The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  Mr. DeNovia, the earth science teacher, was explaining to them how geodes formed. Jory had her new spiral notebook out; at the top she had written Rocks: Our Friends and underlined it twice. “Geodes begin as bubbles in volcanic rock,” Mr. DeNovia was saying in his oddly effeminate voice, “or as animal burrows, tree roots, or mud balls in sedimentary rock.” Mud balls, Jory wrote down. How could such a hairy man have such a high voice? she wondered. Mr. DeNovia produced a sliced-open geode from a cardboard box on his desk and held it up. He gave it to the girl at the head of one of the three classroom tables and told her to examine it and pass it on. He continued with his lecture: “Over time, the outer shell of the spherical shape hardens, and water containing silica precipitation forms on the inside walls of the hollow cavity within the geode.” Hard, Jory wrote, and then put gets in parentheses. The boy seated next to her at the table handed her the geode. “We always called ’em thunder eggs,” he whispered, and then stared straight ahead.

  Jory was too surprised to say anything.

  “I don’t know why.”

  Jory looked sideways at the boy. His hair was the color of dirty straw and it was short and stuck up from his head in odd little tufts. He had on an old flannel shirt with a torn pocket. The pocket had a sucker stick falling out of it.

  “I think thunder eggs are different,” whispered Jory.

  “I don’t think so,” he whispered back.

  “Excuse me,” said Mr. DeNovia. “Is there something you two would like to share with the class?”

  “Not really,” said the boy, scooting a little lower in his chair.

  Jory held perfectly still.

  “Crap,” the boy said very quietly.

  Crap, Jory wrote down on her paper, and then scratched it out.

  When the bell rang, Jory stuffed her books and papers into her schoolbag and walked quickly out of the classroom. She bypassed the row of lockers and continued down the hall—she had no idea what her locker combination was and no intention of ever coming back to find out. She only wanted to get outside. To get up the stairs and outside and then home. Home. That’s how she thought of the diamond-shaped-window house now, right this very minute. Streams of students were heading in all directions, laughing and yelling and latching on to each other as if they hadn’t seen each other in months. Two long-haired girls in front of her shrieked as they wrapped their arms around each other’s necks. “What’s the word?” screeched the first one. “Thunderbird!” shouted the second girl. “What’s the price?” the first one continued. “Forty twice!” the second girl exclaimed, and then tripped and dragged the other one down with her and they collapsed onto the floor in a giggling heap. The boy who had sat next to her in earth science jogged Jory with his elbow. “Wow,” he said. “Way too much zig-zag.”

  “Yeah,” Jory said, although she had no idea if this was true, or what this assessment meant exactly. They veered around the two girls, who were still lying on the floor laughing.

  “Hey,” he said. “Here. You dropped this.” He held out a crumpled nylon by its toe.

  For a moment Jory didn’t remember. And then in a rush she could feel the blood flooding her neck and her face. “That’s not mine,” she said, walking faster, her eyes on the ground ahead of her.

  “Huh? I was right behind you when you dropped it.”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay,” he said. He wadded up the nylon and shot it, overhand, toward a garbage can. It fell short. “Shit,” he said. “Hey, where are you from,” he asked, running to catch up with her. “You seem kind of like you’re from somewhere else.”

  “I’m from here,” she said. “Around here.”

  “Did you go to Rimrock last year? I never saw you there.”

  “No,” Jory said. “I went . . . somewhere else.” There. She had confirmed it. She was a freak from somewhere else.

  “So, what do you think of Jism?”

  “What?”

  “Jism High.” The boy gave Jory a close look, then shook his head slightly. “Never mind,” he said.

  They had come up the stairs and were now outside in the dust and glare of the parking lot. Jory felt as if several days had gone by since she had first stood there this morning. “Where are the buses?” she asked him, squinting and turning. “Do you know?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Over there.” He pointed back toward the gym. “You ride the bus?”

  Jory was too tired to care whether or not riding the bus was the worst, most uncool thing to admit to. She nodded.

  “Yeah, well, okay then. Catch ya later.” The boy waved and jogged off toward a pickup truck that another boy was already backing out of the parking lot. “Hey, hang on, dickhead!” he yelled as he grabbed on to the tailgate and jumped into the bed of the still-moving truck.

  Jory walked toward the gym. She had no idea which bus was hers. There were four buses parked in a row beneath the gym’s overhang, but no drivers in them. Small groups of kids shoved each other onto and off of the buses. Jory waited in line and then climbed the steps of the closest bus. She peered inside. “Which bus is this?” she asked a large girl sitting in the front seat. The girl stared at Jory and smiled hugely. A boy with black hair combed completely down over his forehead in long greasy bangs leaned forward. “It’s Number 2,” he said. He pointed a thumb in the large girl’s direction. “She’s a retard. She don’t never say nothin’.” He sat back down in his seat.

  Jory stepped down out of the bus. Her neck and shoulders were terribly sore, as if she had been lifting heavy books onto shelves or swimming across a large lake. She glanced across the parking lot. Students were piling into cars and pulling out of the parking lot as if escaping a burning building, tires screeching and engines roaring, all of them in an apparent rush to get out first. Maybe she could ask the woman in the front office which bus she was supposed to get on.

  As quickly as she could, Jory made her way back into the school building and up the stairs. She walked down one long hall after another looking for the secretary’s office, feeling her armpits becoming slicker with each step. Finally, as if by magic, she turned left and there it was, where it had been all along. She opened the office door and saw the reassuring wood-paneled counter. The woman from that morning, though, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a hunched balding man in striped overalls pushed a mop in incremental motions across the beige linoleum floor. “Uh, sir,” Jory said, “is the secretary here?”

  “Nope,” the man said. He plunged the rag end of the mop into a yellow bucket. “Someone had a little ax-i-dee-dent in here.” He inclined his head toward the door. “Took ’em down to the nurse’s.” The man pulled the mop out of the bucket and plopped it onto the floor again.

  “Do you know which bus—I mean, do you know if any of the buses out there go to Deer Flat Road?” Jory licked her lips and willed the man to look up again.

  “Those buses go every which way,” he said. He rested the mop against the high counter and turned to look out the window. “And that seems to be where they’re heading right about now.”

  Jory stood on her tiptoes. Through the window she could see the buses, one after the other pulling out of the parking lot, leaving a great cloud of dust in their wake.

  Jory left the office and walked down the front stairs. She pushed the heavy glass door open again. There was no one to ask, no one to call: her father was at work, her mother couldn’t drive, Grace didn’t have a car. Maybe she should just start walking, maybe she would remember the way back once she got down the road a ways. She gazed across the flat expanse of the nearly empty parking lot. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a miraculous thing: there, turning into the school’s far drive, was the ice cream truck. She took a few hesitant steps toward it and then began to run.

  “It was awful,” she said as she put her book bag down by her feet. “So awful you can’t believe it.”

  Grip t
urned toward her and made a sympathetic face. “Even the kids?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do they wear boots and spurs?” He downshifted, cresting the small brown hill and turning left next to the Day ’N’ Nite.

  “Yes. So do the teachers.”

  “Right on. Sounds like my kind of school.”

  “Skullcats,” Jory said, making claws with her hands. “GRRRRRHhh.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked her skirt under on each side. “I’m never going back.”

  “Ah, c’mon.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It couldn’t have been that terrible.”

  “I’m not kidding—you think it’s a joke, but I can’t go back there. I know I made it sound funny, but it wasn’t like that. The kids all smoke and the girls look like they’re twenty-five . . . I can’t explain it.” Jory shrugged helplessly and hugged her knees even tighter. “And it was like my dad didn’t even notice.” Jory glared at him, then abruptly began to cry.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” He steered the truck toward the side of the road and braked and then turned off the engine. “It’s not so bad,” he said again. He moved his legs around until he was turned completely toward her. “I like cowgirls.”

  “I don’t,” she said, sniffling, but also thrilling at his concentrated attention. “I like Indians.”

  “Well, okay. So you’ll wear moccasins.”

  “I only have stupid-looking mary janes.” She held up an offending foot for his inspection. “And my parents hate me.”

  “Nah. My parents hate me.” He made a mock grimace. “Your parents hate me—everybody’s parents hate me. But nobody,” he said, looking at her, “hates you.”

  “Why do your parents hate you?”

  He shrugged. “No reason in particular, I guess. I’m just not exactly who they were hoping for.”

  “Who were they hoping for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. One of those kids on Flipper maybe—all blond and tan and self-sufficient, pulling in the fishing nets while looking out to sea and saying, ‘Gosh, we better hurry, it looks like rain.’ Something like that.”

  Grip clicked on the radio and they listened in silence as a sweet-voiced man crooned: “The face in the moon—that’s you, that’s you. The face in the moon, that’s you.” “All righty, then,” said Grip abruptly. He started the truck’s engine and pulled back out onto the roadway. “Time to get you home, Miss Schoolgirl.”

  “I know you think I’m a baby.” A note of bitterness and self-pity crept into Jory’s voice. “You’d probably think Schism was perfectly fine. You’d just stomp right in with your boots and your long hair and be the fun cool guy.”

  “Are you nuts?” Grip shifted gears and stared with concentration at the road in front of them. “I spent most of high school in lockdown. I was cool and fun all right.”

  Jory turned her face back toward his. “Lockdown?”

  “Yeah, you know. Juvie. Juvenile detention.”

  “Why were you in there?”

  “Because I was a troublemaker and a stupid punk.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah.” Grip steered the truck up the last little hill before Deer Flat Road.

  “What does that mean? What did you do to be a punk?”

  For a long moment he said nothing. Then he glanced at her and said, “The usual. Breaking and entering, fighting, drunk and disorderly—that kind of thing.”

  “Oh,” she said, not knowing what expression to put on her face, her tongue suddenly feeling awkward in her mouth.

  “The usual,” he said again.

  “The usual,” she said. “Well, I guess that’s not so bad, right?” She picked her book bag off the truck’s metal floor and began to fish aimlessly about in it. She poked her hand into one pocket after another, not looking at him.

  “See,” he said. “That’s who I am.”

  She pulled a pen out of her book bag and clicked its top button in and out. “No, it isn’t—that isn’t who you are.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “And way more besides.”

  He looked at her, and for the second time she noticed that his eyes were not a normal brown, like most brown-eyed people, but a yellow-brown more like an animal, like a sad-eyed, brown-eyed dog.

  “You’re wonderful,” she said. “You’re a wonderful person.”

  “You don’t know squat,” he said, and pulled to a stop in the dirt road in front of Mrs. Kleinfelter’s house.

  Jory sat in the truck, unmoving.

  “Go on,” he said. The truck’s engine was still running. “You’d better get.”

  Jory’s eyes stung as she picked up her book bag and jumped out of the truck. She stood in the dip in the road next to the truck, waiting for him to lean out the window and take back what he’d said, to say something that would change things, make it all seem funny, the way he always did.

  He pulled away from the curb without even waving, without looking back.

  Jory stood in the road until the ice cream truck disappeared down the street. He had never said anything like that to her before. She threw her book bag down and watched as it tipped over in the dirt and spilled out several pencils and her English I reader. Jory left her bag in the road and walked up the cement path to the old woman’s house, her head ringing with every single event of this horrible day. She climbed the steps and knocked on the front door. Then she rang the bell, pushing in the old-fashioned round button and listening to its flat insistent buzzing going off inside the house. After a moment, Jory rattled the door handle and then opened the door and stepped inside. “Hello,” she called. “Mrs. Kleinfelter?” The house was silent and smelled faintly of ramen noodles. Jory could not believe she was doing this. She had never gone inside anyone’s house without being invited, and she had no idea why she was doing this now, but it felt thrilling, both shameful and intimate, like watching someone undress from behind a closet door, a thing she had done once when she spent the night at Rhonda’s and they had spied on her sister, who was trying to bleach her pubic hair with Jolen mustache bleach.

  Jory stood quietly breathing in the living room, looking at the curlicued cuckoo clock and the long blue couch that had lace doilies covering its back and arms, the matching blue plaid armchairs, and the old-fashioned television in its wide wooden console. The floor was hardwood like their own house, but there were braided oval rugs in shades of lilac and green and yellow put down here and there, and a bookcase filled not with books but with small painted figurines: gilded swans, Chinamen pulling rickshaws, grand ladies in pink-frilled ball gowns with poodle dogs on tiny gold chains. Glossy black panthers slinking along and ballerinas poised on one opalescent toe. Jory picked up each figurine in turn. They were made of ceramic and weighed next to nothing and felt smooth and cool to the touch. Their surfaces had all been painted and then had some kind of shiny glaze put on them. All the figures, even the animals, had individual expressions of joy or exertion or anger painted onto their minute faces. Tiny paintbrush strokes that slanted eyes into envy and curled lips into hunger or haughtiness. Each one had a hole cut deliberately into the bottom to keep it from exploding in the kiln. When her father had brought her a Hummel figure back from Germany, he had explained the firing process to her. Jory stuck her little finger into the hole in the base of the ballerina. She was wiggling the ballerina back and forth on her finger as Mrs. Kleinfelter walked into the room. “Oh, merciful heavens,” Mrs. Kleinfelter said, pressing a hand to her chest and taking a step backward. “You nearly scared me to death.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jory said, trying to take the ballerina off her finger and put it back on the bookshelf without attracting any attention.

  Mrs. Kleinfelter sank down into an armchair. She fanned herself with a gardening glove that she had been carrying. “Oh, my goodness,” she said.

  “I was jus
t coming over to ask if I could use your phone, because ours isn’t connected yet and I thought I heard you say to come in, but I guess I must have misheard because I guess you were outside or something.” Jory gestured frantically and moved closer to the front door. “So, I’m really sorry I scared you.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Kleinfelter said, still breathing heavily. “Yes, indeed. You shouldn’t go frightening old people like that. I’m lucky I didn’t have a stroke. You’re lucky I didn’t have a stroke. What would you have done then? I’d like to know. Me down on the floor with my eyes rolled back.” Mrs. Kleinfelter shook her head. “Do you know any lifesaving techniques? Are you a registered nurse? No? Then you’d better not go wandering into old people’s houses and scaring the living daylights out of them.” Mrs. Kleinfelter closed her eyes. “Go on, then. The phone’s in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, no, that’s okay. I shouldn’t bother you any more,” Jory said.

  “You’ve bothered me this much, you might as well go a little further.”

  Jory stepped carefully past Mrs. Kleinfelter and into the next room. An old rotary dial phone just like the one in her and Grace’s house hung on the yellow wall beneath a picture of a man sleeping next to a haystack. Jory leaned over an ancient-looking stove and picked up the phone’s receiver. She dialed the first number that came to her head.

  “Hello,” her mother said. “Hello?”

  Jory listened to her mother breathe for a second more and then she hung up the phone.

  She walked back out into the living room. “No one was home,” she said to Mrs. Kleinfelter. “But thanks anyway. And I’m really sorry.” She stepped past the armchair where Mrs. Kleinfelter was still sitting and put her hand on the front door knob.

  “I made those myself,” Mrs. Kleinfelter said. “I used to think I might do some real kind of painting once upon a time.”

  “The figurines? They’re beautiful,” Jory said, moving back over to the bookshelf. She picked up the panther and ran her finger along his sleek head. “How did you get the eyes to look like that? Like green jewels?”