1
It was the last day before the Christmas holidays, and I sat in a bathroom stall at school dressed as a witch. The long, black fabric of my dress was trailing out under the stall door because of its ridiculous volume. I was crying. My knees were pulled up to my face and my arms wrapped around my legs, head burrowed in the black folds. My whole body felt tight, every muscle strained to the point where I was certain that a gentle tap could snap me in half. My face was hot and glazed with snot and tears, and I had to shove some of the fabric of the dress into my mouth so that my choking sobs wouldn’t reverberate through the entire bathroom.
I had never cried like this before. This was the way ladies in Lifetime movies cried, clinging to some guy’s leg as he was trying to walk out the door. I was the opposite of that. I had been one of those tough-as-nails, little shithead kids that didn’t cry—not when I got hurt, not when I was yelled at, not when I was picked on. And even when I did cry, it had always been short and to the point, secretly performed without witnesses and no evidence left behind of any kind whatsoever. I had always considered myself to be pretty unbreakable, and I was. Or at least I had been up until that point in the bathroom.
Just like that, my childhood armor was obliterated, and all it took was my soul mate ramming a butter knife into my heart.
His name was Carl Sorrentino. Mr. Sorrentino—my biology teacher. It was true that he was about twenty years older than I was, and I could see how that could be a thing for some people. Small-minded people. There were hurdles to overcome, sure, but what are hurdles when one is faced with destiny? This was destiny. It wasn’t just that I thought we were soul mates—I knew we were. I just knew. My reasoning was that when you know things on that level, they don’t need to make any practical sense, because love is a bigger truth than logistics, and basically anyone who wanted to have a problem with that could go suck it. Love is love. It’s all that matters. How does age even play into it? It doesn’t.
I knew that Mr. Sorrentino felt the connection too. I knew I wasn’t delusional, because despite the fact that we didn’t exactly address our feelings openly (which would have been technically totally illegal), there were actual things I was basing my inevitable conclusions on. Real things that Mr. Sorrentino did and said. Signs.
For example, the smiley faces he drew on my tests, next to phrases like “You got it, Gracie!” or “The Grace-monster strikes again!” And he would draw little eyes into numbers on the tests—for example, when he wrote 99 percent on a test, he’d make the circles of the nines into eyes. Sure, it was corny as fuck, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was adorable.
Then there was the way in which our eyes met when he told one of his biology jokes that no one got except me. I’d smile knowingly at him across the classroom, and he’d smile back and the whole world would pass between us in these moments.
Or at lunchtime he would sometimes let me hang out with him in the classroom, and I’d ask him detailed questions about whatever the hell we were studying at that moment. I honestly never cared much about what we were studying, but my grades were excellent because of the amount of energy I put into my biology work. He was so patient. He looked at me while I talked. He’d sit there and wait for me as I worked out my questions, trying to be witty and deep and challenging. And then he’d nod and say, “You know, that’s a damn good question, Gracie. You’re taking this to the next level. Here, let me show you something.” And he’d draw diagrams for me on the chalkboard. He would draw detailed cross sections of animal and plant cells, or the entire respiratory system, or DNA strands—complex diagrams with arrows and descriptions—all just for me.
Plus, he high-fived me a lot, which would have been nauseating had anyone other than Mr. Sorrentino been doing it, but with him it kind of worked, and really, it was the only kind of touching we were probably allowed to do, so I got why he did it.
There were lots of other things. And yeah, I wasn’t an idiot—I knew they were all small things that could have easily been dismissed as nothing, but the whole point was to look at the bigger picture. All you had to do was connect the dots. And the bigger picture was crystal clear: Mr. Sorrentino and I had a powerful, earth-shattering connection. The kind that defies all rules and traditions. The kind that reinvents the game. The kind of connection that is too strong to follow in the well-worn paths of any prototypes.
But whatever. It turned out I was delusional after all.
It was the last performance of the school’s production of Macbeth, in which I played one of the three witches. I hated drama, but I had auditioned for the part after Mr. Sorrentino had called me a witch for getting 100 percent on a pop quiz. I figured maybe it turned him on to think of me that way and that it couldn’t hurt to play out the fantasy—black gown, hat, and all.
As I got off the stage from my second scene, Mr. Sorrentino came up to me and pulled me over to where a brunette lady stood.
“Gracie, I’d like you to meet Judy, my fiancée. She’s going to be doing some substitute teaching here starting in the new year.”
Judy had voluminous hair and smiled so broadly that it looked like she had about four thousand teeth. She had freckles and thick eyebrows, and she was wearing this Dillard’s-looking Christmassy dress with little Christmas-tree-ornament earrings. Her lips were pulled tight across her face due to the smile, and the soft pink goo of her lip gloss glistened in the light. I shook her outstretched hand. Her fingernails were painted the same soft pink as her lips, perfectly manicured.
“So nice to meet you finally!” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you. Top student in your biology class, huh? Not bad at all!”
I stared at her blankly. She continued talking for a while about all the great things Mr. Sorrentino had told her about me. She seemed truly thrilled about my grades. I just stared. When you first get injured, you sometimes don’t even feel it because of the shock. The pain is there, but it’s still anesthetized by the suddenness of the circumstances.
Judy continued smiling. “Oh, and Carl tells me you’re interested in studying biochemistry after school.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“How amazing is that?” she said, her wall of teeth gleaming.
I turned to Mr. Sorrentino. “Mr. Sorrentino, can I talk to you for a second?”
He looked at Judy quizzically. She smiled.
“Sure, Gracie.”
I led the way into the nurse’s office, which was the closest empty room available down the hallway.
“What’s up?” Mr. Sorrentino asked, smiling. “Hey, you did great out there, by the way. Shakespeare isn’t easy. Not everyone can memorize that kind of language.”
“You never told me you had a fiancée,” I said.
His smile didn’t exactly fall off his face, but it froze in a way that made him look displaced. “Well…” He halted, looked at his elbow for a second, and then continued, “Judy wasn’t my fiancée until yesterday, but quite frankly, that’s my private life, Gracie. I don’t see how—”
“She didn’t exist before yesterday? She just appeared out of thin air? I didn’t know that was possible—scientifically speaking.”
He looked at me, bewildered. Eyes almost unfocused with noncomprehension.
Copyright © 2021 by Mercedes Helnwein
