King was nothing like that.
I on the other hand, was exactly the suburban housewife stereotype; small minded, bigoted and afraid of the unknown.
My eyes caught on his bright gaze as I surveyed the students, still caught in debate. He watched me as if he knew me, knew the horrible bits of me but accepted them. Even more, he looked at me like he could see the dark heart of me and liked it.
Later that night, after a long day of back-to-back classes because I’d taken on teaching both grades eleven and twelve advanced English and History in an attempt to make some much-needed money, I finally closed my online grade book and got ready to head home. It was late, after six thirty, so most of the students and teachers had long ago headed home unless they were part of the basketball team currently practicing on the other side of campus in the gymnasium.
It was knowing this that I finally allowed myself to open the left-hand drawer in my desk and pull out the little pile of apple poems that I’d tied the other day with the pink ribbon I’d worn in my hair. There were nine of them, tiny scraps of paper, some written on the backs of receipts, some on standard issue notebook paper and one on real, old school parchment. It was that one that I smoothed out with shaking fingers now.
How could a boy so young write something so exquisite? I felt each word throb through me, in tandem with my heartbeat so that I found myself re-reading the poem in that intimate cadence.
He couldn’t love me, of course. He didn’t know me. I was a game to him, an older woman he wanted to conquer so that he could crow to his friends about his prowess in the bedroom.
At least, that’s what I told myself. Even though I didn’t know him very well, it felt fundamentally wrong to think he was capable of such calculated cruelty. His sense of right and wrong was his own but I didn’t think he was a deliberate heartbreaker. I saw him flirt shamelessly with girls in my class and the halls of EBA but he never took it too far and despite speculation, I hadn’t heard concrete evidence that he’d slept with any of them.
It was more than that though. I kept telling myself that I didn’t know him, but secretly, I felt like I did. I knew that he was smart as a whip, both intellectually curious and thoughtful in my classes and in others. He’d been given a scholarship to EBA, though rumor was his father was richer than Crocus off his illegal drug trade, and even though everyone kept waiting for him to screw it up, he was a model student. Everyone loved him; even the acerbic teachers mentioned how well he was doing in their classes despite coming in at mid-term in the second trimester.
I knew that he was a shark at pool, that he liked local IPA beers and tequila shooters, preferred burgers above all other food, and bizarrely, loved Elvis nearly as much as I did. I felt I could guess at the other stuff too, the abstract that made up the spirit of him. He was tender but possessive, soulful but cruel when crossed. I’d witnessed these things but more, he’d given me a window into his elemental self by writing me those poems.
He wanted me to know him. How could any woman resist a man who opened his beautiful heart to her without knowing what she would do with it?
I could have turned him in for inappropriate behavior the second I found out he had been lying to me about being my student, or the first time he spent me an apple poem. I didn’t and it astounded me that he knew I wouldn’t.
I sighed heavily as I rewrapped the poems and placed them back in my desk before I gathered my things to walk home because my car was still at Hephaestus Auto.
Entrance was also not exactly the picturesque west coast town that I had been imagining when I moved here. The downtown core was sizeable and beautifully maintained, with a huge main plaza dominated by an elegant fountain, wrought iron chairs and a tended garden. The buildings were old, Victorian inspired or red brick and all meticulously restored. The only blight on the town was a sprawling industrial lot on the east side of town beside the river where a garage, a tattoo parlor and a little strip mall stood. This was the side of town that the down and out citizens of Entrance lived. There weren’t many of them and they weren’t truly impoverished even if the single level bungalows had seen better days. No, it was the chain link fences locking in frightening beasts that had maybe, at one time, been dogs, and the pungent scent of marijuana that seemed integral to that specific burg. As a girl who had spent her entire live in the affluent and posh neighborhood of Dunbar in Vancouver, the seedy side of Entrance terrified me.