Nate crossed the room in two easy lopes, turned a chair backward, and sat. “You? Nah.” He rolled his eyes and she swatted at him.
They used to joke about that, Bridget’s hamster-wheeled brain, the thing that never stopped. Even when she was drinking, she’d stand up suddenly, her whiskey and Coke sloshing over the edge onto Alecia’s new carpet (and you could tell she had a small heart attack about it), and proclaim to have an idea. This was back when they thought they could do things. Nate and Bridget were teachers. Holden was a doctor. Alecia was in public relations. They were a dream team for some not-yet-established charity that helped children and bought them shoes or taught them to read or gave impoverished girls tampons. They had potential, dammit.
Bridget straightened the papers on her desk, just for something to do, her mind slipping dangerously on the thin ice of the past, the way it sometimes did. Some days she never really found her footing. But Nate made it more bearable. He touched her arm.
“How’s Alecia?” She brushed her hair back off her shoulders, sat up straighter, and gave Nate another bright smile. “Gabe?”
“Oh, you know. Ups and downs.” He shrugged, and Bridget wondered how many of the downs Nate really got to see up close.
“Give them my love.”
He nodded and pulled out a folded index card. “I stopped by because I wanted your advice on this.” He pushed it across the desk at her.
The ravens came in sets of three
One for each sword, drawn down, unfreed
Fearless
Until nightfall when he’d cower
Washed with the blood of a thousand kings
Bridget read it twice, three times. It made very little sense; it wasn’t even symmetrical, poetically speaking. The rhythm was wrong. But something about it crawled around in her brain, skittering across her unfocused thoughts.
“Who wrote this?” She flipped it over, not expecting a name.
“I’m not sure, but I found it on the floor, near my desk after last period.” He leaned back, pulling on the chair back. Nate was a fidgeter, not much different from the long-legged boys in her classes, their knees bopping, cracking their knuckles. “It weirded me out. You don’t think it’s weird?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m a creative writing teacher. You should see the shit I read. They’re kids. Some of them truly think that what they’re going through on any given day is the worst pain they’ll ever have in their lives.”
Nate gave her a sad smile. “Aw, Bridge.”
“No. You don’t get to feel sorry for me. That’s not your job.” She waved her hand at him. She studied the card again. Something in the last line, the thousand-kings part, jumped out at her. She snapped her fingers and flipped through the journals on her desk.
She’d made them keep a handwritten journal. Some days it was classwork, some days it was homework, but it couldn’t be typed. In her view, journals were meant to be taken to bed, scrawled in while tucked under the blankets, a private enclave of thoughts.
Their handwriting was atrocious and they whined incessantly about the assignment. Most of them wrote about what they did, which was boring as all get-out, even documenting what they’d eaten for breakfast. The girls often confessed their weight, a long-held secret, bursting out of them like jelly from a doughnut. They turned them in on Fridays, and Bridget might check to see that they were complete, but didn’t grade what they wrote. Sometimes she gave them topics in class, sometimes it was open-ended.
She grabbed the black leather one; she knew which one it was by heart. Lucia Hamm wrote about death and dying—a lot of them did. But most of them glossed over it, or mused about what it was like to die, what happened or how it would happen to them. Some of them were scared. But Lucia Hamm seemed to fly toward the subject, undeterred by her teacher losing her husband almost a year before to cancer. Lucia tackled pain and death clinically, a biology lab dissection. As if Bridget’s hurt could be pulled apart like little frog’s legs, pinned back to the wax, sliced clean down the middle, and simply exorcised. Bridget had seen it before, a death fascination; that’s not what bothered her. It was almost mundane to be Goth. But Lucia got under her skin.
She flipped through until she found the page. A drawing, three blackbirds along the top, feathered over a wire, three swords pierced through a beating heart. No kings. Huh. She flipped it around to show Nate. He studied it.
“Gotta be, right?”
“I’ve given up trying to figure her out.” She shrugged. “She sees birds.”
Nate cocked his head, moved his hand in a circle, like go on.
She sighed, the idea exhausting her. “She finds dead birds, she says. She’s written about it. She says they come to her and she knows bad things will happen.”
Lucia, on the fringe, but exotically, unsettlingly beautiful. Crazy white hair, black-rimmed eyes and bloodred lips. She’d been held back in kindergarten, something about emotional and social readiness, so she was a full year older than the other seniors. She had a way of speaking, clipped and certain, her gaze level and steady, like she was humoring you. Bridget always looked away first, couldn’t take the directness. Every conversation felt like a confrontation.
She handed the card back to Nate.
“I think there’s something going on. Lately her grades have been tanking. She comes in, looks like shit. No makeup. Haven’t you noticed?” He tapped the card against his knuckles and twisted his mouth. “She’s got that godawful brother, you know?” Bridget vaguely knew. Her brother, Lenny, a dropout, and her father, Jimmy, had skipped town.
Bridget eyed the journal, suddenly ashamed. She hadn’t really been paying attention. This was her job, not just the teaching, but to observe them. In that way, Nate took it more seriously than she did.
Nate had anonymous social media accounts. He never posted anything, just scrolled through the newsfeeds. He followed his students and they followed back, not knowing who he was. So stupid, Bridget thought. Didn’t they know the creeps who were out there? But Nate knew who was fighting whom, where to be, when to be there, who was getting bullied, who was doing the bullying. It made him a better teacher, he defended. He’d never abuse it, she knew that, but still. She told him she didn’t want to know anything. Leave her out of it. She wondered if Alecia knew that when she lay in bed next to her husband at night, he scrolled through his phone, spying on the lives of his students like they were his own personal miniseries. It was a moral gray area, she admitted, but Nate did it for the all the right reasons. In the drama that played out at school each day, the stage was set online the night before.
“I just don’t have it in me. Not this year. Other years, I’ve been with you. Fighting for them. Against the administration, against their parents, against themselves half the time. Not this year. I’m barely hanging in.” She opened Lucia’s journal, fanned through the pages, and realized for the first time how many of the entries were drawings. Half of them, at least. She’d have to talk to her about that. This wasn’t art class.
Then, a glimmer of recognition as she turned the book one way, then the other. She’d known once what it all meant, although her skills felt rusty. Aunt Nadine had taught her how to do a reading when she was barely ten, perched on her lap while a cigarette snaked down to the butt. But that was a long time ago.