teacher, talking to another student, a girl Maggie doesn’t know. He looks up. The eye contact is too much for her and she begins to cry. He remains seated and the other student gets up. Maggie moves off to the side and the girl ignores her, heading for the door. As the other student says good-bye, Aaron gives Maggie a very strange look. It’s as though he’s annoyed by, even angry at, her presence and her tears.
When the other girl leaves his expression softens, but not completely. His face is a country she has been to multiple times but now there are no trespassing signs across it. There are dense mountainous regions she’s never seen.
We should just get the good-bye over with, Aaron says, because dragging it out won’t help anything.
This takes the air from her but then he approaches. The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.
He hugs her firmly. She contemplates kissing him but she’s afraid he will reject her. Instead, she cries and shakes in his arms. She can feel the fear in his torso. Reticence has replaced hunger. She wonders how long she can stay inside the cocoon of his smell and shirt and life. Even though she is in animal pain, this is the most alive she has felt since March. To be held by him like this. His face is over her shoulder, watching the door, and she has her face in his chest, wanting to suffocate in the fibers of this shirt his wife probably bought him.
After a period of time he must have thought was long enough or too long, his arms slacken. He wants to go back to life. Papers, game scores, meatballs, paint swatches. She skitters off his body like a mouse. She lets him see her casualty of a face. He takes it in. Is his heart hurting for her? It has to be.
You should go to the washroom and clean up, he says.
His tone is neutral though unrelenting, like a natural disaster.
She walks out of his room for the last time and down the hall. She stops in the girls’ room, looks in the mirror, and sees that her black eyeliner has run down under her eyes. She smears it into her flesh with angry fingers so that her cheeks assume a dark cast.
By the time she gets home she feels dead and looks it. Her father says, Maggie are you okay?
Ya, she says, I’m upset because a friend is moving.
Which friend? he says.
She goes up to her room and sits on her bed. She only wants to think of Aaron but knows the only way to get out of this alive is not to think of him at all. She sorts through their relationship, all the hot moments and the soft ones, the way he looked at her that made her feel she was growing into a woman, the notes, the poems, the way his mouth felt between her thighs. The laughter and the glances and all the risks he had taken with his whole life for her.
And then today.
She can’t get the coldness out of her head. His body language, his words. His eyes, dead like those of a fish on ice. How could he have done the things he did to her, put his mouth on her and say he loved her over and over, and then act as though she is nothing? Then she thinks a more terrible thing—that perhaps he isn’t acting.
He comes to graduation. Maggie hopes that the reason he comes is to see her. They meet on the lawn, a teacher and his prize student. The sun is bright and the day is like every graduation day—balmy, perfect, historic. He’s wearing a short-sleeved white oxford shirt and gray suit pants. Crisp. She’s wearing a turquoise dress, the same one she wore in Hawaii on the motorcycle with Mateo, and her bangs are braided to one side. He leans in, taking her into his arms, and whispers, You look beautiful.
Her sister, knowing nothing, walks up and asks if she may take a picture.
They both smile. The camera flashes and the picture is stored. For years afterward, Maggie will look at it again and again.
A week later