“Shouldn’t you be crying?”

Harrison Beck was staring at a blank space several feet in front of his father’s coffin and thinking about how much worse the mosquitoes in Fairbank, Iowa were than the ones in Chicago, and about how unused to the dry Iowa heat he was, and wondering how long it would take for him to become used to these things. He wondered if he would even be here long enough to become used to these things, or if, in fact, he would be here so long that when he returned to Chicago it would be the city air that he was unused to.

“Shouldn’t you be crying?”

Harrison didn’t want to become used to Iowa. He pitied people who were. It wasn’t intentional, but looking around, all he felt was pity for these people, who didn’t even know they were bored. He knew that they were, though. He could tell from the mourning clothes they wore, layered and elaborate and lacey, like children playing dress-up, and from their sobbing faces, that the most exciting thing that had happened to them in months was the death of the funny old man down the street.

His father had died of cardiac arrest, of all things. And two weeks before his eightieth birthday, too. Harrison grimaced.

“Hey, shouldn’t you be crying?”

“I’m sorry, what?” It wasn’t until the third or fourth time that she said it that he realized that the young woman to his left was talking to him. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. He tried to make this clear to the girl by continuing to stare pointedly at the blank space several feet in front of his father’s coffin.

“I heard your eulogy. He was your dad, right? So why aren’t you crying?”

“Excuse me?” This time he did turn and look at her, startled by her frankness. When he did, he was taken aback. She was different than he had expected; a swishy thing, all hips and cocked eyebrows. She had spoken as though she was telling a joke, and she smirked now as though he had laughed. She wasn’t dressed for mourning – she wore a yellow sundress and sumptuous rings of eyeliner, and she looked more like a goddess in that moment than any painting Harrison had ever studied. Her lips were full and her skin was pale as china. Oh, how that moment of watching her stretched on in all directions, at once eternal and so fantastically fleeting, just the span of time it took for him to breathe, once in, once out.

“Everyone else is crying,” she explained with a gesture to the pallbearers and his cousins and his mother and her friends.
He barely noticed them. “You’re not,” he noted.
This earned him a smile. “No, I suppose not.”
“So, why aren’t you crying?”
“I asked you first.”
“Fair enough.” Harrison shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“Well, are you sad?”
“Yes, of course I’m sad! Yes. I am sad. I just don’t really need to cry. It’s not like I can control it. I’ve never needed to.”
The girl scoffed. “Never?”
He shrugged again.
“You’ve never sat down after a long day, a bag of chips in hand, and just had a good, long cry?”
He shrugged a third time.
Her dark eyes narrowed. “How old are you, like, thirty? How could you never have cried?”
“You think I’m lying?” He laughed. “Who are you?”
“Nell,” she said, smirking again. “I live right down the street.”
Nell, he thought. She held out a slender hand and he shook it. Nell, Nell. Nell...
“And who are you?” she asked, grinning.
“Harrison.”
“Shall I walk you home, Harrison?” She pulled up her socks.
“Sure,” he said. He glanced behind him. His father’s coffin had been lowered into the ground. His mother was being consoled by a cousin. The crowd was dispersing. “Sure.”

After jogging over to his mother to let her know he’d meet her at the house to help her with the repast, Harrison left with Nell. On the walk home he asked her how she knew his father. She didn’t, she said. She’d never met him before. She just liked to go to the cemetery sometimes and talk to the people who weren’t crying. “They’re the most interesting,” she explained, laughing. “They’ve got the best stories.” Harrison looked at the ground. He didn’t think he had any good stories.
Still, he tried. He told her about how he was moving to Fairbank to be with his mother, all alone in her duplex, and about his teaching. She said she thought that biology was probably the most fascinating subject she could think of. Really? he said. He thought it was the most boring.
She stopped moving then, stood still on the sidewalk, and faced him. “How could you think that it’s boring?”
“I don’t know. It’s not compelling subject matter.”
“Life? How is life not compelling?” She laughed. “Look at the grass, Harrison,” she said, and his own name fluttered on his skin when she said it. “Look at that leaf on the sidewalk. Can you not feel the life there?” He could. “How many cells are in the human body? I mean, approximately.”
“About eighty trillion or so?”
“Are you kidding me? How does that not amaze you?” And it did, when she put it like that. She pressed her hands to her face and kissed her palms and her wrists and up her arms. “Thank you,” she whispered to her cells. And Harrison smiled at her and thought it, too. He couldn’t help but let her strange whimsy rub off on him. He felt the afternoon sun on his face and watched the dried leaf get lifted up by the August breeze. Thank you.

He didn’t see Nell again for weeks. He tried to, walking by the cemetery almost every day, but evidently she had found some other people-watching location. He was starting to wonder if she wasn’t just a figment of his own mind, some fantasy conjured up to comfort a lonely, middle aged man living with his mother. He got a job teaching biology at the public high school and settled into Fairbank. He felt himself slowly becoming a part of the town’s flat scenery, and it distressed him to no end.
But then it was the first day of class, and he found her. He was reading off attendance to an audience of droopy-eyed teenagers whom he both envied and loathed, and there she was. “Rogers, Nell.”
He didn’t even register the name until he heard her voice sing out a gentle, “Here.”
His senses heightened to tingling. His eyes searched the room and he found her sitting in the back corner. She grinned at him, as though they were sharing a joke. He smiled back. S***, he thought.

She was all Harrison thought of now. When he went home and graded the homework, he lingered on hers, rereading every word. In class, he had to make a conscious effort not to watch her openly.
From what he could tell, Nell didn’t have any friends. She ate lunch alone in the sun with whichever book she had with her that day, stretched out on the grass. He could just barely see her lying there from his office window while he ate and responded to emails, and since the start of the school year he had made a habit of glancing out at her every so often. She was always alone; she was back in the cemetery some days after school, with her camera or a book, and she seemed to prefer her own company to anyone else’s. She liked his company, though, he knew that. He could tell by the way she looked at him through her eyelashes from her desk, or the way she rewarded him with a smile in class when he made a joke just for her.
He argued with himself constantly. She was a child; he’d seen her mother pick her up from school. It wasn’t like that, though, of course not. So what if the way her lips moved when she spoke gave him chills? She fascinated him, that was all. That was all.
Still, ever since that August day, he’d seen the world differently. When he stepped outside into the sun, he welcomed it. She had done that to him. He wanted to talk with her again. He wanted to see Fairbank the way that she did, but he wasn’t quite there. He needed her to open his eyes.

About a month and a half into the school year, he wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and asked her to stay after class.
“Harrison,” she greeted him, sitting down on his desk and pulling out her paper bag lunch.
“You should probably call me Mr. Beck.” He ran a hand through his hair and tried to ignore how it trembled.
“You think so? But I knew you as Harrison first.” She took a bite from her peanut butter sandwich and left lipstick smudges on the bread. “Besides, I’m not asking you to call me Miss Rogers, am I? We’re on better terms than that, Harrison.”
He chuckled. “I see your point.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? It’s very intimidating having you as a teacher, you know. I’ve been trying to impress you.”
He gulped. “What? Of course not. You’ve been very impressive. Why do you ask?”
“Well, you did ask me to stay after class. That usually means something’s wrong, doesn’t it?”
Oh. “No,” he said, “you haven’t done anything wrong. I just wanted to see how you were doing. In school, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, yeah, I’m great! School’s fine. I’ve started looking at colleges, you know. And yeah, I know, I have a whole year before I need to start applying. I’m just anxious to grow up, I guess. People tell me I’m mature for my age.” Nell searched his face, as if waiting for him to challenge that claim.
“Oh, definitely. You’re very mature.”
She preened. “Why, thank you.” And she was, too. He’d seen her reading books that he hadn’t ever read, and he envied her perception, the beauty she saw in Fairbank. And when she bent over to pull out an apple from her lunch bag, Harrison glanced at her breasts, and they were full, and she was womanly, and in many places she would have been considered an adult years ago. He felt his stomach drop and ran a hand through his hair again.
He changed the subject and for a while they ate lunch together and talked about Fahrenheit 451, the most recent book he’d seen Nell reading. He was startled by how much she reminded him of the girl from the book, Clarisse, and he told her this. Her eyes grew hard then, narrowed, and she looked at him for a long time. Then she asked him, “How’s your mom?”
“What?”
“I remember seeing her at the funeral. She looked pretty shaken.”
“Oh. Yeah, she’s fine.”
“That’s good. And how are you? I mean, with your dad…?”
Harrison grimaced. “I never really meant much to my dad.” He was silent for a moment, but she peered at him through her eyelashes like she did in class, like she wanted him to say more. He didn’t mind; he was vulnerable with her, but he felt like it was okay for him to be. “He was always really funny with me,” he said finally, “really childish. I guess I never really had any responsibility to grow up because he was so… ‘young at heart,’ as he liked to say.”
Nell smiled. “Well,” she said decidedly, “you are too, you know. Youthful. Your lectures are always filled with ‘childlike wonder’.” Her eyes sparked with humor.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”

She came into his office with her paperbag lunch the next day, and the day after that. Again she perched on the edge of his desk. Harrison noted how everywhere she went she seemed to be at home, draping herself along the benches outside the school, leaning back and luxuriating behind her desk in his class. He also didn’t fail to notice how his office had, at least for the past few days, replaced her solitary lunch ritual on the grass outside his window.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked him near the end of one of these lunches.
He laughed. “I am grown up.”
“Come on, you know what I mean. For example,” she smiled and splayed her hands out behind her, “I want to be a pirate. What do you want to be?”
He told her then about his painting, about how sometimes his head became too filled up with thoughts and that painting was the only effective way he’d found to clear them. About how sometimes he couldn’t see the beauty in the world until he painted it, how that act was what brought the life out.
He talked about it until the bell rang to end lunch and students started filing in, and the whole time he spoke Nell listened eagerly, eating her apple and holding her chin in her hands. “Do you paint now?” she asked as she packed up her lunch.
“Not as much. I’d like to.”
“You should paint me,” she said, and she winked at him as she sauntered out of the classroom.

After two more weeks, he decided that he would. They had been eating lunch together every day; she either stayed late after class or she crept into his office after the bell rang. She sat on his desk and dangled her soft, bare legs over the carpet and they talked about everything that popped into her mind. Their conversations consumed Harrison’s thoughts; for the rest of the day they lingered on the edge of his consciousness and his nights were filled with them like heady incense.
He had heard the other teachers in the science department lounge gossiping about their lunches together in that bored way that Fairbankers did anything, but he wasn’t worried. He and Nell were more careful than that; they skirted around the tension between them, only suggesting it with sultry glances over textbooks or a dangled, bare leg.
Those four words – you should paint me – plastered his dreams in red propaganda letters until he couldn’t ignore them anymore. After that, he studied the paleness of her skin whenever she rested her hand by his leg. He imagined exactly which colors he’d use for her lips, her dark eyeliner, the gentle flush of her cheeks. She was so young and yet he felt so much smaller than she. She was freshness and softness and when he painted her – late at night after his aging mother was asleep – he refused to censor her with clothing. No, he painted her how he imagined her, and she was the perfect nude model in his mind, winking at him and whispering, “I’ve been trying to impress you.”

When Nell walked into his office some weeks later with her bag lunch and her smirk, Harrison felt a surge of power. She sat on his desk like always, her feet dangling over the edge, her toes resting by his leg. “What’s crackin’?” She asked as she popped a baby carrot into her mouth.

He was buzzing all over. “I have something for you.”

“Oh?”

He got up and moved to the corner of the room. He could feel the stupid grin on his face but he didn’t care. He was so, so happy. “It’s not much. I mean, it’s not perfect. Nothing could compare to the real thing.” He brought the painting over to her. It was small; light enough to carry, but big enough to fill the space. “It took much less time than I thought it would, actually. In the beginning I didn’t know why, I thought maybe I was just in a good headspace, but then everything was going so smoothly – I could see you so vividly – and I realised. You’re my muse. Nell, you’ve been my muse for, what? Weeks, now? Months? God, I lose track of time around you. It’s like you’ve always been right there, peering at me out of the corner of my eye, and now finally I can see you. And I know, I know, the painting isn’t great, but it’s mine. And it’s yours. If it’s mine, then it’s yours. I am yours.”

Harrison was breathless. He knew what would happen now. He basked in the warm glow of it. He had known that she would come in just like she had, that she would sit on his desk with her feet dangling over the edge, her toes resting by his leg. And now he stood before her, leaning against the desk where she perched, and he waited, watching as she studied herself through his eyes.

For a long, luxurious moment her eyes moved across the canvas, and everything was golden. But then she met his eyes, and she sat back, and her red, plump lips curled, and her eyes were hard, and she said, “What the f*** is this?”

“Nell.” He reached for her, his hand on her bare knee.

She flinched at his touch and jumped down from her perch. “No. F***.” She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Wha…? What the f*** is that?”

“Nell, wait. S***, this was not supposed to happen.”

She gaped at him, backing into the corner of the room. “Oh my god, what was supposed to happen?”

“Calm down. It’s okay.” He walked towards her.

“What was supposed to happen, Harrison? Did you think I would like this, that I’d be flattered? Was that your... plan? Seduce me with this… sick, pornographic fantasy?” Her words wavered, like she was crying, but when Harrison looked into her face all he saw was disgust. She looked around the room like she was taking it in for the first time and her breathing became erratic.

He smiled, trying to calm her. “Nell, it’s okay. Don’t say that, it’s not like that. I know you feel it too, Nell, I know you do.” He touched her shoulder, her hair. She cringed but stood still. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you act around me, the way you dress. You might not think, in this moment, that you want this, but I know you do. And it’s not– it’s not the sex. No, no, no, it’s so much more than that. You’re my muse, I told you. You’ve changed me, Nell.” He brushed her hair out of her face. “You’ve changed the way I see the world. How can you expect me to just ignore that, to ignore you?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Wait,” she began, “is that what this is about? Christ. Have I changed you, Harrison? Have I opened your eyes to all the beauty in the world?”

“Yes,” he sighed in relief, stroking her arm. “Yes.”

She slapped his hand away. “F*** you. I thought we were friends, you complete-!” She looked up at the ceiling, trying to steady her breathing again. “You asked me about every little thing I thought about. Do you realize how good that made me feel? I thought you really got me.”
“I do, I do,” he murmured, reaching for her again.
“No, you really don’t! The fact that you have the... audacity to call me your ‘muse’, to make that ridiculous painting, shows just how completely ignorant of my existence you really are. I’m a human being, I’m not perfect!”

“Nell–”

“Oh, and how f*ing dare you tell me that I ‘want it’? That I came onto you because, what? I eat lunch with you? I wear lipstick? How self-centered do you have to be to think that I dress this way for you?”

There was a heavy silence then. Harrison sat back against his desk. Nell’s paperbag lunch crinkled against his hand and he flinched. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled, staring at his palms. “You just, you don’t understand. I was so unhappy before you. I felt so empty. I didn’t mean for this to happen this way, I didn’t know you wouldn’t… God, I– I need you, Nell. I need you, I don’t know if I can go on if I don’t have you. I don’t know what I might... do to myself.”

“Are you…?” She stalked up to him. “Are you threatening suicide? Wow, that is so fucking childish.”

“Nell, I’m asking you for help.”

“No, you’re not!” She was in his face now, a vain on her forehead bulging. He kept expecting her to be crying, but each moment she was more composed than the last, more angry now than anything. “That is not asking for help. That is forcing me to f*** you because you know I don’t want to be the cause of someone’s death!”

“Nell, please...” He was crying now. He was crying, and when he realized it, he wept harder. Shouldn’t you be crying? he remembered. He wept so hard he laughed. “Look!” he said, and he grabbed her hand and pressed it to his cheek. “Do you feel that? Those are tears. I’m crying, Nell! Remember? I couldn’t cry before you, I could never cry. You’ve made me feel, Nell!” And he laughed, and he wept, and Nell remembered and she laughed along with him.

“Oh, Harrison,” she laughed. “You’re pathetic. You think I’m proud of you? Because you can cry now? Oh, finally, he feels! He feels! F*** that, Mr. Beck. You’re crying because an underage girl won’t f*** you.” She grabbed his damp face in her hands and looked at him for a long time. Then hugged him to her shoulder so her lips brushed against his ear. “You make me sick,” she whispered. “I never want to see you again. Ever. And you can be sure as hell I won’t be avoiding you. I’m not going to be the victim here. You’ll be the one who avoids me, got it?”

He nodded into her hair.
She stood up again, grabbing her bag lunch and his painting from behind him. “Okay. Good.”

He moved out of his mother’s duplex two days later. When he returned to Chicago, he was unused to the city air.