Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  I certainly wasn’t looking for their compliments. Nothing I did would change, whether they gave me a compliment or not. Maybe that was the arrogance I would be accused of possessing. To me, it was just a simple truth.

  There were teachers I respected, of course, but many I didn’t respect. I didn’t do anything disrespectful to them. I was simply indifferent. In those teachers’ classes, I looked beyond them to the challenge of the work.

  Still, there was no way around this. I was standing there fantasizing about a teacher and actually hoping he had some fantasies about me. For the moment, at least, I was in exciting new territory, certainly more interesting territory than I was in with Carlton James in the cafeteria. If I had too many more experiences like that, I would probably give up on boys altogether, I thought.

  “Sit. Take a load off,” Mr. Taylor said.

  He put his hands behind his head and looked at me. There was something about the way his eyes moved over me that made me hesitate. I told myself I was feeling the natural instinctive fear a female had of a male. I had read enough about it to know what it was.

  Then I told myself to stop being so damn analytical and enjoy this. You can analyze it later. For now, just soak up the experience. You’ve never been with a man who looked at you more as a woman than as a brilliant brain. You don’t have to romanticize about it. You’re really here, and he’s really here looking at you and saying these things to you.

  “You’ve got to learn how to relax, Mayfair,” he said. “You’re too intense about everything.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I was never in his class. He had come to teach junior-high English when I entered ninth grade, nearly three years ago. Allison had him for English now, but I really had no contact with him.

  “I watch you, see you moving about the school. When you walk through the hall, you barely look right or left. You don’t let anything distract you. I never saw anyone as intense. A bomb could go off, and you’d keep going in the direction you were headed if you had some purpose, some goal to fulfill,” he said, and widened his smile. “Not that there’s anything wrong with the way you walk,” he added.

  “What’s that mean?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. Did he realize he already had gone too far? I regretted coming back at him so fast and hard. He shrugged, took his feet off his desk, and leaned forward. “Well, you move with a great deal of confidence. Great posture,” he said. “Even now, standing there, you don’t slouch like so many of the girls your age do. I have to tell you that you fascinate me, and I don’t mean because of your off-the-charts IQ scores.” He nodded. “The way someone walks can tell you a lot about that person.”

  “I’m not conscious of it,” I said. “I don’t think about walking like that. Walking is a habitual action. We might be conscious of it occasionally to impress someone, but generally, we don’t think about it. Everyone has a unique way of walking.”

  “Exactly. That’s my point. It’s part of who you are. Insecure people have a far different way of walking from secure people, and you don’t look at all insecure, ever.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. Stop challenging every comment I make. Relax,” he repeated. He paused and leaned back again. Then he nodded at me and smiled. “Until today, I didn’t think looking this way was important to you,” he said, holding his right hand out, palm up.

  “Looking what way?”

  “Attractive. I don’t mean to say you weren’t a very pretty girl before, but now you have your hair styled. You’re wearing makeup. Quite intelligently, I might add. And you’re wearing clothes that complement your figure. You don’t mind me telling you these things, do you?” he quickly asked.

  “Mind? No. I just didn’t expect it.”

  He shrugged again. “Why not? I’m no hypocrite like some of my fellow male teachers who will swear on a stack of dictionaries that they don’t lust after any young, beautiful teenage girls.”

  I think I was more surprised than he was at my smile. “I don’t doubt it. I’m just surprised to hear you say it.”

  “Hey, we’re all human,” he said. “When I see an attractive woman, I don’t pretend I don’t see her just because I’m a junior-high English teacher. Which reminds me.” He lifted a pile of papers. “Spot English grammar quiz. It’s good to give them. Keeps the kids on their toes, but I hate correcting them. Care to help?”

  “I really do have to get to the library, Mr. Taylor. I have a paper I want to finish this week, and I have lots of reading left to do.”

  “Oh, too bad. Well, maybe when you have time, you can stop by once in a while after school and help me with some of this dull work, huh?”

  “Why would I want to do dull work? You shouldn’t think of what you teach as being dull.”

  He laughed. “I knew it would be an interesting challenge talking to you, Mayfair. You really are a breath of fresh air for me.”

  “Why is that? What makes me so fresh?” I knew I was asking too many questions and challenging him too much, but I couldn’t help being interested.

  “You’re not distracted with yourself. I think that’s why you didn’t do all these cosmetic things until now. You have your feet on the ground. You’re head and shoulders above your peers, and I don’t mean just because of your IQ. There’s something very mature about you. I can have a conversation with you.” He paused, stood up, and came around to the front of his desk to sit back against it, folding his arms. “I bet you wouldn’t mind speaking to someone more mature, either. You must be starved for meaningful conversation at this school.”

  “That’s not why I come here,” I said. Instinctively, I brought my books up against my breasts. The way he was looking at me made me feel as if I were standing naked in front of him.

  He shrugged. “Maybe not, but everyone wants some social contact with other people. I’ve noticed you don’t have all that many friends here. You don’t join any clubs or teams. You don’t sit with anyone in particular in the cafeteria or walk with anyone in the hallways. You don’t even talk to other students at the lockers in the morning. You float through this place as if you’re on the way to somewhere else.”

  “You sound like you’re watching me all the time.”

  “As much as I can,” he said with that disarmingly soft smile again.

  His honesty didn’t shock me as much as it excited me. Again, I felt myself smile as if there was another part of me taking me over. I didn’t want to resist.

  “Actually, I overhear the students gossiping from time to time and pick up things the guidance counselor says. No one’s saying anything terribly negative about you,” he quickly added. “It’s just comments, observations.”

  “I’m sure,” I said dryly. “They all have my interest at heart. I confuse them.”

  “I’ll say that’s true, but you don’t have to explain to me why you don’t socialize much with your classmates. As I said, I know you’re head and shoulders above them. Miles ahead of them, in fact. I’m sure what they do, what interests them, is unimportant to you.”

  I wanted to say that wasn’t completely true, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to continue standing there talking to him. His words and the way he continued to look at me were starting to make me unsure of myself. I think it was because he was touching places inside me that I usually protected, like my loneliness. Now I thought it was a mistake to play with him like this, to allow myself to have such fantasies.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, and turned toward the door.

  “Okay. Please stop by anytime you want to talk or take pity on a poor junior-high English teacher buried in drudge work. Even though I love my subject matter, there’s still drudge work,” he added quickly. “No matter what exciting thing you end up doing, you’ll see there’s always the drudge work.”

  I glanced back at him. He held that licentious smile. It sent a tremor of excitement through my breasts. I felt myself blush.

  When I had woken up th
is morning excited about my new look and how my classmates and other students would react to me, what was furthest from my mind was how the best-looking male teacher in the school would react. How did I miss that? I hated not anticipating something, especially something directly related to me. Although I would have had to be blind or completely oblivious not to have noticed him before, I never dreamed my changed appearance would mean that he would be the one I would draw out.

  The one thing I hated most was surprise. I spent most of my time researching, investigating, and understanding everything I saw, did, and touched. I was always prepared, but I would be the first to admit that I wasn’t prepared for this. He nearly had taken my breath away.

  This whole experience had me confused, not just about him but also about myself. I hated anyone causing me to be unsure about myself. It rarely happened at school, but I wasn’t leaving his room because I was dying to get to the library. As hard as it was for me to admit it, I was leaving his room because I was a little frightened of my own reactions.

  I was acting and thinking like one of those girls in my class whom I ridiculed.

  I hurried out and didn’t look back, but just like before, I instinctively knew that he was standing in his doorway watching me walk away.

  And he wasn’t interested in my good posture, either. I had first thought that this skirt Julie had chosen was too snug and too short, but it was the way many of the other girls were dressing. Give the devil her due. Julie knew fashion, knew how to be attractive. She had captured my father’s interest and his heart, hadn’t she? What good did it do me to deny it?

  I did almost nothing in the library. I couldn’t get the conversation I had with Mr. Taylor out of my mind, nor could I stop thinking about the way he looked at me. When the bell rang and I left to go to my next class, I anticipated him being in his doorway waiting for me to walk by again. At first, he wasn’t there, and I felt a combination of relief and a little disappointment, but before I’d passed his room completely, he appeared.

  “How’d your research go?” he called out to me.

  “Fine,” I said, only glancing back at him.

  “Best posture in the school,” he called after me, and laughed. I kept walking, walking faster but smiling to myself.

  I was thinking so hard about him that I completely forgot about the incident in the cafeteria with Carlton James. It wasn’t until I went to PE class that the consequences of that disappointing conversation were brought home to me. I was just getting my uniform on when Joyce Brooker stepped up behind me.

  “We heard you blew off Carlton today,” she said.

  I turned and looked at her. I couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to me or I to her. She was probably the prettiest of the girls with whom she hung, or I should say clung. They always looked more like a clump of girls clinging to one another than a group of close friends.

  Joyce had almost doll-like facial features, stunning green eyes, and thick amber hair. She had the best figure, too, but she behaved just like someone who knew all this would behave. Talk about a walk, I thought, recalling Mr. Taylor’s comment about me. Joyce didn’t walk; she moved as if she were on a fashion model’s runway. If any of them would go on to become Miss California, it would be Joyce. I could just see her answering the final question.

  “If you could have one wish, what would it be?”

  “A better cell phone.” Or maybe she’d realize she had to at least look serious and mature and say, “I would want to see an end to poverty.” Even though she didn’t know a single poor person.

  Sometimes I felt a little envious of her, but I smothered that feeling as quickly as it showed its face.

  “He never got on,” I told her.

  “Huh?”

  The other girls joined her. They were like pigeons waiting for me to cast some peanuts.

  “I couldn’t have blown him off. He never got on.”

  She laughed and looked at the others. “Well, he tried, didn’t he?”

  “If so, it was a pathetic attempt,” I said.

  “Pathetic? Carlton James? I think it might be you who’s pathetic for rejecting him. Unless, of course, you’re seeing someone outside the school. Someone older, maybe? Someone in college? Figures that someone with your brains would probably be dating a college boy, maybe even a graduate student.”

  “Are you?” Cora Addison quickly followed. I always thought she had a face like a fox’s, because it was so narrow, and her nose was so pointed and long.

  I gave them all a big smile. “I never realized my comings and goings were of so much interest to all of you. I guess I should be flattered. You’re interested in someone other than yourselves. I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Curiosity, not interest,” Denise Hartman corrected. “We can’t help wondering if being so intelligent means you have no love life. Men don’t like brainy girls.”

  “There’s no basis in fact for that sort of conclusion, Denise. The least intelligent organisms conjugate.”

  “What?”

  “I’m surprised you’re not familiar with that, being closer to an amoeba than a primate.”

  “Excuse me,” she said, with her right hand on her hip. “Can you talk English?”

  “Is that what you speak? It’s difficult to tell.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Joyce said.

  “Was there a question? I’m still not finished translating.”

  “Ha-ha,” Cora said. “Forget her.”

  “No,” Joyce said, not giving ground. “The question was, are you seeing someone on the outside, and is that someone older, maybe much older?”

  I half wondered if someone had reported my private conversation with Mr. Taylor or had overheard him talking to me in the hallway. Was that what she was fishing to find out?

  “That’s two questions,” I said.

  “Well, give us two answers.”

  “Do you write the social column here?”

  “Sort of. So?”

  I slipped on my sneakers and looked at the three of them. “I still don’t understand why this is so important to all of you. Don’t you have any lives of your own? Do you have to use other people’s lives for your kicks and highs? Live vicariously?”

  “Forget the big words. You don’t have anyone, do you?” Cora said with a wry smile. “That’s why you’re not answering us. You’ve probably never had anyone.”

  “Any boy, at least,” Denise said.

  The two others brightened.

  “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? You’re gay. That explains why you rejected Carlton and why no one has ever seen you with a boy anywhere.”

  “Believe what you want,” I said. “Unlike you, I couldn’t be less interested in what you think or do or what anyone in this school thinks or does, for that matter.”

  “Carlton’s the best-looking boy in school. He could have any girl he wanted,” Cora said, mostly to the other two. They nodded. “Why would she reject him if she wasn’t gay?”

  “Come to think of it, now that you’ve brought it up, Cora, I’ve seen the way she looks at us, especially in here when we’re undressing,” Joyce said.

  “Oh, really? How do I look at you?”

  “Like a boy looks at us.”

  I smiled. “You have misjudged me, girls. I am studying you, but I’m in the middle of doing a research paper on lower forms of life, and your resemblances to single-cell organisms are too remarkable to ignore. Carlton James might be the subject of every adolescent girl’s wet dream to you, but he doesn’t fit my criteria. I require more than a handsome face. I have to be with someone who can do more than talk about bubble-gum cards.”

  “Wet dream?” Denise said.

  “Look it up,” I said, and walked out to the gym.

  The only reason I continued to take PE was my belief that it was important to get some physical exercise every day. I enjoyed the warm-up Miss Hirsch put us through, all the exercises, but only ha
lfheartedly participated in the games, especially basketball. Whatever team I was on, the members hardly passed the ball to me. I didn’t care. I was more interested in running up and down the court. Sometimes I didn’t even notice who had the ball.

  The three bitches from Macbeth ignored me for the remainder of the period and afterward in the locker room. What Joyce had been asking about my seeing someone older did make me a little more self-conscious, and I deliberately avoided walking near Mr. Taylor’s classroom. I hurried out of the building at the end of the day. Allison was already waiting for her mother to take us home.

  “You probably got a lot of compliments today, huh?” she asked me.

  “I didn’t notice,” I told her.

  “Yes, you did.” She stared at me and almost reluctantly added, “You look very pretty now, Mayfair. Even some of my friends said some things about you, some nice things.”

  Why take it out on her? I thought. “Thank you, Allison. And yes, I did receive compliments.”

  “I knew you would. My mother will be very happy about it.”

  “That’s good. It’s good she’s happy about something,” I muttered.

  I looked back as other students poured out of the building. The three bitches from Macbeth looked my way and then laughed as they piled into Joyce’s SUV. I had hoped that my answers had discouraged them from having any more interest in me and what I did and didn’t do, but as it turned out, my responses had resulted in quite the opposite reaction. I wouldn’t learn about it until that night, however.

  When Julie picked us up, she had almost the identical question waiting on her lips.

  Yes, I had received compliments, I told her, and yes, I felt better about myself. She drove with a smile of self-satisfaction planted on her face all the way home. But thanks to the bitches from Macbeth, that would quickly disappear later.