Teach Me (20 page)

Who
invented this idea, of cars all driving in circles at high speeds,
everyone trying to exit at different points? Seems like a terrible
way to organize a roadway. Not to mention, British roads are narrow
and wrong-sided as it is. Every time we turn onto a new street, I
flinch in terror, afraid we’re
going up the wrong side of the highway.

Luckily
we haven’t made any
turns in a while, so I can relax for a stretch. I shift in my seat,
trying to get comfortable. I’m
still pleasantly sore from this morning, waking up to Jack behind me,
in the spooning position we fell asleep in, only this time with his
early morning excitement in evidence. The way he slid into me from
behind, both of us curled on our sides, angled him to stroke my
G-spot every time.

I
shiver, and he catches my eye with a grin. “How
are you feeling?” he
asks.

Sometimes
I hate how perceptive he is. “Sore,”
I admit.

“Good.”
His smile widens.

“That’s
very mean, you know,”
I tell him. “Taking
enjoyment in other people’s
sore spots.”

“Is
it wrong to enjoy the fact that you can still feel me inside of you,
hours later?” He
flashes a wink before his eyes turn back to the road.

Lucky,
because I can feel my face flushing. Though, to be honest, I enjoy it
too. This physical reminder of how we connect.

Then
my eyes catch something outside the window, and I can’t
help gaping for real. “What
the heck is that?”

An
enormous bronze statue appears alongside the road, like a mythic
Roman god, only with wings for arms, spread wide and flashing in the
Saturday afternoon sun.

“The
Angel of the North,”
he says, as if that’s
self-explanatory.

“Um,
the what?”

“It’s
a sculpture. Finished a couple decades ago. It’s
supposed to represent the coal miners who worked in this area, and
our transition from the industrial city that Newcastle used to be,
into the bastion for the arts it is now—or
it’s trying to be
now, I should say.”
He glances sideways at the towering statue, which reminds me of
something you’d see
in pictures of ancient Egypt, like a sphinx or a goddess overseeing
her property. “Personally,
it just reminds me how badly this city needs a new hobby. I think we
used something like enough steel for sixteen buses in that statue?”

I
laugh and press my cheek to the cool car window to get a better look
at the angel’s
blank, expressionless face. “I
don’t know, I kind
of like it. It’s
hopeful, right? When old businesses or jobs or industries or whatever
fade, there’s always
something new to take its place.”
I dare a sideways glance at Jack. “I’d
think you of all people would appreciate that they made art from it,
instead of just some other practical thing like extra buses.”

“Yeah,
well, you’ve never
experienced public transit in this area,”
he replies with a smirk. But underneath that, there’s
something else, I think. A twist to his lips and a reluctance to meet
my eye.

He
does like the statue. He does like this city, his hometown. He just
needed to get away, for personal reasons, so he’s
trying to find excuses why he could never come back.

I
understand that all too well. I love Lancaster—I
love the Renaissance Festival we hold every summer, which I used to
work for in high school, where we’d
all dress up and fake terrible British accents and sell mugs to out
of town tourists. I love the Corn Ball we hold ever fall, the
bonfires and the Halloween haunted houses that I’m
missing right about now, October in the middle of nowhere,
Pennsylvania.

But
I can’t go back. Not
when I’ve come this
far.

I
press my palm to the glass and watch it sweat beneath my body heat.
“Do you visit
often?” I ask. I’m
not sure why. I can already guess at the answer. Maybe I just want to
hear him open up and admit it.

“Not
lately,” is all he
says at first. The Angel of the North fades from view behind us, and
more and more buildings pop up alongside us—townhouses,
red-roofed buildings that were clearly all built at the same time to
look just the same. In between them I glimpse church steeples and
some other monument high up on a hill in the distance, or maybe just
a ruin, it’s hard to
tell from here.

Just
when I think he’s
forgotten my question altogether, he clears his throat softly. “It’s
hard to be reminded of what you left behind, sometimes. Even though
you’re happy
somewhere new and you know you’d
be unhappy if you returned. Change is hard. Leaving is hard.”

I
slide a hand over his where he’s
gripping the clutch, and tighten my grip just enough so he feels it.
“Trust me, I know
the feeling.”

“Better
than I do, probably.”
He flashes me a quick look. “Speaking
of which. Did you see the information about the grant that I left the
other day?”

“I
did. Thank you for that.”
I squeeze his hand a little tighter. “I’ve
got to think about it some more.”

“It’s
good for any school, you know. Anywhere.”
The way he says it, it sounds like he’s
worried I misunderstood. Like I thought he was trying to tell me what
to do.

“I
read the fine print, yeah,”
I reply with a small laugh. “I’ve
got to do some research on schools.”
I adjust myself in the seat again—it’s
still uncomfortable, especially on a drive this long. But I think,
judging by the way the neighborhoods around us look more and more
city-like, that we’re
almost there. “But,
to be honest, I did a lot of research before I applied to come here.
Merton is where I really want to be.”

Jack
nods. “It’s
a great school, especially for poetry. My obvious bias aside.”
He wiggles an eyebrow at me, and I laugh again. He, on the other
hand, sobers up pretty quickly. “I
just want to be sure you’re
doing what’s best
for you, Harper. Not for anyone else.”

Something
about the way he says it nags at me. Doesn’t
he trust me to do that already? Does he really think I’d
just uproot my whole life for a guy, even one that I am falling hard
for?

But
it doesn’t seem the
right time or place to tell him off—I
mean, he’s not in a
good mindset right now, all the smiling aside. He can’t
be. His
father
just died. So instead of starting a fight, I just nod back. “Of
course. I always do.”

Don’t
I?

The
wake doesn’t start
until this evening. I drove up early to get us checked into the hotel
(after declining Mum’s
twenty offers for us to stay with her, and another twenty curious
phone calls from Kat about why I told her I’d
be bringing someone), but also to give myself a little breathing room
first.

I’m
not ready to break the denial that I know I’m
experiencing. Not quite yet.

So
we check into our hotel in downtown Newcastle, twenty minutes on the
bus from where we need to be later tonight, and I spend the afternoon
showing Harper where I grew up. First we stroll across the Millennium
Bridge, which I remember visiting the weekend it opened with my
parents and Kat. From the peak of the bridge, we count the few boats
out on the Tyne, and I point out the few buildings I remember the
names of.

“What
was it like growing up here?”
she asks as we head back across the bridge toward the Newcastle
shoreline.

“That’s
sort of a broad question,”
I point out, swinging her hand between us. “What’s
it like growing up anywhere?”

“Fair
point.” She wobbles
her head a little as she considers this. “What
do you like most about your city?”

My
city. Is it my city anymore? I left it so long ago, half the pubs
have changed in my absence, and the people I knew here have either
moved away to start their own lives elsewhere, or else they’ve
settled down and grown up into people I wouldn’t
recognize if I ran into them on the street. Adult people with whole
different lives and worries and hobbies than we had when we were
teenagers mucking about this town, catching buses in from the suburbs
to pretend we were university students already, not yet aware that
being older was not always better than being our age.

But
I guess, in some ways, it will always be my hometown. “My
favorite thing is . . . Well,
it’s a place.”

Her
eyes flash with interest. “Show
me?”

“It’s
a bit of a hike from here.”

Harper
kicks up her feet at me. She’s
donned flats for the walking around part of the day, with heels
stashed in her bag for—
for
later
, I tell myself,
stubbornly refusing to think about what, exactly, happens later. “If
you insist,” I
reply.

We
cross town, and then I take the back route up from the river.
Meandering through little bridges across a small creek off the Tyne,
we take a narrow path alongside said creek past a few strands of
ducks, nestled into the grass along the banks. One last bridge to
cross, and then we’re
at the little pub where I used to go almost every weekend. Mostly
because they didn’t
card, but also because it’s
one of the few old-school pubs that’s
survived in the city.

Granted,
on the weekends it turns into a club just like the rest, and yes, I
definitely knew which bartenders didn’t
card, and lurked around the bathrooms while it changed over when I
was still underage, so we could stay inside without facing the
bouncer or the cover charge out front.

All
in all, this pub had everything a growing boy needed. Fried food,
loud music, and the promise of alcohol if you were smart enough to
earn it.

It
looks smaller inside than I remember, the dance room at the back half
as big as it looms in my memory. But it smells just the same, like
beer and old wood.

Harper
smirks at me. “
This
is your favorite place in Newcastle? No wonder you left.”

“Oi.”
I swat her arm to shut her up before the bartender overhears. “I’ll
have you know this place has plenty of charm, if you know where to
look.” We pull up
two chairs at a table near the bar, and I take the liberty of
ordering us both the fish and chips (for nostalgia’s
sake). Then I spend the next hour boring her with stories of
everything that went down in this pub. Breakups and makeups and
fights and my first kiss, actually, with a girl who turned out to be
twenty and slapped me when she found out I was only sixteen, right
there on that barstool in the far corner.

By
the final story, she’s
doubled over with laughter, and I have to admit, my teenage self, in
retrospect, was not as suave as I remembered.

Then
my gaze falls on the wall behind the bar. The last story I’d
been about to tell. The day I, overage now, but only barely eighteen,
decided to take on a friend in a very ill-advised contest, somewhat
fueled by how many shots of Jäger
we’d already
consumed. We were both trying to throw our drink coasters onto the
highest shelf, where the bar stashes funny old knickknacks that are
still up there today, old-school toys and creepy dolls from the late
eighteenth century.

We
may or may not have smashed an entire shelf of the latter. And been
escorted straight into the back of a police wagon.

The
one and only time I’ve
ever been in trouble with the law. We were lucky in that when we
explained what happened, the policeman who’d
brought us in doubled over in hysterics, and the pub didn’t
want to press charges anyway. But now that I’m
remembering the whole story, anticipating telling it to Harper, I
think about the ending, and my mood crumbles as hard as that shelf
did once upon a time.

My
father was the one who picked us up at the station. He drove us in
stony silence the whole way home, and I was sure, I was
sure
,
based on everything he’d
done in the past, the way he’d
always treated me, that I was done for this time. He was going to
throw me out of the house, lock me out without waiting for the word
go.

But
when we got home, and my mother came screeching to the door, wringing
her hands, asking what on earth had happened, what was that policeman
saying, my father looked at her, and he said, “All
a mix-up, Suzanne. They brought in the wrong kid.”

I
never thanked him for that. I mean, he must have known I was
thankful, by the way I gaped at him while Mum went back inside, and
kept gaping even while he explained, “You
learned enough of a lesson today. If you ever pull something like
this again, I’m
leaving you in that cell to rot.”

But
I never said thank you to him, for not making it worse. For not
telling Mum, and blowing the whole story into a mess it would’ve
taken months for me to shovel out from under. As far as I know, he
never told another member of the family, not even his sisters.

Not
even when he was throwing everything and the kitchen sink at me the
last time I saw him, listing every reason I’m
a failure. At least he had that much courtesy.

Harper
squeezes my hand. I didn’t
notice her move, didn’t
notice her scoot her chair around beside me to gaze into my eyes, her
soft hands encircling my calloused ones. She doesn’t
ask what I’m
thinking. She doesn’t
need to. She just smiles at me, holds onto my hands, until I take a
deep breath and nod.

“Let’s
go.”

From
there, we hike across town to the Green, where all the uni kids hang
out. I used to come here underage too, trying to fit in, making
friends in the weird majors like arts and textile designs. And other
poets, of course. Lots and lots of other poets, most of whom were
even more dramatically inclined than myself, and we all dressed very
poorly.

After
the Green, we meander through the Grainger Market, an indoor market
that’s been around
for centuries, and still sells some of the same stuff they probably
sold when it opened in the 1800s—fresh
fruit, meat, cheese and fish—along
with some newer additions – Apple
products, weird hats, clubwear. We pause at a stall selling furry
neon leggings and joke about how if you wore them, you’d
look like you cut off a yeti’s
feet and dyed them yellow to make shoes.