After the needle came out, as we ate our cookies and drank our juice, I examined the bags of syrupy blood. No matter how long I stared, I couldn’t differentiate mine from Jack’s.

Chapter 37

Dear Sunshine,

It’s a boy.

Love,
G

Chapter 38

In high school, my English teacher favoured me. He wasn’t a particularly attractive man—his features were slightly too close together, his nose pointy, his mouth a small wet hole—but he possessed a certain charisma and eloquence. He called himself a writer, despite being unpublished, boasting he could have been as great as Hemingway, if only he’d had the time to write. Saintly sacrificing his own career for the children, he felt it was his duty to share his gift. A true martyr, really.

He was a friend of my father, and had been for as long as I could remember. A frequent dinner guest in our home, he and my father would drink bourbon from glistening tumblers and argue loudly about the nuances of Raymond Carver in the darkness of the kitchen.

I was on the cheerleading squad and my English teacher was the team supervisor, so he was usually at practice on the weekends. I always hoped he would show up, and took comfort in the fact that he was watching me. I saw him as a protective father figure and felt a sense of safety in the way he seemed to care about me.

I found myself seeking his approval in all that I did, and began asking him to read my poems after class. Unlike my father, he was encouraging of my pursuit to be a writer.

One day, I knocked on his open door.

“Come in, Miss Grace.” My English teacher glanced up from his papers, waving me in. All of the desks were empty, lined in straight rows and evenly spaced. The quiet classroom felt strange.

He was seated at a large wooden desk at the front, grading papers, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. “What can I do for you?”

“I wrote a new poem.” I crossed the empty room, my notebook extended, and pulled a chair alongside him. “I wanted you to read it.”

“I’d love to.” He eyed me and reached for the notebook, then placed it on his desk and scanned the page. His hands clutched the edges, crinkling the paper slightly.

The air smelled of chalk dust and coffee; a half-empty mug was balanced on a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I glimpsed around the room, reading a Jane Austen quote that was scrawled across the chalkboard: “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”

When my English teacher finished, he peeked at me over his glasses. “That’s lovely. Really good work.”

“Thank you.” I smiled, feeling victorious. “Is it long enough?”

“It could use some more visuals. Keep working on it, it’s almost there.” He pointed to the page, and I noticed a small paper cut on his finger. “You misspelled ‘language’ though.”