There was no sound in the claustrophobic hallway except Zach’s breathing, which heaved like the interior of a conch shell. I could feel his eyes dripping down me, coursing through the folds of Jefferson’s crispy black dress, which resembled an upside-down shiitake mushroom if you squinted at it. The silvery-black fabric felt flimsy, as if it could stiffly peel away like tinfoil around cold fried chicken.
“Blue?”
I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face — head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow — was heading straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.
He wanted our tectonic plates to collide, forcing one on top of the other so molten material from the earth’s interior gives rise to a wild and unstable volcano. Well, it was one of those sweaty moments I’d never had before except in dreams, when my head was in the cul-de-sac of Andreo Verduga’s arm, my lips by his alcoholic cologne in the dead end of his neck. And as I stared up at Zach’s face hovering at the intersection of Desire and Shyness, patiently waiting for a green light (even though there wasn’t a soul around), you’d think I’d flee, run for my life, lie back and think of Milton (throughout the evening, I’d been engaged in covert Neverlanding, fantasizing it’d been he who’d met Dad, his mother and father who’d squirreled around the living room), but no, at this bizarre moment, Hannah Schneider slipped into my head.
I’d seen her at school just that afternoon, right after sixth period. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black wool dress, a tight black coat, moving unevenly down the sidewalk toward Hanover carrying a cream canvas bag, her head bent toward the ground. While Hannah had always been thin, her figure, particularly her shoulders, looked unusually hunched and narrow, dented even — as if she’d been smashed in a door.
Now, caught in some gluey moment with this kid, feeling like I was still in Kansas, the reality of her getting so close to Doc she could count the number of gray hairs on his chin felt gruesome. How could she stomach his hands, his rocking-chair shoulders or the next morning, the sky sterile as a hospital floor? What was wrong with her? Something was wrong, of course, yet I’d been too preoccupied with myself, with Black and the number of times he sneezed, with Jade, Lu, Nigel, my hair, to take it to heart. (“The average American girl’s principal obsession is her hair — simple bangs, a perm, straightening, split ends — to the breathtaking rebuff of all else, including divorce, murder and nuclear war,” writes Dr. Michael Espiland in Always Knock Before Entering [1993].) What had happened to Hannah to make her descend into Cottonwood the way Dante had willfully descended into Hell? What had caused her to perpetuate a marked pattern of self-annihilation, which was obviously replicating at an alarming rate with the death of her friend Smoke Harvey, the drinking and swearing, her thinness, which made her look like a starved crow? Misery multiplied unless it was treated immediately. So did misfortune, according to Irma Stenpluck, author of The Credibility Gap (1988), which detailed on p. 329 one had only to suffer a tiny misfortune before one found one’s “entire ship sinking into the Atlantic.” Maybe it was none of our business, but maybe it was what she’d been hoping for all along, that one of us would unstick from our self and ask about her for once, not out of snoopy intrigue but because she was our friend and obviously crumbling a little bit.
I hated myself, standing there in the hallway, next to the Turner and Zach still hovering on the edge of his dry canyon of a kiss.
“You have something on your mind,” he quietly observed. The kid was Carl Jung, fucking Freud.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said harshly, taking a small step backward.
He smiled. It was incredible; his face had no expression for anger or annoyance, just as some Native Americans, the Mohawks, the Hupa, had no word for purple.
“You don’t want to know why you’re like that boat?” he asked.
I shrugged and my dress sighed.
“Well, it’s because the moon shines right on it and nowhere else in the picture. Right here. On the side. She’s the only thing that’s incandescent,” he said, or some other word-of-the-day response to that effect, full of oozing lava, lumps of rock, ash and hot gas I opted not to stick around for because I’d already turned and headed down the stairs. At the bottom, I again encountered Patsy and Roge, positioned right where we’d left them like two shopping carts abandoned in the cookie aisle.
“Isn’t it something?” Patsy exclaimed.
They waved good-bye as Zach and I climbed into the Toyota. Big smiles fireworked through their faces when I waved and shouted out the unrolled window, “Thank you! Look forward to seeing you again!” How strange it was that people like Zach, Roge and Patsy floated through the world. They were the cute daisies twirling past the mirror orchids, the milk thistle of the Hannah Schneiders, the Gareth van Meers snared in the branches and the mud. They were the sort of giddy people Dad loathed, called fuzz, frizz (or his most contemptuous put-down of all, sweet people) if he happened to be standing behind one of them in a checkout aisle and eavesdropped on what was always a painfully bland conversation.
And yet — and I didn’t know what was wrong with me — though I couldn’t wait to unload Zach as soon as we arrived at the Cabaret (Jade and the others would be there, Black and Joalie too, Joalie, I hoped, suffering from an unforeseen skin irritation that refused to budge, even with persistent entreaties of various over-the-counter medications) I sort of marveled at the kid’s buoyancy. I’d approached his would-be kiss with no less dread than if a plague of locusts had started to descend upon my lands, and yet, now, he smiled at me and cheerfully asked if I had enough leg room.
Incredibly too, at the bottom of the driveway, when we were about to make a right, I glanced back, up the sharp wooded hill toward his house, and saw that Patsy and Roge were still standing there, most likely with their arms still snug around each other’s waist. Patsy’s green blouse was visible, shredded by the matchstick trees. And though I’d never confess it to Dad, I did wonder, for a second, as Zach turned up the pop song on the radio, if it was really so atrocious to have a family like that, to have a dad who twinkled and a boy with eyes so blue you wouldn’t be shocked to see sparrows winging through them, and a mother who stared, unwaveringly, at the last place she’d seen her son like a dog in a supermarket parking lot, never taking its eyes off the automatic doors.
“Are you excited about the dance?” asked Zach.
I nodded.
“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”
The Christmas Cabaret was held in the Harper Racey ’05 Cafeteria, which, under Student Council President Maxwell’s iron fist, had transformed into a sweltering, Versailles-styled nightclub with imitation-Sèvres vases on the side tables, French cheeses and pastries, gold tinsel, big, crudely painted posters of deformed girls on makeshift swings affixed over the “World Enough and Time” Wall (Gallway class photos from 1910 to present), which were meant to evoke the flouncing fiddle-dee-dee of Fragonard’s The Swing (c. 1767), but inadvertently conjured The Scream (Munch, c. 1893).