He sets his pen and paper down on the table and takes my feet in his hands, rubbing them at first, and then he wraps his fingers around my ankles. “I trust you, I do. But do you understand how important it is that we keep this secret?”
“Duh.”
“I need you to take this seriously.”
“I am taking it seriously.” I try to pull my feet away. He squeezes my ankles so I can’t move.
“I wonder if you really understand the consequences we’d be hit with if we were exposed.” I start to speak. He cuts me off. “Most likely, yes, I’d get fired. But you, too, would be sent packing. Browick wouldn’t want you here after a scandal like that.”
I shoot him a skeptical look. “They wouldn’t kick me out. It wouldn’t be my fault.” Then, not wanting him to think I necessarily believe this, I add, “Meaning technically, because I’m underage.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” he says. “Not to the higher-ups. They root out any and all troublemakers. That’s how these places work.”
He keeps going, his head tipped back, talking up at the ceiling: “If we’re lucky, it wouldn’t go any further than the school, but if law enforcement caught wind of it, I’d almost certainly go to jail. And you’d end up in some foster home.”
“Come on,” I scoff. “I would not go to a foster home.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“You may forget this, but I do actually have parents.”
“Yes, but the state doesn’t like parents who let their child run around with a deviant. Because that’s what they would brand me as, a so-called sex offender. After they arrested me, their next step would be to make you a ward of the state. You’d be shipped off to some hellhole—a group home of kids fresh out of juvie who would do god knows what to you. Your whole future would be out of your hands. You wouldn’t make it to college if that happened. You probably wouldn’t even graduate high school. You may not believe me, Vanessa, but you have no idea how cruel these systems can be. Give them a chance and they’ll do everything in their power to ruin both our lives—”
When he starts talking like this, my brain can’t keep up. It feels like he’s exaggerating, but I get too overwhelmed and lose track of what I believe. He can make even the most outrageous things seem feasible. “I get it,” I say. “I’ll never tell anyone as long as I live. I’ll die before I tell. Ok? I’ll die. Can we please stop talking about this now?”
At that, he snaps out of it, blinking as though he just woke up. He holds out his arms for me to crawl into and cradles me against him. He says “I’m sorry” again and again, so many times the words stop making sense.
“I don’t mean to scare you,” he says. “There’s just so much at stake.”
“I know there is. I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not stupid. I know you’re not.”
The French classes take a weekend trip to Quebec City. We leave in the early morning, boarding a coach bus with plush seats and little TV screens. I sit by a window halfway back and dig my Discman out of my backpack, put in a CD, and try to appear like I don’t care that I’m the only one without a seatmate.
For the first two hours, I stare out the window as the bus drives through foothills and farmland. When we reach the Canadian border, the landscape stays the same but the road signs switch to French. Madame Laurent shoots up out of her seat at the front of the bus and calls for our attention. “Regardez!” She points to each passing sign and prompts us to read them out loud. “Ouest, arrêt . . .”
Somewhere in rural Quebec we stop at a Tim Hortons for a bathroom break. There’s a pay phone out front and I have two prepaid phone cards in my pocket from Strane with instructions to call if I get lonely. The receiver in my hand, I start to dial when Jesse Ly walks out of the Tim Hortons, wearing a long black coat that fans out around him, practically a cape, followed a ways behind by Mike and Joe Russo, who smirk, nudge each other, and don’t even bother lowering their voices as they make fun of him. “Check out the Prince of Darkness,” they say. “It’s the Trench Coat Mafia.” They don’t call him gay, because that would go too far, but it feels like that’s what they’re really making fun of, not his coat. Jesse’s face, his tipped-back chin and clenched jaw, shows he can hear them but is too proud to say anything. Dropping the phone receiver, I hurry over.
“Hey!” I grin at Jesse as though we’re good friends. Behind us, the Russo twins stop laughing, which has less to do with me and more to do with Margo Atherton, who stands by the bus peeling off her sweatshirt, exposing six inches of stomach as her T-shirt rides up, but I still feel like I’ve done a good thing. Jesse says nothing as we board the bus and take our seats. Before we take off, though, he gathers up his stuff and moves down the aisle to me.
“Can I sit here?” he asks, pointing to the empty seat. I pull off my headphones, nod, and move my backpack out of the way. Jesse sits with a sigh, tips his head back. He stays like that until the bus shudders on and drives out of the parking lot, back onto the highway.
“Those guys are morons,” I say.
His eyes snap open and he inhales sharply. “They’re not so bad,” he says, opening his novel and turning his body a little away from me.
“But they were being dicks to you,” I say, as though he might not have realized.
“Really, it’s ok,” he says without looking up from the book. He clutches the pages, chipped black polish on his fingernails.
In Quebec City, Madame Laurent leads us through the cobblestone streets, pointing out the historical architecture—the Notre-Dame Quebec Cathedral, the Château Frontenac. Jesse and I barely acknowledge each other as we hang back from the rest of the group, watch the mimes perform on their big granite pedestals, ride the funicular from upper town to lower town and back again. He buys chintzy souvenirs: a watercolor of the Château Frontenac from an old woman on the street and a spoon with a scene from the Winter Carnival etched on the back, which he offers to me. We catch up with the group an hour later and I expect to be in trouble, but no one even noticed we were gone. For the rest of the afternoon, Jesse and I again sneak away, wandering the Old City streets without talking much, just nudging each other every once in a while to point out something funny or strange.
On the second day of the trip I try calling Strane from a pay phone, but there’s no answer and I don’t dare leave a message. Jesse doesn’t ask me who I’m trying to call, doesn’t need to.
“He’s probably on campus,” he says. “There’s a coffeehouse open mic thing today in the library. They make all the humanities faculty go to them.”
I stare at him as I slide the phone card back in my pocket.
“You don’t have to worry,” he says. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“How do you know?”
He gives me a look, like, Are you kidding? “You’re together all the time. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on. Plus, I saw it up close firsthand.”
I think of what Strane said about foster homes and jails. I’m not sure what I’ve said counts as telling Jesse, but to be sure, I say, “It’s not true.” The words sound so pathetic he just gives me another look. Like, Please.