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us and said, “What?” with a huge smile. We could tell he loved it. He was too short and heavy to have competed with the other guys in college, probably got laid here and there, but not with the hot girls. So this was exciting for him, being the new, young, cute teacher about whom all the girls whispered.
    Some weeknights, my friends and I dressed up in short skirts and heels and went into the city to bars. This was before the city cracked down on underage drinking, when the bouncers smirked at our fake IDs but then waved us in. We went with the sole purpose of picking up boys. Usually we wound up sitting by ourselves, our drinks sweating on the table. We smoked cigarette after cigarette, just waiting to be chosen by the boys who came through the bar. Sometimes we got lucky. Only sometimes. There was no rhyme or reason to when. But I learned that year in my psychology senior elective that this sort of partial reinforcement was the kind that kept girls like me roped in. It kept me coming back again and again for more, like someone who keeps pulling the lever of a slot machine, dropping hundreds of dollars in coins, because twenty-three pulls ago she won ten bucks in quarters.
    Every once in a while, it happened, though. Every now and then, a boy locked eyes with me and my heart sped. I sat taller in my chair; I cocked my head and smiled. Everything else went away, my mind — my whole body — a sharpened arrow pointing toward that thing I wanted. It was just that boy and me, and the promise that he would prove I was everything I wanted to be: beautiful, desirable, worthwhile,
real.
Those nights we got lucky, we didn’t make it back into New Jersey until two or three, sometimes even four, in the morning. We’d be late for school, and I’d fall asleep in Mr. Reardon’s calculus class, waking with my cheek stuck to my textbook from drool. It was as though we had two lives — the one in the city, where there were lights and glamour and possibility, and the one during the day, where we squeaked by with Bs and B minuses, where we were average. Anyway, Mr. Reardon never seemed to care. But I also fell asleep sometimes in Mrs. Jefferson’s English class, and she wasn’t so forgiving. My punishment was to stay after school to help her photocopy poetry handouts for our class. And this is how things happened with Mr. P.
    See, the faculty didn’t really have offices. They had one big room where they each had a desk, and there was a workroom right off this big room where the copy machine and fax and extra paper and such were. The shared faculty office room was lined in dark wood and it echoed. It felt ancient and meaningful the way old things sometimes do. It felt like things had happened over the years in this room.
    Every time Mrs. Jefferson sent me to the workroom, I had to walk right past Mr. P., who was there prepping for the next day’s class. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and I could feel his eyes on me as I went into that room.
    At some point he waved me over, and I sidled up to his desk.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” he asked.
    â€œI’m a teacher now,” I said. “You didn’t hear?”
    He smirked. His cheeks were kind of puffy up close, and so smooth I doubted he needed to shave much. He had light freckles across the bridge of his nose. “You got in trouble, didn’t you?” He did that thing where he brushed his hair out of his face.
    â€œMaybe,” I said. I didn’t like him thinking of me in that way, as some little girl who got time-outs. He just watched me. I wished I knew what he was thinking. I shifted around a bit and twirled a piece of hair around my finger.
    â€œActually,” I told him, “I’m having some problems staying awake in Mrs. Jefferson’s class.”
    â€œThat boring, huh?” he joked, then he looked around, worried perhaps that someone had heard him.
    â€œIt’s not that,” I