that half smile again. Like he already knows the answer.
I can’t help but smile back. “No, it’s not.”
“You wouldn’t want some guy confessing his love for you, and saying he’d do anything for you—even die—that wouldn’t be enough for you?”
My face floods with heat again, and I can’t believe
Ben Michaels
is making me feel like I’m not smart enough to argue. I think I might hate him.
“What, you want some guy to propose by putting an announcement on the Jumbotron at a baseball game or something?” Ben asks.
“Oh please, that’s ridiculous. I don’t want someone announcing to the whole world that he’s proposing to me. It shouldn’t be about the whole world—it should be about just the two of us.”
“So your perfect proposal, what would it be?” Ben asks.
“Seriously?” I look at Poblete and she shrugs, obviously enjoying the real-world application. “I don’t know. It would just be the two of us, and I guess I’d want him to say something honest, not overly romantic, not something that would make a great story to tell his friends. I’d just want him to lean over…” As I say it, I lean slightly toward Ben, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body radiating into the empty space between us, and drop the volume of my voice. “… and say ‘Janelle Tenner, fucking marry me.’”
A couple of people in the room gasp, probably because I just dropped the F-bomb in AP English, but Poblete laughs. “Interesting. And back to the text. What about our woman in the paragraph. What do you think she says to our speaker’s proposal?”
I can’t help but sigh in answer. Because I don’t know. I look back at my prompt. “I want to say that she also said no. But it
is
Dickens. She probably said yes and lived out a miserable existence, because the evils of society pressured her into accepting such a ridiculous man.”
Poblete nods. “Thank you. That does sound Dickensian.” She looks around the room. “Anyone else care to wager a guess?”
“I agree with Janelle,” Alex says. “About the response. Most of us were taken with this proposal. What’s to say the recipient of the proposal wouldn’t be swept up the same way? Plus, it’s in the nineteenth century. Most girls didn’t say no.”
I turn around to smile at Alex, and he nods in response.
“Thank you.” Poblete looks around the room. “Anyone else?”
No one responds.
Poblete turns back to me. No, not to me—to Ben.
“What?” he says.
“So what happens?”
He slumps down a little in his seat. “Why are you picking on me?”
“Because out of everyone in this room, I know you’ve actually read
Our Mutual Friend
.” Her smile widens, and my chest burns slightly. I’m jealous—actually legitimately jealous. Of a teacher. Not because I think they have something going on or anything ridiculous like that. But because she knows him. Poblete
knows
Ben. She knew he was this smart, engaging, charismatic guy, who had—
has
—something to say.
Whereas I’d been fooled. Like half the rest of the population at Eastview, I’d thought Ben Michaels was a waste of life.
“Even though it’s going to undercut the great argument I just staged against Janelle?” he asks. She doesn’t respond, and with an exaggerated sigh, he sits up a little straighter. “She says no.”
“Why?” Poblete asks.
Ben shrugs. “Like Janelle said, in the novel this guy is
obsessively
in love with her, and it kind of freaks her out.”
“So if we look at this passage and compare it to the one from yesterday…”
While the class continues the discussion, I can’t stop staring at Ben. I try to be pissed off. We just spent a good fifteen minutes arguing for the sake of debate. Even though I was right. Even though he
knew
it. But I’m not mad. I’m not even annoyed.
Because it’s been a while since I lost a debate.
So when Ben looks my way, that grin on his face, I shake my head slightly and return the smile.
I have to admit, I enjoyed that. A lot.
But that doesn’t mean he’s going to get out of answering my questions today.
W
hen the bell rings and people stand and start filing out of the classroom, I put my hand on Ben’s arm and try to ignore the way that touching him seems strangely intimate.
“Here’s the thing,” I say to Ben. “I know you’re lying.”
He shifts his weight on his feet. And I wait until the classroom has emptied out, including Poblete, who’s conveniently disappeared.
“I know you’re lying,” I say again. “And it’s not just the usual tells—the stiffness in your upper body and the evasive eye contact and the slight change in the pitch of your voice. It’s more than that. I have actual proof.”
His eyes widen as he looks up at me. He’s surprised, but not as much as he would be if he
hadn’t
done anything.
“When I was eleven, I did the La Jolla Rough Water for the first time. It’s a three-mile ocean swim from La Jolla Cove to Scripps Pier and back. I didn’t finish, though. I was stung by a Portuguese man-of-war. It was a bad sting. The thing completely latched on to my shoulder and arm, and the venom was so bad, it got infected and left a weblike scar on my left shoulder.”
Ben’s face flushes with color, and I have the distinct impression he already knows about my scar.
I grab the neck of my T-shirt and pull it aside to expose my left shoulder, where the skin is completely smooth. The scar I’ve had on my left shoulder for the past six years is completely gone.
“Whatever you did, you did this, too.”
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness
—Emily Dickinson
B
en runs a hand through his hair and then tugs on the ends, something I’m beginning to recognize whenever I seem to be making him think too hard about what he’s going to say.
I fold my arms across my chest. “Whenever you’re ready.”
He glances up. “And what if this is one of those things that just can’t be explained?”
“Don’t give me that.”
He takes a deep breath and cracks his knuckles. I feel light-headed and a little nauseous, because whatever he’s about to say is going to be a game changer. Whatever he did to me, I was dead, and he brought me back, and that shouldn’t be possible.
Ben opens his mouth, and I hold my breath waiting for him to speak.
Only he exhales and then says, “You’re not going to believe me.”
“Maybe you haven’t heard, but a little more than a week ago, I rose from the dead. Try me.”
He looks like he might deflect again, but instead he sighs. “I’m not sure I know how.”
“Try.”
He runs a hand through his messy brown hair again. “I saved you.”
“How?”
He shrugs, and this time his voice is barely more than a whisper. “I can do things like that. I can … use energy to manipulate molecular structure.”
“Manipulate molecular structure,” I repeat slowly, and then bite the inside of my cheek to keep from saying more. If he thinks I’m just going to stand here and accept a load of crap so he can laugh about it to his friends, he’s dead wrong. “Really?”
“It’s hard to explain, I mean, I don’t even really know the limits of what I can do. I know I can heal other people, though.”
Something in the way he says that makes all the anger bleed out of me. Suddenly, I don’t think he’s lying. I’m looking at him and I can hear the conviction in his voice, but how can I know for sure? I don’t know what to say. No matter what he tells me, I’ll have no idea if this is actually the truth or if he’s just making up something he thinks I want to hear.
I gesture to him. “Show me.”
Ben shakes his head. “Give me your hand. It doesn’t work on me.”
I offer him my left hand, and a shiver runs through my chest when his hand touches mine. He turns my hand over and exposes a small cut on my thumb. I don’t even know what it’s from. Maybe a paper cut that was deeper than I’d thought, who knows. It’s scabbed over, probably a few days from healing on its own, but Ben touches it. His fingers are warm—no, they’re hot and growing hotter—and I feel a little of that heat transfer to me. It feels like heat is pouring into my thumb. Somehow it manages to be just shy of burning, but the rest of my body shivers, like it can’t figure out why it’s so cold in comparison.
Then my broken skin begins to knit itself together right in front of my eyes. It starts at the base of the cut and moves up, until I’m staring at clean, smooth skin, and I can’t even tell where the cut was.
Holy. Crap.
I feel flushed but somehow too cold at the same time, and my eyes itch like I need to close them and rub them back into reality.
Because this can’t possibly be real.
We stand there for who knows how long. I’m staring at my thumb, wondering where the scab just went and how it’s possible. I don’t know what Ben’s thinking. But my heart is pounding so hard that my pulse is ringing in my ears, and as we stand there, Ben still holding my hand in his own, I start to feel self-conscious about my heart rate, like maybe he can hear it or sense it.
I pull my hand away, and Ben looks down at his shoes as he shifts his weight on his feet.
“How? How can you do this?”
He starts to shrug, and I just know he’s about to give some line to blow me off.
“Don’t bullshit me, you must have a theory.” Any guy who likes to argue for the sake of debate also likes to
know
things.