What Was She Thinking? by Zoë Heller

on her own. He shrugged then, and said he would be back on Friday. They parted amicably.
    An hour and a half later, as she was wheeling her bike out of the school car park, she found him waiting for her on the street. It was six o’clock, and the main road that runs along the west
side of the school grounds was busy with rush-hour traffic. All the children—even Homework Club attendees—had gone home. Sweet wrappers and crisp packets—remnants of the afternoon exodus—were skittering about the pavement in the purplish dusk light. Sheba smiled hello to Connolly and asked what he was doing there. He winced, as if it pained him to say it. “Waiting for you.”
    She knew right then what was going to happen, she says. It came to her, as these things sometimes do, in a perfect and fully formed revelation. He had a crush on her; he had been developing this crush for some time. She had encouraged it or, at the very least, failed to discourage it. Now, he was going to declare himself, and she—because she could think of no other feasible reaction—was going to affect amazement and horror.
    “What did you want to see me about?” she asked him. “You know, Steven, if you need to talk to me about anything, you can do it in school.”
    She started walking fast, wheeling her bicycle beside her.
    Connolly trotted to keep up. No, he said, shaking his head, he couldn’t tell her in school.
    “Well, then,” Sheba said, “you have to arrange a—”
    “I really like you,” he interrupted.
    She was silent.
    “I think about you all the time. I was—” He gazed at her unhappily.
    Sheba smiled. “I’m glad you like me,” she said, maintaining her tone of teacherly brusqueness, “but I can’t talk to you now. I have to get home.”
    “It’s more than liking,” Connolly objected impatiently.
    They had reached an intersection. Sheba hesitated. Her way home was to the left, down a long shopping street called
Grafton Lane. She needed to get rid of the boy—she couldn’t have him trailing her all the way to her house—yet it seemed callous to abandon him there on the street corner. After a moment, she made the left turn and continued to walk with him, past the cheap shoe shop with wire baskets of cut-price slippers crowding its forecourt; past Dee-Dar, the tatty Indian restaurant where St. George’s teachers held their staff dinners; past the post office and the chip shop and the ancient chemist’s with dusty boxes of Radox in the window. Connolly was quiet for a while. And then, in a sudden rush, as if he had been holding his breath, he said, “I’m really into you, Miss.”
    Something in his voice made Sheba think that he was about to cry. She couldn’t be sure, because he had his head down. “Steven,” she said. “This isn’t …” She paused, uncertain of how to go on. “This just … it won’t do!” She straddled her bike, preparing to mount it.
    “I can’t help it,” Connolly said, looking up. “I swear, I can’t help myself.”
    Sheba had been right. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, Steven,” she said. She was about to reach out her hand and pat his shoulder when his face suddenly came pressing in at hers.
    Sheba says I couldn’t possibly understand what it feels like, after twenty years of faithful marriage, to be kissed by someone other than your husband; to feel the pressure of a stranger’s mouth on yours. “Things fall asleep in a marriage,” she told me once. “They have to. You have to lose that mad sexual alertness you had when you were out in the world on your own. All these years with Richard, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously suppressed anything. I’ve always been so grateful to be married—so relieved that I would never have to be naked in front of a stranger again. But I’d forgotten how exhilarating it is to expose yourself … to be a little scared. As soon as Steven kissed me, it all came back in an instant. The, you know, high of it. I was amazed at how I could