Paper Airplanes
By Sara B. Fraser
It’s not a measured strategy, my confession to Angelo in the hallway, class still in session.
Inside is chaos: fifteen-year-olds gleeful at their newfound freedoms, thinking they are the shit, but with no understanding that they are merely sacks of hormonal electricity whose brains haven’t developed enough to control their behavior.
Outside, however, in the hall, sequestered and alone, Angelo listens.
I tell him about the plane crash, how it changed my life. How it saved me. Because I think it did save me. Though sometimes I’m not sure. He listens when I tell him this, but then I worry that I’ve given him ammunition, so soon I am agitated.
Class ends and I put it out of my head.
Later that evening the memory returns. I am on the floor with my back against the sofa, looking through mail and drinking a glass of scotch. The plastic bin—pre-shredder purgatory for junk mail—is against the opposite wall. If something looks important, I open it; if not, I fling it across the room, thwack, against the wall and let it drop into the bin. On Fridays I have two scotches, or three, and shred.
Believe it or not, I still anticipate mail the way I did in the nineties, when Steve used to write to me. Sheets of paper—physical paper, touched by his hands. We were in college: Steve had gone to St. Louis while I had stayed in Boston. His letters were sweet, often apologetic. On the phone, we spent so much time whining, accusing, or masturbating, that my grades suffered. I don’t know if his did, but I imagine they must have. Or maybe it was only me who carried the trauma of our relationship around, into classes where there would be some little professor and a blackboard down at the bottom of a lecture hall and I’d be gazing out the high windows or doodling Steve’s name with loopy S’s and hearts for E’s. He’d cheated. I’d threatened. And worse. Over and over, he’d break it off or I’d break it off. A letter would arrive. I or he would forgive. And repeat.
Now most of my mail is addressed to either me or the current resident; the sender isn’t picky, so long as someone with a wallet opens it.
An offer of bonus miles brings it back. The vague humiliation is still there, the way feelings sometimes are, detached from their cause. The silvery logo embossed over the return address and the plane dive-bombs in my imagination, as it so often has, and I remember telling Angelo. I try to ease my shame by reminding myself that it was a risk. Administrators encourage us to take risks. That’s not what they mean, of course. They think taking a risk means assessing kids with a new app or letting them use their phones for something “educational.” Real risk, to me, is personal, maybe a little dangerous.
“I’m here for a reason,” I said.
I didn’t expect to say that. It just came out. I was being driven by something bigger than myself, bigger than Angelo and the other kids. I’d handed over the reins.
When I started teaching, I had visions of fruitful discourse, opening minds, and being an inspiration to kids, but I was starting to realize that I actually hated it. Not to say that I hated teaching, just all the quote-unquote behavior control that goes with it. And the jumping-through-hoops that goes with it, teaching to get them to pass the fucking test. Assessing their every breath to justify my existence. The holy grail of every assignment being a good rubric to stave off the ire of parents.
To be honest, I don’t think I’m very good at the whole thing, and for whatever reason, lately it feels as though things are coming to a head. I need to shit or get off the pot, as my dad says. Dig in and be happy or look for a new career.
Angelo had nuggeted some kid’s backpack, derailing my lesson. I stayed calm, my face a mask of concern suffocating the scream I felt inside. “I’m here for a reason.”
I’d always thought his eyes were the color of a dehydrated person’s urine, a trickle of pee after wandering the desert. But that morning, they were the color of a stone at the bottom of a river. The thick, clean slime that coats things down there.
His head jerked slightly, like it wanted to pull away and drag the rest of his body. But he stayed. I was the kid-whisperer. I went on: “I might have been killed. When I was a little older than you are. I was supposed to be on a plane and it crashed. Do you understand? I was saved and so there must have been a reason for it.”
Nobody had survived. And, where was I? In a split-second that I didn’t fully comprehend, I’d stepped off the Blue Line at Government Center and walked all the way back to my dorm on Comm Ave. I about-faced at least ten times, looking at my watch repeatedly, gauging whether I could still make it to the airport, breaking into a run, my backpack bouncing against my ass, changing my mind again, lingering, faltering, until finally, it was too late.
My roommate Mary and I saw it on the breaking news that interrupted Oprah.
“Holy shit,” Mary said as I grabbed the boarding pass off the desk, the flight numbers matching. “What are the chances of that?” We watched the burning aircraft in a distant field, the newscaster in the foreground with her bulbous mic.
Mary’s jaw hanging off of her face looked grotesque.
“Close your mouth,” I told her. I guess that kind of comment was what made her request a new roommate for sophomore year.
I called Steve.
“Oh my god. You’re not on it?” First, he sounded relieved, then pissed.
“I, I missed it.”
“And you were going to tell me this. When?”
“Soon. I’m telling you now.” I was distraught. He thought I’d died. It felt like I was letting him down by being alive.
“Why did you miss the flight?”
“I was…watching Oprah?”
He reminded me that he had bought vanilla candles for his dorm room. His roommate was away, and he had planned on bringing me to a football game on Saturday night. And all of that made me regret my decision. But, I was alive! Me! Cherie! The only one! And couldn’t we do it another weekend?
“Cher, maybe we should just forget it. Okay?”
“You’re right,” I said. I wanted to hang up on him, but he got there first. If I’d stayed with him, I’d be dead. I don’t know what to make of that fact, but I have always felt weirdly connected to Steve because of it. Though not necessarily in a good way.
Sometimes I replay the news program online, see the spotty fire across a field near the Catskills. I imagine the moments before as if I were on the plane—stringy oxygen masks dancing their party of doom. On the outside, the wing catching the low rays of the sun as it dips, gathering speed, rolling, the sun becoming a strobe light.
If I’d died, I could have haunted Steve forever, been etched into his consciousness as his one true love. How would any woman have been able to compete with my memory? That’s the way it would’ve been with me, if he’d been the one to die. Hell, I let myself believe he was my one true love and he’s still alive. But I know he’s not like that. I assume that if I’d died, he’d have played the handsome bereaved boyfriend role: the ultimate chick magnet.
Until recently, the whole thing was pretty much dormant in my consciousness. I don’t know why, but lately, it’s been rearing up. There must be some reason I was saved—which seems absurd considering some of the people who died on that plane: a physicist from MIT, a priest, a mother without her children. Why me?
Maybe it’s Facebook’s fault. Steve was out of the picture, and I’d forgotten the damn plane crash. I was kind of doing my best, you know, teaching kids, thinking at least I was doing my part—for the physicist, the priest, and the mother. I was doing my best. Trying to be worthwhile. But along comes cheeky Mark Zuckerberg. Steve and I became friends. I would scroll through pictures of him, his wife, and their three daughters—often in matching outfits.
His eldest wears glasses and does gymnastics. Claire. The middle, Christine, sings in the chorus. The youngest is Caroline, and she’s in pre-K. Bethany, his wife, tags Steve in photos of the children’s artwork: girls with stick legs in triangle dresses. Santa with a beard of cotton ball.
Yes, all three girls’ names begin with C. So does mine. Coincidence? Everything got thrown up in the air and jumbled. The life I’d created and was content with, I started to see all the cracks.
Angelo in the hallway. What did I think was going to happen? That he’d kneel at my feet, apologize for making stupid jokes, playing the app that emits a high-pitched noise no one over thirty can hear, tossing Skittles and half-pencils over the heads of his classmates and missing the trashcan? Was I going to reform him so easily?
Of course, I didn’t expect that, so imagine my surprise when he shows up to class with his homework done and sits still for the entire fifty-three minutes, doesn’t lob a single thing or roll his eyes or tie his shoelace to the leg of his desk. Which isn’t to say that class is all that much easier: other members of the herd are in high form, as usual.
I stop him after class, put my hand on his forearm. I drop it quickly though. It’s a step too far. For me, anyway. He doesn’t seem to mind. We wait for the other students to shuffle out. One of his friends fires a wad of crumpled paper at the side of his head, but he ignores it. We are left standing on chalk dust and plastic disposable pencil husks like some post-apocalyptic academic disaster.
“What I said,” I begin. “I just want you to know that I said it, I said it because, I just wanted to help you see—”
On his face I see something much more grownup than I’d expected. He is smiling in a sort of bemused way. Not sarcastic. Lovingly? Like one of my parents?
“I don’t know why I said it,” I say. “Never mind.” I go back to my desk, but Angelo is rooted.
After I sit at my computer, he says, “No, it was cool. See you tomorrow, Ms. Ross.”
I’ve been doing some other stuff. I don’t want to say crazy, but maybe slightly unhinged:
I brought a can of IPA in my lunchbox not too long ago and drank it with my sandwich in the lunchroom. Nobody even noticed! I should have brought a Budweiser if I was trying to be noticed. But I wasn’t, you know? I don’t think. I was smoothing mayonnaise on bread in the morning and when I went to grab the sliced turkey from the fridge, my hand skimmed the beer can and it was a compulsion I couldn’t disobey. It was Friday and I wanted a beer with lunch.
And my makeup. I’ve gotten more extravagant. Cotton-Candy eyeshadow, Alexander-the-Grape lipstick. I paint it on in the morning for two reasons: One, I do like to look good. And young. And the pink on my lids brings out the blue in my eyes. I remind myself of a white rabbit. And two, because I don’t want to disappear into the burlap rubble of the high school. I want to stand out and I want to be found. I’m staking a claim.
Also, I’d been swearing during class. Fucking this and fucking that, and fuck off. I do it to make them laugh, and to get them to stop acting out, but it’s had the opposite effect. It stuns them into silence, but then it opens the door for bad behavior. So I’ve stopped. But maybe too late.
Angelo is quiet, studious, maybe smug? It goes on for days. No high-pitched noises, no trying to make his classmates laugh, no throwing things or dancing across the room, earbuds thumping rap and him ten minutes late, interrupting instruction. I worry he’s gearing up for an attack.
I’ve offered him a secret, like a glowing ember, a chakra, a nugget of soul. Now I don’t know what to expect. I try to ignore him.
A couple of weeks after Thanksgiving I feel a cold coming on and call in sick. I sit by the window for hours, watching occasional passersby three floors below, then I start scrolling through pictures of Steve’s family. It’s been a month since Bethany posted a photo of the three girls and their retriever in a field of pumpkins. There have been no new pictures in maybe two months. This is some kind of drug, amping me up. Every day that Bethany doesn’t tag Steve convinces me that there’s trouble in paradise. I scroll through the older photos I’ve seen a hundred times: Bethany and Steve in front of a Christmas tree, decked out in handsome holiday-wear; at the beach, the view from arm’s length above their heads, the ocean lapping at the sand behind them. I check Bethany’s profile and her relationship status has changed to “it’s complicated.” I feel it like I’ve been plugged into a wall socket.
Mid December, Angelo starts staying after school. “Do you mind if I do my homework here?”
What am I supposed to say?
He sets up shop with his papers and his books, and he sometimes stays until I am ready to go home. We walk together through the quiet hallways, the silence uncomfortable. Talking would feel wrong; as much as I want to fill the silence, I find myself mute.
I allow myself to be satisfied that something miraculous has occurred, that I’ve actually reached him. His second quarter grade is a C+, up from a D quarter one.
I am thinking about destiny. And the long lines of our lives, the way they veer this way and that, crisscrossing each other’s in unknowable and profound ways. I think I can see under the surface, that I’ve laid eyes on a universal truth, and understand it as it flows through me. Maybe this is it: the reason I didn’t die. No big revelatory thing, just this kid. Maybe he’ll go on to cure cancer or negotiate peace in the Middle East, or something even grander, something I wouldn’t even know about because I’ll be dead by then. My elation gets watered down immediately by the idea that, now that my life’s work is done, what is there to keep me alive? What about the forty- or fifty-odd years I might have left? What am I supposed to do with them?
Monday before break, I am watching Angelo, and he catches me peering around the side of my monitor. He waves and I go back to work, but I am embarrassed, and don’t want to give him the wrong idea. Something shifts.
“You can’t have much to do? Angelo? It’s almost Christmas break?” He finishes a sentence before looking up, his pencil fairly twitching from use. His eyes drill into me. My hand rattles the mouse.
“Just making sure I’m caught up with everything.”
I get spooked. Is something going to happen between us? I don’t know what makes me think it. Self-doubt I suppose. Maybe it’s all baloney and he just has a crush. I’m pretty enough, and I’m keeping well, despite my age. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe that’s all I have going for me. The idea is wretchedly titillating. Satisfying in its own right, but it spoils the thoughts I’d been having just moments before, that I was going to play a role in the world’s salvation. Ha!
I can read the headlines already, based on nothing, see myself in an orange jumpsuit. Will he visit me when he turns eighteen? Will we get married in prison, rent a small house in the outer suburbs with white vinyl siding and a doghouse in the yard, and move into it when I am released? Will we have kids? Will I work at Walmart?
Am I a predator? Will I be able to resist if he makes a move?
Let me introduce the gnome that lives in my head. He often tells me things I don’t want to hear, but sometimes he calms me down. When he whispers, it tickles my earlobes. Cherie, Relax. You’re a mother figure. You’re doing a good thing. Don’t be scared. And anyway: Steve. Steve and Bethany have split. Steve is your true love.
Angelo accompanies me out of the room, waits as I lock the door. About halfway down the hall, I turn. “I left something. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I head to the English office, determined to thwart any romantic ideas he might have.
I rummage in the top drawer of my desk; I don’t even use that desk much—most of my stuff is in my classroom. But I have to make it look real. For whose sake, don’t ask me, as the door is closed and I am all alone. To be a good liar, you have to play it out. It’s like Daniel Day Lewis on a movie set: he never goes out of character.
I slip a packet of sticky notes into my pocket and head home.
I spend a few nights with my parents in Lunenburg over Christmas. I go for long walks, hoping Steve is in town. Hoping he’ll see me on the side of the road, roll down the window, smile at me—his dimples deeper, white sprinkled into the stubble on his cheeks. I imagine getting into his car, driving to the Motel 6 on Route 2. We’ll sit on a saggy mattress and have a heart-to-heart, a really mature one, where he’ll confess how much he’s always loved me. Our fights were nothing more than proof of the passion. We’ll pledge ourselves to each other and fall back onto that creaky bed. You can picture the rest.
My parents’ love is overbearing, their concern claustrophobic. At least there is a lot of television-watching in the living room, which is a welcome relief. But my mom comes to my room in the evenings, kisses me on the forehead like I am still a little kid, ruffles my hair, tells me she loves me. Concern in her eyes.
I return to my small apartment a day earlier than planned. I tell them I have a lot of grading and pretend to have a bunch of friends to hang out with. My first night back, I drink scotch with Taco Bell for dinner.
There hasn’t been any movement on Steve’s Facebook page, nor on Bethany’s. I’m a little tipsy and I press send: “Hey Steve! How are things?”
To my surprise, and fearful delight, he responds immediately. “Hey Cherie. Good. Long time!”
The evening is eaten up in a frenzy of messages. We talk about his kids, my job. Nothing about Bethany. He reminds me that I used to want to be a journalist. I chide him for succumbing to the misconception that teachers are only teachers because they failed at something else. I am thinking of Angelo and his C+, and my memory is already cleansed of the gray area, the weirdness; it is a teaching success story. A sort of miracle.
“I love my job!” I say. “And I’m never bored. Can you say that?”
He concedes the point. “I’m really enjoying this,” he says. “Do you want to meet and do it in person?”
“But you live in St. Louis?” I remind him, my heart doing more gymnastics than his daughter Claire.
“I’m going to be in Boston. For business, and I’ll see my parents in Lunenburg. You’ll be around?”
“Um. Okay. Sure,” I type.
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.”
“Lol” I say. “Just. You know. How are things with your wife?” And then there is a long pause. I move away from the phone, shaking my limbs like I am trying to fling mud off of them. When I return, there is still no message. The little green dot next to his profile has gone dark. For the next couple of days, I check regularly, watch a lot of Netflix. On New Year’s Eve I go to a party with a friend from graduate school and end up letting this pale-handed suit feel me up in the corner by the bathroom. I throw up when I get home and spend New Year’s Day on the sofa binging Downton Abbey. Then, that afternoon:
“Hey Cher. I’ll be landing on Friday. Can you pick me up?”
I wait for as long as humanly possible before sending my cell number and “Text me your flight info.”
Waiting at the airport, I check myself in the rearview. I open the door when I see him, but I get yelled at by an officer: “Stay with your car. You’ll have to move along.”
“There he is,” I say. “Keep your pants on.”
Steve trots across, looking to the left, pulling his coat around him. He slides into the car, says, “Let’s go to your place,” and stretches his arm across the back of my seat, his fingers already twined in my hair.
He talks about the project he’s in town for, asks how my parents are, mentions that his brother has developed some autoimmune disease—nothing too bad, but it’s chronic. I remain quiet, listen to him, smiling and nodding. He feels like something comfortable: a blanket, hot cider, Friends. The tunnel is backed up, so I take a different route through Chelsea. The stairs to my apartment never felt so echoey. They’re carpeted, but the silence as we ascend is full of contradictions: We are going to re-unite. Physically. That is the point. And to tell the truth, I can’t wait for that. If there’s anything Steve and I were good at, it was sex. But mixed with the anticipation are these strange little noises Steve is making through his nose. Tut-tutting the state of my apartment building, I think. Or maybe I am being overly sensitive, given the storybook midwestern house he lives in (I’ve seen photos on Facebook—wide marble-topped island, gleaming appliances, the living room fireplace big enough for a small pony).
He drapes his coat over the arm of the couch but doesn’t sit down. I throw my thoughts away and show him the bedroom. I’d shamelessly put burgundy satin sheets on the bed, but now I am embarrassed by them, and feel like a slut.
Oh well, I think, and go for it anyway.
The next morning, sitting at the table, showered, mugs of coffee steaming in front of us, I let myself be fooled into thinking my life is about to change. The know-it-all gnome was right all along: We are each other’s one true love. The plane crash was just a pause, and now that I’ve served my purpose, saving Angelo, I can go back to Steve and start over. I fantasize my role as stepmom to Claire, Caroline, and Christine. Will I have to move out there?
“Remember when I missed the flight to St. Louis?”
Steve looks up from his phone, reaches a hand over to my bathrobe, pushes the fabric over like he wants a better view of my collarbone.
“Of course. And I forgive you.” His smile is rather ugly, elastic lips and yellow teeth, but I ignore it.
“Anyway. I told one of my kids about that. I don’t know why I did it. I wanted him to feel special, I guess.”
“You don’t have kids.”
“Student.”
“And how’d that go for you?”
“Well. It worked.”
Steve laughs a little through his nose.
“Well, it did.”
“That’s good.”
I refill our cups and spread butter on toast. “So, what happens now?” I say.
“Hold on, I just have to get this.” He follows his phone into the bathroom, texting with his thumbs—the first person our age I’d seen be able to do that. I still text with one pointer finger. Or I use speech recognition.
I can hear him talking behind the bathroom door, but I can’t get a sense of whether it’s personal or professional.
“I have to run,” he says as he comes out. “You around tomorrow?”
I close my eyes when we kiss goodbye. He waves from the second-floor landing. I am in my bathrobe and this time his smile is sweet.
I wait all day.
“Hey you,” I text, finally, the next morning.
After several minutes, he texts back. “I feel terrible,” he says. “I can’t do this,” he says. “I love my wife,” he says.
“Liar,” I say. I say it over and over. “Liar, liar, liar. You’ve always been a liar.”
I open the window and hurl my phone onto the sidewalk.
The thudding, cracking sound is the best thing ever. A violent death for that insipid device. It’s like I threw Steve out the window, and Mark Zuckerberg, that asshole. It’s incredibly satisfying.
Back in school the following Tuesday, the kids are mostly comatose, hating that vacation is over. I can’t get a read on Angelo; he is in the shadow of a hoodie. About halfway through class, I am explaining why the fifth paragraph must loop back to the first, and up he walks. He’s standing in front of me, staring.
“What are you doing?” I say. “When I’m speaking, you should be seated. And listening.”
“Can I go to the bathroom?” His eyes are glassy. Is he stoned? Sad? But I am wound up in my own feelings. My pride. My need to be the one in charge.
“Go to the bathroom,” I say. “And you can go to Mr. Richards’s office afterward. Don’t come back.”
There is snickering.
As class ends, the last class of the day, he comes to get his backpack.
On her way out, a kid says, “Thank you, Ms. Ross.”
There is always one nice one.
I pretend to be busy, looking for something in my filing cabinet. “They were playing the noise,” Angelo says. “The one you’re too old to hear.” Accusation in his voice, and hurt, and anger.
I try to keep the upper hand, even though I am starting to feel ashamed. “Well, you can’t just walk up to me. In the middle of class.”
But he had been trying to help.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, you wouldn’t.”
“I’m really sorry, I am.” I slump like wet snow sliding off a roof in the sun. The hallways are clearing out. The school settling, almost vibrating with the sudden quiet. I stand and reach for anything—a pencil, a box of Kleenex—but sit back down, sideways in the clunky little desk. “I’ve been, I don’t know.” I stare at the floor. A paper airplane made of today’s homework is halfway under my desk. “Can you see me?” I say in a small voice. I watch his feet.
“I can see you, of course I can. You’re a good teacher.”
I shake my head. “No, I mean, really see.” I dare to look up. He is looking out the window. A few flakes of snow like lost baby insects toppling toward the ground. “Do you really see me? Sometimes I think I’m invisible.”
“But you were saved, right? For a reason?” He unzips the side of his backpack and slides in the pencil that had been tucked behind his ear. I hadn’t realized how much I loved him for being able to keep a pencil balanced there. “Your hearing’s not good, that’s all.” He hoists the backpack onto his shoulder. “You’re just old. None of the teachers can hear that sound. You guys have no idea how annoying it is.”
There is nothing particularly comforting in his words, but I feel calmer. I start to let myself feel ashamed for having asked him such a crazy question. But I am grateful that he listened. He doesn’t look at me with eyes of concern, like my mother, or skepticism, like Steve. He just answered simply, like a child. And thank god he hadn’t grasped the scope of the question. Because I shouldn’t have asked it, not of anyone.
That evening, I pour myself an extra-large scotch and start to fling junk mail across the living room. I wonder about Angelo, about his life, about his parents. My prior lack of curiosity about who he is apart from my role in his life shames me. The solution doesn’t involve anything outside of myself, which is comforting. All it requires is a different kind of thought.
I think of texting Steve, to tell him I am okay, to make peace, to put his mind at ease. But my phone is broken. The snow is falling harder and burying it on the sidewalk, three floors down.
Sara B. Fraser is a highschool Spanish teacher and author of the novels Long Division and Just River, both published by Black Rose Writing. Her short stories have been published in the American Literary Review, the Jabberwock Review, Salamander, Carve, and others.