Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong Page B

asserts itself as just like every other room in which she’s taught. She’s assigned “Cathedral” for this class. She’s been craving Carver as a sort of antidote to all the blur and complication of her life.
    She watches all the girls carefully: the hopeful ponytails, the defiant extra bits of weight spread through their bellies and their hips. She wants to take them each aside and place her hand up on their arms and tell them to cherish this time, their freedom. They will squander it, she knows, mostly. They will be silly, worry too much, sleep with the wrong boys. At least they’re trying, though. At least they’re not locked up already, trapped inside a consequence from which there might not be escape.
    She opens her book and reads the first few pages. She has made a class packet, all the stories, poems, and essays bound together in a red construction-paper-covered book, but she brings her owncopies when she teaches. She likes looking at all the different notes and comments she’s made to herself over the years.
    Charles comes in just after her. He carries a big coffee and a handful of books, a WNYC tote bag. He wears his thick round glasses, a long unbuttoned wool black coat. His beige shirt is covered in lines of pink and blue paisley. He does this often, shirts like this that make no sense.
    â€œMorning,” says Charles. She brightens at the sight of him, at the idea of being the one who knows what to do.
    She wants to be able to just listen to him, to sit back and maybe learn. She has sent along her own notes on Carver, notes she put together mostly straight from the text she now holds in her hand. He emailed a long outline of plans for every minute of the seventy-minute period, some of which was scripted. Maya’d skimmed it, smiling, sure he’d end up using very little of what he’d written down.
    â€œGood morning,” Maya says. She straightens her legs and hops slowly from the desk. “You ready?”
    He nods. “I think I am.”
    â€œThe plans look great.” She has them printed out and holds them now to show him. Five pages single-spaced. He’s broken the time up into painstaking ten-minute increments.
    His nose scrunches and his ears redden. “I thought I’d go off-script a bit,” he says. “Maybe just discuss the story and then I’d assign a sort of reader’s response.”
    â€œSounds good,” says Maya. Her book’s still open and she runs her thumbs along the pages, dropping his script back onto her desk.
    â€œI love this story,” he says, taking off his glasses. He lifts his shirt to rub his lenses. He always wears the glasses and she likes the look of him without them. His abdomen—the bottom part, just above his jeans—appears from underneath his shirt as hewipes carefully. His skin is taut along his hip, darker than she’d figured, firm.
    Maya fixes her eyes on the snow that comes down in tiny flakes outside and holds her hands firmly on either side of the open book.
    Two girls come tittering through the hallway, peacoats, soft black stretch pants. They come into the classroom; Jackie is the chubbier, the more self-conscious, and the smarter, and Chloe—the smaller girl, the one who wears a bright splash of sometimes pink and sometimes red lipstick, even with her T-shirt and sweatpants and artfully messed-up hair, who raises her hand before thinking of what she’ll say—Maya has ignored her hand a few times, looking out the window as she lectures, waiting for the other, more insightful kids to speak.
    More kids shuffle in over the next few minutes. There are the few who are two and then five minutes late and they avert their eyes from Maya, who makes a big speech at the beginning of each semester about her strict lateness policy and then is terrible about docking or scolding them as the semester proceeds. Their coats and hair and shoes all have tiny snow splotches. Their