Chapter 5
Heather M. Fellaway had lived with her mother her entire life.
Saint Mary’s College of California was thirty minutes from El Sobrante by car. She’d been accepted with a full scholarship, including housing. They had a beautiful campus, and a part of Heather would have leapt at the chance to live on it…
But a bigger part felt obligated to stay at home and dedicate her life to being her self-destructive mother’s only guardian.
When Crystal Fellaway had finally gotten clean during Heather’s senior year of college, Heather told herself that it was an opportunity to finally feel okay about leaving home. But even then, she realized, she just didn’t have the guts. The worry that her mother would die if she were to leave her completely to her own devices was fully embedded in her by then. She had had an offer to move to Southern California to teach at an elementary school in Torrance shortly after graduating from college, but chose to remain in the Bay Area. Her double major in English and French couldn’t have gotten her anything but a teaching job. Truth be told, she had never desired to do anything with her education but impart it to others. In fact, very few desires for a life of her own had ever fully existed…and if they did, Heather herself knew very little of them.
Naturally, when she turned down the teaching job in Torrance, she didn’t feel in the least that there was something she had missed out on. Instead, she’d felt relieved. A few months later, she was hired at Juan Crespi Middle School, her own alma mater. Sure, there was a certain embarrassment about going back to the school you once attended as a teacher…sure, one could say that the type of person who did such a thing was stunted in some way…but those were thoughts she conveniently ignored as she proceeded into the next, new-old stage of her life.
After three and a half years of teaching at Crespi, it was Crystal Fellaway who finally broke the ice:
“You gotta give yourself the chance to live your own life,” she’d told Heather.
Deep down, Heather reluctantly agreed…but only on the condition that her “own life” could be lived in proximity to her mother’s – a thirty-minute-in-light-traffic-drive proximity, to be precise – and she moved to the city of Alameda: a naval base town that was now home to the working and middle classes. Some people called Alameda the place “where semi-senior hipsters come to breed,” though when Heather had moved there in July just before starting her new job, she was far from semi-senior, and breeding was definitely the last thing on her mind.
Matthew Yin’s party was set to start “around seven” and end “around whenever. ” Heather had never cared much for parties. It wasn’t that she disliked talking to people – in fact, she thought of herself as one of those people who are always in ravenous search of a strong, striking, uncanny human connection – the problem for her was the type of talking that went on at parties (and in most day-to-day human interactions): to her, it all seemed very forced and superficial. When Heather was in college, she never attended parties. She was the opposite of her party-animal mother, who didn’t understand why Heather felt afraid of going out and mingling. Now that she was out of her mother’s house, however, Heather somehow felt more pushed to do it. At home, she had only had her mother to interact with, but now, living alone, Heather felt like a loser if she didn’t ever see anyone. The fear of feeling like a loser, was, for Heather, one the greatest motivators she had at her disposal.
Heather squirmed into a black dress. It was just a plain black dress that only slightly hinted at the fact that a bodily form existed beneath it. It looked so plain, probably because it was. She glanced at the purple scarf hanging on a hook on her bedroom door. She didn’t know if she should wear it, but it was the only thing in her entire wardrobe that had any splash of color. All of her other clothes were gray, black, or white. In her mind, she heard the lyrics of the song Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll by Ian Dury and the Blockheads:
Every bit of clothing
ought to make you pretty
You can cut the clothing,
grey is such a pity
She hadn’t thought about that song in months. But it was another line: Keep your silly ways, or throw them out the window that got her to pull the scarf down and sling it over her neck.
She had made brownies earlier that afternoon from scratch, and arranged them carefully on a decorative plate.
Seeing as how it was late August, the sun was still shining brightly when she stepped outside of the small house (a 1944 bungalow, on which she paid 1200 a month, including utilities) she now lived in and headed for the car. She’d had very little time to tend to the front yard of the house (if you could deign to call it a yard…it essentially consisted of brown grass, some overgrown weeds, and a single rosebush); since moving in, all of her attention had been focused on the interior: primarily spackling and painting. That evening, she stopped in her tracks as she came abreast of the rosebush. It was one of those tall rose bushes that look more like a small tree, and whoever had rented the place before her had inserted a stick into the dirt and tied the bush to it, so that it would not fall over or snap in the wind.
Heather noticed for the first time that there was one small, yellow rose growing on one of the stems…hardly a real rose yet, more like something between a bud and a rose. She inhaled. The scent was strong and intoxicating. She took a few steps back and carefully placed the plate of brownies back onto one of the concrete steps. With the tips of the fingers on her right hand, she lifted the rose slightly so that she could bring it even closer to her face, and as she did, the bud suddenly snapped off and rolled into the palm of her hand. She had the feeling like she had just killed a small animal. She could feel her heart crushing a little bit, wanting so desperately and more than anything else in that moment to rewind time by just a few seconds. She held the flower in her hand, in shock, for nearly an entire minute, and then she brought it to her face. Maybe it was her imagination, but she could have sworn it didn’t smell as strongly as it had just a minute ago.
Matthew answered the door.
“Hey!”
“I brought brownies,” Heather offered, suddenly feeling a very self-conscious need to be upbeat and interesting.
“Great,” he said, his face brightening. “They look like they were made from scratch.”
“I got the recipe off this show on the Food Network.”
Matthew smiled. “Come in. Lots of people are already here. Can I get you anything to drink?”
Heather felt a sudden twinge of anxiety when Matthew said “lots of people.” Her mind kept reminding her of how foreign this type of social scene was for her, how unaccustomed she was to socializing with people…how she was probably terrible at it. She told her mind to “shut up,” but for some reason it didn’t quite work.
They walked through the hallway until they came upon the kitchen.
“Matthew!” Heather heard a familiar man’s voice exclaim. The two of them turned around at the same time to see that it was Principal Louis, dressed in another wacky sweater and black slacks. The predominant color of his sweater at the meeting the other day at the meeting had been green, but today it was burgundy. Heather stared at him in shock.
Principal Louis stopped, mid-leap across the room, when he saw her.
“Hello, Heather!” he exclaimed. “So good to see you here.”
“Nice to see you too,” she said meekly. It sounded totally unconvincing, but Principal Louis didn’t seem to notice.
“And you are wearing the scarf!” he beamed. “I’m so happy you like it.”
“Well, I figured this dress needed a punch of color,” Heather replied. What the hell is he doing here? she wondered.
“That’s right!” he said. “A punch of color! I love the way you use language. That’s why I hired you. You have a way with words, Heather Fellaway.”
“Me?” Heather asked incredulously.
“And the violet suits you perfectly, I think.”
“What was it you wanted, Principal Louis?” Matthew asked. He was still balancing the plate of brownies in one hand and had, somewhere during the odyssey from the front door to the kitchen, also acquired a bottle of sauvignon blanc in the other.
“I’ve told you a million times to call me Zach,” Principal Louis cried. If Heather had been drinking anything, she would have done a spit-take in that moment and then tried to conceal her sudden laughter. It wasn’t that she thought the name Zach was stupid or anything like that, but until that moment, she realized that she had never actually known Principal Louis’ first name. The name Zach seemed entirely inappropriate for a principal. The principal at Crespi had been named Stewart Mills. That seemed far more appropriate and far, far less laughable.
“I know, I know,” Matthew said. “Old habits die hard. Especially because I’ve called you Principal Louis since I was at Alameda High.”
Heather blanched. “Principal Louis was your principal when you were a kid?” she asked Matthew.
“Oh I’ve been there a long, long time, my dear,” Principal Louis told Heather.
“That’s amazing,” she said. The voice in her head promptly told her that she sounded stupid, that she had absolutely nothing of substance to add to a conversation, and then reminded her that she was bad at this whole “talking” thing altogether.
“I’ll compromise,” Matthew said to Principal Louis. “I’ll call you Zachary, not Zach. Whenever I hear or say the name Zach, I think of that show Saved by the Bell.”
“Fair enough,” Principal Louis said. Heather half expected him to turn to her and say: “I’d like you to call me Zachary as well, Heather.” But he didn’t.
“The reason I tracked you down is because some people want to start the karaoke, but we can’t figure out how to set up the machine.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Matthew assured him.
“Excellent!” Principal Louis exclaimed. He nodded approvingly at Heather once more.
“I just have to say it one more time: I really think I hit the nail on the head with that color.”
“Do you drink?” Matthew asked Heather as he continued into the kitchen and set the brownies down on the table.
“Not really,” Heather said. “It puts me to sleep.”
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “Do you do karaoke?”
“Not in a million years,” Heather told him. It was such a definitive statement that once the words were out of her mouth, she realized that any further explanation would have been superfluous.
Matthew nodded and gave an amiable shrug.
“Help yourself to anything,” he said again, before disappearing to help Principal Louis in the living room. She wished he would stay and talk to her the entire night so that she wouldn’t be forced into the position of having to actually “socialize.” Just the word itself gave her entire body a wallop of anxiety.
Heather decided that the best way to avoid the possibility of a panic attack was to completely avoid all encounters with the karaoke machine. And the surefire way to do that was to remain in the kitchen for the rest of the night. It sounded a little like a prison sentence when she thought about it, but a self-imposed psychological prison sentence was always, indisputably, infinitely better than public humiliation. Added to that was the knowledge that this was only the beginning of her career at Alameda High School, and anything she did now she might have to live down for the rest of her time there. Given Principal Louis’ track record, who knew how long that could turn out to be?
Heather stared into the punchbowl, taking small, surreptitious glances at the outline of her head, neck, and shoulders, and attempting to appear nonchalant. She felt more awkward than she had ever anticipated she would. Was she beginning to regret her decision to attend the party? One could say: somewhat. It is in these moments of small despair and loneliness that a person can start to feel as though her entire life has somehow gone amiss. Heather thought about her decision to leave Juan Crespi and to move to Alameda. Was it all just a big mistake, seeing as how she was now standing here, uncomfortable and alone at a party in which she could make friends but had no idea where to actually begin? What had she really been searching for when she had moved out of her mother’s house?
The confrontational question echoed in her brain, synchronized with the ripples on her reflection in the red punch staring back at her. Impulsively, she reached for the large spoon used to pour punch into the paper cups, and filled hers with the bright red liquid. She was just about finished pouring herself a glass, when a finger tapped her on the shoulder. Heather was so startled that she jumped, and the paper cup and its contents fell to the floor, covering her shoes and the bottom part of her transparent stockings. Heather gasped, drenched in instant punch and even more instant embarrassment.
She whirled around to face the finger tapper, who just so happened to be Tom Beckett. She looked down and was even more horrified to see that some of the punch had spilled onto his khakis.
“I’m so sorry,” Tom Beckett said.
“I’m sorry,” Heather countered. It was a contest to see who could sorrier.
“I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that,” Tom Beckett continued. “I should have made some kind of noise to hint to you that I was standing right behind you. Like clearing my throat. That would have startled you less.”
It was hard to disagree with such a logical statement, even though when she really stopped to think about it, it actually didn’t sound all that logical. If anything, it was overly-logical.
“I’m Tom Beckett,” he said, handing Heather a stack of paper towels that he had managed, in the eight second conversation they’d had thus far, to rinse under the faucet so that she could dab at her stockings with them. The punch was soaking through her stockings and Heather was beginning to wonder if it would stain her skin. She was relatively certain that instant punch could do such a thing.
“I’ll get the mess on the floor,” Tom said. “You can tend to your shoes.”
Heather nodded. She wasn’t sure how comfortable she was blotting her calves with a stack of Brawny paper towels, much less in front of a kitchen full of strangers who had just witnessed the entire embarrassing spillage affair. She noted, however, that Tom Beckett didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed himself.
At that moment, Matthew reentered the room.
“I leave for one minute and you’re already causing an international affair,” he said dryly to Tom Beckett, who was, at that point, on all fours on the floor trying to soak up the remainder of the punch.
“Sorry to use up all your paper towels, Matthew,” Tom said.
“Let me get the mop,” Matthew continued. “It’ll take two minutes.” He opened a cabinet door and pulled out one of those mops that looked like an extra-long sponge. The mess was gone in no time.
“…And it’s better for the environment,” Matthew added, as he expertly squeezed the now-pale red liquid from the mop, rinsed it in the sink, and slid it back into the cabinet. “Now that you’ve killed an entire forest worth of paper towels.”
“Well I didn’t know where you kept your cleaning supplies,” Tom said to him. “And I didn’t want it to stain your floor.”
“Black linoleum doesn’t stain, you idiot,” Matthew said. He turned to Heather.
“I see you’ve met Tom Beckett. The clumsiest person alive…or at least to grace Alameda High.”
“Actually, I was the one who spilled the punch,” Heather pointed out.
“I caused her to spill it, though,” Tom added. “It was really my fault.” Here again was that one-upmanship of niceness; Heather didn’t know whether it was deliberate or simply a learned reflex on both of their parts.
“It’s a party,” Matthew said. “Things are going to get spilled. I’ve made peace with it.”
Suddenly Principal Louis’ voice rang over the general hum of the gathering.
“Does anyone know if this karaoke machine has Born to be Alive?” he called out.
Matthew gave them both a dry look.
“I have made peace with the great many realities of being a host,” he said to Tom and Heather before disappearing back into the living room.
“You only get one chance to make a first impression,” Tom Beckett said to Heather.
“This isn’t your first impression,” Heather said. The words came out of her suddenly, like an unexpected hiccup. He stared at her, confused, as though she’d just started speaking French. Heather quickly decided it was necessary to follow up:
“I mean,” she said more slowly, more controlled, “I saw you at the meeting earlier this week. You read a poem.”
His face registered, then brightened.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I forgot about that. Louis pointed you out in front of everyone when he gave you that scarf…” his eyes widened a little in observation. “The one you are wearing right now.”
Heather smiled and shrugged a bit.
“I felt bad that he called you out in front of everybody like that,” he told her.
“It wasn’t all that bad,” Heather said. Even though it had been.
Eventually, Heather broke her promise to herself and followed Tom Beckett into the living room…yes, the very same living room she had vowed not to enter for the entirety of the evening. They talked about their English classes. He taught twelfth and ninth, and AP English, which only met once a week.
“I’m nervous about teaching high school,” Heather confessed.
He seemed surprised. “I’d think that teaching middle schoolers would be much harder.”
“The thing about middle school,” Heather told him, “is that the population is so inconsistent. You have the little kids who are still like elementary schoolers, and then you have the kids who want to be grown up, and the kids who are grown up but aren’t ready to be grown up yet…” she went on and on. Actually, she had never articulated any of these thoughts to anyone before, least of all herself.
Once she had finished talking, Heather had the distinct feeling that she had somehow said too much and overwhelmed him. She could see it in his face. He was like the sponge mop that Matthew had used in the kitchen: completely saturated. Heather looked down at her legs and saw that the red stains were still there. Usually that kind of thing would have upset her and she’d make an excuse to leave and go home, but for some reason it didn’t matter to her so much in that moment.
“Do you sing?” Tom motioned to the karaoke machine. Principal Louis was singing Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.
Stayyyyyyy…just a little bit longerrrrrr…
Heather laughed. “I don’t like being the center of attention.”
“But you’re a teacher.”
Heather shrugged and took a sip of punch. She didn’t really have the energy to explain it to him.
“I think you do sing,” he said after a beat.
Heather smiled sarcastically and shook her head.
Beckett nodded insistently. Heather hoped that he wasn’t one of those people who thought he knew people better than they knew themselves, people who tried to make you think they could tell you something about yourself that you didn’t already know.
“I will sing,” she told him enigmatically. “But only the right song.”
“I think I know what that song is,” Beckett said gamely.
Heather was more than a hundred percent sure that he didn’t know. He couldn’t possibly know, because they had just met.
“I’m going to put a song on,” he said. “And if it’s the song you’re thinking of, you have to sing it.”
She laughed at the idea.
“What if you’re wrong?” she asked.
“Then,” he paused. “I will sing the song.”
Heather scoffed. “You’re willing to humiliate yourself like that?” she asked.
Tom Beckett smiled. Over by the machine, Matthew was sitting with a large black binder in his lap that listed all of the songs available by artist and title, with the corresponding number codes to punch into the machine in order to call them up. Principal Louis was still singing Stay. It seemed to her as though he had been singing it forever, even though she knew it was probably only a two-minute song. Apparently, the job of “karaoke code number puncher” had, literally, fallen into poor Matthew’s lap. It didn’t strike Heather as a terribly difficult task, but most of the people at the party by that point had been drinking and had lost hold of their more basic abilities and senses. Out of the corner of her eye, Heather spotted Theodore Gladstone, the AP Chemistry teacher, in the corner of the room holding a Corona in one hand and dropping an entire brownie into his mouth at once with the other.
“Magnificent brownies, Heather,” he said with his mouth full, “Excellent texture.”
Heather smiled uncomfortably. She was pleased, but also a little grossed out by his slightly orgasmic facial expression. When she shifted her gaze away from Theo Gladstone, she saw that Tom Beckett was talking to Matthew Yin. Together, they leafed through the laminated pages of the songbook, and then Tom Beckett dropped his index finger against one of the sheets. It was clear from where Heather sat that he had selected a song, but she wasn’t the least bit worried or concerned. There was no way…
Matthew nodded and Tom Beckett returned to Heather on the couch.
“You guys seem to get along really well,” Heather observed.
“We’ve been best friends since the sixth grade,” he told her.
“Did you go to Alameda High too?” she asked incredulously. Beckett nodded. Heather was beginning to think that maybe she wasn’t a freak for coming back to Crespi after going there for middle school...maybe she wasn’t stunted. Beckett and Matthew Yin didn’t seem to think of themselves that way.
Principal Louis finally wrapped up the song and there was a smattering of applause. Maybe a little more generous than a smattering. He wasn’t a bad singer, per se. He was zealous, and this is what carried him through each song he undertook, kept him buoyant and, strangely, in tune. Heather wondered if the same applied to his job.
“I think it’s time for me to pass the microphone off to the next worthy crooner,” he proclaimed. He looked back at Matthew. “Tell me, Matthew, what’s the next song on the list?”
Matthew took the mic from him, just a little bit forcefully.
“It’s Underneath Your Clothes by Shakiraaaaaa!” Matthew said, doing his best impression of Bob Baker on The Price is Right. “Sung by our very own Heather Fellawayyyy!”
Heather’s heart froze. How? She thought to herself. How could it be possible? How did he know?
Somewhere deep inside of her body, Heather started to shake. There was simply no way she could go up there and make a fool of herself in front of all of her new colleagues and co-workers. It was one thing for Principal Louis to do that. He was the kind of person who could make a fool of himself in front of everyone, all day every day, and still never suffer for it the way she would.
“Heather Fellaway, come on downnnnn!” Matthew bellowed again.
Heather looked at Matthew, who held the mic outstretched in his hand, and then over to Tom Beckett, whose face at that moment reminded her of a hopeful Dalmatian puppy, wagging its tail and panting: “Was I right? Was I right?”
It suddenly struck her as very warm in the room…bordering on the voracious, steaming maws of hell, actually. It was also in that moment that she realized that she had not fully appreciated just how many people were standing in the living room listing to the awful, ongoing singing brigade, and having a great time laughing at other peoples’ expense. She steeled herself. There was only one thing left to do, and that was to lie.
“Not the song,” she told Tom as flippantly as she could.
“No?” Tom asked incredulously.
Heather pursed her lips and shook her head like a petulant child.
“Oh well!” Tom said, rising to his feet.
“What are you doing?” she asked, alarmed.
“I don’t welsh on bets!” he grinned. It was the first time Heather had ever heard anyone use the word “welsh” in an actual conversation. She knew what it meant, of course, she just had never actually heard anyone say it. The song was starting up, sounding so familiar and inviting and yet at the same time so foreboding. It was time to sing. Someone had to sing. Heather would not move from the couch. Even if she wanted to, she could not move. She felt like a tree stump, lodged in the soil, glued helplessly by panic to the earth.
It was at this moment that Tom Beckett began to sing.
She couldn’t believe Tom Beckett was going to take a humiliation bullet for her like this.
She couldn’t believe men listened to Shakira.
She had expected it to be one of those horrifying, cringe-inducing karaoke debacles, in which the person a has no clue about the melody or the cadence of the lyrics and just merely stumbles through them like a ranger trying to step through tall grass and tripping before falling face down in horse manure, but Tom Beckett actually knew the song…one could even guess by heart. Still, Heather admitted to herself, there was something missing from his performance. After all, there was a reason that people like Heather loved Shakira, and a lot of it had to do with her voice. Shakira didn’t have a generic voice that took a person years to recognize when it came on the radio. Shakira had the voice of a little lamb. A slightly nasal little baa-baa lamb.
Tom Beckett was not singing the song like a little lamb. He was singing it like a man, which was fine and all, but it wasn’t doing justice to Shakira, and as stunned and amazed as Heather was that he was even up there at all, she couldn’t help but feel that he was botching it…just a little bit.
Her favorite part of the song was the bridge, and it was fast approaching. For some unexplainable reason, Heather felt her heart pounding again. It had settled down momentarily until now, yet for some reason, this pounding was different. It was not the heartbeat of running away or fleeing or fear of losing face, but the kind of pounding that you feel only when you absolutely know that you are on the verge of doing something extremely necessary, and extremely badass.
“Underneath your clothes, there’s an endless storyyyy….”
She suddenly realized that Principal Louis was sitting next to her. She didn’t know how long he had been there.
“This Sahara singer certainly is wonderful!” he cried.
Heather didn’t have the heart to correct him. Or maybe it was the guts. He was still her boss, after all. And besides, the bridge was upon them. Escalating, advancing…
“There’s the mannnn I choooooose, there’s my territory….and all the things I deser-er-erveeee…for being such a good girl…for bein’ such ahh-hey-hey-hey-hey….”
And then, out of nowhere, it grabbed her.
Or rather, she it.
Heather does not recall much from that actual moment, except that she only knew one thing and that was that she simply had to sing. She had been an official Shakira fan since 2001, since her single Wherever Whenever debuted in the United States, and nine years is really quite a long time in a person’s life when you think about it –especially if that person is only twenty-seven years old – and for seven and a half of those years of love and dedication to Shakira, she had consistently practiced her little lamb voice in the shower. Not even Heather’s mother, with whom she had lived for all those years, had ever heard Heather’s little lamb voice. But in that moment, all of Heather’s fears and doubts and chronic embarrassment somehow melted away…melted into the favorite lyrics of her favorite song of all time:
I love you more than all that's on the planet
Movin' talkin' walkin' breathing
You know it's true
Oh baby it's so funny
You almost don't believe it
As every voice is hanging from the silence
Lamps are hanging from the ceiling
Like a lady tied her good manners
I'm tied up to this feelinggggggggg…
The only visual she can recall from that fevered moment is that of Theodore Gladstone choking on one of her brownies in shock (and also due to the fact that he had been shoveling them into his mouth at an unhealthy rate), and Coach Wai of the soccer team slamming him on the back and trying to deduce whether or not he would have to employ the Heimlich maneuver. Gladstone would recover. He would be okay. But in that one bridge of a song by Shakira, Heather Fellaway’s life would change forever.