“We are the true heirs to the vision of Thomas Jefferson. Democracy and freedom live on in Pacifica.” He looked at the dirty teenagers, sitting on prefabricated plastic chairs in a circle. Some of them looked half-feral. They were just there for the meal, most of them didn’t give a shit about getting an education, let alone about Pacifica or the war. “Did any of you read last week’s pamphlet about the continental congress?”
A hand shot up. It was a girl whose name Tracy couldn’t remember. “Mr. Ott, did you know that congress is another word for fucking?” She asked. The boys all snickered.
Donald, a small fifteen year old with a scar on his forehead, seemed interested all of a sudden. He leaned forward in his chair. “Is that pamphlet really about fucking?” He asked.
“Yes Donald.” Tracy said. “It’s all about fucking, you should read it.”
“No,” the girl whose name Tracy couldn’t remember said, “it’s about these old guys who started the country back in olden times…”
“I’m glad you read it Ms…” Tracy tilted his head toward the girl. She’d only been to two classes, so he didn’t feel too bad about not remembering her name.
“Monet.” She said.
“I’m glad you read it Monet. Tell us what you learned.”
“All these old guys would get together and bitch about how the king of England was being all cunty about taxes and whatnot. It was all guys and no girls, so I’m thinking it was some kind of secret fag-club where they could indulge their fuck-preferences ’cause back then being a fag would get you burned at the stake.”
The other students were fascinated by Monet’s take on history, and Tracy had been teaching long enough to know not to fight for control of the room. “I’m sure some of them were homosexual.” Tracy said. “And they would’ve kept it hidden back then, although they wouldn’t have been burned at the stake. If queer history is a topic that interests you Monet, there’s some good literature on the subject in the school library.”
There was laughter and a few woos, as if Tracy had implied she was a lesbian. She smiled. “I just think it’s hot when people are fucking like horny little bunnies but they have to keep it secret because it’s supposed to be wrong.” The room was silent as everyone watched Tracy for his reaction. “Where is Missy today?” She added as if she hadn’t already made herself clear.
Tracy felt himself turn red. “I don’t know.” He said. “Let’s try to stay on topic. Can anyone tell me why American history is important to learn right now? Does anyone see any parallels between the founding father’s time and our own?” Nobody in the group had any idea why American history might be important to learn right then, and no one saw any parallels either. They just wanted to eat, and if the conversation wasn’t about fucking they weren’t going to participate.
Tracy was just going through the motions as a teacher, he knew he was just another old face to his students. He didn’t care enough to try to break through anymore, and he felt guilty about it. The last student he had cared about, he’d cared too much, and now she was gone. Missy. Missing.
“She’ll come back, just like last time.” He said to Cameron. She was worried about him and had invited him for an after-work beer. She was the only person he knew who wasn’t judgmental about his love for the girl. Cameron had a husband and kids at home, so she’d seen some of the confusion that life could breed. She’d told Tracy that he was going to lose his job over the relationship, but he told her he didn’t care. He was in love with Missy, and that was all that mattered.
“It’s been a week.” Cameron said. “Did you check the unit?”
“Yeah, I checked the one she was in last time and two others.”
“There are three different juvenile mental health facilities in Seattle? We must have a lot of fucked up kids.”
“I checked the adult ones too. All her records show that she’s eighteen now.”
“She just turned sixteen.” Cameron said.
“I know,” Tracy said, “but we wanted to get married. When she came out of the unit last winter she was so fragile and worried about the future. I asked her to marry me.”
“Oh Jesus…”
“What? Cameron, we love each other…”
“She’s a child, you’re twenty nine years old.” She said. “You probably scared her off. Why does it have to be a love story? She’s a teenager suffering from mental health problems and you’re an overgrown man-child. Can’t you see how pathetic it all is?”
“No,” Tracy said, “you sound like Beth or one of those bitches from the union. Missy is not a child, certain experiences end childhood, like seeing your whole family disintegrated. Like spending months on the street, dumpster diving for food. Like being raped.”
“And look at you, coming in to save the day.” Cameron laughed and sipped her beer. “You can protect her from the war, protect her from the streets, you’re her savior right? It must be nice to be Jesus for a while. That’s a much better role than history teacher.”
“Don’t make fun of me.” Tracy said.
“No, I’m serious. I understand you. I look at the kids in my classes and I wish I could save them. I wish I could be their mother -every single one of them! I want to save them from the world, and love them unconditionally, and tell them it’s going to be alright, but I don’t. I can’t. It’s not my job. My job is to teach them music. But if there was a kid who wanted that from me, if they opened themselves up to me in that way, I’m not sure I could resist.”
“Right, if they needed you to, you would love them…”
“I wouldn’t fuck them!” Cameron said. “See, that’s the problem with you men, you get all the different types of love mixed up. All I’m saying is that emotionally, I would give whatever was needed to one of my students. I would be glad to.”
“That’s what makes you such a good teacher Cameron.”
“Maybe, but there’s a selfish side to that desire, and I really think you’re in denial about that. Your wake-up call should’ve been when she tried to kill herself. You don’t think she would do that again do you?”
“No,” Tracy said, “she’s over that.”
“So where is she?”
“There was a guy.” Tracy said. “She tried to hide it from me, but it was a guy she met in the unit. Not another patient, an older guy. I think she met him a bunch of times, all in different places…”
“Did you follow her?”
“Only once. I was worried about her. I thought she was getting into drugs or something. She had a bunch of money all of a sudden and she was sneaking around. She disappeared right after we had her age changed, which would’ve freed her up to travel with this guy.”
“You think he’s a pimp?”
“Some kind of flesh trafficker, but I got a good picture of him and put it through wikiface. His name’s Arthur, he lives across the bay in Bremerton. I was over there watching his place this morning, but he didn’t leave the house. I’m going over there again tonight.” Tracy took a big gulp of beer.
“Are you crazy? This guy could be dangerous!”
“Yeah, I’m crazy.” He said. “She makes me crazy. I’m about to lose my job right? I don’t care. I’ll be ostracized socially? I don’t care. People will talk shit and I might even be arrested? I don’t care about any of it. I’m a man in love.”
Cameron shook her head no. “You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and now you’re pretending you wanted cookies for dinner. You’re kidding yourself Tracy.”
“I feel sorry for you. I tell you a beautiful love story, and you see it in the most negative possible light.” He finished his beer.
“Listen, Tracy, you’re a good teacher and a basically decent guy, please don’t do anything stupid.”
Tracy walked the outer deck of the ferry to Bremerton and looked across the water. The sun was hiding behind dark clouds that were raining on some green hills in the distance. It looked like a haze, stretching upward from the trees to the clouds. It was cold, but Tracy didn’t
zip up his coat. He let the wind whip it open, thinking the discomfort would pull his consciousness back into the present.
She was smart and curious, and she liked to read. She asked him if he had a library account. “Yes, of course.” He’d said. “I can even take hard-copies if I want.”
“They wont let me start my own account because I can’t prove where I live.” She said.
“Didn’t you show them your group-home ID?”
“It has to be issued by the housing authority or it doesn’t count.” She said. “Do you think you could check out some books for me?”
The wind ripped his jacket from his shoulder and he pulled it back. Any good teacher would’ve helped. The gulls squawked overhead. She liked to read paper books, she said she liked the way they felt in her hands. It became a regular thing, him taking her to the library, to satisfy her appetite for fiction. He gently tried to guide her selections. If you like fantasy novels you might want to read some books on mythology, or the middle ages. She was so thin he wanted to feed her, she told him the food at the group-home was terrible, so he started taking her out for dinner sometimes.
They connected on a deeper level over the saddest book of all time, The Shape of Nothing, with its infinite longing for the old America and for lost innocence. They connected over the music in the book, the music of the nineties and aughts, and then the private jokes between them, and meaningful looks in class. There were movie nights together, and her telling him about her family, and breaking his heart with every twist in her story. Then the realization that they’d formed a safe place between them, an understanding, an acceptance.
And then the sexual connection.
Of course it was wrong, she was fifteen years old, but it wasn’t her youth that turned him on. It was her need, her position of being alone in the world, of having nothing and no one. Missy needed him in a way that no one else ever had before.
The ferry was almost to the dock, so Tracy got back into his car on the lower level. After she moved in with him a councilor from the group home showed up to make trouble. People at the school started treating him differently, everyone was talking behind his back, but he didn’t care as long as he got to have her. The months before her first disappearance were the happiest of his life.
The first time she’d left he got the flip side of all happiness he’d had. It was a week of sheer panic, and he’d finally gone to the group home and found the councilor, and she’d told him about the call she’d gotten from Missy. She’d swallowed a bottle of pills and she was scared. She couldn’t feel her fingers, and she decided she wanted to live. He went to the unit but they wouldn’t let him see her. They looked at him like he was the one who had put her there.
The ferry’s auto-driver took over his small-screen and got him off the boat as the rain arrived and beat down on his windshield. It was a twenty minute drive to Arthur’s apartment building, an old house converted into three or four apartments. Tracy knew from the nameplates on the post boxes that Arthur lived on the ground floor in front. There was a Brazilian mini-transport parked on the street, and Tracy thought it might belong to Arthur. He parked across from the building and waited.
She had been in a manic state when she came out of the unit. She had to go back to the group home, and she said she couldn’t see him anymore. He had managed not to panic outwardly. He just said that he loved her more than anything in the world and that he wanted to take care of her. He said he would be waiting for her when she was ready. She had a pass to his apartment on her small-screen and it was the middle of the night when she came. She didn’t say anything, she just crawled into bed with him.
The war had flared up again that spring and the city was under siege. Every other night getting in and out of shelters and the constant high-pitched hum of drones overhead. The dead would sometimes be left in the street for days before the sanitation department would pick them up. Missy and Tracy were closer than ever through it all. He saw the ring in the window of the pawn shop up the street from his place. It was perfect, an oblong diamond in a platinum band with a dragon engraved along the side. It was a mix of pristine beauty and fantasy, like her.
He’d been sitting there for almost two hours when the lights in the apartment went off and Arthur emerged. He was a short, heavy man with a large nose. Something about his body language and style told Tracy that he was ex-military. He got in the Brazilian and Tracy directed his small-screen driver to follow at a safe distance. Arthur was headed south on a two-lane road and Tracy figured it would be pretty obvious that he was following the guy, but he didn’t care. Missy had been acting strange around the end of summer, dismissing long absences and otherwise not acting like a young fiancée in love. She was more concerned with getting her date of birth changed to make her look eighteen. Tracy paid the right people and bought her false ID files on a new small-screen. That night they made love, and it seemed like things were going to get better.
But she was still disappearing for long stretches of time. He decided to use the tracker on her new small-screen to see where she’d been. He found that she’d been back to the unit twice, had spent the whole day at a women’s health clinic, and had been to Bremerton once.
Arthur’s mini-transport parked at a ferry dock down the peninsula from the one Tracy had come in on. Arthur got out and waited by the railing. The rain had stopped for the moment and Arthur was looking out at the bay, waiting on a ferry. When Missy was sleeping one night he went snooping though her small-screen and saw that she’d opened a bank account with her new ID and that there was a significant amount of money in there. It was all PAC, about half as much as Tracy earned in a whole year teaching. It was a relief, because he’d thought that all the sneaking around meant that she had met someone else. But what was she doing to earn that kind of money?
The next time she said she was ‘going out’ he’d followed her. She didn’t go far, a few blocks to a coffee shop where she met Arthur and they sat at a table by the window. Tracy had been on the opposite corner, behind Missy and facing the man, and he’d gotten a few good pics of Arthur’s face.
When the ferry arrived a young girl greeted Arthur and they left together in the Brazilian. Tracy followed them to a bank not far from the dock. The girl was an unlikely prostitute. She seemed like she was in her late teens, a bit older than Missy, and she looked athletic. Maybe basketball or softball. Arthur came out holding a couple of envelopes and got back into the car. After a ten minute ride they came to a dive seafood place and he took the girl inside, still holding the envelopes.
Tracy went in and sat at the bar where he could see Arthur and the girl in their booth. He ordered a Yonium Lager and drank it absently. Arthur was showing the girl paperwork and getting her signature on documents. They stopped only for a moment to order from a waitress. The girl counted all the money in one of the envelopes and put it in her bag. They seemed friendly and nonchalant about the whole thing. Tracy imagined him talking that way to Missy, laughing with her like he was now. The waitress brought their food.
The bartender asked Tracy if he wanted another, but Tracy ordered a double shot of Jamesons. He drank it in three quick gulps. Time was passing and their popcorn shrimp was almost gone, so Tracy made his move. He surprised the girl by sliding in next to her on the bench seat. “You evil putrid little pimp.” He said to the surprised man across from him. “You’ve gotta be one of the worst human beings I’ve ever seen in person. This is how you make your living? Luring desperate girls with a little quick cash? You don’t give a damn what happens to them do you? As long as you get your cut.”
“Do I know you?” He asked. A little flicker of anger came through the confusion. “’Cause if you knew me you wouldn’t sit down at my table uninvited and start calling me names.”
“Missy.” Tracy said. “Where is she?”
He nodded, understanding the situation. “I couldn’t tell you.” He said.
“Whatever you got for her, I should get a cut.” Tracy said. “I’m the one
who got her the new ID files. You don’t care how old they are, do you Arthur? How old’s this one?”
“How old I am’s none of your fuckin’ business.” The girl said.
“Some people are aged by years and some people are aged by experience.” Arthur said. “Missy was no child and you should know that better than anyone. Wasn’t it you that got her pregnant?”
The girl sitting next to Tracy took a second look at him while he tried not to show his surprise. “She… She was pregnant?” Arthur just looked at him and said nothing. “We were going to get married.” He said. “We coulda been happy together.”
“She wasn’t too happy when I met her.” Arthur said. “A suicidal girl with no family who just turned sixteen and was pregnant with her history teacher’s baby. She was scared to death. Scared of being trapped into a life with you. I showed her the way out. If I hadn’t, she’d have ended up right back in the unit.”
“You go recruiting girls in mental wards? You’re the worst type of predator.”
“That’s priceless coming from a teacher who knocked up one of his students.” He turned to the girl. “Let’s get out of here, I don’t want to lose my temper.”
“Wait.” Tracy said, pulling out his wallet. “How much? I just want to know where she is. How much will that information cost? I have to find her.”
“You’re never going to find her.” He said. “It’s time to get on with your sad excuse for a life.” Arthur stood and looked down at him. “Let the young lady out of the booth.”
Tracy looked at her. “You don’t have to do this. Have some fucking self esteem. You’re worth so much more than whatever money is in that envelope. What would your mother say?”
Arthur grabbed Tracy by the arm with both hands and yanked him up from the table. “If I wasn’t with her I’d kick your ass up and down this restaurant you ugly piece of shit.” He said.
The girl came out of the booth. “My mom’s proud of me, she supports my decision.” She said. “There’s a long history of military service in my family. Believe it or not I’m joining up to protect assholes like you who don’t appreciate it. You can’t understand it because you don’t know what sacrifice is. Someone’s gotta fight the war, and you oughta thank Christ that there’s people like me and Missy who’re willing to do it. What Arthur does is vital to the war effort, and you aren’t fit to lick his boots.”
Arthur and the girl left the restaurant and everyone in the place was staring at Tracy. He felt drunk all of a sudden. All the faces staring at him were clearly military and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed before. Tracy got money out of his wallet and put it on the bar. “What?” He asked the bartender. “She was young. She didn’t understand how rare what we had was. That kind of love doesn’t happen every day. You have to fight for it.”
The bartender shook his head at Tracy. “No one wants to hear it buddy.”
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The Accompanist