mr. delacour

kendall teare

GRAHAM DELACOUR SIGNS OFF HIS FINAL EMAIL as he’s signed off all the others: cheers, g.d.

Goddamn cheers is right, he thinks, as he slips his school-issued laptop into his messenger bag for his final walk to the main office where he’ll deposit the computer and his building key into the hands of the overly perfumed, overly kind lead secretary. He’ll thank her and mean it, and then should thank the principal—not that he feels particularly grateful toward him but because it’s the thing to do. Ten years ago he would’ve expected a full exit interview, but today’s admin doesn’t wan the crusty English teacher’s take.

He is only fifty-nine, making him a bit young to say goodbye to Roosevelt High.

Affordable healthcare keeps most of his type in the classroom until their late 60s. But he already feels too old, though he hardly looks it yet. At least that’s what his hairdresser told him, snipping the top layer that’s still more pepper than salt. So it isn’t his vanity that’s making him go.  

It’s that, year by year, the references that his colleagues throw about in casual faculty lounge conversation have begun to elude him. This slide towards irrelevance has been slow, imperceptible for the first three decades, but in the last five years, he’s begun laughing along like a little brother. He’d always prided himself on being able to make water-cooler conversation about the current prime-time sitcom, the best of last weekend’s late-night, the who-fouled-whom of major league sports, and enough foreign affairs not to seem like a bumpkin. And now they are talking about shows—at least he thinks they’re shows—he hasn’t even heard of, never mind seen, and this new rank of American royalty, the social media influencer, whose very platforms he’s only seen quoted in New York Times articles. His own references, likewise, have fallen flatter and flatter, until one year, about three years ago now, he stopped making them altogether.

As he’s swinging his bag onto his shoulder, he recalls that his final contribution to office banter had been a line from Waiting for Guffman—met with crickets and a hasty return to brewing coffee, retrieving a lunch box. It was the second first-week of school without Eva; she’d left two Junes ago. After she’d cleaned out her desk, he had told her that he felt like the last living D-Day veteran. The next oldest person in the department was barely forty. She’d handed him her favorite pen and said, Do us all proud.

He pushes the swivel chair into the desk and looks around the cramped cinderblock room to see if he’s missed anything. Small, jagged patches of paint peeled off, institutional cream giving way to institutional blue, as he pulled down the papers he’d taped up over the years—the collage of academic calendars and lockdown drill protocols, curling preschool masterpieces painted by the fingers of his now-grown kids, elaborate inside jokes handed to him by students at the end of the year (“Out of Context Quotes, 2010”—better than any thank-you note).

It’s a terrible office, really. No windows, a retrofitted, glorified closet. But it’s been a hideaway too. To retreat from the others, especially during those final years. Yesterday, as he had every year prior, he ditched the post-graduation faculty happy hour—a sad affair at the local sports bar. When Eva was still there, he would’ve hung back after the ceremony to eat cold pizza with her in an empty classroom and do their informal highlight reel of the year, the good, the bad, the funny (Remember when you tricked your 10th grade classes into always doing the assigned Scarlet Letter reading because you told them if they didn’t they’d miss the big sex scene? How could you stand that kid who moved from L.A. and, no matter the topic of discussion, always found a way to name-drop celebrities his parents know? I’m still cracking up over the fungal toenail reply-all debacle…). This year, yesterday, several of his colleagues insisted he come, so they could toast his departure, but he knew better. Casual interactions with the rest of the department are best avoided or cut short, lest new social obligations be foisted.

Case in point: Just this morning, as he went to refill his coffee, he was pressured to “maybe” grab a beer sometime with one of the other tenth grade teachers who’d won his conditional respect by fighting to keep Macbeth in the curriculum the year he was off that team. Another had cornered him on the way to the copier and invited him to a round of golf, to which, if that colleague was offering to pay, which he was, Graham couldn’t say no. When he returned from this ill-timed printing run, he pulled his office door closed to finish grading, leading his colleagues to believe that he’d already left, that they’d missed him. Saved them all the considerable awkwardness of feigning mutual fondness, wishing a great summer, a great life.

Anyway, the room’s done its job. He’s been productive there. And had laughs. He turns off the light and steps out into the hall, shutting and locking the door. As he turns the key, he notices, just above eye-level, the yellowed name tag, its black ink now faded to purple, reading Grim Delasnore. He gently picks at the bottom left corner and manages to detach most of it intact. This he slips into the billfold of his wallet.

ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO THAT SPRING, the school newspaper had run an anonymous lampoon of Roosevelt’s “worst teachers.” Some were eviscerated for their cruel attitudes towards students, others for their embarrassing attempts to appear “down with the kids,” one for his “irrelevant curriculum, impossible-to-meet standards, and inflated ego,” all while leading the “most tedious, cynical class conversations of all time,” earning himself a weakly punned pseudonym. The editor-in-chief was suspended over the column and made to deliver apologies in person to every individual named. When the lanky, freckled seventeen-year-old came knocking, tail between legs, to apologize, Graham could hear, across the hall, Eva’s ballpoint pause.

The kid made intense eye contact but seemed to be looking at the wall beyond as he said how he was sorry that he ran the story and was aware how hard Mr. Delacour and all the other teachers work to make challenging classes engaging and that English might not be every student’s cup of tea and that he could see how this may have hurt teachers’ feelings and have seemed disrespectful and that, of course, he didn’t agree with the author of the piece but felt it was his duty to keep an unbiased editorial page, to give the student body a voice, you know?

And then he added, paraphrasing Graham’s own classroom refrain, Besides, we know that you don’t do your job to be liked but to help us be right.

To which Graham had replied, capping his famous red pen, I assume you know that it is also the job of the editor-in-chief to make sure there aren’t any copy errors in the final edition of his paper. I counted at least fifteen grammatical mistakes and six obvious misspellings, including the word “misspell,” and thrust a bloodied copy of the school paper back at the young EIC.

Graham told him he had papers to grade now, but thank you for coming to see me. I appreciate it.

He slammed his door closed as soon as the kid’s trotting step rounded the corner out of the faculty offices. He wasn’t lying. He had at that moment a stack of seventy-five papers in front of him, untouched, all of which he’d collected more than three weeks prior. The Friday before the scathing editorial ran, he’d finally returned the Lear papers from the previous quarter. His AP Lit students had turned in shit, so he assumed there was a connection between a certain C minus, an entitled senior student who wrote a column for the paper, and the cowardly screed on the editorial page. That was all. Disgruntled customer. He turned back to his grading then rested his head in his hands. His eyes were watery and throat was tight. Allergies, must be.

Anyway, plenty of students loved him, he reminded himself. One even a little too much. Not that he’d known at the time—not even an inkling, he swore. He only learned about it a few years before this moment of re-christening when that one, Alden, had returned to Roosevelt as his colleague. Eva had even been on the hiring committee, given her blessing. Initially, he’d looked forward to it, his favorite student returning a decade later. Not that he’d ever tell Alden she was that—his favorite. Teachers aren’t supposed to have favorites, or if they do, they aren’t supposed to say so. But this unspoken rule doesn’t hold in the opposite direction: one bright April day, she’d decided to tell him that he was hers. (I’m your favorite student? He cackled, she groaned: Her favorite teacher.) He couldn’t resist feigning misunderstanding when she was driving at something serious. What he actually didn’t understand, even now, was why she couldn’t let the rest of it remain unsaid. It felt so light before it was wrapped in language.

Then there was—right in the midst of the memory within the memory—a slap outside his door, snapping him out of reverie. He cracked it open, but no one was there.

He barked across the hall to Eva. Was someone looking for me?

She said nothing, just stared up. He wheeled out to see the spot she was eyeing. It appeared, from the freshly inked name tag, that Grim Delasnore now occupied his office.

Stay gold, Ponyboy, said his friend from behind, a smile in her voice. The ballpoint scratched on. She was the fastest gun in the west. Her essays turned back within a week, corrected in ink as blue as her eyes.

HE WALKS OUT OF THE ENGLISH WING and approaches the main office by way of the gymnasiums. On his left he passes fifty years of athletic achievements, collecting dust in glass cases. On his right are the gym doors, three sets of them—enough to accommodate 1,600 students. The final ones are ajar and emanating 2000s pop. A phrase from a Rihanna song catches his ear—he’s forty and has a crick in his neck from sleeping on a friend’s couch. He and his wife are fighting, so he’s spent the previous night muffling the percussive terrorism of his friend’s daughter’s portable speaker playing “Umbrella” on repeat past midnight. Not four hours later, he’s here, squeaking down the lino hallway, waving a meek hello to Pierre, the early shift janitor, on his way down to the sour weightlifting room. Rihanna and his neck won’t let him alone. He’ll cave and buy the song later, play it on repeat himself in his closet as he optimistically supposes he’ll correct at least six papers before sunup. He won’t; Eva will arrive early with a coffee and a blueberry scone—dry, like he likes them—and ask how he’s doing. (No, really. How are you?) He’ll pause “Umbrella,” and be honest, which will take time. It takes a school year of mornings like that but eventually his neck, and his marriage, unkink themselves. He hopes he thanked Eva for more than the coffees and scones. But she’s gone, his papers are corrected, and his neck—which he’s been touching this whole time—feels better than it ever has.

He detours the laptop return and pokes his head in. The gym is empty but decorated like the dance scene from Back to the Future—or his own high school prom. There are bundles of blue balloons in every basketball hoop and streamers strung across the bleachers. It could be 1960 or 1980 or 2000. But it’s June 2022, and there’s a banner that reads Happy 20th (+ 2) Reunion, Class of 2000! In the fall of 1999, her senior year, Alden used to drop by his office and quote a random line from R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and he’d reply with the next. Then the week before Christmas break, they started this bit where they pretended Y2K was going to be a literal apocalypse, so they ended everything they said to each other with “just wanted you to know, in case the computers destroy us all.”

Mr. Delacour?

He turns around, and there’s a familiar face beaming at him. Shit, he is not going to remember the name. Average height, blond, holding a box of something heavy. Behind her, two women are supervising the inflation of a massive brown bear—their school mascot, Teddy, yes, like Roosevelt. One is holding the paws wide while the other hits the power on the industrial air pump. He’s pretty sure he had her in English 10—Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, all that—and that she answers to either Jessica or Hillary with one L.

Casey Walters. The blond gestures to herself. I was in your AP Lit and AP Lang classes. 

They were the best. So funny. I never see a phallic symbol without thinking of you! I still tell everyone about the elevator scene in Gatsby: “Keep your hands off the lever!” Or the baton in Sun Also Rises. Hilarious, truly. She readjusts her grip on the box and its contents, wine bottles apparently, clank. Here, let me set these down.

Teddy roars to life. Graham shifts his bag to his other shoulder and thinks, My legacy: literary dick jokes. Excellent.

How’re you doing? She doesn’t pause for an answer. This is such a nice surprise. I kind of, well, I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but thought you would’ve retired by now? Honestly, I feel kind of old now, so I’m sure I’m just projecting.

Great to see you, Casey.

He gives her a brief, shoulder-to-shoulder hug. Hearing them speak always brings it back. Such a chatty one. He had to cut her off more than once in his polite but firm way. He can’t recall where she sat senior year but, now that she’s said Lang, he’s sure he remembers her sitting in the back row with … wow, the names are not coming today, and, of course, Alden. Could it really be twenty years already? He has to anchor each school year to the ages of his kids. 1999-2000, Abigail, his eldest, would’ve been in fifth grade. The year of night terrors and science fairs. Max, their youngest, wasn’t out of diapers yet—they held him back from kindergarten for that—late bloomer, now a prodigy at an investment bank.

What the hell, it’s not like he has to run off to a game or to pick someone up (though memory lane has him feeling like he’s captain of the Delacour minivan again), so he does his best Eva impression and, to this student whom he remembers best for excessive class participation, he offers, I’m actually retiring this year, today. How are you?

Lucky me then—catching you on your way out! I’m great. Living in Seattle, still working in tech. Tried the whole “living in a van” thing in 2020, but now that I’m unexpectedly expecting, I’m getting ready for that new phase of life. She rubs the side of her stomach, which is protruding under her sundress. He’s going to congratulate her but she barrels on without a breath.

It’s so strange to be back in town for the first time in, gosh, twelve years? Not since the last reunion. I’m the chair. We had to postpone for COVID, obviously, and our usual venue ended up closing a few months ago. She gestures up at the reunion banner. But Principal DeWitt was nice enough to lend us this space last minute. (Principal DeWitt who couldn’t be bothered to offer Graham a spot on the search committee for his own replacement—real generous guy.) Congratulations, that’s so exciting! About the baby, I mean. Well and the reunion, too.

He is surprised to be tongue-tied. Teaching in town all these years, he runs into former students all the time. He and Eva used to run a little annual competition: how many kids can you spot without having them spot you. He won every year but one—the year Eva was out on maternity leave. She joked that she couldn’t stand “Ms. Morris!” being called down the produce aisle or having to suddenly cinch her towel in the public pool locker room after meeting the eyes of a student in the mirror, but they both knew better. She loved knowing and being known by her students. He, meanwhile, still drives two towns over for groceries and three for the gym.

You expecting a good turnout tonight?

So the RSVPs haven’t been super strong, but I’ve heard from at least a dozen people via text who’ve decided to come and are bringing other people from our year. My whole crew is definitely coming. Her eyes widen, and he can see the thought transcribing itself on the teleprompter in her head. Oh man, they would love to see you. You’d be the best surprise ever. Would you come?

That’s very sweet of you, but I think my wife and kids already have a little fête planned for me. I saw an ice cream cake in the freezer, so, you know, can’t miss that.

She puts on a pout. For like fifteen minutes? Stop in and let us toast you! We won’t even be underway until quarter of nine.

Then she looks serious and he hears her say, I think Alden will be there. Something inside him begins to hum. Will she now?

Sorry? I said actually get here a bit earlier because parking’s going to be competitive. 

He flushes, realizing his mistake. Alden wasn’t friends with Casey. No, they weren’t even in the same class period, technically. Alden had him first, but she also had a study hall—yes, that was it—eighth, the last period of the day, so sometimes, when she didn’t have a lot of work, she would ask to come watch eighth, too. He would always give her a hard time but never refuse her a pass. Her laugh cheered him on—what a comfort to know that at least one person gets your jokes. If someone asked him again—like one of his sycophantic young colleagues had the other day and he’d shrugged off—which year was his prime, the only honest reply would be 1999. He’d had Alden twice a day, every day.

He shakes his head while backing towards the door. Too late for this old man. Please tell everyone hi from me though—that I hope they’re well.

Graham Delacour, master of the quick exit, leans against the door frame and gives his best, most generous, greatest Gatsby smile, the one that lets him get away with just about everything, and delivers, cloaked in the warm syrup of fatherly fondness, his famous, favorite conversational cut off,

It was great to see you. Take care. 

He takes the steps out of Roosevelt High two at a time. As he approaches his car, a shadow passes in his peripheral vision. That superstitious part of his brain tells him to look. It almost convinces him that he’s summoned her here. He hasn’t but, says the magical thinking, maybe that’s his sign to text her. In the car, he takes out his phone and opens a message, but the louder voice reminds him that if she’s in town, she’ll reach out. Come to him. Always has before. 

Once home, he sets his book bag by the back door, and it slumps onto the floor facedown, inert now that it’s laptopless. He grabs it by the corner and walks it to the bins by the garage. As he opens the lid, he’s struck by deja vu; he’s done this, something like this, or exactly this, before. The last day of high school, June 1980, his beat-up Jansport with the fraying straps. 

He’d forgotten to check the small pocket, where he’d tucked the mimeographed copy of Mrs. Carter’s letter of rec. She’d made an exception, she never shared her letters. But he’d flashed his dimples, which have gotten him, then and since, most good things. Her letter—read once, in his car, before he turned out from the school lot—made him cry and believe he could teach. Reckless, hasty, he’d forgotten to take it out before he tossed the backpack, casting off his adolescent burden in the drunken euphoria of grad night.

He turns the worn leather bag upside down over the garage floor and shakes, half-expecting the long-lost letter to flutter out, but there’s only the clatter of paper clips. He pockets these and tosses the empty bag—reminder of so many working weekends, so many hours uncompensated—in with the ripe summer trash. He hopes his daughter won’t notice it’s gone; she gave it to him for Christmas in 2012, the first one out of college, overspending on her family out of her first full-time paychecks. She’s become more sensible since then—gotten her law degree, had a baby, bought a BMW, saved for retirement. She’ll be sending him a monthly allowance before he knows it. Thank god none of his own kids signed up for his thankless profession. He would’ve laughed them out of the room if they had tried, and they knew it. It was rule #1 in the Delacour household: Don’t be a teacher. Rule #2: No glitter.

All three kids are home on this perfect June evening. Summer solstice, in fact. They eat burgers and hot dogs on the patio out back. His wife, Lina, the most earnest soul he’s ever known, reads aloud a retirement-themed poem she’d found on Pinterest, and then his middle daughter puts on Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now,” both the original and 2004 remaster. They reminisce about the stories he brought home from school—the discrete events that had been easiest to explain to those who hadn’t been there. It paints a funny portrait of his thirty-four years at Roosevelt High. A caricature of his teaching career. They sing him “Happy Birthday” as colorful wax drips tie-dye designs into the cold, sweet icing. He’ll be sixty tomorrow, but they had to celebrate tonight. In the morning, he and Lina will leave for a month-long Mediterranean cruise.

He pulls each of his beautiful, blond, grown kids in for a tight hug as they depart. He whispers thank you in each ear and gives them each a single kiss on the cheek. How he got so lucky in his home life, he’ll never know. His children are so kind, so open, so blond, so unlike him, so the spitting image of Lina. That old intrusive thought gallops in: They’re her kids, he’s just the chauffeur, janitor, bank. His wife wraps her arms around him from behind and rests her chin on his shoulder, quieting his mind with the reassuring warmth of her toned torso. They wave as the youngest backs out of the driveway.

She whispers, I love them, but I’m so glad to have you all to myself.

As soon as he’s sure his son is out of range, he turns, smiling, and pulls her into a deep kiss. She takes him by the hand and leads him inside, up to their bed, the happiest place in their marriage. It’s as good as it ever is, but the whole time he’s kicking himself for not going back downstairs first to turn off the lights. Retired, yes, but still responsible.

GRAHAM CHECKS HIS WATCH ON THE BEDSIDE TABLE. It’s only ten thirty, but Lina’s deep in sleep—her long, blond hair draped across her neck like an elegant scarf. He’s been staring at their ceiling for the better part of an hour, watching the light from the moon change. They’ll need to be out the door by six, but the car’s already packed. Dishes done. Patio furniture stacked. Not a thing out of place. Nothing else to do. No reason to putter. He remembers there’s half a bottle of wine yet. That’ll do it. Red wine always sends him into a stupor.

He pads into the kitchen and pours wine into a juice glass, which he sips at the island while scrolling on his phone. He opens up the email app, at first intending to delete it, but then remembers a message he’d like to save before he does.

From: Eva Morris

To: RooseveltEnglishDept. 

Subject line: To Byzantium 

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I have served with many of you for so long. It is with no less pleasure that I have served with some of you for a few years only. To colleagues new and old, I wish you much success in your continued mission as the intellectual and spiritual guides to our young people as they wend their way towards the first major fork in the path of life: high school graduation. I would not have made it this far, nor had nearly as much fun along the way, without all of you. Thank you. I’ll only be a few blocks away, so if you wish, pay me a visit—and soon. I’m here, as they say, for a limited time. And then—on to Byzantium.

Yours, 

Eva

Of course, being very Eva to do so, the final phrase links off to Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” He clicks the hyperlink and reads the poem to himself, first in his head and then, softly, without intention, aloud:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire 

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

They shouldn’t have been friends. Or at least shouldn’t have been as close. She was one of those English teachers who had students adopt a 19th century poem, learn it by heart, and recite it for the class, often tearfully, so moved they were by the poet’s words—a feat he attributed to her infectious passion for those words and her genuine celebration of the students’ own words, too. He is—was—one of those English teachers who could only be bothered to read a poem aloud if it was part of AP exam practice and even then had to put on a silly voice to make it through the thing. She was his better in so many respects: always knew how to counsel a student going through a tough time, unfailingly made the right call in even the grayest situations, remained humble in the face of all the warranted praise she received from current and former students. She was the wise, brilliant, passionate one; he was the one who made her laugh.

She wasn’t quite so earnest and kind-to-the-bone as his wife, though; no, they had little in common. In all the years Graham had worked at Roosevelt, his wife and Eva had only met half a dozen times. Would she have come over tonight, under different circumstances? If she had, he knows she would’ve given him that look while Lina had read the poem. The slightly mean, very meaningful look. Her trademark “seriously?” look. But, at the end, she would’ve snapped politely, as one does for any poet, as she would for any tearful student. Anyway, they would’ve said a real goodbye inside the offices. Had one more long conversation—book bags slung over shoulders, parental obligations momentarily forgotten—in that awkward linoleum hallway between the coffeemaker and the toilet. That’s where their friendship will always live.

Somehow he’s finished the bottle of wine and is now wearing jeans and sneakers and checking his pockets for his wallet and keys as he pulls the backdoor closed behind him.

He turns the key in the ignition and says aloud, What am I doing? before he puts the car in reverse and pulls out to the right. He takes a left at the end of his street, a right at the first intersection, and heads towards the center of town. The bars are bustling, queues of heeled women wait with khaki-clad boyfriends. Kids younger than his own—surely a recent former student among them—jaywalk with a squeal, wielding gravity-defying confections from the trendy dessert parlor that just opened up. At the intersection, he fiddles with the radio and lands on the oldies station playing the opening bars of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” the pre-game anthem of his senior year of college. This spurs him on, straight up West Main Street, knowing that as long as he doesn’t take his foot off the gas, he’ll reach the big hill and long drive that will deliver him back to the entrance of the school.

The summer moon is high now, lending familiar suburban streets an uncanny, sepia glow like they’re illuminated from within, a paper lantern replica of the town he once knew. He’s about to flip his right blinker to turn ninety degrees towards his destiny—a warm champagne toast raised by beaming former students whose names he’s long forgotten—when he has to slam on the brakes to avoid colliding with a large deer, an unblinking doe, standing in the middle of his lane. She bounds across the road and into the brush on the opposite side. Someone has to lean on the horn behind him before he recalls that his purpose behind the wheel is to be moving. More wine than he realized, he thinks, or maybe the weird light. He pulls over a block up from the school and cuts the engine. What am I doing, he hears himself say again. He looks back and across the street to the spot where the deer disappeared, the deep hedge of the town cemetery. He exhales, not realizing that he’s been holding his breath this whole time.

Now he’s here, parked, apparently to make a guest appearance at the reunion. He looks in the rearview and sees that balloons flank the main entrance to Roosevelt: 2000. Silhouettes are recognizing each other, embracing. No, this isn’t right. He shouldn’t be here. But neither can he bring himself to restart the car.

Rather than sit and chance getting recognized by another Casey, he gets out, looks left, crosses to the opposite side, and begins picking his way between granite headstones and marble monuments. He’s only been here once before—the burial—though he’s passed the entrance on his way to work every day since. He’d told himself he’d visit once a week, tell her all the inane department gossip and gripe about the new district initiatives, but he couldn’t make it through the gates. As he enters, he remembers that she’s beside a tall pine. Just his luck—there only seems to be one of those in the whole place.

Eva Morris 

1962 - 2020

Friend, Teacher, Mother

He kneels down in the soft cemetery grass and starts to dig: a few inches deep, off to the left side, below the word friend. When he’s satisfied with the shape and depth of the hole, he pulls the name from his wallet, smooths its inevitable creases over his knee, and places it rightside down in the earth, burying it with a few pats of dirt. He knows it’s silly, but he likes the idea that she’d be able to read it if her blue eyes were there. They’d had a pact. Ride or die.

Turned out that Eva couldn’t wait. Cancer—like her mother and sister before. He puts the dirty fingers of his right hand to his lips, gives them a kiss, and touches them to the top of the headstone. I’m out, too.

He gets up and dusts his hands off on the thighs of his jeans, debating if he should sit and wait a while, maybe say something more to her before going home, or turn away now and resolve to lie silent next to his perfect, sleeping wife. Before he can answer his own question, from the shadows a voice whisper-shouts, Are you crying?

His gaze drifts until it settles on the outline of the only person to whom the voice could belong. He laughs. They do have this odd connection, even he will admit that. A fine filament that, if you tug it hard enough, will pull on the other person miles, years away.

How the hell are you here right now?

Our twentieth reunion is tonight. Heard you didn’t want to see us. Sounds like me. But why aren’t you over there?

He folds his arms over his wrinkled button-down with the semi-conscious intention of hiding his small paunch. But he realizes that trying to hide it admits embarrassment, so he drops his arms back to his sides. He’s old. He should have a bit of a belly now. Who’s he trying to impress anyway?

She approaches him, but they are still several yards apart. His cheeks must be shining in the moonlight; he dries them with the back of a hand, making like he’s getting a speck out of his eye. He hasn’t seen Alden in more than a decade. A handful of texts after she left and then nothing.

He was never sure who let it die.

Wanted to get some air and thought I’d pay a visit to my old haunt. She drags from a joint and exhales a plume in his direction. She too is wearing jeans—black—and a leather jacket he’d recognize anywhere, though the warm evening doesn’t warrant it.

Really? You hung out in the cemetery?

The cemetery was the unofficial headquarters of the drug-rug wearing, pot smoking, vaguely delinquent. In high school, she had run with a crowd associated with the opposite epithets: well dressed, squeaky clean, Ivy bound.

She doubles over and straightens up with a smirk. You still don’t know anything about me, do you?

He watches her in the moonlight, smoking, smirking, and says, That’s the great thing about retirement—plenty of time to learn new things.

He doesn’t mean this of course, or only half does. She’s always egged on his impulse to tease. When she was briefly back as his colleague, she had a knack for peeking around door frames, pulling faces, delivering normal replies as though they were punchlines. He’s missed that volley sometimes. Even Eva didn’t serve it back like that—hard.

So the rumors are true then. Special last day?

Ah, you know, just bureaucratic crap, device returns, etcetera. The real last day was when the kids left. One of my classes gave me a singing card.

A mutual understanding of his sarcastic enjoyment and their sarcastic intention passes between them. Alden knows that rule of engagement well: Never give Delacour something sincere unless you don’t mean it.

Your favorite. But really? No sad faculty lounge ice cream cake send off? 

No, the ice cream cake was had with the family. A happy, back-patio ice cream cake. How sweet. She holds out the joint. Want some?

He does but he shouldn’t. Saying yes to her made things complicated once before, saying yes, against his better judgment, to a walk in the park on a bright April day, a dozen years ago.

After meandering around the duck pond, they sat down, side by side, on a wooden bench (easier to talk if you didn’t have to look). It had started when she was his student, she explained. She felt cliche for the crush—so predictable. Always the precocious but absurdly unconfident girl, always the charismatic male English teacher who let her sit with him in the classroom alone during lunch, replied to the snarky notes she left in his faculty mailbox, gave her a copy of his favorite novel at graduation.

She tiptoed around outright accusations but asked once, softly, voice almost breaking, How did he not know the impact of those actions on someone like her?

It’s rhetorical, she assured him, you don’t have to answer. (He didn’t.)

She was older then, that morning, than she had been, obviously—anything is older than 15, 16, 17—but in so many ways, she still felt like his Former Student more than his Current Colleague. (Ironic capitalization proliferated in their text exchanges that year, lightning the mood of otherwise weighty conversations.) And as a Former Student, there’d always be thousands like her, she insisted, who bore that same flattening, unfeeling label, and only one of him, the Favorite Teacher. That imbalance irked her at first, then became unbearable, which brought them to this moment on the bench in the park.

How can I help? He had wanted to know. (The right question, the upstanding question, even now, tonight, he stands by it.)

She looked away and continued. She would never be another Eva, she knew that, she assured him, but she wanted some confirmation that she wasn’t incorrect in her perception of a… mutual fondness. He answered the rest of her questions with a question, a joke, a laugh.

Anything else would have crossed The Line, he told himself.

He hadn’t realized they’d been moving closer, but they’re now in arm’s reach. He shakes his head at the joint she’s offering him and laughs.

It’s all so absurd. He’s only gotten drinks with her once before and made sure to stop after two. Mixing Alden and intoxicants never seemed like a great idea.

Their late-night text banter, however, was fine. Too much fun to be a problem. He never stopped to wonder if it was one innuendo too many. He was too tickled to think with his brain; the banter came from the pit of his stomach, where butterflies are born. That winter and spring, he excused himself for the bathroom so often that his wife suggested he should see a urologist. His was a different kind of incontinence: he couldn’t hold back even the smallest smile when her name appeared on his phone, so it was off to the toilet to type a teasing reply.

You’ve never gripped anything that hard before? Sad, he wrote, slamming back her serve—a complaint about how sore her hands were from a day of competitive doubles tennis.

Really pressing up against The Line with that one, she volleyed. You’re pressing The Line up against me, he returned.

But what’s actually pressing up against him, now, in this moment, this graveyard, is the smell of the joint and something floral. Could Alden really be so grown up as to wear perfume?

Come on, it’s legal now. Besides, as of tonight, you’re not a teacher. Don’t have to be on your best behavior anymore, she mocks.

It must be the oncoming birthday, speeding towards him like he’s the deer. He wonders where the doe went. Probably back with her kids. Like he should be. Not that his kids live with him anymore. But he really should be home when 59 turns to 60.

Against the shoulds, he takes the joint from her and puts it to his lips. He pulls. The taste of burnt paper lingers and resurrects another kind of memory. His own high school graduation night he got so high he thought he’d died and returned as a ghost, so he watched his parents watching TV from outside the living room window, almost scared them to death.

The summer after her confession in the park, Alden left Roosevelt, ostensibly to take a position at a school closer to her then-fiancé, who was at residency in the city. The following fall, Eva poked her head into his office one day and caught him staring at this ironic postcard Alden had sent him when she was in college. She asked how Alden was doing at her new school, and Graham replied with a joke that didn’t quite land. Eva had raised an eyebrow and said, Interesting. After she turned the corner, he pulled the card off the wall and threw it out.

Fuck, says Alden, eyebrows raised. Cheers to your retirement then.

She sits down on the warm dirt below the pine and leans back against its trunk. He follows. Here they are again, side by side.

This is where they begin with the “remember when’s?”. 

She brings up the group essay experiment that she still holds against him; the time he had to leave class the day after New Years to throw up from what was clearly a hangover; all their many in-jokes and their origins; the time he showed her a picture of himself in high school, a scrawny thing with early 80s hair and too-short track shorts. He laughs like he hasn’t in years.

As they pass the joint back and forth, their fingertips brush. This is new. In the twenty-five years he’s known her, they’ve never touched. Not even a hug. With other Former Students—Casey, just today—but never her. Maybe that had been his mistake. Maybe the withholding had made it all worse.

A breeze picks up. At some point, Alden realizes whose grave it is and gestures towards the cold stone. I always felt like she was the One Who Got Away, says Alden, of the woman whose class she’d never had the pleasure of taking. She was so good.

But instead you had three years with me—you should’ve gotten a consolation prize. An ice cream cake, maybe. He says this in the affected inflection he uses to signal self-deprecation. He’s the master of transfiguring hurt into humor. They could put that on his grave.

She rolls her eyes. You still don’t get it, do you? 

What? He pulls on the joint. It’s almost ashed. He feels so outside himself. Like he’s watching himself play opposite a foulmouthed, easy-on-the-eyes, leading lady in his own biopic.

The generic ring of an iPhone rips through the moment. Shit, she says and gets up to take the call—hers, thank god, as he hopes Lina hasn’t woken to the empty bed—and he hears her, so close yet a lightyear away, speaking into the receiver in the gooey voice one reserves for pets and young children.

Sorry, that was my kids. It’s bedtime in L.A.

Not to worry. You’re in L.A. now? The complete image of a sunny life fades in: palm trees, sea breezes, children splashing in shallow surf, a husband who brushes a strand of hair away before leaning in for a sunlit kiss.

No, they’re visiting their grandparents and wanted to say goodnight. 

The scene dissolves, and Alden comes into focus again, settling back against the tree. What time is it?

Few minutes after midnight, she says and asks, Why? Need to leave already to pick up a kid from practice?

In the years after high school graduation, she would text him when she was in town, ask him to coffee or lunch. He could never spend more than an hour, squeezing her in during chauffeur duty. Easier not to explain to Lina.

A little too late for that now, he says. Past midnight means I’m officially 60. He doesn’t say but thinks, Fuck, that was fast.

And I’m almost 40, she says. That matronly enough? 

He’d told her at the park that it would be easier for him to navigate this relationship once she was more “matronly.” She wouldn’t need a mentor, or whatever it was she was asking him to be, by then, but he could try to someday be a friend. No matter how many times she asked why it mattered for her to look older, he never explained. He couldn’t; age wasn’t really the problem.

He looks over at her. She’s flashing him her own greatest Gatsby smile—the one that makes you feel understood in just the way you want to be, a smile that once lit him up two hours a day. The responsible part of him shouts, Quick, look away! but he rebels and holds her gaze, considering once more the heavy-lidded eyes, mane of dark hair, the smirk. It’s the smirk that had almost done him in. He sees it in the doorway of his classroom, at a desk in the back right corner, walking in the hall with friends, across from him in a diner booth, coming towards him across the newly green lawn of the town park on a bright April day, here tonight beside the grave of his best friend. Fuck that smirk, fuck her for still having that smirk, he wants to fuck that smirk right off her face.

(No! He doesn’t mean that. He swears—to whom? Eva? himself?—he doesn’t.)

But the answer to her question—whether she’s matronly enough yet—seems to him self-evident in the way he’s staring at her, so instead he answers her with his unanswered question: What were you going to say earlier?

When? 

When you said I still don’t get it. 

She breaks eye contact and says, I feel like the moment’s passed. 

Well now I have to know.

From her body language, reeling backward, a look on her face he’s seen only a few times before—whenever she was contemptuous of something an ignorant male classmate said, for instance—he thinks for a second that she’s going to stand up and walk away, but she doesn’t.

I thought you preferred to leave things unsaid, she says. Unexplored. 

But it’s also his birthday, it’s his retirement, his best friend is two years dead, and he’s a greedy little boy who wants to hear that same bedtime story just one more time.

As you said, I’m not a teacher anymore. Haven’t been yours for a long time.

It’s funny. I’ve been a teacher now for nearly as long as you had when I first walked into your classroom. For more years than I had when you first met me, actually. I was only fourteen.

He’s long teased her about looking young for her age, but her actual fourteen year old self is inaccessible to him, blurred behind a pane of fogged glass. What he’ll never forget is the last day she was in his classroom—not as a teen but as a young woman, twenty five, maybe twenty six. He can picture that Alden with alarming clarity. The length of her hair (just below the shoulder). The color of her nail polish (a deep lilac). On their final day as colleagues, in his empty classroom, they’d sat alone together, side by side, to watch a movie she’d been begging him all year to give a chance. Even after her April confession, which to another might’ve been a caution, he figured it couldn’t hurt to humor her.

There’s a tricky thing with this profession—the illusion of intimacy it creates between teacher and student, she says. The teacher maintains the boundary, The Line, as the student pushes up against it. What keeps it safe is that most students graduate and don’t look back. The favorite teacher becomes a fond memory, the favorite student a success story. It depends on never again having proximity, or chemistry. And if you have both, things can get weird.

They did get weird. That day when they were alone in the dim classroom, watching that obviously romantic movie, sitting at desks arranged close enough that he could smell her green apple shampoo, how much he’d wanted to reach out and… Instead he’d abruptly excused himself to get a drink of water.

She squints up at the moon above. He follows her gaze and rests his eyes among the stars. 

He can tell she’s finished, but he’s dissatisfied. The story wasn’t over. 

It’s so clear. You can almost see the Milky Way, he offers. He gives some wait time, like any good teacher, to see if she’ll bite, but she doesn’t. So he tries a different tactic: I imagine it doesn’t feel so weird anymore though. (But he knows it must. He’s feeling very… weird. She must be too.) Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here again, alone with me.

When he came back into the room, the lights were on and the projector was off. What had happened? Did he ask her why she’d stopped the movie? Did she answer him?

So what’s next? Alden asks the sky. Now that you’re no longer Mr. Delacour.