Fall Roses

Chapter 2: Mac

Mackenzie was usually the first one to her first period English class. She was trying to get more mileage in for the upcoming cross-country season, so her and her coach thought it best that she should run to school in the morning and get ready there. Mackenzie didn't mind; she enjoyed the long hot shower in the school locker room alone. She didn't like to shower with her teammates after practice – it made her feel like a perv – so it was nice to get in one hot shower for the day.

Mackenzie – or Mac, as her friends and coach called her –appreciated the extra reading time she got from getting to school so early. The room, placid and mute, let her mind escape the pressures that governed her life and just let her be. She was re-reading Dorian Gray for the third time – maybe fourth, she couldn't remember – and basked in Wilde's prophetic prose that ebbed and flowed like waves of words that washed across the pages' surfaces. "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."  

"How apt," thought Mac, entranced by Wilde's words. She had always felt some sort of sacred bond with the author, founded in a shared desire of forbidden beauties. Mac knew what and how she felt was wrong but could not understand why it felt right. Though she went to public school, Mac's educational environment was permeated by righteous Christian indignation. She always headed the advice of Corinthians to "do everything in love," but it appeared that her town's parish had skipped over the verse. Glatner was run by a mayor who had thrice cheated on his wife, a school board that embezzled money to fund a staff Christmas party, and a city council riddled with members accused of domestic assault. However, no one batted an eye, for these were common mistakes of Christian men who could be saved. This could not be said of others who fell outside of the town's realm of normality – the sheep of another flock. The town itself seemed to be under some bigoted, bastardized, Christian trance, letting people like her know that her sin was not forgiven and must be kept hidden.

How could love be a sin? Mac was deeply troubled by this. Her Uncle Bruce, an English professor at the local community college, seemed to her the only pious man she had ever met. Him, and her father of course. Both her father and uncle were academics, her father attending Harvard Divinity School and her uncle traveling to Europe for his doctorate in English Literature at Oxford. Mac's father never got to finish his doctorate in Christian Ethics because of the accident.

Uncle Bruce was so open-minded, an anomaly in this small town he chose to live in. In her childhood she would take buses across the country with him, partaking in inner-city social projects that helped homeless transgender youth or watching as he stood as a character witness in trials for southern migrants. Mac could not understand how he was capable of enduring the hatefulness spewed by his neighbors against the people he dedicated his life to serving. "The field of academia is fickle" he would tell Mac, and he didn't want to lose a tenured position at even the least prestigious school. Besides, he told her, it was fruitful to bestow upon the next generation "a seed of acceptance to plant in their heads," allowing them to not feel so alone in a place that was suffocating if you were othered. Mac often rolled her eyes at this when wasn't looking; she knew the people of this town inside-out, and no liberal English professor was going to start a revolution at East Burrow Community College.

Despite this, Mac didn't hate everything about Glatner. She loved her team and coach; the forest trails she ran behind her uncle's petite wood cabin; her best friend, Jay, who she had been running with since middle school and the one person she could trust with her life; and Deidra O'Connor, the apple of her eye for which she could never taste.

Mac looked up at the petite half-ginger after her backpack fell to the ground. She had heard the junior girl clicking down the hallway in her heeled brown boots but wanted to play it cool as if she hadn't noticed her. Deidra, the queen bee of Glatner High, was bonafide eye candy. She dressed professionally, but never came off as prissy like her popular peers did, and was absurdly beautiful. Today her hair was pulled back from her face, and Mac could study the profound beauty of her features: emerald green eyes, a petite button nose, rosy round cheeks, and a heart-shaped pout. The green-eyed girl stared back at her, sylphlike and graceful when turning back to face the athlete.

When asked what she was reading, Mac decided to play it cool.

"I've always loved Wilde's prose style. I find kinship with him."

Kinship with him? "Way to make it obvious" she thought. Here she was, alone with the prettiest girl she had ever known, practically screaming "I'M GAY" through a megaphone into her face.

Mac couldn't look away from Deidra, waiting for the girl to respond that she knew her secret, that she would call her a dyke and expose her to the whole school. Mac replayed the sorrowful scenario a multitude of times in her head during that few seconds of dreadful silence, broken by Deidra's response.

"Well, that's cool, I guess."

Mac nodded slowly, realizing that Deidra had no idea who Wilde was. Mac returned to her book, underlining the sentence she had previously read to look busy: "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

Deidra turned back around, and Mac let out a sigh of relief. "Of course she isn't well versed on gay Irish poets," Mac thought. Though relieved, she was a bit disappointed, for she hoped she could one day find solace in someone who felt the same as she did – the possessor of a taste for a fruit forbidden in the garden of Glatner. Soon students filed into the classroom, erupting in a thunderous roar of tumultuous laughter and conversation about the previous night. "Did you see him do that keg stand?" "Can you believe SHE hooked up with him?" "Marissa's ass looks HUGE in her cheerleading skirt."

Mac sat mute in the back, eyeing up Deidra from behind. Now that her friends had arrived, the green-eyed girl seemed to have forgotten their previous interaction. There she was, laughing away with Chloe and Marissa, probably chattering about an upcoming party or a weekend mall trip.

Finally, Mr. Tulson walked in. Mac smiled. Mr. Tulson was her favorite teacher; he had pushed her to take this advanced class after reading an essay she wrote in her English III class on The Colored Purple. Mac enjoyed school but avoided AP and honors classes – she couldn't afford to invest too much time in her studies because of practice. She planned to get out of this small-minded town and knew the way to do so was by obtaining an athletic scholarship. Still, English came naturally to her. Her Uncle Bruce's love of literature germinated inside of her, nurtured by a home library of countless classics that she spent her free time reading. She bloomed to be well-versed in several of the English literary giants – Faulkner, Woolf, Becket – and could engage in conversation for hours about the portrayal of Victorian English women by Austen versus the Brontës. She planned to study English in college, so her uncle pressed her to take this class as preparation. She finally agreed to take it because she had already read all the books on the syllabus and knew she would not be adding more to her plate that would distract from running in her limited free time.

Mr. Tulson passed out the papers from last week, now graded. As he dropped one on her desk he mouthed "excellent" with a wink. She took the paper and immediately tucked it into her notebook, not wanting others, or herself, to see the grade. She would read his comments when she got home, going over it with her uncle and engage in some boisterous discourse on the importance of tense usage and the vitality of varied sentence structure after dinner.

After the Hamlet lesson, Mr. Tulson announced that the next project would be in pairs. Mac closed her eyes and took a deep breath in; she preferred to work alone, especially in a class where she the oldest by a year. She figured most students in the class thought of her as a stupid jock that wanted a high-level class on her college resume and didn't want them talking down to her when doing the project.

Mr. Tulson read through the list of preassigned partners, waiting for him to call out her name. She promised herself she would just put up with whoever she was assigned to work with, letting them take the reins on the project without a fuss if they didn't trust her to carry her load if they so pleased.

"Deidra and Mac."

Mac's eyes widened. The petite redhead turned around and smiled at her and gave an awkward wave. Wanting to look slick, Mac nodded and winked back. Deidra quickly turned around.

Did Deidra O'Connor just blush?

Mac shook her head at the thought. No way the beauty queen and scholar of Glatner High would blush at her! Still, Mac smiled to herself and looked down at her shoes, for a part of her could not shake the pink that glowed on Deidra's cheeks. 

"Maybe this project won't be so bad."