Bittersweet Dreams (13 page)

I watched how his friends greeted him with laughter. He shook his head and spoke, describing our conversation from his perspective, and then they all looked my way and laughed again, especially the girls.

Yahoos
, I thought.

They surrounded me. If I wasn't careful, I might catch the disease of ignorance. That's what I told myself, but deep inside, I did feel a sense of disappointment and defeat.

Before the bell rang to end the lunch hour, I left for the library. I wasn't even going to bother to go to math class. My teacher, Mrs. Samuels, would simply check with the librarian later to see if I had gone there. I wanted to go on the computer and see what I could find on the mating habits of primates. I had told my science teacher that I was going to do a paper on the subject, and he'd looked very interested.

I was almost at the library when Mr. Taylor appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. It was almost as if he were lying in wait for me.

“Hey,” he said. “How's your day going?”

“Like a blur,” I said, and he laughed.

“Where are you headed?”

“The library. I'm doing a research paper.”

“Come into my room for a while. I've got a free period,” he said, shifting his shoulder. “C'mon. I'm not going to bite you.”

“Why?”

“A little intelligent conversation,” he said. “I'm starving for it. I spend most of my day talking to junior-high students. Don't you know this is the front line in the big battle called education?”

“What about the other teachers? Don't you talk to them?”

He shrugged and smiled wryly. “I said
intelligent
conversation.”

I looked back when the bell rang. The students would be bursting out of the cafeteria like a herd of wildebeests in seconds. Half of them would knock into me. Maybe that, more than my curiosity about Mr. Taylor, made me turn in his direction. Whatever the reason, I did.

I'd always wonder if it wasn't something meant to be, not that I believed in fate or fixed destiny. If I did, I couldn't be much of a scholar, because it was too easy to fall back on that rather than study and do research for an explanation, but I couldn't help secretly hoping it was fate.

That way, all that had happened to me, to Allison, and especially to my father wouldn't have been my fault, not my fault at all. All the blame and guilt would fade, and I would be the object of sympathy, not anger and disappointment. But deep in my heart, I knew that to hope was to dream, and to dream was to deny what was real. Maybe that was all I had ever wanted to do. Maybe I was guilty of everything I had accused most other people of doing.

I wasn't profoundly gifted after all.

I was profoundly dumb.

Mr. Taylor went behind his desk and put his feet up. I stood just inside his classroom doorway with my books cradled in my arms. I wasn't about to fool myself. It wasn't the prospect of having any sort of intelligent conversation that brought me into his room. I had really come in because I was far more interested in how a mature man thought of me than I was in how one of the boys in my class thought and behaved. I already felt a difference in my own reaction. It was more exciting, because his flirting and my responding seemed like something forbidden. After all, he was a teacher, and I was a high-school junior. There were all sorts of news stories about teachers who exploited their young students, even female teachers seducing young boys.

I did think to myself, however, that if we weren't who we were, it would be different. Suppose it were a couple of years from now. If I were a woman six or seven years younger than he was, and he were a businessman and not a teacher, no one would think anything of it. People could say a teacher had an unfair advantage over a student. He or she had great powers of influence. Students supposedly looked up to and listened to their teachers. That was certainly true for most.

But I had gone through almost all of my school years and never really been influenced by a teacher. I didn't need any teacher to encourage me to study or be responsible about my schoolwork. I didn't need any teacher to inspire me to have interests in science or math or English or history. If anything, I occasionally found myself inspiring one of them. How many times had I heard one of my teachers say, “You know, Mayfair, you have me thinking like a college student again”?

I certainly wasn't looking for their compliments. Nothing I did would change, whether they gave me a compliment or not. Maybe that was the arrogance I would be accused of possessing. To me, it was just a simple truth.

There were teachers I respected, of course, but many I didn't respect. I didn't do anything disrespectful to them. I was simply indifferent. In those teachers' classes, I looked beyond them to the challenge of the work.

Still, there was no way around this. I was standing there fantasizing about a teacher and actually hoping he had some fantasies about me. For the moment, at least, I was in exciting new territory, certainly more interesting territory than I was in with Carlton James in the cafeteria. If I had too many more experiences like that, I would probably give up on boys altogether, I thought.

“Sit. Take a load off,” Mr. Taylor said.

He put his hands behind his head and looked at me. There was something about the way his eyes moved over me that made me hesitate. I told myself I was feeling the natural instinctive fear a female had of a male. I had read enough about it to know what it was.

Then I told myself to stop being so damn analytical and enjoy this.
You can analyze it later. For now, just soak up the experience. You've never been with a man who looked at you more as a woman than as a brilliant brain. You don't have to romanticize about it. You're really here, and he's really here looking at you and saying these things to you.

“You've got to learn how to relax, Mayfair,” he said. “You're too intense about everything.”

“How do you know that?”

I was never in his class. He had come to teach junior-high English when I entered ninth grade, nearly three years ago. Allison had him for English now, but I really had no contact with him.

“I watch you, see you moving about the school. When you walk through the hall, you barely look right or left. You don't let anything distract you. I never saw anyone as intense. A bomb could go off, and you'd keep going in the direction you were headed if you had some purpose, some goal to fulfill,” he said, and widened his smile. “Not that there's anything wrong with the way you walk,” he added.

“What's that mean?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment. Did he realize he already had gone too far? I regretted coming back at him so fast and hard. He shrugged, took his feet off his desk, and leaned forward. “Well, you move with a great deal of confidence. Great posture,” he said. “Even now, standing there, you don't slouch like so many of the girls your age do. I have to tell you that you fascinate me, and I don't mean because of your off-the-charts IQ scores.” He nodded. “The way someone walks can tell you a lot about that person.”

“I'm not conscious of it,” I said. “I don't think about walking like that. Walking is a habitual action. We might be conscious of it occasionally to impress someone, but generally, we don't think about it. Everyone has a unique way of walking.”

“Exactly. That's my point. It's part of who you are. Insecure people have a far different way of walking from secure people, and you don't look at all insecure, ever.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Stop challenging every comment I make. Relax,” he repeated. He paused and leaned back again. Then he nodded at me and smiled. “Until today, I didn't think looking this way was important to you,” he said, holding his right hand out, palm up.

“Looking what way?”

“Attractive. I don't mean to say you weren't a very pretty girl before, but now you have your hair styled. You're wearing makeup. Quite intelligently, I might add. And you're wearing clothes that complement your figure. You don't mind me telling you these things, do you?” he quickly asked.

“Mind? No. I just didn't expect it.”

He shrugged again. “Why not? I'm no hypocrite like some of my fellow male teachers who will swear on a stack of dictionaries that they don't lust after any young, beautiful teenage girls.”

I think I was more surprised than he was at my smile. “I don't doubt it. I'm just surprised to hear you say it.”

“Hey, we're all human,” he said. “When I see an attractive woman, I don't pretend I don't see her just because I'm a junior-high English teacher. Which reminds me.” He lifted a pile of papers. “Spot English grammar quiz. It's good to give them. Keeps the kids on their toes, but I hate correcting them. Care to help?”

“I really do have to get to the library, Mr. Taylor. I have a paper I want to finish this week, and I have lots of reading left to do.”

“Oh, too bad. Well, maybe when you have time, you can stop by once in a while after school and help me with some of this dull work, huh?”

“Why would I want to do dull work? You shouldn't think of what you teach as being dull.”

He laughed. “I knew it would be an interesting challenge talking to you, Mayfair. You really are a breath of fresh air for me.”

“Why is that? What makes me so fresh?” I knew I was asking too many questions and challenging him too much, but I couldn't help being interested.

“You're not distracted with yourself. I think that's why you didn't do all these cosmetic things until now. You have your feet on the ground. You're head and shoulders above your peers, and I don't mean just because of your IQ. There's something very mature about you. I can have a conversation with you.” He paused, stood up, and came around to the front of his desk to sit back against it, folding his arms. “I bet you wouldn't mind speaking to someone more mature, either. You must be starved for meaningful conversation at this school.”

“That's not why I come here,” I said. Instinctively, I brought my books up against my breasts. The way he was looking at me made me feel as if I were standing naked in front of him.

He shrugged. “Maybe not, but everyone wants some social contact with other people. I've noticed you don't have all that many friends here. You don't join any clubs or teams. You don't sit with anyone in particular in the cafeteria or walk with anyone in the hallways. You don't even talk to other students at the lockers in the morning. You float through this place as if you're on the way to somewhere else.”

“You sound like you're watching me all the time.”

“As much as I can,” he said with that disarmingly soft smile again.

His honesty didn't shock me as much as it excited me. Again, I felt myself smile as if there was another part of me taking me over. I didn't want to resist.

“Actually, I overhear the students gossiping from time to time and pick up things the guidance counselor says. No one's saying anything terribly negative about you,” he quickly added. “It's just comments, observations.”

“I'm sure,” I said dryly. “They all have my interest at heart. I confuse them.”

“I'll say that's true, but you don't have to explain to me why you don't socialize much with your classmates. As I said, I know you're head and shoulders above them. Miles ahead of them, in fact. I'm sure what they do, what interests them, is unimportant to you.”

I wanted to say that wasn't completely true, but I didn't. I didn't want to continue standing there talking to him. His words and the way he continued to look at me were starting to make me unsure of myself. I think it was because he was touching places inside me that I usually protected, like my loneliness. Now I thought it was a mistake to play with him like this, to allow myself to have such fantasies.

“I've got to go,” I said, and turned toward the door.

“Okay. Please stop by anytime you want to talk or take pity on a poor junior-high English teacher buried in drudge work. Even though I love my subject matter, there's still drudge work,” he added quickly. “No matter what exciting thing you end up doing, you'll see there's always the drudge work.”

I glanced back at him. He held that licentious smile. It sent a tremor of excitement through my breasts. I felt myself blush.

When I had woken up this morning excited about my new look and how my classmates and other students would react to me, what was furthest from my mind was how the best-looking male teacher in the school would react. How did I miss that? I hated not anticipating something, especially something directly related to me. Although I would have had to be blind or completely oblivious not to have noticed him before, I never dreamed my changed appearance would mean that he would be the one I would draw out.

The one thing I hated most was surprise. I spent most of my time researching, investigating, and understanding everything I saw, did, and touched. I was always prepared, but I would be the first to admit that I wasn't prepared for this. He nearly had taken my breath away.