I make it to the parking lot. I see the familiar streams of students, all wearing the same plaid gray uniform I am, heeding the same morning bell.
I stop, thinking of how my dad never drove into this parking lot. He never said why, and I never asked him to. His Tacoma was so much older than the other sedans and convertibles owned by students, his truck bed filled with tools other parents never used themselves.
The Nokia buzzes in my skirt pocket. I fumble for it.
Papa d same. Just come after class.
I can’t bring myself to go to class like this is a normal day. It feels like betraying my dad: moving through a usual day, when he can’t move at all.
I wait until the parking lot is quiet and the final morning bell has rung. The classes will begin without me.
I cross a couple of lawns and sidewalks, passing empty picnic tables and industrious classroom scenes.
I stop at the courtyard in front of the Mary statue. I look at her open, empty hands. Her gaze turned downward.
Looking at her makes me feel the truth.
I’m still hoping to see Ms. Holden.
The shame rises up in me, hotter than any anger, heavier than any sadness or fear. I sit on the bench below Mary. My dad might never return to me, might not even be my dad anymore, and I’m still thinking intrinsically disordered thoughts about my history teacher.
Then I feel another truth, something coming up from somewhere deeper.
I was hoping that this huge worry—Will my dad survive or not?—maybe would be the Thing. Maybe that would finally dislodge my thoughts about Ms. Holden. Maybe the disorder of my dad falling off a roof would finally make order fall into my heart.
“Is that why it happened?”
My whisper is small and choked.
“Tell me a reason,” I say.
I cover both eyes with my palms. I can hear remnants of students’ and teachers’ voices, the wind through branches pushing away the fog. Even a bit of sun starts to touch me. But there’s no voice. No answer from Mary or any saints.
I stay there until the bell rings again, until the courtyard fills again with students passing through. I ignore them. Until—
“Cory?”
I pull my hands from my eyes.
Of course it’s Ms. Holden. Of course she’s standing in front of me, in her sensible slacks and black cardigan and flats, every inch a teacher except for her hair, still tangled from salt water—today she surfed in the morning instead. She’s holding a thick stack of handouts.
“You okay?” she asks. “Ready for more AP test practice?”
I look up toward the school’s one-story roof, so I don’t have to look at Ms. Holden, and shock bolts through me when I think of my dad falling from it.
“Hey,” Ms. Holden says, and she rushes toward me with more tenderness than I’ve ever seen from anyone outside my family. “Hey, hey.” She just sits next to me. I feel other teachers and students looking. Someone murmurs to Ms. Holden, and she says she’s got me. I try to breathe in and a sob coughs up from me instead.
“Come on,” she says after a long moment, when my breathing returns to a normal speed. She stands up, tilting her head for me to follow her to her little office.
If I weren’t crying, I might say going back to Ms. Holden’s office feels like going home. I might wonder about getting to my next class on time, or if I’ll have points taken off my school citizenship grade for skipping my first class.
But my whole gaze falls to her keys, which I haven’t noticed before. I’ve never seen her unlock a door.
There’s a small, square-shaped rainbow.
I’ve seen these square rainbows before. Last year some protestors put some square rainbows up on the directional signs of the Oaks Mall parking lot. My dad glimpsed some and said, “Bakla signal. Like a bat signal for gays.” Then he giggled. My mom scolded a familiar scold at him. I sat frozen in the back seat, hoping the moment would pass fast.
Even though that was months ago, before Ms. Holden arrived, I knew.
I was both mortified, and glad, to be at an all-girls school. I liked the smell of my classmates’ wet hair in the morning. The way girls smiled and had steady, buoyant voices that never broke or deepened. I liked the graceful and awkward ways girls moved, all sharp elbows and soft torsos and strong limbs.
I liked to think that if I pried Ms. Holden out of my mind, that part of me would leave me too. But I knew. I know.
Seeing the rainbow key chain, in the hands that already hold so much power for me, the office suddenly feels holy. I feel what I’m supposed to feel in the cool calm of a chapel. I feel seen, settled, in quiet communication with someone, somewhere I’m supposed to belong.
But like I do in any chapel, I also feel nervous.
She drops her keys onto her desk and sits. She’s waiting for me to talk, looking at my face. But I look straight at the floor, sniffing away the last moments of my weeping. How is it that I can feel someone smile without looking at them?
She closes the door.
“Want to share that coffee, Tagubio? I’m assuming it’s coffee.”
I remember I’m still gripping the thermos and the brown bag with a bagel.
She opens the bottom drawer of her desk. She pulls out a mug, a packet of chocolate cookies, and some potato chips.
“Always have to have sweet and salty,” she says. “For snack emergencies.”
We sip the bitter coffee. She laughs, watching me. “You don’t seem used to it,” she says, and hands me a cookie. “Wait ten years.”
“Till I’m twenty-seven like you?” I sniff.
She rolls her eyes. “Cory, I’m twenty-five,” she says, and toasts the cap of my borrowed thermos with her mug.
I calculate. Eight years between us.
I do finally feel hungry. I chew the bagel.
“You must need to teach,” I apologize.
She shakes her head and picks up a cookie. “Not till the afternoon,” she says. “Anyway. Seems like a lot happened since we discussed heretics yesterday.”
I nod. Then I start talking. I try to keep my voice strong in my throat, but I feel it wobble a few times. She gasps a little. She stops eating and leans toward me, listening. She says she’s so sorry. I feel like I’m in confession.
“The thing is,” I say.
She nods.
“I never upset my dad. But I did yesterday, somehow. Then he—”
I can’t go on with what I want to say. That he must have been distracted on that roof, thinking of how I’d disappointed him.
I definitely can’t go on with the deeper thing I want to say: that maybe this is my punishment. My lesson. For everything I can’t stop feeling, can’t stop wanting.
Ms. Holden sits back in her chair. She seems stunned. For a moment I think I’ve horrified her. She closes her eyes and takes her glasses off, thinking.
In the next moment she takes my right hand with both her hands.
My whole world sways. Only the part where Ms. Holden is touching me feels still and stable. I’ll never shiver or fear or want again, as long as she keeps holding my hand. I want time to stop. I want school and the cars outside and electricity all to stop.
This is what I was supposed to feel with a boy, with any boy, but I feel it now and I don’t want to stop feeling it. All the doctrines disappear for me in that moment. To my shock, all my shame disappears too.