Cody Rasnick

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You have watched him for nine days, which is eight more than you needed.

You did not choose him for anything he has. That's the part nobody would believe, if there were anybody to tell. Five thousand dollars in a credit union account with a coal-camp name on the sign, a used Corolla, a rented half of a house up the hollow where the road stops being a road. Type 2 diabetes at twenty-four, which he manages the way a man manages a leaking roof — buckets, apology, a metformin bottle in the desk drawer under the tardy slips. He is scraping by. He is 5'7". He teaches eighth grade in a building with radiators that knock in September.

You chose him because he was near, and because you were leaving, and because a man mid-yawn in an empty room is a door standing open.

He does not know you. There is no history between you at all. That is the fact that would matter most to him, if he could be told: you are not a debt come due, not a punishment, not his grandmother's God — he doesn't have one of those, never did, never missed it. You are a stranger. He is a stranger. Whatever this is, it is not personal, and somehow that is worse.

Still, nine days. You couldn't help learning him.

The scar through his left eyebrow, a pale interruption in the hair of it, older than he is careful about — nobody at the school knows the story and he has never once volunteered it, which means either it's boring or it's his. You will find out from the inside, or you won't.

The leg. God, the leg. He sits on the front edge of the desk during independent reading and his right heel goes like a sewing machine, up and down, the whole room ticking with it, and he does not know he is doing it, has never known, will go through life having a wife someday put a hand on his knee. The kids call it the Rasnick rumble behind his back and he has never heard them.

The bridge, evenings. Cable footbridge over the creek that runs brown even in dry weather, planks flexing, green shade coming down off the sycamores so thick the light goes underwater. He walks out to the middle and stands there and does not do anything. No phone. Just stands, and bounces the leg, and the whole bridge takes it up, and he lets it.

Twice a month he drinks too much with two men he went to high school with, and drives back on the shoulder at fifteen miles an hour, and the next day at 7:40 a.m. he is at the door of Room 12 saying good morning like a man with a clean conscience.

Single. No ex who still matters — not one name that puts a hitch in him. No kids. Both those facts sat in your ledger as advantages, and you would like the record to show that you noticed they were also just facts about a life, that they were thin, that they cost him something to arrive at.

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Last bell has been gone twenty minutes. The room has that after-school heat, the window up on its sash, a rectangle of hard afternoon lying across the tile. Chalk-ghosts on the board where he half-erased the vocabulary and quit — *hypothesis*, *chronology*, *weathering* still legible in smears. His lanyard hangs crooked, his own small photograph swinging at his sternum. Paint on the cuffs of his shirt from the mural the art teacher roped him into. Sneakers gone gray with creek mud.

He is looking at nothing. Then he yawns — enormous, whole-face, eyes screwed shut, jaw wide, the honest animal yawn of a man who slept badly and has nobody to be handsome for. Nothing in his hands. Nothing behind him but the mirror over the sink in the corner, the ugly institutional mirror where kids check their hair, and in it the back of his head and the empty rows of desks.

You go in on the yawn. That is all. Nobody knows how. Not you either — you only know it works, the way you know how to swallow.

He finishes it. The jaw closes, the breath goes out. He lifts one hand and rubs his eye with the heel of his palm, the way he does every morning of his life.

And the hand stops there, raised, covering.

Behind it, in the dark of his own hand, everything changes hands.

You feel the body come to you like a house with the power still on. The tongue, thick and sour. The sinus ache. The blood sugar high and sweet as syrup, a slow fog you will have to learn to fear. Small, this body. Lower to the ground than you remember being. Left knee that clicks. And a heel already going, already tapping the tile, doing its sewing-machine tick without asking you — his habit, still in the wiring, going on without him.

Let it go. Let it tick.

The hand comes down.

It comes down slower than a hand should, and the eyes it uncovers are blue and are not his, and they do not go to the door or the window or the chalkboard.

They go straight to the mirror.

Because you have to see. Nine days of watching from outside and now, at last, from in — the pale slash through the eyebrow, the fringe pushed forward on the forehead, the crooked lanyard, the little photo ID of a man who was here four seconds ago and is not anywhere now. You look at the face and the face looks back with your looking in it, and it is the strangest thing you have ever done, and there is no way back, and no term on it, and no one will ever know.

Cody Rasnick will be at the door of Room 12 tomorrow at 7:40 saying good morning.

You lift the hand again. Turn it over. Palm, then knuckles. Chalk in the creases. A callus at the base of the middle finger from gripping a pen too hard. Somebody else's hand, wearing your intention now like a borrowed glove that will never come off.

Then you take your eyes off it and look up.