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“Like a cache? A Wayback Machine?”
Katie shrugged and crunched her denuded pretzel stick. “I’m not internety.”
“I’ll see what I can do. When is this happening? Once I get the address?” Wil took some pretzels.
“When do you get off work?”
“Tomorrow? Four.”
“Pick me up after you’re done at work. I want to see what you wear to work and what you’re like right after. But I need to focus tomorrow, so don’t text me or call. If I think you might text, I’ll be wondering if you’re going to when I’m supposed to be writing.”
“As it happens, I don’t even have your number. Seeing as we have not spoken to each other in thirteen years.”
“Right. Give me your phone.”
Wil handed her phone over again, and Katie programmed herself into Wil’s contacts.
Just like that.
Which told Wil it was never that Katie didn’t want Wil to have her number. It was thatDianafeared Katie didn’t, or thought it might not be a good idea, or simply had never thought to give Wil access to the daughter she watched over and worried about.
“Fair warning, I used the yacht picture to come up if I contactyou,” Katie said. “So don’t call or text me tomorrow, but I like that you do have my number, and then I can think about how much you’re holding yourself back and if you will manage to. Like if you might just lose it and send me a nude.”
Wil did not imagine herself sending Katie Price a nude—or rather she tried not to, but did a little bit, and had to squeeze her legs together. “Katie. I’m starting to think you’re teasing me.”
“I am not. At all.” She touched her temple. “I’m just looping and looping and looping up here, all day long. Guess who I like to loop on lately?”
Wil breathed in, slowly. Breathed out. “Okay. What are you writing?”
“I’m trying to adapt a novel. A screenplay.”
Then Wil saw something on Katie’s face that she was able to identify, the same thing she’d seen a hint of earlier.
Katie felt uncertain.
Uncertain people, frightened people, walked into Wil’s house twice a week. Wil had learned a lot about how to connect with, validate, and work through those kinds of ordinary human feelings. “Tell me about that.”
“I’m struggling,” Katie said. “I’ve never been like you. School was hard for me. I had to put all of my psychic energy into flattering and impressing Mr. Cook to get the grade I needed to keep my admission to Winston-Salem, and then I didn’t go. It’s a lot to try to stay positive about doing something I’ve never done before that no one even wants me to do, especially when it’s not going well. And it’s not going well. Which is why me and my babies are spending a month in Wisconsin.”
Wil took a Twizzler out of the bag and peeled a strip off it. “I have so many thoughts on that, I don’t know where to start.”
“I mean, dig in. I already feel like a rabbit about to bolt, so this is probably a useful conversation for me to have.”
“First off, ‘flatteringMr. Cook’? Do you think that? Because I have to tell you, nobody thought that.”
Katie pushed off her Uggs, pulled her bare feet onto the bench seat, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I spent that whole semester acting like he was the best teacher ever, when literally no one hadeverliked him. I don’t even think anyone had everlearnedanything from him.”
“Sure,” Wil said. She thought about that class from Katie’s perspective, which she hadn’t before. How much Katie engaged with Mr. Cook. Asked questions. Made him feel like he was the caliber of teacher he had never bothered to be. “It wasn’t fair. Now that I think about it, it was worse than not fair, like, aren’t teachers supposed to be observed sometimes or something? To make sure their talents aren’t coming from the efforts of one of their students? But more important, you wereacting. We were all so fucking entertained by you. I’ve actually talked to other people from our class about this over a beer, how you razzle-dazzled Mr. Cook into not being a dick for the entire semester. There is lasting gratitude. Jen Diver, for one, who got her IEP accommodations so she could take her tests and quizzes in the library and didn’t collapse into a puddle of sensory overwhelm.”
“Hedidn’t know I was acting.” Katie said this in a voice Wil didn’t recognize, as though she were speaking for someone else.
Or repeating what someone else had told her.
That gave Wil something to think about. She turned and wrapped her hand around Katie’s bare foot. She could feel Katie’s pulse throbbing under the soft skin of her instep.
Katie was looking out the windshield at the school building, and Wil looked, too, remembering.
She had put Mr. Cook in the category of a bad teacher, a bully, but she hadn’t really interrogated his behavior from her perspective as an adult. Male teachers had so much power. It had been adicey move for Katie to take up the work of appeasing this grown man who should have known better, who should never have put a student in the position of bolstering him in order to maintain his emotional regulation and ego.