Handpepper
stared down his trouble-student until her laughter fizzled out.
They had a running beef. He knew she judged him. He knew
she knew all there was to know about the material he taught, her
parents some kind of brainy pair of mucky-mucks. What she
didn’t know was that there was more to life than knowing
things. Grace, that subtle beast, should grab you and not let
go. There was style and tact, finesse; there was the
“how” that no recalcitrant student, regardless of
intellectual stature, would ever divine by simply contenting herself
with the “what” and calling it good.
And what kind of a name is Zara, anyway?
Once he’d gained the upper hand
internally, he thrust his real one out before him in a burst of
unanticipated desire to put Zara in her place. Now here was a
girl with things to hide. He retired his sorry methodology with
the spurious declension of a child dropping an uninteresting toy, and
pointed at her, turning his hand then over and curling the finger back
into his fist.
“Zara perhaps you’d like to
come up here and show us your stuff,” Handpepper exclaimed, he
hoped without too much moxie.
She looked at him, surprised. She
couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called on for
anything classroom-related, and wasn’t sure how to act. She
paused. The class, wrapped up in its own distractions, had been
ignoring the exchange, but began to take notice as Zara rose from her
seat. She did so slowly.
Zara Allen-Karuth had enjoyed a grip on
the attention of her peers from the minute she’d first entered
school. Her reputation preceded her. Kids would walk down
anxious hallways and shrug up to walls as they passed her, not wanting
to get hurt, not wanting to get any of her on them, whatever it was she
was, had, stuck-to or snuck-from. Anything she touched was in
trouble.
The aisle leaned outward as she made way
toward the teacher, parting around her like a schizophrenic sea.
By this point most kids had learned to separate fact from fiction, but
there remained the autonomic response, the rubberneck effect that
extracted awkward looks from otherwise low-affect faces. She
smeared by them now with an almost whimsical forward movement.
Zara didn’t quite know why she accepted the challenge. For
surely it was a challenge. She looked into the nearing face of
her teacher, his eyes burning, embarrassed and successfully masking the
fact. He dazzled her despite himself.
Handpepper’s smile stiffened as
she came near. He’d not thought it through, but found
himself surprised to find her closing in. His groin grew
tingles. Pepper on the palm. He came-to. She was
standing beside him, expectantly, her long arms leaping down her body
toward the floor. He followed them to her waste, back up.
He glanced over her shoulder at the far wall, where there were posted
those papers by student’s who’d made the grade, good
examples. Zara’s were among them. She was his star
student. They stood together in silence, eyeing each other, until
a spitwad cruised by, provoking motion.
“I stand here in the circle, then?” Zara said, rhetorically.
Handpepper pulled another pencil from
his jacket pocket. “If you would be so kind.”
The pencil tip was carefully placed into the small opening. He
stood back. The class looked on with glazed expressions.
They’d missed it both times before, and had some inkling that
there was something to see, but they weren’t sure what to
expect. They knew only that Zara was about to fuck some shit
up. Which was enough. For her part, Zara too was accustomed
to blowing the lid off whatever she touched, twisting tassels into
little whips, suggestion into something else. She approached the
surface of things recklessly, assuming nothing impenetrable lay behind
the curtains she loved to part. Today she approached the front of
the class feeling oddly drawn to Handpepper, to his fragility, but not
wanting to nurture it. He was on the verge. He just needed
a small tap, carefully placed.
She hesitated. Everything was in
order. Attention was on. Handpepper was rubbing his hands
together slowly, striking a vaguely pedophiliac pose, and she knew
exactly what she was supposed to do. She took a deep breath and
stepped into the conduction spot, trying to feel for slight variations
in her mood, her electrostatic charge. Hairs stood on end.
She shivered. She closed her eyes. And then… And
then… And then ball-all.
Eyes open.
Focus.
She looked out at the class, knowing
well she didn’t have long until the light below their upturned
faces pulled those pink cheeks back down, before their open laptops
regained control. She needed something to regret.
“Do you have any questions about
the process, Zara?” Handpepper, uneasy, had added a small
rocking motion to compliment his finger wringing. Class interest
waned.
“No.” she answered. Which was true.
“Well perhaps we could get on with the demonstration.”
Right.
Zara thought that if she traced her way
through her life, even a small section of it, surely she’d run
across some snag, some little sweetness she might use to power the
machine. Wasn’t an insult given - or received - all she
needed, some kind of guilty episode she’d packed away? She
began back with an eye for the abnormal, something that might stand
out, she reasoned, to someone watching her, someone with some sense of
what might be something she shouldn’t feel so good about,
something worth hiding. El Farto perhaps..? Nothing.
She wandered back. Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs..? She
thought of her dirty Turk, his eyes sliding down her face to the bare
skin of her neck to her burgeoning breasts. She pressed them
forward, affording a better view. She licked her lips, accepted
the dog from greasy hands that stood in protest when she tried to
pay. Still nothing. So further back, and faster. Her
mother..? She wandered through their morning routine.
Her mother was always up first, having
spent the small hours of daylight working her book into a frenzy of
exclamation points and sub-textual apology, preparing breakfast, waking
Zara out of her escape, waking her again, again, cold breakfast sitting
on a table scattered with her father’s pipe tobacco and papers
from around the world; she waited for ill feelings. She snuck
into her parent’s bedroom. Rifled through the
drawers. She knew everything in them already, of course. No
secrets in this household. Her mother had shown her the dirty
toys when she could barely name them. Underwear. No
money. She walked back, eyes still closed to the classroom, and
into the kitchen, where her mother feigned displeasure at Zara’s
decision to skip the meal.
This wasn’t working. She
looked back on these things with bemused boredom, surveying the events,
the people in her life, with such familiarity that she had barely to
pay attention to the task, creating as much as recalling, painting
strokes over the pictures to amuse herself, make it glow a bit where
faded outlines lay.
Further back. Two years,
three. Her father reading in the kitchen, single malt in hand,
pipe, and Zara fresh from a shower, towel-wrapped. He looks up,
smiles.
“Zara have you ever thought about how you define yourself?”
“Dad,” Zara was not
impressed, “why do you always sit in the kitchen to read?”
“I don’t always sit in
here,” he protested. He watched his daughter get a glass
from the cupboard and walk to the sink, fill it. “Would you
say that you’re more restricted or enabled by that
definition?”
Zara began to circle the table, touching
each chair as she went by, skipping the one her father occupied.
“It’s a funny place to read,” she
continued. “It’s so domestic.”
Marshal kept reading. “It
might be, according to this, that definition actually mobilizes
meaning, like placing a dyke in a river. The water,” he
looked up, “can speed up and change direction.”
Zara finished her drink and returned to
the sink. She turned on the faucet and began to rinse the
glass. “Not that I mind,” she said without
turning around. “I think it’s cute.” She
turned off the water and put her glass on the dish rack. This was
all very deliberate. Her father looked on as though she was
setting herself up for a punch line, her body cutting through the room
from point to point like a carefully reasoned argument. Ask coy
question; make subtle remark; flirt. She let her towel slide down
her body until one bare 14 year-old breast was peaking over the napped
fabric. QED.
“Zara your towel is slipping
off.” Marshal casually noted. He pointed toward her
and tipped his index finger up and down, motioning for her to right
it. He looked back down at his book. “So given this
metaphor, what do you think happens when the self is undefined?”
Zara sighed. She let the towel
completely drop, and stood there in the middle of the kitchen while her
father read. She watched the smoke curl up from his pipe and get
caught around the light bulb above the table, dimly lit, conserving
energy but still running up the bill. She looked around the
kitchen, then down the hallway. The rest of the house was dark.
“Zara are you going to stand there all day?”
She opened her eyes.
Empty seats yawned in front of her,
standing in for students, and to her left Handpepper, briefcase in
hand, was on pause in the doorway. He looked smug.
“Because you’re more than welcome to.”
Zara watched him leave, then turned to
the ETM only to find it cold, blank, dull as the bulb in her
kitchen. She thought about her father, her idiotic maneuver, his
response, and shrugged.
“Whatever,” she said, and
retrieved her bag from the back of the class. She hurried back
toward the door, bent on skipping the rest of the day. She had a
boy to track down.