Matt shifts his weight in the desk, sitting back in his chair as the movie begins playing. “Alright,” Ms. Bergman says as she selects a scene from the menu. “I think we were about halfway through the poetry reciting scene, correct?” Several heads nod towards the front of the room, as Ms. Bergman fast forwards through the movie clip. “Now, this clip will answer numbers 13-15 on your Poetry Moments paper, so the people with that assignment should be paying extra close attention.” Matt glances down at the paper Samantha Oswald had handed him. It wasn’t even a worksheet, just a piece of notebook paper. I’ll take care of your part of the assignment. You just have to get up in front of the class and do some of the presentation. Deal? Matt looks towards Samantha, who’s eyebrows are raised, awaiting an answer. He nods smiling the smile he did for the nerdy girls, not quite an I-want-in-your-pants smile, more of a I-like-the-way-you-think kind of smile. Even with the lights out, he could see her blush as she turned her head to the papers on her desk. Seeing her blush turn his thoughts to Casey, how red her face gets every time he takes her out on his motorcycle, her hair all crazy and tangled, her cheeks wind burned. The way her lips purse when he’s about to say something stupid in front of her parents, the way she laughs when he tells her he loves her. She’s a girl he can get along with. She understands it’s all an act. And those thighs…
“YAWP!” A kid yelling in the movie breaks Matt’s trance. He had skipped the last few days of class, but he thought he had heard the teacher say the character’s name was Todd.
“Close your eyes,” the teacher in the movie says, “Now, describe what you see.” And Todd recites this poem in front of the class,
I close my eyes,
And the image floats beside me.
A sweaty-toothed madman
With a stare that pounds my brain.
His hands reach out and choke me,
And all the time he’s mumbling,
Mumbling Truth,
Truth like a blanket
That always leaves your feet cold
You push it, stretch it,
It’ll never be enough!
You kick at it, beat it,
It’ll never cover any of us.
From the moment we enter crying,
Until the day we leave dying,
It will only cover your face,
As you wail and cry and scream.
The words strike like a hard left hook. Truth. Truth like a blanket. Matt’s mind flashes back to last night, Casey sitting on the edge of her bed, eyes filled with tears, clutching that patchwork quilt, all that was left of her family. “My grandmother told me that if I could hold onto this blanket, all the love she stitched in, that we’d see each other soon someday. I believed it like it was the truth” She whispered, bringing the soft quilt up to cover her torso. Matt had wrapped his arms around her and held her like that, rocked her back and forth, laying her down gently, stroking her hair until she fell asleep.
Last night was the first night Matt ever stayed with a girl all night long, until the morning came. Before, he’d been ashamed, of what he’d done, and who he was. He knew he didn’t have to be that way with Casey. She was more than the other girls. More… real.
Matt gives up on the movie. He isn’t even sure what it’s called… something about poetry. It doesn’t really matter. He checks to make sure Ms. Bergman isn’t looking directly at him and takes his sketchbook out of his bag and flips it to a blank page. Taking his wood pencil out from behind his ear, Matt begins sketching absentmindedly, still thinking about Casey. This is so stupid. He’s never let any girl get to him like this before. It has to stop.
But… why?
His mind wanders back to last weekend, when he took her to the spot for the first time. They drove in her car, because it was already getting dark and his motorcycle was too noisy to take down there, they might get caught. She sat on his lap on the old wooden picnic table, with all the names carved in it, drinking out of her flask and listening to the night. “Someday I’m gonna get real, real far away from here.” She had said after taking another swig. “Maybe I’ll go to school on the coast, and become a photographer. Not for those famous people, though. No, those famous people wanna look too pretty. I need to take pictures of real people.”
Looking at her that night, he nearly laughed out loud. She was the prettiest person he’d ever seen, and he’d look at a lot of women. There was something deep about her. A beautiful sadness in her eyes, a hardness in her smile, something untouchable in the way her voice sounded that he just couldn’t get out of his head. “You’re gonna make it some day Casey.” Matt had said. Funny thing was, he meant it.
Matt looks down at the series of lines on his paper. At first, it doesn’t look like anything, but then, he starts to make out the shape of Casey’s bedroom, the queen sized bed in the corner, dresser next to the closet, not a thing out of place. He starts to shade in the dark corner of the room when he notices something that must be a mistake. There’s someone in the bed. More than one someone. One slight curved line marks Casey’s unmistakable figure, and another, darker line, his. Matt stops and looks at the drawing for several seconds, and the bell sounds. He closes his sketch book just as the lights come on and shoves it into his bag, stuffing his pencil in his pocket. Not in a huge hurry to get to seminar, Matt stands and smoothes his curls, then shakes his head to make it look like he wasn’t trying too hard. Slipping his bag onto his shoulders, he walks out of the room and heads down the hall, not looking at anyone in particular, but watching the whole procession as they migrate to their separate destinations, all different, and all the same.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“If you touch me again in a way I don’t want to be touched I swear I’ll rip off your fkn nose and shove it up your ass!” Casey says evenly, shoving the freshman into a locker. She may be small, but nobody touches Casey Remsburg unless she wants to be touched. Even Matt gets hit when Casey doesn’t want to be touched. He learned that early on.
Picking her bag up from where she dropped it, she slings it over her shoulder and starts walking to seminar, shoulders back confidently, steps a little small on purpose, making it look more like a saunter than a walk, like she wasn’t even trying. What was that kid thinking anyways? He must’ve been new. Felt kind of sorry for him, thinking back. He looked like he might pee his pants. Might as well teach them early Casey thought. I’m not just one of those easy whores.
Not that she hadn’t been before they moved here, before everything happened. She’d had her share of drinks, smokes, guys. Big parties. Never anything too serious, always going with the flow. That was how her life worked, until it happened. Then she moved here, with her aunt. Sort of. Susan, her legal guardian, is never around, so it’s not like they really live together.
When she got here, she started out the same way. Hanging out, looking cool, working her ass off to make it look like she wasn’t trying at all. She scoped out the different cliques, figuring out where she could make her best fit. Nothing seemed to be coming together. She didn’t want to be stuck with a crowd that had a criminal record again. That ended badly for everybody last time. That seemed to be her only choice though. Casey Remsburg, for the first time, wanted to have a plan, and couldn’t think one up.
Until she saw Matt.
He was sitting out front of the school on his motorcycle, with some nerdy looking guy standing awkwardly beside him with a book open. She saw right through his front. Even from a distance, she could see the bright shimmer in his eyes, how intelligent he really could be. But she also saw what he tried harder to hide. The pain deeper than anyone else’s, except for maybe… hers.
From that moment, Casey knew where she was going to start her life here at North High. On the back of that motorcycle.
It wasn’t hard to catch Matt’s attention once she ran into him for the first time. He had English in the room she had seminar, so as he was coming out of that room, she went in. It started out as a simple flirtatious glance. She knew that he would see her interest, and then she wouldn’t have to search for him anymore. He would come to her. The next day he was waiting for her outside her seminar after the final bell. “Hey.” He had said. “Wanna go for a ride?”
