Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one’s letting me in on the secret.” There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.

Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.

The funny thing was that his kiss had felt like fucking me, and his fucking me felt like being kissed, everywhere, every bit of my body unbearably warm and buzzing.

“Maise,” I said. “Huh?” “That’s my name.” I gave it easily, freely, no strings. You remember these things later, when they matter. “And the reason I need that class,” I said, “is so I can get the fuck out of this town.” He smiled, a big, crooked grin. “Good. That’s a worthy reason to fuck me over.”

There was something very boyish about him at that moment, despite the five o’clock shadow, the blue rivers of veins mapping the back of his hand, the entire adult world he was part of. He looked lost. Maybe it was hypocritical, but the boyishness I barely tolerated in guys my age was exactly what drew me to him. He was like me: not fully part of the adult or child world. An exile, watching wistfully from the outside.

Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you’re gorgeous, you’re fearless and unpredictable, you’re a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes.

He looked at all of me, my fresh teenage skin, my adult certainty, my old soul. No one had ever looked at me so completely. No one had ever seen me as such a whole, rounded person.

The earth sank beneath us, pressed by the weight of the whole universe above. How could it set us up like this, every planet precisely aligned, if it didn’t mean for us to collide?

“You’ve done something to me.” My voice was quiet, too, a ribbon of breath threading into the breeze that stirred my hair. “I feel like I’m waking from a long dream, and everything is so much more beautiful than I remembered.”

I kissed my teacher in the shadow of the water tower, beneath the stars.

I’ve been pretty honest so far, haven’t I? So I’ll admit: it wasn’t innocent, blind love. His age drew me to him in the first place; now it was his being my teacher that gave me a wild, terrified thrill every time we touched, infusing me with adrenaline, making my skin prickle. The danger was an electrode buried in my brain, lighting up my most primal fear and pleasure circuits. There was more to it, of course. Something was unfolding in me that had never opened before. But I wasn’t kidding myself. The forbiddenness was part of it.

This was an old-time, black-and-white-movie kiss, with the orchestra swelling in my chest, hot tungsten lamps carving out our shadows. My bones turned to air, nothing holding me up but the fierceness of my desire.

“I can’t hold on to you. You’re like that shooting star. Just a trail of fire in my hands.”

Things I never expected to do my senior year: kiss my best friend, fuck my teacher, let said teacher hold my hair while I puked my guts out.

That’s another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they’re true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.

The city at night gave me the same melancholy twinge I’d felt as a kid watching Mom plug in the Christmas tree. Something beautiful and full of promise, but something you knew you could never touch.

And that made my heart ache, too—the thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.

Why did everything beautiful come from pain?

“We have no age. We exist outside of time. We’re timeless.”

He held the ring out to me, and I took it, swallowing. My skin flashed hot and cold at the same time. This, I thought, is going to become a memory: the way I’m shivering but so warm inside, the way the sky is trembling above us, threatening rain, and the way your eyes are bluer than I’ve ever seen. I slid the ring onto my right ring finger, its heart pointing inward, toward mine.

The highway at night looked like a movie flashing past us in fast forward, all the lights receding, out of reach. Autumn spread its golden disease through the woods, Midas trailing his fingers over the treetops. Dying things became extraordinarily beautiful at the very end.

Where was the lens between me and the world? Was it my eyes, my skin, my mind? Where did reality stop and my perception of it begin?

“You must really hate me, huh?” she said. “No.” I took a deep breath, wiped my face with my hand. “If I thought you could change, I’d hate you for not trying.” I looked her dead in the eye. “But this is who you are. You’re a liar, and a thief, and a junkie. I don’t hate you, Mom. I’m disappointed in you.”

“I’m fucking terrified. I’m just a kid inside, Evan.” “So am I.” He stroked my hair. “Maise, so am I. Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We’re all just pretending for each other.

Out of everything I ever learned from Evan Wilke, I think that lesson was the most important: that none of us actually grow up. We get bigger, and older, but part of us always retains that small rabbit heart, trembling furiously, secretively, with wonder and fear. There’s no irony in it. No semantics or subtext. Only red blood and green grass and silver stars.

“Don’t be afraid,” Evan said. “We’re in this together, hand in hand, against the world.”

It’s always good-bye with the mouth and until we meet again with the heart.

“To the only love that lasts,” she said when we raised our champagne glasses. “The love of family and friends.”

You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday. We lose everything. If you’re trying to avoid loss, there’s no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends.” His fingers curled around mine. “That’s all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”

What if this is all we have? This closeness, this space between breaths, holding each other like air in our lungs, the oxygen metabolizing into our blood in a thrilling, ephemeral rush? How could it ever, ever be enough?