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I guess I'm too slow, yes, I'm too, yes, I'm too slow
You said any time of the day was fine
You said any time of the night was also fine
Susan laughs. Abby laughs.
Anna doesn’t.
“Hope you gave her a hell of a Christmas bonus.”
Abby doesn’t miss a beat. “Alright,” she says. Easily. Upbeat. “Luka, eleven. It's going to be very tough to beat.”
For a second, she thinks she’s missed something. She looks at John to see if he’s laughing or winking or something. Maybe this is some fucked up joke between him and Susan. Maybe this is something they’ve referenced before. Who knows? They’re dating, after all. Anna’s sure there’s probably a million things they’ve talked about and shared with each other that she isn’t privy to. Sometimes, she wonders if they talk about her. What John says. What Susan knows, and what she doesn’t. Anna thinks about them a lot. More than she should, she knows, but John isn’t laughing and he isn’t winking, and Susan isn’t even looking at him anymore.
And Abby carries on like John Carter never said a thing.
“Come on,” she wheedles, her head cocked as she appeals to Luka, and Anna knows the nonchalance it takes to pretend you don’t give a shit about what a boy thinks. “You don't have to say how old you were. Just confirm you were older than eleven, and we can award the prize to Carter.”
“I get a prize?” John asks, and he’s watching Abby the same way Abby’s watching Luka.
Susan slides in between them, her typical wry tone so dry it’s begun to sound bitter to Anna. She’s heard John and Susan sniping all morning, snatched fragments of some kind of disagreement that John keeps pressing and Susan keeps brushing off, only here, Susan’s beginning to sound like the slighted one.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” she says. John knows what she means. Anna knows, too. Abby doesn’t hear anything. Her eyes have slid back to Luka.
And Luka, finally, is ready to speak, but Anna —
“Is that true?” she asks.
“What?” Susan asks, impatiently. She’s the umpire of the game. She wants to intercept whatever play she thinks Anna’s making. Probably because Anna’s no fun. Susan hadn’t even asked Anna about her virginity. She’d only rolled her eyes, said, Lemme guess — Christmas Eve, 1998. Then, catching John’s blush, and Anna’s stoic expression, she’d laughed uproariously, assuring everyone she was only kidding, only kidding, and ceded the floor to Abby, stifling her laughter in the elbow of her sweater.
Anna bit her tongue then. She doesn’t now.
“What he said,” Anna presses. She chucks her chin at John. “Is it true?”
Abby snickers, setting off a bout of laughter between her and Susan again. “What? That his parents paid the maid? I guess we’d have to ask Gamma about the working conditions of The Help.”
Susan. “Maybe that was the bonus!”
Luka snorts. Even Gallant is smirking.
But Anna isn’t laughing. John isn’t laughing.
Instead, he’s got this grotesque kind of snarl curling his lip that looks like disgust passing itself off as humour. He kind of shrugs, he kind of shakes his head. He digs the penknife into the desk.
“John,” Anna says, digging in harder, leaning on him, all her focus on him, only. If only he would look her in the eye…“Is that true?”
John keeps his face turned away, lips pressed tightly together, and even though he’s got one leg crossed casually over the other, she can sees his shoulders creeping upward, and his knuckles turning white.
It reminds her of a late night on an L platform. It was so cold that even with her coat on, and her hat pulled low over her ears, even with the righteous inferno of outrage fueling her, she was still freezing. And John, she remembers John standing there in just his white coat, shivering, and insisting that he treated a rapist the same way he treated every other patient. He’s got that same look on his face — utter stillness. As if hoping that some predatory eye will pass him right over, if only he can remain motionless enough, as if that strict, self-denial, self-control will make him absolutely invisible.
“Of course it’s not true,” Abby says, but she sounds less sure now.
“Obviously!” Susan chortles. She looks at John. John, who is looking at no one, who is staring at the carving in his desk, brow furrowed in deep contemplation of his art. Susan chokes back a giggle, until she can’t, and she’s sputtering, and she’s laughing again.
Anna turns on her. “This isn’t funny. Why are you laughing?”
Susan’s eyes go wide, her jaw dropping as though Anna’s upset is something amazing, and shocking. She scoffs, mouth wide open, as though she can’t believe anyone could be upset, and she laughs like Anna’s embarrassing herself for taking it all so seriously. She flings her arm out towards her boyfriend. “Because…” she says, “because he’s obviously lying.”
“I’m not lying,” he says. He’s smiling but it looks painful, lips pulled back and stapled to the corners of his mouth. More like a wince, more like a rabid dog, baring its teeth. Nothing like a smile. He keeps his eyes lowered, and digs the penknife in deeper, until the wood cracks and splinters.
“Why would he be lying? John?” She turns to him, and asks him directly. “Why would you lie?”
“I’m not lying,” he mutters, but it’s mostly to himself.
Susan’s voice drowns him out completely. “Because he wants to win the game!”
“Oh, right. Okay.” Anna throws herself back in her seat, tilting back the desk until the front two legs are off the floor with all the defiance she showed her tenth grade English teacher when she was fifteen. She throws that same vitriol and disdain at Susan, now. “So who here thinks that John wins the game?” She puts her hand up. She glances over one shoulder, then the other, evaluating the rest of the nearly empty classroom. Luka sighs — sure, fine, he’s too mature for this. Whatever. Gallant looks properly ashamed, but then, she supposes, high school isn’t so far away for him. But neither of them put up their hand. No one does. “I’m confused. So he hasn’t won the game?”
“Well, we don’t know yet,” drawls Susan. “We haven’t heard from Luka.”
“What do you need to hear from him? Something worse? I think we should call it for John right now —”
“No —”
“What then? What’s the competition? What’s the game? Explain it to me. What’s the game? I don’t get it.”
Finally, Luka, the adult, steps in. “Why don’t we all take a step back, and take a break. I think everyone’s just feeling a little bit stressed out from being inside all day.”
Anna tilts the chair back and back until it’s only atoms keeping it upright. She looks at John, waiting for him to look at her, to mock Luka, to defend himself, to do anything. But he just scratches away at the desk, shaking his head like he’s above it all.
“Fine,” she says. She lets the chair slam back to the floor. “Yeah, fine. Sorry to ruin the fun.”
“I don’t think you’ve had fun since Carter laid you out in 1998—”
“You know what, I don’t know what your problem is. You hate me, you’re clearly jealous of Abby, you’ve been picking at John all day—”
“John,” she mocks, drawing out his name all saccharine sweet and simpering.
“Yeah, fine. Whatever you and John have going on between you is your business —”
“Good,” Susan snaps. “Then stay the hell out of it.”
Hours later, and Anna’s still furious. She’d spent the entirely of the session resenting everyone else in the room by turns. Luka, for his passive appeasement and his casual disinterest. Gallant for being too young to be brave, a soldier without a spine. Abby, because John loves her and she laughed. Susan, because John trusts her, because he’s with her, and because she hurt him. John, for saying it at all and then saying nothing else.
Herself, because in that moment, she was angry, she was horrified, but she wasn’t helpful. She didn’t help him. Maybe, she thinks, she even hurt him more, by pointing it out and making everyone look at how ugly it was, and maybe she made all of them uglier by doing so.
When the seminar ends, Anna is up and out the door, her scarf trailing in the air behind her. She isn’t dressed for the cold, but she’s just got to get out of there. She can’t be in there for one second longer.
She stands on the steps, inhaling the winter air in deep gasps. It slashes and prickles its way down her throat, still cold when it reaches her lungs. It burns, and that makes everything feel a little better. Her fingers stumble trying to thread the zipper of her coat, and she stamps her feet, annoyed and numb at the same time. There’s a countdown ticking away in her head where she’s racing against any of her colleagues finding her out here before she can get away clean. They’re probably all mingling. Laughing. John and Luka shaking hands like gentlemen. Susan and Abby teasing them both. Abby and Luka making eyes at each other. Susan turning John by the chin, kissing him on the mouth, demanding his attention.
Anna wants to run. She steps onto the road, but a hand at her elbow holds her back.
“Hey, wait. Wait up. Where you going?”
It’s John. It has to be. There’s no other touch that makes her relent so quickly and with hardly any fight. She slumps back against the wall, and looks at him. The warm light of the hall behind him gilds him like a golden frost. Over his shoulder, she can see the others ambling toward them, down the hall, but John, evidently, has run ahead.
“I gotta catch the train,” she says, distractedly.
John nods. He sniffs, the chill already turning his nose red. He buries his chin in the collar of his rich, wool coat.
“I wanted to catch you before you left,” he says. “I wanted to - I wanted to…I guess I wanted to thank you.”
Anna nods. She shakes her head. Shrugs. Looks anywhere but at him. “S’nothing,” she says. “I didn’t meant to embarass you.”
“You didn’t.”
“It’s none of my business. But if you — if that kid that you were — if he’d walked into the ER, and said that…”
“I know.”
Her mouth twists. That’s a lie. That’s a lie. She can’t help but look at him, trying to catch his gaze to catch him in it. He looks at her, and he lifts his chin, and he keeps himself quite still.
“Do you?” she asks. She keeps herself just as still, holding him there, and she hopes that to him, she appears steady. Not scared. She is something certain, something solid to lean on.
He opens his mouth.
“Carter!” Susan calls for him, and the stillness is broken. He starts, abruptly stepping back to look over his shoulder. “You coming?”
He looks back at Anna.
“Go,” she says.
He hesitates, as if he wants to say something. He opens his mouth. He closes it again. He swallows, and steps back another step. “I didn’t lie,” he says, even as he turns. The wind almost takes it, but still, she can hear. “I promise, I didn’t.”
“I know,” she says. “There wasn’t a single moment when I thought you did.”
And he turns away, and runs to catch up with Susan who slips her arm through the crook of his, and Anna looks away, and starts down the street towards the L, her hat pulled low, her hands shoved in her pockets, and she doesn’t look back. But he does.