So the story uses the cemetery down the road. Mel wanted to get out of the school. The narrator of the story, who is embarrassingly me, suggests a walk through the cemetery.
Mel opens up.
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I waited for awhile, and then, once we neared the cemetery, I asked her if she had family there, more to break the silence than anything.
"A brother," she told me, as if I should have known. "He got killed in an accident when I was ten." She walked into the grass and pointed toward a back section where the graves were smaller. "Over there," she said. "I don't think you can see it from here exactly." She stuck her hands back in her pockets. "He got the annual dedicated to him," she said. "You can look it up. He's got his picture in it. So tell me, why do people do that--dedicate something to somebody who's already dead?"
"Probably made your folks feel good," I said.
"My dad drinks every night," she said. "He drank before too. He works at the brewery--I mean, you can drink there all day long if you want, as long as you do your job. And at night. He drinks at night too."
"Gets drunk?" I asked.
"Falls asleep in his chair." She turned her head and pointed farther east. "Bruce Richter's father is out there--that new grave. Every time I see him in school, I kind of shrink, you know? You just don't know what to say to a kid whose father hung himself. Do you say your sorry, or what?—'I’m sorry your father hung himself'—how does that sound?"
"I didn't know that," I said.
"There's a lot you don't know," she told me.
Some kid went by and laid on the horn. "Freddy Jackson," she said. "He lives next door. He seems like such a kid to be driving already-"
"I don't know him," I said.
"He's a sophomore?—thin, lots of zits?"
I shook my head. "What are we doing here, Mel?" I said. "Is it your father you want to talk about or what? Why am I out here?"
She took a deep breath, looked up at the streaks of clouds across a flat autumn sky, and almost lost herself when finally it came out. "I can't stand him," she said, "even in class. I didn't go today, you know. I skipped until eleven. Can you imagine that?—Melinda Drost skipping class?" She walked farther into the stones, and I followed her. "I can't stand it that he can talk that way about stupid math problems when I know he doesn't even care. He just goes on and on as if doing dumb problems is a really big deal with him, but it isn't. Trust me, I know better."
She was talking about Wilson Crotty, Mr. Math, a man who so rarely came into the teachers' lounge that first semester that even though we shared a free period, I'd barely said a word to him since I came. When we talked, he asked such obvious questions that I knew he was working hard at trying to be social. "So, Marshall, I saw you with golf clubs yesterday—you play golf, do you?" Every word coming out nervously, bite-sized as numbers.
His gangly body was little more than a rack for the double-breasted suits he always wore, in the era of beards and beads. He kept his wispy mustache barely visible, and parted what was left of his hair down the center, about a decade or more before it became popular. He couldn't have weighed more than say, 120, just out of the shower.
"You don't like Crotty," I said, not so much as a question.
"I feel sorry for him," she said. "I really do. Do you realize how much he's given to kids since he's been here? You don't know, Mr. Sandoval. He's been here forever, and what's he ever got out of it? Even my dead brother got a yearbook dedicated to him."
"Mel," I said, "I don't get this at all."
"I don't want ever to see him again," she said. "I want to get out of your stupid essay assignment, and I want to quit math, and I want to leave school, and I just want to die."
"Mel," I said, but that's when it came, when it all poured out, finally, when the tide of her pain couldn't be held back any longer.
"I let him say things to me that he shouldn't say to a kid--a girl. I let him tell me things I shouldn't have to hear, and it makes me want to puke. He's so lonely. He just says this stuff to me and expects--"
"What kind of stuff?"
She picked a stick off the ground and broke it in pieces. "Must I draw you a picture?"
"Makes you uncomfortable?" I said.
"No," she sneered. "I take all my teachers out here so I can bawl my head off."
I was barely 22, a first-year teacher who drew his daily breath from five periods of teaching English in a basement room where each day I fed my spirit on the lives of my students. Lord knows, alone in the country with Melinda, my brightest student, somebody who talked to me like an adult, I felt no more than a foot away from being another Wilson Crotty, a man who, it seemed, had unbuttoned his loneliness to the only student he respected enough to want her to understand him. It pains me to say it, but I think I understood Wilson Crotty much better than I would have wanted to admit—much better, perhaps, than I understood the predicament of Melinda Drost.
"Did you tell Templeton?" I said, pointing back over my shoulder as if the principal stood just beyond the trees.
"I'm telling you," she said, almost derisively. "I know what Templeton will do."
And so did I.
"He says he loves me," she told me. "Gives me the chills. Horrible. He stands there over my desk like the teacher, and when all those contest problems are finished, and the other kids are gone—then he tells me that stuff. And there I sit, beneath him, and he goes on and on." She was looking down at a stone, her arms crossed over her chest. "He lives with his mother—did you know that? I mean, did he ever tell you that? I mean, do you ever talk to him?" she said, looking up, as if I were the guilty one. "You know, she treats him as if he was six years old--honestly, she does. He's got to do these jobs. She's got them written on the refrigerator--'take out the garbage'-that kind of shit."
"He told you that?"
"Every single year there's a math contest, you know, and this is my last one, and every night he wants to take me home." She was almost crying. ''I'm scared to death of him," she said.
I didn't know how to handle it. I really didn't. I felt almost nauseous. "Did you tell him?" I said.
She laughed. "How do you say no to a teacher?" she said, her bottom lip in her teeth. "And he touched me," she said. "Last night he touched me. He tried to make out with me."
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