comes the fall—
I shouldn’t be talking to you, he writes.
Outside her phone, her brothers laugh. Someone in the kitchen wonders if there is a pepper grinder.
Maggie is like, Okay.
Knodel says he’s been drinking and he is going to say something he shouldn’t. And Maggie is like, Okay.
He writes, I’m a teacher and you’re a student, and we shouldn’t be talking like this. And she is like, Okay.
On the one hand, Maggie is confused as to why he shouldn’t be talking to her. After all she has lots of friends and many of them are boys and she talks to them a lot and it doesn’t mean anything. She gets along with boys in a way she doesn’t with girls. On the other hand, she knows what he means. He means, Don’t make me do this, why are we doing this, we can’t do this, I love my wife, my kids. But she feels, already, his hands down her pants.
She says okay because he is the authority figure. He’s older and smarter and if he says they shouldn’t be talking—even though he is the one initiating the conversation—then they probably shouldn’t be talking. Maggie is aware of a boundary, unclear though it might be, and she doesn’t want to be the one to cross it first. It doesn’t even occur to her to cross it. She is a kid, she is not his equal. So for him to say, Hey, we shouldn’t be talking, made a part of her feel she was being castigated, feel she had done something wrong even though she was mostly confused. All she’d done was answer his questions.
At the same time, it becomes abundantly clear that something has been building for quite a while. Since freshman year, there has been a steady accumulation. Every conversation they had at his desk. Every time he said, Great job. Every time she wore a cute shirt, and he wore a new tie. Every piece of advice. Every couplet of banter. Every text about debate. Every time some other kid said something stupid and she sneered and he smiled. Every drunk mom, every drunk dad, every nagging wife. Something has been growing.
The next day Maggie goes snowboarding. She plays with the children. She leaves her phone in the cabin and, because she’s a kid herself, everything in the phone is out of sight, out of mind.
By the time she gets back there are fifteen messages, all of them from Knodel. Like a weird poem. Each text is some iteration of, Hey, everything okay? Are you upset? Tell me what you’re thinking. Hello?
It seemed he was scared she might have been mad, or freaked out, about their conversation last night. Maybe even—God forbid—she had been creeped out.
She writes back, I’m not mad, I was snowboarding all day.
He says, Okay, cool.
She doesn’t reply.
He says, We will talk more when you are back from break.
• • •
Maggie attends a New Year’s Eve party at Melani’s house. It’s almost all couples, and no alcohol, because Melani’s parents will be coming home sometime after midnight. It is cool at this time to have a boyfriend. To engage in routine fucking and then talk about it with other girls who have boyfriends. The guy from work whom Maggie’s seeing is out of town. He’s not a boyfriend. He reminds her of her brother David, except that he plays hockey. They haven’t yet had sex.
Often that night Maggie finds herself standing alone, looking around the room. She has a queasy thought that all the couples here tonight will stay together forever. She worries that she, too, will go to bed with a Fargo boy and wake up five years later, pregnant with a third kid, watching television in threadbare Uggs.
Sometime after midnight, her phone dings. It isn’t the non-boyfriend. It’s Aaron Knodel, who is newly in her phone as AK. He was Knodel at first, in her contacts. She changed it to AK while she was in Colorado, when it first began to feel like something she needed to hide. Now her heart pounds. She brings the phone close to her chest, as if cradling a bird. She looks around the room but nobody is paying attention.
They have been texting all day, but now that it is definitively night, her hands begin to sweat with the wonder of it. While she’d been in Colorado he said the reason they should stop talking was that he was afraid of saying something he shouldn’t. All day Maggie has been