The question hung in the air, but there was no sign of groping toward an answer. Not a hint of interest. Jesse had learned not to care, any more than her students did. To believe there was a way out. They were all prisoners of the clock. “Can someone cough,” she said, “so I know you’re alive? I gave you guys the first two reasons for the rule against double jeopardy. What’s the third? And how is it similar to the reason behind a statute of limitations?”
Wluich’s leg hammered the floor, beating out a cry for help: Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Get me out! From Bell’s single AirPod, a faint thumping permeated the room. If Bell were trying to provoke Jesse, that might be reason for hope. She wasn’t; the music was merely a gesture of pure contempt.
Acevedo hadn’t meant to catch Jesse’s eye, but he did, and knew he was busted.
“Mr. Acevedo? You look like you have the answer.”
“A statue of limitations, that’s, like, what the pigeons shit on in the park, right?”
As far as everyone were concerned, Dave Chapelle had never been funnier.
“Anyone else?” she asked. “Someone who actually plans on going to law school one day?”
Bell raised a hand; she didn’t remove the AirPod, but she did appear to have been roused to something resembling sincere interest.
“Ms. Bell?” Jesse said. If Bell gave the right answer Jesse would end class early, on a high.
“Who earns more money?” Bell said, “the prosecutor or defense?”
Hammond took her on. “Everyone knows prosecutors don’t make jack. My boy Rafe, his pop’s a defense lawyer, owns a duplex on Park. Paid with cash.”
Jesse knew, on some level, that she should laugh. It was funny how she was trying to save her life by turning her students onto the prospect of becoming lawyers and changing society for the better, while they were only in it for the promise of a fat paycheck. But she was far beyond laughing. So very far.
The subject of money had the effect of a Red Bull suppository on her thirteen pre-laws.
“How much money do you make?” Wluich asked.
Jesse lifted her spiral curriculum. Inside, the first page warned her that, as a minimum wage adjunct, with fewer legal rights than an enemy combatant after 9-11, if she were to deviate from what was set out in those pages, even to the extent of a single micro-moment of personal judgment, said deviation would constitute terms for immediate dismissal, and she would be forced to pay the rent on her joke of a studio apartment from what she could dredge up working temp jobs.
She thought she’d learned not to care. Still, she always seemed to have, at the last minute, some fight left. A reflex, like a twitch, or gasp, for life.
Did her students?
Could she use herself as an example of the benefits of hard work and study? Hardly. Her clothes were K-Mart and she hadn’t washed her hair in days. She ate what she could afford: fast food, ramen, bodega pastries. She’d had her chance to be a lawyer, at one of the biggest firms in the country, and she’d thrown it away.
If anything, she was an example of what not to be.
Holding the spiral binder out in front of her, like a shield, she said, “This is Hudson University’s curriculum for your class. My private life is not in this curriculum.”
It wasn’t money, finally, that had kindled their interest. It was the hope that “teach,” for a moment, would be real with them. They slouched back down in their chairs.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer.” She set the curriculum back onto her desk. “I was in law school, but I took a break.”
“If you’re not a lawyer,” Bell said, “why are we even listening to you?”
“Why should you listen to me?” she snapped. “Maybe because I was dean’s list at Columbia, and now I’m a part-time adjunct teaching pre-law in the ass-end of the Bronx, justifying my existence to you guys.”
The only sound was the death rattle of her only steady gig. But they broke out into laughter, egged her on. Somehow, she’d made a connection.
“You want to make money?” she said, to keep the connection going. “Do the work, come to class prepared. Simple as that. It’s all on you.”
From way back in the last row, Bike Messenger Dude caught her attention. Did they know each other? His eyes were blue and clear, like her brother’s eyes, like Wyatt’s. Blue and clear and full of love, for the world and everyone in it. Eyes that would never again see a first snow, or that stranger who might turn out to be the love of your life.
She was coming apart right there in front of her class, and where would she find that in their Rules for Adjuncts?
It was Wyatt, right there across the room. Sending her a message.
All I did was love you…all I ever did was love you and you killed me.
He spoke without waiting to be called on. “So you can get on with your life.”
“What?” Jesse said, trying not to show how freaked she was. “What?”
“The third reason for the rule against double jeopardy,” the bike messenger said, with his casual, offhand drawl, as if it were most natural thing in the world that a dead boy had just spoken through him. “We can’t be punished for the sins of our past.”
A piercing siren signaled the end of class. Jesse startled. Her students couldn’t escape fast enough.
Outside, she raced from school through a frigid November night. Hustled through the wind toward the light of the subway. She stood at the edge of the platform, whisper-close to the tracks, looking up and down the platform for the inevitable psych-job.
“Come on, crazy,” she said under her breath, “one push, one little shove. Do your part for humanity, help the coward who can’t do it herself.”
The train whizzed by, close enough to feel its vibration against her skin. It stopped and its doors groaned opened. Being dead was one thing, standing all the way to Manhattan was quite another. She raced for the single available seat, scrunching her body to fit between two fellow commuters wearing giant puffy down coats. Jesse had apparently discovered the secret to invisibility, because her neighbors displayed not the slightest inclination to move aside so she could wedge into the seat. Wyatt still haunted her, even as he disappeared, gradually, like an echo. She shoved in her AirPods and turned up the volume on The Whodunnit Podcast, shutting her eyes to plunge deeper into today’s mystery, but also to block out the sadness exhaled by the other passengers, which hung in the car like a cloud of resignation, raining grief and sorrow.
Within minutes, a homeless guy shuffled in, rattling the coins in a jumbo McDonald’s cup.
“Collecting fares,” he called.
He was young, with long unwashed hair, like Bike Messenger Dude. Across the aisle, a guy in a suit and tie pretended to be engrossed in the Times; a tourist couple handed their daughter a bill. The homeless guy shuffled his cup at her.
“Pay here, for your convenience,” he said.
The girl deposited her bill.
He shook his head and sighed. “Kids pay, parents ride free. Way of the world.”
He turned away, catching sight of Jesse as she searched through her wallet. She was down to two fives. “We have a special discount for November,” he said, standing above her now, shuffling his coins. “The price your heart needs to pay.”
It was Wyatt again, and he looked so sad.
You have no idea what it felt like, watching you give up, day after day. The Wyatt I loved, wasting away, and worse, not even caring. I had to do something. I couldn’t lose you. But I never…how could I have known? Wyatt? How could I ever have known?
“You don’t pay,” he said, scrambling his cup again, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to disembark.”
Wyatt dissolved into the homeless guy again.
“Tell him I didn’t know,” she pleaded. “Please.”
He shrugged. “Would if I could.”
She put both fives in his cup; he shuffled away.
“The price your heart needs to pay,” he repeated, weaving through the car.
Jesse never cried, not even when she was a girl. Her other brother, Cheyenne, could never stop his waterfall of tears, even being the king of dares, stitched and patched and casted dozens of times. But Jesse would not cry. Not for Naughton, where she’d grown up and where she’d escaped and never been back. Not for Cheyenne, or her parents, or over crashing out of Columbia Law, or for her students, or this homeless guy, or everyone staring down at their phones, as they always did, out of fear of making eye contact with a fellow human being.
And she’d never cried for her twin, Wyatt. Not once.
But in full view of a trainload of commuters, she couldn’t stop sobbing. The suit-and-tie never looked up from his paper; the tourist couple and their daughter pretended to be engrossed in the subway map. The puffy down coats didn’t know she was there. No one paid the least attention.
But Jesse had mastered the art of emotional control; she shut down her tears as if they were a summer squall, fixed her AirPods in place, turned up the volume on Whodunnit, and shut her eyes again. When the Eighth Street station finally filled her window, she pushed up, stepped off, climbed the steps and headed south, as usual.
Tonight, there were too many NYU students crowding Broadway, so she escaped onto Waverly Place, turned left onto Greene Street, which would take her to West Fourth Street and home. She passed a hole-in-the-wall nestled in the middle of the block, a place she’d never seen before. A boutique—maybe a pop-up? The window was barely big enough for the one mannequin, a hell-raiser in silk and skin-tight leather, with a look that said, “Just try fucking with me.” Above its head, large neon letters spelled out, HOLLY ALTER. Jesse gazed through the window: It was the kind of place with no price tags—if you were interested in something, you had to ask a sales clerk. And if you had to ask what something cost…
But it didn’t matter, because she could never pull that outfit off, not in a million years.
On MacDougal, she picked up dinner at Wok In, Wok Out, which was sandwiched between a head shop and a place that sold sex toys. Then she turned around and headed for her four-story walk-up on the corner of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. As she fumbled for her keys the air changed; suddenly the bitter cold relaxed. She turned, curious, toward Sixth Avenue.
The store lights glimmering in the dark reminded her of Christmas, and she was home again, back when everything was good. How she’d loved this time of year. The clean, crisp air; the early afternoon shadows, warm and honeyed. Paper turkeys hanging in the window at Kroger’s, a dusting of snow. The way November’s sense of promise charged the air with anticipation, even when the recession tore through Naughton, with layoffs and foreclosures, bar fights and divorces. Her parents separated and got together again, and separated for good, leaving her to care for Wyatt and Cheyenne. When fentanyl became as easy to score as aspirin—even then—the widening embrace toward Christmas made Jesse feel like everything was destined to work out right.
It was all destined to work out right. And then Cheyenne decided to torment Wyatt during his night shift at Cumberland’s.
No—shut it down. If there’s one thing you’re great at, it’s shutting down the past.
She found her keys, and Naughton belonged to someone else’s memories. She opened the security door and climbed the rickety stairs while the bag leaked grease onto her hand. The upside to living on the first floor was that she’d been kicked out of her gym when she couldn’t afford the fifteen bucks a month, and at her age, twenty-seven, she could still handle a flight of stairs without croaking, fit or not. The downside was that her windows let in everything: car radios, brawls, lunatic monologues, and any number of sure-fire winners of American Idol—all night and clear through to morning.
Every. Single. Night.
She opened her door and reached for the light switch. Ten thousand roaches swarmed her kitchenette, across the sink, into the oven, surrounded the fridge.
“Yeah, you better run,” she said. “I’m in that kind of mood.”
Her walk-up was so old that George Washington might have slept there—but only if it was late at night and everything else was closed. You could start a breath at one end of her studio and finish it by the time you reached the other. Sweatshirts stuffed under the sill kept the cold air from blowing in. At least in theory. She called the style of her apartment “Contemporary Earthquake,” because the floor sloped and buckled. When the rental agent had given her the grand tour, Jesse couldn’t believe her luck.
“Wow!” she’d told the broker. “A real fireplace!”
“It is,” the broker said, “if you plan to cultivate potted plants. But throw a match in there and you’ll pretty much take out West Fourth Street clear down to the park.”
The bathtub featured the exclusive amenity of a gaping hole above the faucet. Whenever she showered, every living species of roach spilled into the tub and down the drain.
The alcove was just large enough for a bed, dresser, and closet.
Now she sat on her recliner and booted up her laptop for a rerun of Friends. She’d almost stopped noticing her screen saver. Yes, it hurt every time her Mac came to life—yes, she’d promised herself, a million times and more, to change it. And yes, she would, she would, only…
The three of them, Jesse, Cheyenne, Wyatt—the Bleyzer muckrakers—arms across shoulders on the porch of their parents’ house, the only photo she had of her brothers, and the only way she had of seeing them again, unless she shut her eyes and remembered.
Which of course, she never did.
She vowed again to change the screen saver, maybe to feature dolphins or sunsets, put the past behind her.
Just not today.
Today she would crack open her bag of Chinese food that was neither Chinese, nor food, and imagine that she was the seventh friend, trading quips with Rachel and maintaining a harmless flirtation with Joey, who of course was far too much of a lightweight for a serious affair. She didn’t understand why, but the theme song for Friends always made her cry.
Tonight, she was saved by the buzzing of her cell phone: Her profile on Freelance.com had finally gotten a hit, long after she’d given up on it. It was a professor at Columbia. An old dude in a cardigan that looked like he’d been wearing it since the day they awarded him his Ph.D. His message read:
“I require a research assistant for a project with groundbreaking potential. Your qualifications intrigue me, but I need to know the person behind the resume. Meet me tomorrow night at seven at the Starbucks on Astor Place.”
The person behind the resume! Clearly a MeToo casualty waiting to happen.
On the other hand, Christmas was coming, so school would be out—as an adjunct she didn’t get paid unless she worked. She was two months behind in her rent. If there was any chance that Professor Perv was for real, she had to take it. She texted, “c u then” and shut him down.
Chandler and Rachel were eating cheesecake off the floor, and the sauce was beginning to gum on her General Tsao’s chicken.
Life was grand.
