One
Miss Sweeney disappeared on the first day of March, an icy Thursday morning of gloves and boots and veneers of diamondy frost on the windows of Sacred Heart High School. Her classroom was not bathed in the stark yellow glow of school-issued lightbulbs; the only light came from the windows, and it was morning-soft gray and gave the classroom a surprising bedroom coziness. When Flannery Fields walked into the room, she took the start of this Thursday as a gift. Yesterday she had been mocked for her enthusiasm about Wuthering Heights, but she remained eager to defend her favorite novel. Still, what could trump a free hour? Did anyone want to flip the light switch and start a new school day?
There were already a few girls sitting at their desks, playing games on their phones or listening to music or texting or spacing out entirely. Somebody greeted the dim, teacher-free room with an exuberant “Sweet!” and somebody else snickered before complete quiet descended. It was as if all the girls had taken an implicit vow of silence; they didn’t want to draw the attention of a random teacher roaming the halls during her planning period. Flannery put in her earbuds but didn’t turn on her music. She cocooned herself in the filtered silence and wondered when Miss Sweeney would show up.
But soon, the peaceful scene was shattered by the Calculus teacher’s voice droning up through the heat vents. Flannery dug her book from her backpack, figuring she’d better study for her third hour test. But she heard a few giggling snorts from the girls who sat behind her, a friendly reminder that only a geek of Flannery’s towering stature would be studying when one was basically free to do anything at all. And so Flannery gave in to the strange languor of the morning and played Boggle on her phone until it vibrated: It was Megan Swenson-Saenz texting her from the next desk. This is awkward. Also great. Where do u think she is?
Flannery looked out the window at the teacher’s parking lot, thinking that she might see Miss Sweeney frantically getting out of her car and running into Sacred Heart High.
Maybe she’s sleeping in? She texted a smiley face emoji and a series of z’s after that, as if Miss Sweeney were not merely sleeping in, but had morphed into a dozy, cheerful cartoon character. Most teachers arrived at school by 7:30, but occasionally Miss Sweeney raced in from the teacher’s parking lot at five till eight with her green eyes looking smaller and sleepier without their usual plum liner and fringe of mascara, and her long light brown hair not flat-ironed smooth, but wavy and wet at the tips.
It didn’t occur to Flannery that anything was truly wrong, her intuition felled, perhaps, by drowsy inertia. But 8:00 became 8:15, and then 8:20, and Flannery started to worry: Miss Sweeney’s behavior in class yesterday had been beyond erratic. But maybe she was just sick? Miss Sweeney had been out for a few days in February—strep throat—and had returned to the substitute teacher’s stained coffee cup on her desk.
“Really?” she’d said, holding the coffee cup away from her body, her arm locked straight. She looped her finger and thumb gingerly around the handle, as if holding a tarantula by the leg. A cough drop clacked against Miss Sweeney’s teeth when she sighed. “Really and truly?” The mug was painted tart apple green with black lettering: KISS ME I’M IRISH. Flannery wasn’t sure if Miss Sweeney was referring to the general piggishness of the substitute—a pleasant old man in taped glasses and a linty black sweater vest who wanted to go off-syllabus (and off-planet) and discuss random scenes from The Martian Chronicles—or if her AP English teacher was offended by the corndog leprechaun sentiment.
At 8:30 Megan Swenson-Saenz pulled her headphones off and walked to the front of the classroom. She stood in front of Miss Sweeney’s desk and waved her hands over her head, largely, ironically, as if she were landing planes, until everyone stared at her.
“Does anyone know where Miss Sweeney lives? Should I drive to her house?” She spoke with the officious confidence of a student council president, which she was, and had to endure exaggerated sighs from the popular girls. But Flannery could sense a growing worry, the mood in the room changing atmospherically.
Changing atmospherically. Flannery was pretty sure that if she wrote that phrase in an essay, Miss Sweeney would circle it in red pen and write in the margin: How does a mood change atmospherically? Does a mood coyly sprinkle a few raindrops before said mood swings and burns you with a noonday sun?
She could be a little snarky like that; she was a detailed, precise grader. On days Miss Sweeney handed back their essays, most girls glowered and muttered until the bell rang and they were free to flip through their pages and openly complain in the hall: “What’s with her hatred of extraneous adjectives? Why does she get so bent out of shape by clichés? She probably gets her panties in such a twist because Miss Sweeney herself is a cliché—the teacher who thinks she’s so special, SO different from the other teachers. And how pathetic is her obsessive love for meaning, sense, and clarity?”
Meaning, sense, and clarity were the guiding principles upon which Miss Sweeney judged student writing. Because Flannery’s first impulse was to make her sentences obliquely profound and/or jazzy, she was certainly not immune to Miss Sweeney’s sharp red pen. But Flannery loved getting her essays back from Miss Sweeney. Not that her comments didn’t sometimes sting; they did. But Flannery appreciated the time and effort Miss Sweeney put into grading. (Last year’s Lit teacher had just crossed out a few typos or at most wrote a quick, perfunctory “nice simile” or “cool adjective” comment on her students’ essays. She had four children in elementary school and drank coffee from a squat, rocket-shaped mug that said FUEL.) And Miss Sweeney had written Flannery an encouraging note on the first essay she’d turned in, back in September. F: I hope you are not discouraged by my many suggestions. I am only trying to help you take a closer look at your writing. You are talented: observant and empathetic. I do think you could be a writer. Flannery kept the paper buried in her socks and underwear drawer. When she was having a bad day, she would dig it out and read that last sentence over and over.
Now Megan wagged her finger at the clock. “Seriously, Miss Sweeney should so be here by now. If now was thirty minutes ago.”
The meanest of the mean girls rang in, lightening things up: “Sweeney’s probably gone completely Sylvia Plath on us and now we’ll get stuck with another moronic sub for the rest of the year.” The nervous laughter of her half dozen acolytes even sounded like the bleating of sheep: Behh heh heh. Beh heh heh.
Flannery didn’t have time to mull over their vapid cruelty because there was the thudding of slow footfalls in the hall, not the skittering click-click of high-heeled boots that would belong to Miss Sweeney, had she been running to her classroom, her adrenaline jackrabbiting ever since that heart-stopping moment she’d opened her eyes and looked at the alarm clock. Flannery imagined Miss Sweeney jolting out of bed and screeching: It’s after eight? Students are walking into my classroom and I am still IN MY BED?
Doom arrived, tartan-bright and petite and smelling of lily of the valley: Mrs. Piccone, the freshman English teacher. She stepped into the classroom like a polite, curious neighbor, but her smile slackened as she stood there in the soft light in her pinned kilt and red turtleneck. It had been three years since Flannery had heard Mrs. Piccone recite the Robert Burns poem “To a Mouse” but the memory remained cringingly fresh. Mrs. Piccone was from Atlanta, but her soft Southern accent had disappeared into a sudden and aggressive Scottish burr, and she’d wrung her hands and made eye contact with each girl in the class, one by one—each and every wee mousie!—as she tortured out the lines. Normally Flannery would empathize with anyone who had given an impromptu and brave—if poorly considered—reading, but poetry lovin’ Mrs. Piccone sucked up to the smirking popular girls, which anyone could see was futile.
Now Mrs. Piccone squinted hard at Miss Sweeney’s desk, at the pale green tissue billowing up out of a Kleenex box patterned with gold and green falling leaves. Everyone waited for Mrs. Piccone to speak, but her eyes stayed locked on the Kleenex box, as if she were mining for autumnal metaphor, for symbolic meaning. But Flannery had seen the fall-themed tissues in the red-stickered sale aisle at Target: Miss Sweeney’s box of Kleenex was really just a box of Kleenex.
Mrs. Piccone finally turned to the class and said: “What, pray tell, is goin’ on in here?”
Silence. No one wanted Miss Sweeney to get in any trouble. Plus, nobody knew what was going on. And so Mrs. Piccone crossed her arms over her chest and smiled triumphantly, as if she’d just stumbled onto a secret bunker of party girls swirling around the room in sparkly disco dresses, not a class of morning-dazed girls sitting quietly at their desks. She hustled off to the office and returned with the principal, who walked into the room flushed, his commanding forehead glazed with sweat. His eyes were the eerie iced blue of martyred Scandinavians and he was skinny and nearly seven feet tall. To compensate for his serial killer ambience, he was always aggressively cheery.
He cleared his throat dramatically. “Morning, ladies!” The principal flung out his lanky arms, a weird air-embrace for the class. He occasionally appeared in local commercials for car dealers or real estate firms, and in fact had directed the Sacred Heart fall musical, an all-girl (of course) version of Oklahoma! But, fearing blowback from the conservative Sacred Heart parents, he’d taken a little artistic license with the key romantic scene. Instead of kissing, Will (Emily Wolfe) and Annie (Alysa Lockheart) had exchanged exuberant smiles and the heartiest, hand-stinging high-five.
“Cold one today, right?” He fake-shivered and gave himself a little hug. “I rolled out of bed this morning and told my wife: Time to salt the sidewalks, honey.”
Flannery dearly wished he hadn’t used wife and bed in the same sentence, let alone a phrase overripe with euphemism. From the back of the class, some valiant girl whisper-sang: Chick-a-bow-wow!
The principal (who was never called Mr. Miller; he was solely referred to as the principal as he was both a prince and a pal!) ignored the not-quite-suppressed laughter and asked if Miss Sweeney had been in the classroom that morning. The head-shaking chorus of no, no, no, no, no made his shoulders slump. He clucked out a series of annoyed tongue sounds—deh deh deh—and fussed with his broadly striped necktie before he rallied with a pleasant: “So … you haven’t seen her?”
So you haven’t seen her?
The principal’s verbal style certainly lacked meaning, sense, and clarity, but so did everything else that had happened that morning. He floundered on with small talk: The magazine sales fund-raiser had been a laudable success, and he was looking forward to Friday’s volleyball tournament! He just loved volleyball! He loved seeing everybody having a blast on the court! Flannery blanched at his next sentence, knowing that his words would linger forever, knowing that even when she was a ninety-year-old draped in a pink afghan, clutching prayer cards and trying to discern the terrifying mystery of the afterlife, she would still remember the principal saying: “Holy Toledo, ladies, I love to see those balls really get spiked.”
Still, Flannery felt sorry for him, because everything he said was so stupid and so hilarious, but mostly because his gaze kept straying to the windows, as if willing Miss Sweeney to appear. But everyone was a little off their game by that point and not a single girl snickered or texted a hastily composed sonnet entitled “The Prince and the Pal of the Double Entendre: Ode to His Spiked Balls.”
The bell rang, and the principal looked as startled as if he’d heard the fire alarm, and that was the end of the Awkward Fest. He took a deep breath, and as if absolutely determined to try to impose normalcy, offered up his trademark cheese-ball grin. “Move on to second hour, ladies! Orchestra and band! I want to hear some beautiful music ringing through the hallways.” But a hairline fracture of annoyance cracked his buoyant voice—a teacher not showing up for school was not going to make his day any easier: “You can turn in any homework tomorrow when Miss Sweeney returns.”
Flannery had zippo musical talent and took a second hour study hall, so she loitered, loading her backpack with precision. She wound her earbud cords into a neat bundle, like thin licorice, and pulled the pens and pencils from the dark cavity of her backpack and rearranged them in the outer zippered pouch. She wanted to be the last person left in the room, and when she was, Flannery took a careful look around. Everything appeared unchanged. The framed black-and-white photographs of Miss Sweeney’s favorite writers lined the walls: Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes and Emily and Charlotte Brontë and J. D. Salinger and Flannery O’Connor and Anne Frank stared down at her, along with Jesus, who convalesced on a small metal crucifix by the door. (Miss Sweeney was a big fan of the Christ figure in literature, but Flannery couldn’t quite decipher how she felt about Jesus Himself: savior or mere quotable and compelling biblical character?)
From the hall came the excited speculation about her whereabouts—Sweeney had slept in!—and the chattering energy of Miss Sweeney’s absence crashed onto Flannery like a wave. Even as she thought that, the critical portion of her gray brain mass simultaneously noted how Miss Sweeney would not care for the wave description. And so Miss Sweeney’s imagined words scrolled through Flannery’s brain in vivid red ink: Flannery, can you think of a less pedestrian description for your sudden despair? Perhaps something non-oceanic? Okay, Flannery? As if she were contrasting Flannery’s embarrassing literary name with her embarrassingly non-lofty efforts. But the wave crashed anyway, the creamy gray-green water roared like a lion. Flannery knew that Miss Sweeney had not overslept, that she was not enjoying some midweek carpe diem, eating scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast with a foxy new boyfriend. Flannery knew something was really wrong, and she had the accompanying queasy feeling that it was a wrong that might not be easily fixed.
She picked up her backpack and paused, staring at the green board; she hoped for some kind of Hogwarts Magic, for Miss Sweeney’s whereabouts to be written on the board by an invisible hand skilled in calligraphy, for an exact location to be spelled out in an ominous, jagged font. Flannery cut behind Miss Sweeney’s desk, which felt like a social violation, traipsing through the kitchen area of a restaurant or using the upstairs bathroom of a house when the party was happening in the basement. She rested her hand on the back of Miss Sweeney’s chair for a quick moment and then, as if unbidden, her hand reached to open the top desk drawer. But before she touched the metal handle, she noticed a quarter-inch strap of red leather sticking out of the bottom drawer: Flannery jerked back as if it were a swaying coral snake and then looked at the door before she casually pulled open the drawer as if in search of Scotch tape or a manila folder.
Flannery offered up an aggrieved sigh to the empty room—I am so, so BUSY—acting as if rooting through a teacher’s desk was just one of a multitude of thankless, monotonous tasks she had to perform before day turned to night and she could pull on her comfiest sweatpants and watch Downton Abbey with a big old glass of chardonnay. In short, Flannery acted like one of the teachers. She had studied their tedious delights (along with their whimsical, flattering selfies) via their Facebook updates, until the archdiocese had ruled that students and teachers could not correspond via social networks. Flannery did not particularly miss the sad subtext of adults curating their online lives, and anyway, the one teacher she was interested in had never friended a student. At Sacred Heart High, Miss Sweeney was a stoic Beyoncé in the frothy Kardashian Sea.
Flannery took Miss Sweeney’s purse out of the drawer, slung it over her own shoulder, and walked briskly into the hallway as if pursuing important errands. The loudspeaker crackled, and the principal’s amplified breathing—a fine bouquet of hay fever and mucous—filled the hallway. She flinched but did not hear: Flannery Fields, do not steal Miss Sweeney’s purse.
With the cheery cadence of a sports announcer the principal said: “Attention please. Students in Miss Sweeney’s second hour English Lit class, pleeeeeeaaase report to the gym.”
A few stragglers lingered, covertly texting by their lockers, but by the time Flannery had cut into the bathroom, there was just one other person in a stall, a lone pair of black Converses showing beneath the partition wall. Flannery took the farthest stall and stood waiting, hugging Miss Sweeney’s purse to her chest. When the girl finally flushed and exited her stall, she primped at the mirror for an eternity but never bothered to wash her hands. Normally Flannery would have peered through the crack in the door to see the guilty girl; she would have made a mental note to keep an eye on her in the lunch line, as she was undoubtedly one who would bypass the tongs and plunge her fecalicious hand into the communal breadbasket. Finally there came the sah-woosh sah-whoosh of the bathroom door sweeping open and shut, and Flannery took a seat on the closed toilet and unzipped Miss Sweeney’s purse.
The contents made her heart sink.
Of course she imagined Miss Sweeney standing on the toilet seat of the next stall, her hands gripping the partition wall, her face a perfect smirk as she looked down at Flannery. Did your heart really sink? Are you in possession of a sunken heart? Sunken, as in treasure, or ships? Ahoy there, Matey!
But Flannery really could feel her heart sinking through her chest cavity. Because everything in that purse was useful. She believed there was not a single item Miss Sweeney would willingly leave behind.
An asthma inhaler.
Her keys—four of them—on a cheap, touristy Lady Liberty key ring.
Three tampons.
Stila eyeliner in morning plum.
Her cell phone.
Crest Whitestrips.
Concealer.
Her paperback edition of Wuthering Heights. (An older edition with a pulpy, Harlequin-looking cover. The pages were stiff and ruffled at the edges, as if it had been dropped into the bathtub.)
Her wallet, containing a ten and four ones, a library card, her driver’s license, her insurance card, a blurred photo of—was it a rat with a fluffy pink wig?… and her frequent-customer punch card at Java Joe’s.
Flannery ran her fingers over the fragmented paper and counted out the punches: Miss Sweeney was two espresso drinks away from a free beverage of her choice. Flannery wasted a long moment in the bathroom, oddly comforted by the smell of Clorox and the incessant swirl of the running toilet, wondering if Miss Sweeney would choose a standard latte or beat the system with a four-shot caramel Freebird, which, with tip, was usually seven dollars.
She was putting the wallet back into the purse when she thought to unzip the change compartment. It had felt flat, empty, but contained a folded-up piece of paper:
LCPL Brandon J. Marzetti-Corcoran, Kansas City, MO, was killed in action in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan on Sunday, March 11. Born in Kansas City, he graduated from Holy Angels High School in May 2005 and entered the Marines on November 19, 2005. He was devoted and loyal, to a fault, to family and friends. An accomplished athlete, Brandon was the starting quarterback for the Holy Angels 2004–2005 championship team. He was an avid sports fan, devoted to the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. He is survived by his loving parents, Lisa Marzetti (Liesel Charles) and Ray Corcoran; his fiancée Megan Reynolds and grandmother Helen Marzetti. He is also survived by his future in-laws, Suzanne and Phillip Reynolds, and many friends all over the world. Mass of Christian burial will be at 10:00 am Thursday morning at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church. Burial with full military honors will follow at Oak Hill Cemetery. A rosary will be said at 6:30 pm Wednesday evening and family will receive friends until 9:00. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials to the Holy Angels Athletic Department in care of Holy Angels High School.
Flannery thought obituaries were always tragic, even when the person was elderly, because whether they were ascending to nothingness or Neverland, to Heaven or a fiery, multi-pitchforked Hell (fingers crossed, for many denizens of Sacred Heart!) their time on earth was over and how could you imagine or train for nonexistence? But Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran wasn’t old; he was twenty-five and had died violently. He also had the symmetrical features of a Hollywood hero, which shouldn’t have mattered in the least, but Flannery found herself running her finger over the photo and rereading the obituary … Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran’s funeral was happening in an hour. No, two hours, she thought, with the time difference in the Midwest. Could Miss Sweeney have gone out of town for the funeral and not told anyone? Flannery folded up the obituary and put it back in the change compartment, realizing that Miss Sweeney’s erratic classroom behavior was not mimicking the violent emotions in Wuthering Heights—she was not reenacting the Mood Swings of the Moors. Her grief was purely personal, nonliterary. But, oh, the eternal tenderness of the world, the random ravaged sadness! It all made Flannery want to become a bedroomed hermit keeping the world at bay with books and blankets, with YouTube and cherry Pop-Tarts, because any old day was pure Wuthering Heights for someone.
Flannery took Miss Sweeney’s Wuthering Heights out of her purse and studied the cover: A generically dashing Heathcliff stood behind busty, black-haired Cathy, who wore a daffodil yellow gown tied with a scarlet sash. Her face in profile was the carved jewel of a Fifties starlet, and Heathcliff was standing behind her, holding her by the elbows. Flannery couldn’t decide whether this was sadistic or merely manly, but with her eyes-and-mouth-half-open expression of ecstasy, Cathy herself seemed pretty okay with his grip. Flannery thought back to Monday morning when Miss Sweeney had introduced the book, claiming that Wuthering Heights got a bad rap about being a mere literary bodice-ripper, the madcap antics of Heathcliff and crazy Cathy. For the reader with an open heart and an open mind, Wuthering Heights was more than an entertaining read about doomed lovers roaming ravaged estates and postcard-lush moors.
“Every single thing you need to know about life can be found in the pages of this book.” Miss Sweeney had raised her hands, palms up, a bossy priest bullying her congregation with a personal truth. “Depression and heartache and joy and love and loss? Integrating the dark and the light, the calm and the storm? Ladies! It’s all there.” But she had lost her condescending composure when she’d sighed and said: “God. It’s just such a good book.”
Now the door swooshed open, and Flannery quickly flushed the toilet, as if she’d needed a legitimate reason to be in the bathroom. There were three stalls, and Flannery was in the one farthest from the door. Instead of taking the other end stall, the girl who had just entered the bathroom chose the middle one, as if in some grotesque game of toilet tic-tac-toe. Vexed, Flannery started to stick Miss Sweeney’s book back into her purse, but then found she couldn’t quite part with it; she held it to her face and breathed in the dusty, papered sweetness of secondhand bookstores. Flannery always loved to see what was written in the margins of old books, those random penciled words that added up to a cryptic love letter to both the author and the next reader: OH YES! Ughh creepy shades of Uncle Joe here; Just like the kitchen smell of celery + loneliness.
The chance to read Miss Sweeney’s marginalia about a book they both loved? Flannery, perched on the closed toilet, opened Wuthering Heights. She fanned quickly though the pages, looking for any red-inked comments in the margins. But Emily Brontë had apparently fared better than Flannery. Miss Sweeney had circled no extraneous words, there were no mocking exclamation points, and she had not advised YOU MIGHT WANT TO WATCH THE HYPERBOLE METER, as if casually endorsing a new indie film. She turned to page one, and she read:
Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega!
Flannery thought just one thing, just one word: “WHAT?”
She flipped back to the title page: Caitlin Sweeney was written in red ink in the left-hand corner, and then in the middle page, in flourished black typeface, was the standard “Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” nothing unusual, all was well, and then she turned to the next page, a genealogy chart to help the reader keep track of the names and dates of birth of the characters in Wuthering Heights; okay, sure. But when Flannery turned to the first page of text, she read:
Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega! I was in the backseat of a cab! I was back! Back to the towering rents and the naturally beautiful and brilliant and the strivers trying to become beautiful or brilliant, and the hipster douchebags and the fatigued-looking women in their Dunkin’ Donuts polo shirts and always a lonesome summertime voice calling out, Delicioso coco helado! Delicioso coco helado! Or there’s the winterbliss dream of ice-glazed Central Park, the buses lumbering up Central Park West in the violet-blue hour, and of course the seasonless surprise of seeing the shockingly miniscule Madonna jogging with her two bodyguards, of seeing Lady Gaga nee Stefani Germanotta at Duane Reade with her four bodyguards, and the old men playing chess on the stoops, and the rich moms laughing into their cell phones while the nannies trail with the toddlers, and all the other celebrities and stereotypes I am neglecting! I was back! I had no purse, no ID! I was fluid! I was free!
I was not following my bliss, not even the memory of bliss, nor was I deluged with melancholy, trying to escape into the sepia-toned past. Dear Reader, I was all about the future! I was Ray Bradbury’s pin-up girl! I was following the angel of my life, the one and only Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, and when I found him, I wanted New York City to swallow us whole, to take us into its glittering and gritty manic jaws and hold us close.
Flannery was not only thinking “WHAT” but saying the word over and over, drawing out the vowel and sounding so gasping and questioning and, apparently, grating, that the girl in the next stall sighed with lavish aggravation. Flannery didn’t blame her, because who wouldn’t be annoyed to be in the bathroom with an odd girl talking to herself, a girl whose heartbeat was thundering into what felt like a sternum-cracking crescendo?
Flannery certainly knew the beginning of her favorite book by heart, and the setting was not New York City: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us.”
Where had that page gone?
She peered at the book spine to see if pages had been added; she ran her thumb along the space where the pages met the spine and found it smooth. Flannery touched the cool beige metal of the partition wall—just for the sudden comfort of a stable, physical object—and read the good-hearted bathroom graffiti. Peace to all who read this! Jesus loves YOU! (Along with the less sanguine: Maribeth K is a total whorebag.)
She opened Wuthering Heights again.
As soon as I’d arrived at my classroom this morning I’d seen Brandon at the window. I put my trembling hands on my desk and watched him from my peripheral vision. “You’re back,” I whispered to the empty room, wanting to confirm the itinerant miracle of it by saying the words aloud. Brandon had appeared at the window the previous day when class had already started, but I’d found it difficult to simultaneously process a miracle and lead a class discussion on Heathcliff’s going rogue from Wuthering Heights as my own personal narrative arc was careening so wildly. But I had prayed for Brandon to return—throughout the night, while taking breaks to watch infomercials and seeing his face on every body selling acne wash and exercise machines—and there he was at the windows of Sacred Heart, again: my miracle man, my personal Huck Finn, coatless and wearing an I HEART NYC shirt. O, he was his sweet younger self, my way-back boy. Except for his super-short hair—sexy, sure, but I missed his foppish bangs of yesteryear—he looked just as he had looked seven years ago when we had moved to New York City together, a couple of kooky eighteen-year-olds in sweet, sweet love.
Flannery snapped the book shut and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath in, which was not particularly cleansing, and counted … 1, 2, 3, 4 … and then opened her eyes as she exhaled … 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. She looked at the bathroom floor, the white tile that had yellowed around the base of the toilet, hopefully from age, and reached down and touched her short, flowered combat boots, which looked and felt real, but perhaps were dream replicas of actual boots? Had the trip to T.J.Maxx where she’d bought them with her birthday money been a dream too?
But a comforting thought stemmed Flannery’s existential crisis, if not her panic, because when you read in a dream the words appeared scattershot, changed. A traffic sign might say: WARNING! CARAMEL APPLES FOR THE NEXT 10 MILES, or if you opened On the Road while dreaming, the paragraphs might contain kitten emojis and Roman numerals, and who knew why a brain might churn out candied fruit instead of road construction, or muddled code instead of manly adventures. But it made perfect sense that Flannery’s adoration of Wuthering Heights and her concern for Miss Sweeney had comingled into this lucid dream of a changed narration. Flannery nodded vehemently—yes! Yes! She tapped the book on her leg, warming to her dream theory, which formulated as she sat there on the closed toilet. Emily Brontë herself had considered the power and sway of dreams with a vivid curiosity that had inspired some of her best dialogue, the meme-friendly lamentations of Cathy: “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”
That Flannery was in the midst of a dream was a bit more appealing than the other option, that she was going insane. And so she read a little more, hoping: dream, dream, dream.
Standing in my empty classroom seven years later (Dear Reader, cue the bad luck!) and seeing Brandon as he once was, whole and free and beautiful, filled me with a distilled nostalgia that veered into nausea; my stomach roiled and the room was a sudden sauna. It was the morning of his funeral, but I was remembering another ending, the first ending, the exalted one: the last summer night Brandon and I spent in Kansas before we moved to Manhattan.
We had driven out to the Flint Hills, to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. He parked his truck by the locked Park Service gates, which were low and inviting and seemed a mere formality. We scrambled over them easily, and then it was just the bison and deer and the owls and the eagles, and Brandon, and me. Throughout our school years we had learned from many a dull speaker on Kansas History Days that the soil in the Flint Hills was never used for farming because it was laced with flint and limestone: All those miles of rocky ground had never known the sharp mouth of machinery, and so the native prairie grasses flourished. The sun-blanched bluestem glowed orange in the darkness, halving the world into dark sky and bright ground, and beneath that was the rock, the flaw that would save the prairie.
It was almost midnight, and the air was still thickly warm, weighted with Kansas humidity. Brandon and I held hands as we walked along the winding trail cut by the Park Service. We were quiet. We had talked nonstop on the drive out to the Flint Hills, an hour of marveling over the fact that we had a direct flight to NYC in the morning and we weren’t merely visiting—no tourism for us, baby! How lucky I felt to have Brandon give up everything he knew to move to NYC with me, to have a person support me so fully. My journey was his journey.
Unburdened by the zest for irony and oh-so-quirky originality that I would find in boyfriends of the future, Brandon, my one true love, my soul mate, looked at me in the passenger seat and simply said: “I love you so much. We’re starting the next phase of our lives together. Columbia, Caitlin.”
When the college brochures had started piling up, it was Brandon himself who had pulled Columbia from the wicker basket on my nightstand. Instead of the ubiquitous campus photography of students listening attentively in lecture halls or peering through microscopes, the Columbia brochure had featured a street scene of students walking through the gates at 116th and Broadway, and photos of the great city itself, so vast and heralded with promise that it seemed anyone could land there and succeed.
Brandon was squinting, moving his finger along the fine print: “Columbia alum Herman W-Wouk?” He struggled with dyslexia. I believe this was the first time I’d heard him read aloud.
I shrugged. “Whoever that is.”
He was sitting on the edge of my twin bed, and I was on the floor, painting my toenails the color of Brandon’s eyes: a dreamy aquamarine. I held my breath as he finished the sentence: “Herman Wouk said Columbia was a world of … doubled magic, where the best things of the moment were outside the … rectangle of Columbia and the best things of all history and human thought were inside the rectangle of Columbia.”
“Doubled magic,” I said. “Abracadabra times two.” I flicked my nail polish brush like a magician’s wand, and a dot of aquamarine landed on the carpet, an iridescent moon I rubbed away. “They sound a little in love with themselves at Columbia. And, please, I could never get into a school like that.” But truthfully I knew I probably could get into a school like that: I was a National Merit Scholar from an underserved state.
“You should try to go there,” he said. “You’re brilliant. And it sounds great.”
Brandon’s brilliant was so flattering, his great so winsome, that his words made me feel, not for the first time, that I couldn’t live without him.
“And people move to New York City for all sorts of reasons,” Brandon said quietly. He ran his hand through his lion-colored hair. “Not just for college.”
I joined him on my twin bed—quietly, as my parents were in the kitchen cooking dinner—trashed my pedicure, and we made a plan. More importantly, Dear Reader, we executed that plan. I was going to go to Columbia and live in the dorm, and Brandon was moving to NYC too, where he would find a cool apartment and a job. And now it was all coming true. The day had finally come.
But not quite yet; we were still in the heart of the Kansas night. Brandon led me off the trail, and with the bluestem scraping at our calves, we walked deeper into the prairie. We might have been the only souls on earth that night—it did feel like that—except for the migrant cicada chorus singing us their buzzy migraine of a love song and the occasional truck rumbling down the two-lane highway in the distance.
We made an impromptu bed out of a flat plane of limestone rising out of the soil. Fear not, Dear Reader, I am not about to go all Harlequin on you. I will move onto the safe terrain of “afterward” when we were naked (sorry!) on our backs on the cool rock, watching a fast bloom of storm clouds move through the endless lava lamp sky: bruised purple melting into navy blue, then charcoal. The sky, the swirling sky. The parched rattle of the prairie grass. The lonely birdsong of an Eastern Phoebe: Fee-bee. Fee-bee. The spent, ragged breath of someone who loves you.
Flannery startled at the sound of gagging and splashing. And then came the familiar odor. In dreams, she knew, one could not smell. She pressed Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights to her chest and hissed: “Oh my God.”
“Sorry,” the girl in the next stall gasped out.
“Oh, no. It’s not you.” Flannery turned the book over and held it close to her face, squinting as if she were a Quik Shop clerk checking the authenticity of a fifty-dollar bill. To double-check her fading dream theory, Flannery gave the soft ridge of fat bordering her thumbnail a vicious little pinch. It hurt. In dreams, one did not feel physical pain. That leaves crazy, she thought. That leaves exceedingly super-crazy.
She heard another splash and looked over and saw that the girl’s chestnut brown boots were pointed toward the toilet so that the UGG tags faced the front. All the beautiful Sacred Heart girls had long moved on from the ubiquitous Uggs that middle-aged women wore to the grocery store, so aside from the rosary of potential torments beading though Flannery’s mind—extreme anxiety, the flu, bulimia, pregnancy, extreme anxiety, the flu, bulimia, pregnancy—the girl was barfing in mom boots.
Flannery church-whispered: “Are you okay?” Her trembling hands made the pages of Wuthering Heights quiver as she reread the sentence: “The spent, ragged breath of someone who loves you.”
“I have food poisoning,” the girl said, her voice high and hoarse.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Whenever someone vomited on the school grounds, the janitor covered the puddle with colorful, absorbent rock poured from a fifty-pound bag, so as Flannery sat on the closed toilet reading, her mind’s eye envisioned not only the deep colors of Miss Sweeney’s Kansas prairie reverie but also the chemical pastels of aquarium gravel: blue and yellow, lavender and green. Flannery tried not to breathe through her nose as she attempted to both puzzle out how the beginning narrative of Wuthering Heights—Mr. Lockwood meeting the adult, embittered Heathcliff—had been seemingly replaced by Miss Sweeney’s first-person account, and to comfort the girl in the next stall.
“Um. Do you want me to call someone?”
“God! Seriously?” Flannery marveled at how quickly the girl’s vulnerable sick-voice reverted to snark: “Just leave me alone, obviously.”
“Sorry!” Of course—what was she thinking?—of course she should give the girl her privacy. Flannery stood and unlocked the stall door; she grabbed up her backpack and Miss Sweeney’s purse, but kept the copy of Wuthering Heights splayed open, her thumb and pinkie stretched wide. She walked to the sink, turned on the tap, and looked down at the page.
Dear Reader,
Flannery paused, pressing her finger to the typeface. Addressing the reader belonged to the world of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë taking an epistolary pause to remind the Dear Reader, the Gentle Reader: I’m talking to you). Emily Brontë hadn’t used this coaxing convention in Wuthering Heights, and she wondered why Miss Sweeney was, apparently, using it to tell her tale now. She flipped the book over and looked at the cover—as if the lushly illustrated Cathy and Heathcliff could answer that question—before she started reading again:
So there I was at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve—the Kansas sky evidence of God’s Glory, his gorgeous nighttime aesthetic—having a religious experience in reverse. My hand was on Brandon’s heart; his hand was on my rib cage. I stared up at the sky with zero curiosity about the Kingdom of Heaven because the physical world was plenty. Brandon and I would love each other while we were on earth, and when we returned to stardust, another girl and boy would take our place—that was the deal. I had never felt more connected to the earth, to all of the people who had ever walked the Flint Hills. I believed in the innate goodness of everyone: even the piggish family who had visited that very day, as evidenced by a Capri Sun wrapper glinting in the prairie grass, and the starving pioneers who longed for home, and the Pawnee, who would have original sin forced upon them by priests and preachers in love with a book whose varied interpretations would cause so much cruelty. But even those warriors for Christ must have felt so confused when they raised their eyes to the prairie heavens, because how could a person ever really believe in anything but the big sky, in anything but love?
When the sky opened up, Brandon pulled me closer, his hands moving down the length of my back, and said Caitlin, as if he were naming the rain itself, the Word made flesh.
Yes, Dear Reader, back in the day I had no use for religion yet I was—conveniently!—my very own Christ figure! Alas, I was certainly no longer the Word made flesh, or if I were, the Word would be REGRET. Wuthering Heights ribboned through my thoughts, Cathy mourning the moors, and Heathcliff: I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free … why am I so changed?
O, sing it, sister.
I did not especially want to be a clinically depressed twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher. I wanted to be that love-dazed eighteen-year-old at the Tallgrass preserve and afterward, on the dark drive home, watching raindrops quivering on the windshield before the whisk whisk of the wipers, rubbing my kiss-chapped lips and listening to Neil Young sing “After the Gold Rush”: Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. Oh, and now I wanted to erase my mistakes, to escape from the harsh world of the living and the unknowable world of the dead and join Brandon in that silver spaceship.
When Brandon put his palm on my classroom window, I walked away from my desk and put my hand to his. In my peripheral vision he closed his eyes, as if in bliss or merely relieved. I had closed out Brandon before and I would not do so again; I would not let Brandon stay on the other side of the glass. And so I walked out of my classroom. I walked right out of my life. By the time I was outside Sacred Heart High and taking a quick lap around the perimeter of the building, Brandon had disappeared, but I knew where to find him: in the city where you could get lost, where you could drop the mask. Say good-bye to the vibrant young teacher from that wonderful Catholic girls school in suburban Connecticut! While I searched for Brandon I could blend in with all the other lost souls, my people. Because though I fancied myself as a kind of postmodern prairie girl, I hearted NYC, too.
And so I became a deluded pioneer on Metro North at 8:17 without my iPhone or lip gloss. I was so saintly in my lack of possessions! My purse was in my desk drawer at Sacred Heart High, my hands were empty. I could not be weighed down by the minutia of my regular life. Pilgrimage ahoy! No keys or ID for me! Without my ties to my old life, I imagined I was freer to find Brandon, to meet him on his own terms. I’d stopped for gas on my way to Sacred Heart that morning and had left my credit card in my coat pocket—Providence!—so I was able to buy my train ticket and a coffee.
How wonderful it was to be without my phone, to be unreachable, and if Sacred Heart tried to track me down via my emergency contacts, it would be impossible: My emergency contacts were, sadly, my parents. They were at a yoga retreat in Wisconsin while their kitchen was being remodeled, a journey of comingled hopes: curing middle-age malaise and the unfettered installation of quartz countertops and a Wolf gas range. Namaste!
As I stepped off the train at Grand Central Station—It was Grand! And Central!—I kept my gaze straight; I didn’t gaze up at the ornate ceilings or whip my head around, touristy and indiscreet. I searched for him, discerning all the rushing people and images in my peripheral vision—not him, not him, not him, not him. Despite all that had happened between us, his boyish voice of optimism was still in my heart: Columbia, Caitlin! I decided to splurge on a cab and go uptown to Columbia, in search of doubled magic.
“Look who can’t get enough Wuthering Heights!” Flannery looked up to see Jordan King giving her a big Disneyland smile as she walked into the bathroom, holding the door open for—great—Callie Martin. They were her past tormenters, though this year they hadn’t been quite as evil; perhaps they were discovering empathy or at least they were giving their raging stupidity a break. Still, Flannery would normally be horrified at a chance encounter with the bitchiest girls at Sacred Heart, but just now they seemed a respite—life resuming its familiar natural pattern—from what she had just read in Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights.
“Hey,” Flannery said. She turned off the water and protectively tucked Miss Sweeney’s book under her arm, and, never wanting to invite torment, picked up her backpack and Miss Sweeney’s purse and headed for the door.
Jordan elbowed Callie: “Hey, look who has Sweeney’s purse.”
Flannery looked down at her shoulder and grimaced at the purse strap as if it were a leathery red growth, a cancerous lash she had just now discovered. “Oh, yeah, this is her purse. I found it in the hall, so … I’m going to go turn it in to the office.”
“You do your thing, Nancy Drew,” Callie said, accompanying her laugh with an air horn blast, short and harsh. Flannery pressed the book closer to her body. She almost felt sorry for her, for all stupid Callie didn’t know about Miss Sweeney, about the malleable parameters of the known world.
“God, it smells terrible in here,” Jordan said.
Callie glanced over at the stalls. She pointed at the backward-facing Uggs and made a gagging motion, her index finger pointing to her open mouth.
“I don’t smell anything,” Flannery said, feeling great compassion for the barfing girl, for she considered herself a sort of millennial, suburban Dalai Lama, not only wise and calm in the face of her own detractors, but also leading the Sacred Heart girls by example. So she immediately regretted her next cowardly, caving sentences: “But my sense of smell isn’t all that great. I have asthma. And pretty bad allergies.”
Callie nodded. “Of course you do. But, hey! I’m having a party on Saturday, and I’d love it if you could come.”
Getting in early decision to Columbia had been a game-changer for Flannery, and though the girls still made fun of her—she knew Callie’s invitation wasn’t sincere—they no longer took such sport in mocking her. At her last teacher-student conference Miss Sweeney had told Flannery that once she was away from Sacred Heart, the world would crack wide open. Flannery had thought of cracked-open geodes, jagged and ugly on the outside, glowing and colorful on the inside. Like a decayed tooth in reverse, you had to drill through the dull gray granite of your days to reach the inside, the new world, which might be creamy opalescent blue, royal purple, garnet, or emerald, and threaded with gold. In Flannery’s mind came Miss Sweeney’s red pen: This dental simile seems a bit slobbery … consider your co-pay before further treatment. But in real life, Miss Sweeney had been kind: “The trick is just to hold on until you make it to Manhattan, to Columbia. Once you get there, you’ll find your people.”
And now it was Miss Sweeney who was going to find her people, her person, Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, if what Flannery had just read was true. But how could it be? Flannery tried to think of what to say to Callie—the invitation was surely encoded with a mean joke—but her brain was in pure fun-house mode: all undulating words and images and facts and fonts.
Callie flipped her hair. “It’s just super-casual, my parents are out of town, so … you can bring a date if you want, Flannery.”
“I’ll think about it,” Flannery said lightly.
Jordan gave a hearty nod and smiled, the bitchy curve of it showing a quarter-inch of carnation-pink gums. “Thinking is good.”
Flannery muttered Um and Oh and thus created a new word that braided dread, knowledge, and fear of the up-close future: It was Ummoh time to be sure. She ran her hand through her hair, as if breezy, confident, and the book slipped from under her arm.
“Smooth,” Callie said.
Jordan promptly gave her a suck-up affirmation: “Right? Soooo smooth.”
Flannery picked up Wuthering Heights, unzipped her backpack, and quickly sandwiched it between her bulky Econ book and pencil bag, but Callie had already noticed the distinctive, romantic cover of Miss Sweeney’s vintage edition. “Stalker alert,” she stage-whispered to Jordan. “Flannery has Miss Sweeney’s purse and her book.”
“I do,” Flannery agreed.
Flannery hadn’t needed to explain anything to Miss Sweeney about her experience at Sacred Heart. And in this way Miss Sweeney was so different from the other teachers, not just the ones that blatantly sucked up to the rich, popular girls, but from the teachers who didn’t care enough to notice. Once, after class when Flannery was feeling particularly run-down, Miss Sweeney had looked her in the eye with great solemnity and said, “Flannery, Jesus himself said it best: The mean girls you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
Flannery had laughed, delighted with Miss Sweeney’s quick revision of the New American Standard Bible. “I thought it was the poor that we will always have with us.”
“No, Flannery. That kind of error, so endemic to biblical translations, clouds our vision of the true heart of Jesus, who wanted us to know that the mean girls would be a never-ending problem for humanity, a feminist conundrum, which, though documented in popular films and literature, would never be truly untangled.”
“It’s really hard to be a feminist if you go to a girl’s school,” Flannery had replied.
Miss Sweeney nodded. “Or if you live in the world.”
“I don’t mean, like, that I don’t believe in equal pay or anything crazy like that.”
“Flannery! I know exactly what you mean.”
Now Callie and Jordan were practically blocking the door, but Flannery scootched past them, her body turned to the side. She reached for the steel door handle, which would be so smooth and reassuring, nirvana on the palm. She thought of Miss Sweeney on the streets of New York City, mourning and grief-dazzled on her pilgrimage to reunite with a dead boyfriend. But Flannery also felt a sting of shameful jealousy: Miss Sweeney was free of Sacred Heart for the day.
Callie’s smile was neutral, polite. But Flannery could see her eyes shining with predatory excitement as she raised her brows at Jordan, conveying the ancient code: Here it is, here is how one becomes the Alpha Doggett: Listen, dear underling, and you shall learn my evil and triumphant ways.
And then Callie pounced. “Flannery? I’m dying for you to come to my party. And maybe you could bring Heathcliff as your date?”
Secreted away in her stall, the barfing girl laughed.
* * *
Flannery looked through the square of glass in the door of the school office. A police officer was already there, forming a somber semicircle with the principal, the school secretary, and the ever-creepy guidance counselor, Mrs. Howell, who grinned when she saw Flannery’s face at the glass, but also flapped her hand, trying to shoo, shoo, shoo her away. But Flannery fixed her face in a mask of triumphant innocence—as if she hadn’t just rifled through Miss Sweeney’s purse and discovered her transformed copy of Wuthering Heights, now safely zipped in Flannery’s own backpack—and opened the door.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I found Miss Sweeney’s purse. It was behind her desk.” She used an officious tone and then inflated it further as she overexplained with a hearty: “It was just there, just right behind her desk.”
Behind, inside … for Flannery, this was not a time to be picky about prepositions.
The police officer, who looked about her dad’s age, offered up his polite, crestfallen thanks. “Much appreciated. That will help us immensely.” Flannery’s own father was in Florida with her mother, not at the beach or wandering awkwardly through amusement parks, the childfree couple at Disney World. No, they were at a conference on Irish Literature. And they weren’t professors; this was something they did for fun.
She handed the officer Miss Sweeney’s purse, and he held it at an awkward angle away from his body. Flannery’s hands were still trembling, and when she balled them up at her sides, he gave her a kind smile. The lipstick-red leather of Miss Sweeney’s bag really made his navy blue uniform pop, but he looked so melancholy standing there holding Miss Sweeney’s bag, as if he knew that wherever she was at that moment, she probably needed her purse. Flannery wanted to whisper to him, and only to him: Miss Sweeney’s in Manhattan. Her old Alpha and Omega.
“Better hustle to class, Flannery,” the principal said. He gave her a hearty, crinkly-eyed smile, as if he found her dear or amusing, before he stole a quick glance at the clock. “Miss Sweeney probably just had to leave for an appointment and forgot to get a substitute. So no worries, Flannery! Don’t you fret about Miss Sweeney’s whereabouts. Joe saw her this morning when he was out shoveling the walkway. She parked her car and walked into school, same as always, and according to Joe, Miss Sweeney seemed just fine.”
The counselor grimaced, perhaps only worried about the principal blabbing details to a student. And the police officer shot him a look, but to Flannery, the officer’s disapproval seemed a bit more nuanced. Joe was the custodian and the only adult at Sacred Heart that students addressed by his first name, and Miss Sweeney was the only adult to ever correct them: “Hey, girls, I have a really super idea! Let’s not call the janitor by his first name, okey-dokey? You should all at least pretend that you think people are equal, and thus, equally deserving of your respect. Say it with me, now: Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson!” She had started off mocking the Sacred Heart girls, using the singsong cadence of a sweet kindergarten teacher, but in her disgust Miss Sweeney had resumed her regular voice: “Oh my God, it’s such stereotypical Catholic elitism—what is this, Galway, 1957?—that it makes me laugh. Almost.”
As Flannery turned to leave, perhaps too slowly, she received a jolting shriek of encouragement from Mrs. Howell: “March!” She broke into an ironic march as she said the word, her knees high and arms swinging, and she hooked her thumb toward the office door before she let loose with some high-pitched, hysterical laughter and said, “Keep on truckin’, Flannery!” To make everything that much worse, she had on a burnt-orange turtleneck underneath a sweater vest patterned with tabby cats.
Flannery did not march down the hall to her second hour study hall; she walked out of Sacred Heart High without her coat and looked up at the meaningless gray clouds, expecting … what?
She hoisted her backpack over both shoulders and took a little walk, feeling like she could run for miles and miles, and wondered why no one had created a fruit-flavored energy drink based on turmoil, anxiety, and excitement. She had no fear of being caught, as no one would think a thing of it if Little Miss 4.00 GPA Flannery Fields were not in study hall.
Well, she had never skipped class before, and doubted that she would ever skip it again. But Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights stowed in her backpack changed the rules for the day, even though she was terrified to open it again and find that the pages had reverted back to their original text, her reading a mere bathroom dreamscape. Flannery was also terrified that it was somehow true, that Miss Sweeney’s dead boyfriend was ghosting around the Sacred Heart campus, and that Miss Sweeney was unraveling.
Shivering, Flannery gingerly stepped over the slick spots and marveled at the litter—the clogged earth mosaic of Starbucks cups and Luna wrappers and cigarette butts, and a lipstick palette that must have dropped out of a purse and flipped open: The palette now bled a slushy stream of rose and fig and pink. Yes, Miss Sweeney was there with her, saying: Flannery, the lipsticks are bleeding? Are they in a sort of cosmetic critical condition? A Lancôme coma?
She walked through the rows of cars, the occasional beat-up Escort among the Mercedes, the BMWs, and all the shimmering SUVs, until she arrived at the mouth of the long, winding lane that would lead her off the Sacred Heart campus. In the distance was the roar of the highway, which could have been anything at all, lions or typhoons or machete-twirling pirates crooning: Come here, my pretty, I have some lovely candies for you.
But Flannery had the unwelcome premonition—butterflies in her stomach, circling her sunken heart—that the danger was entirely real, and not for her, but for Miss Sweeney. Yesterday she had seemed pretty animated during class, though contrasted with the dullardly instructional style of the other teachers at Sacred Heart, Miss Sweeney’s literary flamboyance was a delight. But, no, yesterday was really different: Flannery recalled Miss Sweeney chewing her lower lip during class, not pensively, but with alarming enthusiasm. Was her behavior a manifestation of grief, or was she already seguing into something worse? When Miss Sweeney started crying during class, well, sure, it was shocking—later, the words freak show floated down the hallway along with the faux-adult complaints: “God, she’s so unprofessional…” “Somebody missed their therapy appointment this week”—but the blood rosettes staining Miss Sweeney’s chewed lips looked far more jarring than her tears. And of course Flannery thought of Wuthering Heights, of Edgar Linton finding Cathy in a frenzy after he issued an ultimatum about giving up Heathcliff: “She stretched herself out stiff, and turned up her eyes, while her cheeks, at once blanched and livid, assumed the aspect of death … ‘She has blood on her lips’ he said, shuddering.”
Still, Flannery adored the day’s assignment, a short essay about where Heathcliff might have gone when he dropped out of the narrative of Wuthering Heights, brokenhearted and furious that his beloved Cathy had decided to marry her rich neighbor, the iconic milquetoast blonde guy, Edgar Linton. Flannery’s essay, spell- and grammar-checked to perfection, was sheathed in a manila folder in her backpack, and Flannery was already daydreaming of her modest gaze and slight shrug—Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all, really—as she handed it to Miss Sweeney, of Miss Sweeney reading and rereading and chuckling in droll admiration at the lyrical sentences Flannery had crafted with no help from a mystical wood sprite muse or a perky helicopter mom cooking up adverbs. Flannery’s only tools were Frappuccinos and M&M’s. She imagined Miss Sweeney giving an impromptu reading of her Heathcliff essay in the teacher’s lounge, before push-pinning her paper to the corkboard above the hot chocolate packets and coffee machine and offering a pro tip to her fellow educators. “Peruse it at your leisure, people. You might learn a little something. This kind of work is the reason Flannery Fields got into Columbia.”
Flannery walked faster, faster still, accelerating to the optimistic mall walk of a senior citizen before she broke out in a full-on run, her backpack pounding her back as she considered the likelihood of her teacher’s lounge dream-sequence. Probably Flannery’s sentences would receive Miss Sweeney’s standard cutting comments flourished with mocking question marks, which were especially mortifying in triplicate: Is Heathcliff really a “sardonic shepherd” trying to herd Cathy’s eternal love??? Even her ellipses were terrifying: Flannery you might want to reconsider this entire paragraph …
Still, always there was the brightness of I think you could be a writer. And she had Miss Sweeney to thank for getting her into Columbia, her alma mater; she had written a beautiful recommendation letter for Flannery. The day her acceptance letter had arrived, Flannery had sat at her desk, her index finger on the track pad of her computer, already crestfallen. She knew what she would read when she opened the Columbia University e-mail: We sincerely thank you for your application, and regret to inform you that you are a loser who will not be invited to attend our esteemed institution. Alas! But when she had clicked on the e-mail that glorious random Saturday, Flannery had discovered she had no gift for prophecy.
She kept her thoughts trained on the future, but in her head was the depressing sound of the present: “Flannery, maybe you could bring Heathcliff as your date?” And so a mean girl’s voice kept her moving when she reached the end of Sacred Heart Lane and made her way, breathless, down the sloped embankment next to the highway. Flannery walked sideways on the slippery earth, descending in careful goat steps. She thought about how happy Miss Sweeney had been when she’d been accepted to Columbia, and how she’d said that Flannery would love going to school in Manhattan, which was the best city in the world to get lost in. It had seemed fairly weird at the time—had she mistaken Flannery for someone so definitely found? And yesterday’s proclamation, straight from Miss Sweeney’s blood-bitten lips: I would go to New York City and I would never, ever come back.
And today’s words: Manhattan! My old Alpha and Omega!
Flannery thought of the obituary in Miss Sweeney’s purse: the good-looking Marine, Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran, his sonorous, hyphenated last name elevating his first name, his ghost-self at the window staring in at his Caitlin, at Flannery’s Miss Sweeney.
She stood next to the highway and took a quick look back at Sacred Heart.
I’ll do it. I will find you. And I’ll help you.
She would repay Miss Sweeney for the incredible gift of giving Flannery a future to think about beyond the world of Sacred Heart High, a future wherein she would find her people. And so, bravely, foolishly, and with the laughter of the barfing girl ringing in her mind, Flannery made her way across six lanes of highway traffic, cautious as a drunken squirrel darting back twice—Holy crap, that eighteen-wheeler is flying!—no, three times before racing victoriously to the other side, keeping her head down as she crunched along in the frosty gravel, lest a passing car mistake her for a hitchhiker on the exit ramp.
Maybe she was just stoned on the sudden adventure of finding herself on the other side of the highway, the world of quotidian miracles: a Metro North ticket to NYC and a cruller and a large white coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, purchased with the crisp twenties her parents had given her before they went on vacation. Because Flannery wasn’t puzzling out why she had decided to ditch school to look for Miss Sweeney in Manhattan, she was wondering why she’d never before given in to the unfurling magic of any old weekday, all the truant adventures that had passed her by while she learned how to detect hyperbole and dissect a fetal pig and try, try, try, to hover beneath the radar of the popular girls. If AP English via Miss Sweeney had taught Flannery anything, it was that life was brimming with various traumas and tragedies—the great novels didn’t lie—and that there was no need to court sorrow by writing Goth poetry in a black spiral notebook or listening to death-rock because sorrow was always, always looming, sorrow would be thrust upon you, and, as the foot-stomping song from the junior year musical went—everyone was a girl who couldn’t say no, everyone was in a terrible fix.
But sorrow’s wacky twin was on the Metro North train from Nowheresville, Connecticut, to Manhattan: Euphoria rode along with Flannery, even as she worried about Miss Sweeney, even as Flannery texted her friends (Went home. CRAMPS. Awesome.) and her parents in Florida (Got sick of school, went home. Oops, AT not OF). And even if she was the kind of girl to skip class, the teachers at Sacred Heart would be too busy concentrating on Miss Sweeney’s absence to worry about an errant girl, and no one and nobody knew that Flannery was lighting out for the territory. How she knew the hardcore thrill of carpe diem, as she sipped her coffee and looked out the window, the ice-glazed world spilling past. Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights stayed safely zipped in her backpack—she didn’t have the courage to open it again, not quite yet, but the original text was there in her mind as she rode to Manhattan, Emily Brontë’s winter words: “One could hardly imagine that there had been three weeks of summer: the primroses and crocuses were hidden under wintry drifts; the larks were silent, the young leaves of the early trees smitten and blackened.” Flannery looked out at the smitten trees of Connecticut, their branch ends like bony bark hands poking out of their snow shroud to wave good-bye.
Miss Sweeney’s red ink wrote the next thought in Flannery’s mind: Maybe reconsider your waving winter trees? Seems a bit too “Farewell from Ye Olde Cold Hickory Tree” or “Au Revoir, Exclaimed the Weeping Cherry,” if you see what I mean.
Copyright © 2017 by Mary O’Connell