The Abstinence Teacher (31 page)

“That’s okay,” he assured her. “I better get going.”

Ruth laughed nervously. Tim was surprised to feel her hand resting lightly on his forearm.

“I’m going on a date,” she confided, her face close enough to his that he could smell wine on her breath. “First one in a long, long time.”

“Wow.” Tim tried to ignore a pang of jealousy that made no sense. “That’s exciting.”

“Can I ask you something?” She sounded a bit embarrassed. “I kinda need a second opinion.”

She tossed him the sweatshirt and took a couple of steps back toward her house, where the light was a little better.

“Do I look okay?” she asked, turning in a slow circle. “I tried on six different outfits, and they all felt wrong.”

“You look fine,” he said.

“Really?” Maybe it was the light, but her face looked younger than he remembered it, touchingly girlish. “Just give me your honest opinion.”

Tim didn’t need to study her, but he did it anyway, just to make her feel better. She was wearing a belted leather jacket over a tweedy skirt, black tights, and high shiny boots. Her hair was loose, and she tucked a strand of it behind her ear, watching him closely.

“My honest opinion?” he said. “You got nothing to worry about.”

*   *   *

THE RAIN
held off until midway through the second half. Just seconds after Tim felt the first fat droplet strike his face, the sky seemed to burst open like a water balloon. The players ignored it at first, running doggedly through the downpour as umbrellas blossomed up and down the far sideline and subs scrambled for their soggy fleeces, but before long they were glancing plaintively at their coaches, hoping for a reprieve.

Tim didn’t blame them. The game was a blowout, either nine or ten to one; he’d stopped keeping score early in the second half, after the Stars had scored for the seventh time, and the Bandits’ goalkeeper left the field in tears. In an effort to show a little mercy, he’d instructed his team to pass the ball at least three times before shooting, and to be sure to use their nondominant foot when doing so, but even that didn’t stop the bleeding. He’d gone so far as to consider an out-and-out moratorium on scoring, but had decided against it on the grounds that it was more insulting to stop trying than it was to beat your opponent by twenty goals.

With less than fifteen minutes to play, Tim had no objection to calling the game on account of bad weather—it would still count as a victory for the Stars in the Division standings—but the Bandits’ coach wouldn’t go for it. He insisted that his girls soldier on to the bitter end, apparently to teach them some sort of lesson about perseverance in the face of adversity.

Tim was annoyed at first—it was a cold November rain, and he had no hat or umbrella—but the longer the girls slogged on, the more he began to think Soccer Dude had a point. An oddly festive mood took hold in the last few minutes of the game, once the players realized they were thoroughly drenched and might as well make the best of it.

A broad shallow puddle had formed in a badly trampled patch of earth around midfield, and the ball kept getting stuck there. One of
the Bandits lost her balance trying to kick it out, and ended up sitting on her butt in the dirty water with a comically forlorn expression on her face, a mishap some of the other girls seemed to find inspirational. Before long, players were finding all kinds of excuses to slip and fall in the muck. And then they dispensed with the excuses and just went for it. The moment the ref blew the final whistle, both teams converged in the center of the field and began stomping around, laughing and splashing one another, completing the transformation from game to party.

Standing next to John on the sideline, Tim hoisted the collar of his jacket up over his head and laughed as one girl after another ran squealing and flailing through the puddle, many of them so mud-splattered it was hard to tell which team they were on.

“I’ve got half a mind to join them,” he said, but John didn’t seem to hear. Tim turned to say it again, but then fell silent at the sight of his assistant coach.

John had his arms out and his wet stricken face turned to the sky, his expression frozen somewhere between joy and terror as he stepped onto the field. His lips were moving as he made his way slowly toward the girls, but Tim couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

Refresher

ROGER, A SIXTYISH GYM TEACHER WITH AN IRON GRAY CREW CUT,
smiled at his fellow miscreants as he smeared cream cheese on a rubbery bagel.

“Hey,” he said, sounding suspiciously cheerful for someone attending an abstinence refresher course at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. “It’s just like
The Breakfast Club
, except they actually provide breakfast.”

Ruth didn’t know for a fact that Roger was a gym teacher, but it seemed like a safe bet, given that he was wearing those high-waisted polyester shorts favored by coaches of a certain age and a T-shirt that read
PROPERTY OF WEST HIGHLAND EAGLES
.

C. J., the mannish lesbian standing next to Ruth, gave an appreciative snort. (Ruth didn’t know for a fact that C. J. was a lesbian, but she had yet to meet a straight woman who thought it was a good idea to dress like the lead singer in Sha Na Na.)

“Yeah,” C. J. said, eyeing the meager spread of coffee, juice, and supermarket baked goods that had been laid out for them. “You get treated real nice here. Just stay away from the Kool-Aid.”

There were four of them in all—Roger, C. J., Ruth, and Trisha, an earnest young woman who’d brought along her own supply of herbal tea bags—standing around a folding table in the regional headquarters
of Wise Choices for Teens in downtown Lakeview, an hour’s drive from Stonewood Heights. The other tenants in the brick office building included a dentist, a test-prep service, and a company called Home Surveillance Solutions.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Roger told C. J. “I drank the Kool-Aid and it had no effect on me whatsoever. I just happen to firmly believe that sex is bad and my penis is an instrument of the Devil.” He paused, looking momentarily puzzled. “No, wait, it’s my wife who thinks that.”

“Well, she’s at least half-right,” C. J. quipped, tearing open a packet of Sweet ’N Low.

Trisha sipped her Wellness Tea and studied the poster pinned to the wall above the copy machine. It showed a horrified college boy backing out of a dorm room, trying to escape the clutches of a seductively dressed, otherwise lovely coed who had “HIV+” stamped on her forehead in bold black letters.
If Only It Were This Easy
, declared the headline at the top of the poster. A smaller caption at the bottom read,
Abstinence: Because You Never Really Know
.

“This place gives me the creeps,” she muttered.

“What did you do?” C. J. asked her.

Trisha turned away from the poster. She was a short, plump woman with straight dark hair and a pretty mouth. If not for her serious-intellectual eyeglasses, she could have easily been mistaken for a college student herself.

“I admitted to my students that I masturbate,” she said, sounding mortified and defiant at the same time. “It wasn’t like it was part of the lesson plan or anything. We were just talking in a general way, and I said that most people probably did at one time or another in their lives, and that it was nothing to be ashamed about. And then this boy asked me point-blank if I had ever done it myself.”

“Oops,” said Roger.

“I know.” Trisha’s face flushed pink with astonishing rapidity. “I
should’ve just told him it was none of his business, but it seemed cowardly to evade the question. I mean, I tell them all the time that I want my classroom to be a safe place where people can talk openly about every aspect of sexuality and ask any question they want.”

“And look where it got you,” C. J. said. “What about you, Ruth?”

“My story’s not so interesting,” Ruth told her. “I just lost my head and suggested that there might be some problems with our handouts from the Jerry Falwell Institute of Disinformation.”

“Hear, hear,” said Roger.

“I’m a repeat offender,” C. J. volunteered. “They made me come last spring for the same reason I’m here now. Because I don’t care what the goddam curriculum says, abstinence until marriage can’t possibly apply to gay and lesbian people until we’re allowed to get married. Sentencing someone to life without sex is a cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Tell that to my wife,” said Roger.

“Ba-dum-bum,” said C. J. “And I thought Rodney Dangerfield was dead.”

“What about you?” Trish asked Roger. She seemed to have relaxed a bit now that her secret was out. “What’s your sin?”

Roger shook his head.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“That’s not fair,” C. J. told him. “We all fessed up.”

“Whatever,” Roger said. “If you really want to know, I showed my kids a
Playboy
centerfold. Miss April, 1973.”

“Why’d you do that?” Ruth asked, genuinely curious.

“It was stupid,” he said. “I was just trying to make a point about fake tits.”

C. J. looked bewildered. “What’s that got to do with the curriculum?”

Roger cupped his hands beneath his pectorals and gently lifted up.

“I just like ’em natural,” he said.

Ruth and Trisha exchanged queasy glances.

“It’s something I feel strongly about,” Roger explained. “Don’t even get me started.”

JOANN MARLOW
was her usual perky, overdressed self, as if she couldn’t imagine a better way to kick off the weekend than to throw on a tailored silk blouse, a tasteful string of pearls, and three coats of makeup before heading over to the office to knock some sense into a bunch of reprobate Sex Education teachers.

“Good morning!” she said, once they’d all taken their places around the big table in the conference room. “It’s nice to see you all!”

JoAnn flashed a brilliant smile at her captive audience and didn’t seem the least bit put out when it wasn’t returned. She took a sip of coffee from a to-go cup—Starbucks, Ruth noted, not the cheap stuff they brewed for the inmates—and drummed her polished fingernails on the tabletop.

“Before we start, just let me say that I’m well aware of the fact that these special Saturday reinforcement sessions aren’t very popular. Some of the teachers who’ve been invited here in the past have been pretty vocal about that on their evaluation sheets. Some have said they felt they were being punished. Others have used words like ‘indoctrination’ and ‘total waste of time.’ Maybe some of you share these sentiments. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is, get over it.”

JoAnn rolled her chair away from the table and stood up. She wasn’t particularly tall, but there was something elegant and powerful in the way she carried herself, a quality of absolute confidence that Ruth couldn’t help envying, even though it was completely foreign to her and deeply off-putting.

“The first thing you need to remind yourselves,” JoAnn continued, “is that you’re here for a simple reason. You did something wrong. Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t look into your hearts, and I don’t know that I’d want to if I could. At the very least, I
think it’s safe to say that everyone here this morning is having a little trouble adjusting to a new way of thinking. And I want to help you fix that.”

She strode over to the whiteboard and wrote the words “GREAT OPPORTUNITY” in squeaky red marker.

“So instead of feeling sorry for yourselves and resentful of me,” she said, “I think you’d all be better served by adjusting your attitudes right now, before we start. As hard as it might be for some of you to believe, this is a great opportunity for all of us to reconnect with our shared goal, which is to teach the Wise Choices curriculum to our students as enthusiastically and effectively as possible.”

“Yez, boss,” Roger muttered under his breath. “I sho is enthusiastic.”

C. J. covered her mouth with one hand in an unsuccessful attempt to stifle her amusement. Ruth and Trisha stared at the table.

“Go ahead and laugh,” JoAnn said. “But I guarantee your local school board doesn’t see abstinence as a laughing matter. That’s why they’ve adopted our curriculum, and that’s why they expect you to present it to your students in good faith, without additions, caveats, or sarcastic commentary. And if you can’t do that, you should think about resigning or requesting some form of reassignment before you end up facing more serious disciplinary action.”

JoAnn turned back to the board, wrote the word “PARTNERS” in very large letters, and underlined it three times.

“All I’m asking this morning is for you to make a small leap of faith. Just this once, and just as a kind of experiment, could we try to think of ourselves as partners instead of adversaries? If we approach this morning’s activities in the right spirit, then maybe we can make the first small step on the road to establishing a relationship of trust and mutual cooperation. Because the fact is, whether we like it or not, we’re in this together.”

None of the teachers nodded, but none of them protested, either, and that seemed to be good enough for JoAnn.

“Great,” she said. “What I’d like to do is start with some autobiographical writing.”

RUTH STARED
at her exam book and tried yet again to focus her thoughts. So far the only words she’d written were a restatement of the assignment JoAnn had given them before stepping out of the room: “A Sexual Encounter I Regret.” By now, enough time had passed that this simple phrase had become the center of an elaborate solar system of doodled objects—stars and crescent moons and sinuous vines, a palm tree and a pair of sexy lips, the Eiffel Tower and a fish wearing sunglasses, the planet Saturn with a large tulip sprouting from its surface.

Writing had never come easily to Ruth in the best of circumstances, and this morning’s circumstances didn’t even qualify as half-decent. She was tired from a night of fitful sleep, cranky about missing Maggie’s soccer game, and deeply suspicious of JoAnn’s motives in choosing this particular subject—she’d said she was “looking for common ground” with the teachers, but Ruth was pretty sure she was just trolling for more horror stories to inflict on impressionable adolescents. It didn’t help that all three of her colleagues were scribbling away like honor students, C. J. and Trisha unburdening themselves with grim diligence, Roger looking oddly exhilarated, chuckling and shaking his head fondly at the sights on memory lane. On top of everything else, Ruth suddenly realized that she was extremely hungry, a condition she deduced from the fact that she was drawing an excessively detailed picture of a donut with sprinkles on it, floating like the sun above the Eiffel Tower and shooting quivery rays of deliciousness into the sky.