I scowl at him with the dark lividity of all of the bruises I’m about to give him. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
He tosses the book back to me. “The Watchman’s Curse. Read it back.”
“You call that help?”
“It’s all the help you’re getting. Figure it out, dude. I’m outta here. I’m late to meet Little E.”
24
PAX
* * *
“Mr. Davis! Nice of you to join us. Since you're so late, why don't you come sit at the front here. Oh, and look. Right next to Presley. That’s perfect, since you were so desperate to see her last night.”
I rarely question my life choices. I signed up for Advanced Creative Writing because I like how malleable and powerful words are. You can create and destroy empires with a few carefully worded sentences. I've always loved this class, even though Jarvis is a total fucking drag most days. But seeing Chase sitting there on the front row, with her shock of red hair tied into loose pigtails, her lips painted with a slash of red lipstick and a spark of laughter in her eyes, I wish I'd never tried my hand at writing. I swear to God, if she comes after photography next, I will do something drastic and I will not fucking regret that.
Red and white shirt. Thinner this time. A ball-tee. The sleeves aren’t long enough to cover her wrists. The dressings are gone, but she’s wearing an oversized rose gold watch on her left wrist, and a stack of bangles cover her right, doing an excellent job of hiding her injuries. It's been a while, now, since that night outside the hospital. She's probably all healed up by this point, but she's still hiding the evidence. I wonder if that means that she regrets what she did, or if it's just the shame of having such ugly scars forming in such a visible place.
Shame the whole topic of her attempted suicide is off the table. I can’t seem to stop growing more and more curious about what she did and why.
She beams at me, tapping the end of her pen against her notebook as I slowly cross the room and sit down next to her at her table. No single desks in AP Creative Writing. The students in this class have to share with one of their fellow classmates. I've always been lucky in that the other nerds in this class find me terrifying, and there were enough spots to make sure I always get a whole table to myself. Our class has apparently expanded by one, though—she definitely did transfer into this class—and low and behold, here I am having to share with Presley.
“Desperate to see me, huh?” Chase mutters under her breath. “I'm flattered.”
“Don't be.”
Jarvis claps her hands together, interlacing her fingers as she grins, taking in her class. “Okay, now that our personal statements are done—some of you got really creative with those, by the way—we have officially come to the end of our syllabus. You know what that means, right?”
“Early parole?” I offer. A man can dream.
She purses her lips, brow furrowing. “There are still four weeks left until graduation, Mr. Davis, and I wouldn't let you just skip out on this class. Now take out a notebook, 'cause you're stuck with me for the next hour and I want some words out of you.”
“I got two you can have right now,” I tell her. Since we both know what those two words are, she scowls at me darkly.
“I think you're actually going to like the exercise I have planned for you guys, so why don't you just get out a pen and paper and be quiet, huh?”
I equip myself with a ballpoint and my battered Moleskin with a loose, vagabond smile tugging one corner of my mouth up, and Jarvis waits for me to get ready in silence. Once I'm still and looking up at her like a good little boy, she nods. Continues. “I'm not sure what your last English teacher would have done with you guys—”
“Probably try to fuck or kill one of us,” Damiana interjects. The blonde, who usually annoys the shit out of me with her dumb commentary, actually elicits laughter out of me at this. Her statement wouldn't have been so amusing if it wasn't fucking true. I'm not the only one who laughs.
“All right. All right. Yes, okay, okay, okay. That was a stupid thing to say. I should have thought that through a little better. Come on, guys. Let's focus.”
The students settle.
“Thank you. Now. I was going to say. This is a little out of the ordinary, but I thought it might be cool for you guys. I figured that, with so little of the school year left, there's just enough time for us to change things up and engage in a fun writing exercise. How many of you have ever thought about writing a book?”
A couple of people put their hands up. My palm stays glued to the tabletop, even though I've done more than think about writing a book. I know I'll write one. I already have the thing started. Eight chapters might not seem like much, but it's a start. Plus, I'm not in a rush. I don't plan on publishing it for a long time. I might never have it published. The stubborn part of me has considered slaving away on it, carefully weighing and measuring every single word, agonizing over sentence structure and story arc, whittling and reshaping it, polishing it until it shines...and then dumping the manuscript in the bottom of a drawer somewhere and forgetting about it.
Next to me, Presley draws a circle, then traces over it, and again, and again, pressing harder each time until she's created a scribbled mess in the top corner of her notebook.
“Sweet. A good amount of you. That's awesome.” Jarvis likes to use 'cool' language, like sweet and awesome, because it makes her feel more relatable. I'd put money on this being the case. You don’t need to be a budding armchair psychologist to read Jarvis. She wants us to like her. She wants to be we our Keating, and we, her Dead Poet's Society. She wants to impact us to the point that, when we've all become famous writers and novelists and we're being interviewed about our latest masterpiece, we'll look back and attribute all of our success to dear Ms. Reid, the special English teacher who touched and inspired parts of us that would never have been reached otherwise. The only part of me that Jarvis has ever inspired is my dick. She can touch that if she likes.
“You'll be pleased to know that you guys are all about to write a book. Over the next four weeks, you and your partner are going to co-write a novella. You can choose the genre. You can choose whether it's going to be based on a true story, or a new, original work based on your own ideas that you come up with together. There are literally no rules to this assignment.”
Good. Fucking. God.
She expects us to write a book, a month before graduation. We're being cut loose so fucking soon, and she wants us to expend the effort of writing a book now when we're so close to the finish line? The woman's lost her fucking mind. I look around the class, and no one else seems to have realized just how absolutely insane this idea of hers is. My fellow classmates are all looking at each other, chattering at a rate of knots; they have the audacity to actually appear excited.
I’m surrounded by lunatics.
It hits me like a bolt to the temple, then. I'm sitting next to Chase. Jarvis expects me to write a fucking book with her.
“Ms. Jarvis? How long does the book have to be?” Alison Boycraft asks.