Clara pulled an envelope out of her notebook and passed it across the desk. “They’re expecting you on Friday.”
“I’m not going,” Naomi said, even as she opened the envelope and pulled out the plane ticket inside. Begrudgingly, she found herself slightly mollified that Clara had sprung for first class on the cross-country journey.
“Yes. You are. Because I know you. I know you want those kids to be more prepared than you were for the realities of lust, love, and everything in between.” Clara pressed both palms to the desk. “I know you care about that even more than you care about the satisfaction of abandoning the institution that abandoned you over a decade ago.”
Clara leveled a steel gaze. “And look, we can sit here and go back and forth about it for an hour until I wear you down—and I will wear you down because I’m better rested and more hydrated than you are right now—or you can just agree up front and save us both the trouble.”
A thousand denials pressed against Naomi’s lips. Reasons she didn’t owe anyone anything. Ever. Promises she’d made to herself about erasing parts of her past, robbing her memories of any power they tried to wield over her.
Maybe it was the exhaustion. Or the heartache. Maybe she’d depleted all her reserves of strength walking away from Ethan. Maybe this was giving up. Or growing up. Moving on. Evolution. Whether she wanted it or not.
In any case, she found herself saying, “Fine.”
If she could save one person in the ways she wished she could save herself, she reasoned, that could be worth it.
“What the hell else did you put on that list?” Naomi said later, aftershe’d let Clara buy her fish tacos and two jalapeño margaritas. She couldn’t imagine how outrageous Clara’s fallbacks must have been, given her plan A.
Clara shook her head, looking guilty. “Trust me, you really don’t wanna know.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
WALKING THROUGH THEhalls of her old high school reminded Naomi of trespassing in a graveyard. It sent the same chill down her spine, the one that warned of hovering too close to the line between things living and dead. It made her pay too much attention, in the same way, to her own footsteps. Each landing of her heels smacked sharp against the linoleum. The same sense of borrowed grief hovered across her shoulders.
The administration might have turned over, but the silver-haired receptionist currently leading Naomi toward the auditorium hadn’t changed much at all.
She squinted behind her glasses. Someone trying to place an actor in an infomercial. “You were a student here?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said, voice flat and tired. “My boyfriend leaked nude photos of me when I was a senior.” They’d changed the paint color on the walls. It looked even more like undigested oatmeal now. “It was a big, messy scandal. I came into the office while you were on the phone discussing how I was a slut who deserved it.”
The receptionist blanched.
“You probably don’t recognize me,” Naomi said, walking ahead. “I used to be blond,” she tossed over her shoulder. “And less of a bitch.”
Inside, the rows of the auditorium held restless seniors. In contrast to her usual audiences, they didn’t make any effort to hide their nervous giggles when she walked into the room.
Whispers sparked and spread, but for Naomi, they barely penetrated. After months of dreading coming back here and returning to the scene of her trauma, she now stood back and observed it as if through an old, frosted window. Detached. Disinterested.
“Ms. Grant?” A woman who bore a passing resemblance to the new principal’s online photo stood before her. “Are you ready to begin?” She gestured toward the microphone stand in the middle of the stage. It was the same one they’d used for the production ofHello, Dolly!the year Naomi had graduated. Schools really needed better funding for the arts.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” She’d prepared her presentation on the plane. “Sex Should Be Shameless.” Half of it came straight from the slides they used for sales meetings. The usual stats about how recent studies showed that nearly thirty percent of college women could not identify the proper location of the clitoris, and only eleven percent of women experienced climax the first time with a new heterosexual partner.
She’d added some context around her own path to studying intimacy, starting to unpack the stigma against sex work for them, along with a discussion of different resources available to help supplement the Greater Boston Area School District’s sad offering. Not that she’d ever admit as much to Clara, but the plan did help a little.
Naomi took the stage. It was easily ten degrees warmer under the old-school spotlight.
“Hey,” she said into the mic. The room settled surprisingly quickly. She wondered why for a moment before remembering she was both hot and famous.
“I’m...” Hundreds of faces stared back at her. Younger and softer than the ones she’d grown used to. Wanting in every sense of the word rolled off these seniors in waves. She couldn’t decide if they were more open or more closed than her Modern Intimacy participants.
“I’m... well, you might know me by my stage name, Naomi Grant.” She rotated her ring around her index finger. “That’s how most people know me. It’s the name on the poster outside. But, honestly, it feels weird to step back into the footprints of my old life and not acknowledge them. So, yeah. I guess I’ll add that my given name is Hannah Sturm, and I graduated from this high school in 2008.”
“Whoa, dude. That’s, like, so long ago,” a guy in the front row said to his neighbor, who nodded.
Naomi laughed. “You know, in Hebrew, my birth name meansgrace. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to being Hannah on a regular basis, or if I even want to, but I’m okay with making room for a little more grace in my life.”
She breathed in a sense of release. Was this what veterinarians experienced when they caught and healed a wounded animal and then eventually got the chance to release it, healed, back into the wild?
Over her shoulder, she saw her slides projected on a big screen someone had wheeled in. The title bold and big. A merry declaration. She gestured at it. “Actually, I don’t think I’m gonna use those today.”