You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [64]
Later, on her return, she sees the Primidone tablets waiting in their white paper cup on her bedside table, placed there as always by Judith, the staff nurse. For more than two decades, Elizabeth Maynard has done exactly as she is told and the voice of Hester, which has cost her so much, comes only quietly and intermittently. It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off. These last few weeks, try though she has, there have been moments during Ted’s visits when Elizabeth got stuck in the medication’s sludge, patches of time slowing to a halt. The boy has reminded her of what there is to miss. She only wants to know him as a person would. In her heart, she can’t believe this is too much to ask. It might do her good to have a little break, she muses to herself, placing the tablets at the back of her dresser drawer.
“STOP FUCKING TRYING would you!” his brother yells from downstairs as Ted stands at their mother’s bedroom door calling softly, “Are you awake?”
“If you’re not in my car in twenty seconds you’re walking!” John shouts from the kitchen. Ted tries the handle, but as usual it’s locked. He wants to see if she’s okay, but there’s no time now so he grabs his book bag from his room and skips down the stairs.
In the car, his brother plays Rage Against the Machine loud enough to make the seats vibrate. He runs two stop signs and doesn’t speak the whole way to school. Finally, in the parking lot, Ted slips on his headset and a British rock star’s lilting voice sweeps everything from his mind: She walks in beauty like the night, ba ba ba ba ba da da, followed, as he climbs the front steps, by words he can never make out, Marilyn something, and then at last, as he turns into the corridor, the part he’s been waiting for, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, his head swooning to the rise of the vocal line, a line of bliss, followed by a tap on the shoulder—Mr. Ananian’s lips saying, “Turn that thing off.”
The stop button clicks in his ears.
“I’m not telling you again.”
Twenty-odd students slumped on their tan Formica desks, forty-five minutes of advanced algebra, not a hope of seeing Lauren Jencks. He feels ill.
“Oh my God,” he says, working a quizzical expression, “I totally forgot my notebook—I’ll be right back,” and he turns into the hall, walking quickly away, the door slamming behind him.
“Way to go,” Stevie Piper says, giving him a thumbs-up as he darts out of a chemistry class. “You got to come tonight, man—Phoebe Davidson’s parents are outta town.”
“Sure,” Ted says, hurrying down the hall toward the art wing, where Lauren has life drawing. He’s nervous already about her spotting him at the door of the classroom, though he knows she knows he’s been looking at her for weeks, even months, ever since she arrived at school the beginning of term.
Mrs. Theodopoulos has a photograph of a dog set on an easel at the front of the class and she’s using a pointer to direct her students’ attention to the dog’s ear. The kids, their backs to Ted, smudge charcoal on drawing paper, doing ears. Lauren’s in the second row: faded orange cardigan with the pockets stretched open, a bar of sunlight slanting across her back, a patch of her short brown hair shining above her ear, no earring. He loves the fact she doesn’t wear rings or necklaces or makeup and how large her eyes are and how she seems about ten years older than he is, as though she’s traveled the world five times over and for some mysterious reason, bad karma or whatever, is being made to repeat life in high school. In his room at night, when he demurely puts his image of her aside to jack off to the cruder images on the Net,