We’ll recover. The only real fights we’ve ever had—ones in which we didn’t speak for multiple hours—were over Green Day being sellouts, and Star Wars episodes I to III. This wasn’t a fight. But it is something that will weasel its way into future arguments.
How could you be so selfish? future Janie Lee might ask.
You know, I was thinking the same thing when you let Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon board, future Billie might respond.
You’re the one who held me back from Woods. You’re the reason we aren’t together, future Janie Lee would yell back.
Yeah, well, maybe you’re not supposed to be with him. Maybe you’re supposed to be with me. I wouldn’t have yelled that part, but I would have thought it.
Friendship relies on history—on history being positive even when it’s painful. I have to find a way to erase last night the way Woods erases Einstein. I am not sure how. So while the Hexagon is at school, I’m taking a mental health day. Neither Mom nor Dad questioned my “migraine.” The moment Dad left for visitation ministry, Mom retreated to her studio, and I parked myself in the garage to think about the fact that I had two meet-ups last night. The one with Janie Lee. The one after Janie Lee fell asleep on the phone.
I arrived at the elementary school before Woods.
Rusted playground equipment rose out of the scattered pea gravel like a metal graveyard. I squinted at the run-down ball field, where we will hold the KickFall tournament. The grass in the outfield was the shin height of a giant.
I shimmied up a triangular-shaped antenna fastened to the school building with some luck and eroded hinges. The rungs were familiar with my weight and didn’t complain in the least. When I stepped out onto the roof, heat from the day, trapped in the tar-like substance, pressed into the rubber of my tennis shoes. I was sweaty from biking over, but the extra heat was pleasant against the chill.
While waiting for Woods, I stared at the tiny metropolis of Otters Holt: the token caution light, miles and miles of electrical transmission towers pulling power from Kentucky Dam, and the massive dark caverns of the limestone quarry. Power and darkness were everywhere. The evening was quiet except for a barking dog and the Vilmers’ bleating goats. Otters Holt by night was all ghost, no town. The elementary school beneath me needed every ounce of love we planned to show it now that youth group community service was slowing down.
Woods was stepping off the antenna—a fact I was ignoring–not ignoring. He loped toward me, jacket draped over his arm. “Thought you might be cold,” he said. The silky fabric of his favorite windbreaker landed on my shoulders. He hugged me from behind, leaving his arms in a knot around my chest. Leaving my heart in a knot.
“You think Hattie is feeding those goats?” he asked.
“Do you really have to feed goats?” I asked.
We lifted our shoulders in unison. He was a full head taller than me and always had been. When we stood this way, I was eight years old again, with a spray of freckles, bowl-cut hair, and pockets filled with fossils and special rocks. Back then, Woods wrote sloppy lists on his Dad’s yellow legal pads. They said FOUR THINGS BETTER THAN COTTON CANDY and IF SANTA WERE PRESIDENT OF OUR CLASS and POP ROCKS PLUS VINEGAR AND STUFF.
“Van Gogh would be inspired by this view,” he said, his lips nearly against my ear. “Paint me something that looks like this for when we’re old.”
Seventeen-year-old me returned.
Woods Carrington always smelled either like he needed a shower or he’d just toweled off. Oatmeal and honey oozed from his pores. He must have “forgotten” again to tell his mother to get his manly-man shampoo at BI-LO, and he’d showered in her bathroom. I wanted to eat him. Instead, I bumped my head against his chin, told him he was right about Van Gogh, and mentioned the shower. He confessed that he might just be a honey and oatmeal guy. We rocked, left, right, left, sharing balance, neither of us eager to break apart.
“And you are a”—he smelled my hair—“hayfield and epoxy girl.”
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: a hayfield and epoxy girl.
“Let’s play Beggar,” I said.
We claimed a corner of the roof where the old gym slopes to meet the lower cafeteria wall. It was a cave cut from brick and glass, sitting well beyond the range of Mrs. John’s security light across the street. We opened a ragtag deck of cards, and Woods’s fingers moved nimbly over them, the cards singing as they slapped against the old cooler we keep on the roof for a table.
The wind lifted his cowlick, teasing hair that was usually contained by a baseball cap. His hair was the one disorderly thing about him. Everything else could be described as neat-as-a-pin, an item on a list, well-ordered. I was glad he hadn’t worn the cap. He looked boyish in it, and I needed to remember we were not eight.
“Let’s build a house up here and never move,” he said after the cards were dealt.
“Only if you buy us a dragon,” I said.
He grinned as if he knew a guy with dragon eggs, and I’d better want what I’d asked for. That was where I’d gotten into trouble with him. Woods and I had never had many things in common. He was music, and I was sports. He was peppermint tea, and I was an energy drink. He was class president, and I was named an “Art Alien” by an underground school blog. But we lived life on the same frequency, leading and striving and wanting. Inside both of us lurked someone young and someone ancient.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
I answered, “Love,” and he scrunched his nose appropriately.
“What’d you wanna go and do that for?” he asked.
I said, “I needed a word for my favorite card game.”
I thought, Because of your damn whiteboard, Hexagon bullshit.
He swatted at my cards, laughing.
Beggar is a game we learned on a youth ski trip, and while the others abhorred it, Woods and I wasted centuries on the rooftop with a deck of cards and a game of luck. I rarely won. Woods maintained I was secretly competitive, which drove me crazy. I wasn’t nearly as competitive as all the guys believed. I was just good at stuff they didn’t expect girls to be good at.
He dealt, and we played.
He won four straight games.
“Tell me everything you’re thinking,” he said, when I threw my cards atop the cooler.
He rested his weight on his palms, leaning away from me for the first time that night.
I began. “One. Other than my imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put me on the guys’ side of the board. Two. Other than your imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put Mary Dancy on the board at all. You don’t even know her. Three. When I said I don’t know how I feel about Janie Lee, I meant it. Four. The real messy awkward truth is . . .” He prepared himself by affixing his gaze to Mrs. John’s front porch. “Honestly, I always thought . . . well, I always thought . . . we’d give it a go.”
He said two barely audible words. “Me too.”
I was prepared for Billie, we can’t, or Billie, I’m sorry, or Billie, you’re like a brother to me. Nothing in my emotional response arsenal went with Me too.
I said, “I guess I always thought it worked like this. You talk. You kiss. You fall in love, buy a Buick, and never leave Otters Holt. There’s sex in there somewhere.”
“Me too. Except the Buick. We can do better than a Buick.”
At that precise moment, the wide neck of my sweatshirt had fallen off my shoulder, and he stared at my naked collarbone. Under his lingering gaze, I did not doubt he knew that I was made of girl. I righted the fabric, and he trapped my hand with his. “B, there’s a lot of people I love, but there’s no one like you.”
Exposed skin will do that.
My brain crunched thoughts so loudly it sounded as if I were snacking on Doritos. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t like Mary Dancy,” he said.
“But you’re attracted to Janie Lee,” I argue.
“A
nd so are you, but that doesn’t change this. Us.”
When we were younger, I tried to teach Janie Lee and Woods how to make friendship bracelets from cross-stitch thread. Each bracelet was made up of a certain number of strands, a certain pattern of cinching knots against each other. This was friendship. We were four strands. Then five strands. Six strands now. And a series of knots, all in neat little rows, made up our history. I had always thought, always believed, we would stick to that design and I would know the future, because I knew the pattern.
Woods was untying a knot. The pattern was changing.
He touched the small of my back, beneath my sweatshirt. His fingers brushed the recessed place at the bottom of my spine. “You have to know that you’re my second skin.” His thumb moved like a metronome.
“And who is Janie Lee to you?”
He spoke, and as he did, I said the word with him. “Music.”
Music in the way she moved, music in the way she spoke, music in the way she listened. She was a melody we both hummed.
He breathed on my chin, my cheek, my neck. His teeth were so near my earlobe I heard his breath inside my chest. “What do we do with all this love?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Gerry had kissed me, and we’d been fine afterward. Perhaps we were holding our relationship like crystal and it was one of those pink bouncy balls. “Maybe you should kiss us both and see how you feel.”
He didn’t laugh.
I thought I would be nervous.
I thought it would be a big deal.
I thought Saturn might fall out of the sky and cause a tsunami on the other side of the planet.
But when he kissed me, and I kissed him (and I feel like I have to say it exactly that way because it was equal), we were what we’d always been: friends.
I’d really only kissed four people at that point: Fifty, Renley (who moved away freshman year), Gerry, and now Woods. But it was enough to compare. Kissing Woods made me want to say, “If we haven’t found someone we’re in love with by the time we’re forty, let’s get married,” or “Let’s be each other’s backup plan.” Because he was someone I would marry and raise dragons with and let cut my yellow toenails at seventy, but he wasn’t . . . Well, he wasn’t even Gerry.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? R.I.P.: She never bought a Buick.
I know passion isn’t everything, and relationships aren’t just physical, blah, blah, blah, but we were perfunctory. Shockingly perfunctory. And hiding seventeen years’ worth of collapsed desire took all my energy.
“That was nice,” he said, lips hovering inches above mine. And then he kissed me a second time as if the first hadn’t quite convinced him.
I felt polite.
“Yes, that was very nice,” I said when it was over.
We both wiped our mouths with our sleeves.
I used my poker face, I used my sweet voice, I embellished. “If Janie Lee kisses like that, we’re all really going to have a problem,” I told him.
Because it was one thing to tease him about his imaginary gigantic balls, but it was quite another to deflate them.
THE SHORT PART
before
PART TWO
The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.
—LELAND VAL VAN DE WALL
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
The rock ledge felt cool and slippery to Janie Lee’s bare feet. She stood nearly thirty feet off the water, an eternity. Summer sun blazing down, turning skin from pale to olive. She looked down, down, down—her knees knocking, her heart fluttering. Heights: they weren’t friends. They’d been forced into acquaintance two weeks before.
For reasons she understood but detested, her classmates had adopted jumping off Rock Quarry Cliffs as gospel fun. She blamed puberty. The boys had been more annoying lately: jumping off things, hitting on others, making stupid dares.
They ran right off the cliffs like their asses were on fire. To Janie Lee, it was one thing to risk a walk across Vilmer’s Beam and fall into a pile of hay. Another to smack into the lake’s liquid concrete. She wasn’t scared of dying—hundreds, perhaps thousands, had made this jump; she just didn’t appreciate senseless pain. But she was faced with a new decision. The pain of red, smacked flesh or of red, smacked loneliness? She knew the answer.
As so, she had docked her uncle’s johnboat, climbed and switched back over slippery rocks holding on to a green-knotted rope, and scrambled over spray-painted messages from hundreds of jumpers to stand atop Rock Quarry Cliff. To hopefully find someone to eat lunch with this year.
One false start, one running attempt, one set of windmilling arms: she was falling.
Her stomach and throat connected. Her heart thundered in her ears. She sliced through the water without a scream, proud as a peacock.
Cold water streamed up her nose; something grazed her leg. She kicked out and up, racing toward oxygen. Swimming in Kentucky Lake meant sharing this gigantic pool with fish. Only she hadn’t kicked a fish, and the sting in her upper thigh wasn’t from entering the water wrong.
She’d landed on a water moccasin that did not appreciate being kicked.
Swelling, nausea, throbbing. All at once. Pain tied her like a dock rope. She clawed her way to the surface.
In the next cove, Billie McCaffrey baited a hook and asked her father, “Did you hear that?” Her dad was listening to headphones and hadn’t heard anything. She pulled the earpiece away, and said, “Anchor up. Drive to the cliffs.”
Janie Lee’s right leg was already a heavy, useless appendage. By then she’d pieced together that there was poison in her bloodstream, spidering its way up to her heart. By then she’d pieced together that she could die.
She was thinking about God. Wondering if there were violins in Heaven.
She was not thinking about Billie McCaffrey, even though she had often thought of Billie McCaffrey, until she and her dad showed up and hauled a nearly unconscious Janie Lee into their boat.
They were front-page news: Minister’s Daughter Dives into Snake-Infested Water to Save Best Friend.
The paper declared them best friends, and it was so.
Janie Lee gained momentary hero status at school and the instant affection of Woods, Mash, and Fifty. A group of four became a group of five, and Billie McCaffrey made true and dear friends with a girl. They’d been nod-at-each-other classmates before—now they were magnetized. Two town daughters—one the boyish offspring of a local minister, and the other the daughter of a drug dealer—fell into cahoots.
Some people said they fell in love.
Some people were always making assumptions.
PART TWO
EINSTEIN WAS AN IDIOT
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
—CAROL SHIELDS
14
The Saturday morning the Corn Dolly ballot is due for release, Woods and I are on his bed, heads touching, watching the book television. A much-needed break. At his prompting, we pulled double duty this week. Community service projects and the painstaking process of clearing unwanted things from the elementary school lot. Save the Harvest Festival is alive and well, and so far it’s making me want to wallow in a vat of Icy Hot and sleep for a year.
All week we met at 6:45 and worked for a solid hour before school. “Chop. Chop. Get her done,” chirped Woods, the happy overlord. Post-school, we went to our assigned senior citizens. I’ve reroofed a shed, I’ve painted a bathroom the color of lilacs, I’ve made approximately four million trips to Goodwill and three to the dump. Yay for dirty, sweaty redemption. I am behind on homework, have eaten a dozen homemade cookies, and have ignored the mysteries of kissing altogether. Yay for dirty, sweaty distractions.
I was too bone-tired to stand over the Daily Sit and glue another damn anything to anything. So when Woods texted, and didn’t want nothing other than company, I biked over. I noted that he
was very clear about “not wanting nothing other than company.”
His mom vacuums in the hallway. I wish she’d suck up our impatience. The newspaper should be out already. Woods has already trekked to the Fork and Spoon and claims there is nothing to report.
“What did they make you sing?” I ask.
He groans. “Elvis.”
“Glad I didn’t get up for that.”
“Whatever. You get up with the sun.”
Fable. The sun is not involved. If I go to bed at one, I’ll wake up at six. Thus far, five hours is my limit. Before anyone else in my house woke, I spent three hours on the Daily Sit. To no avail. “Do you know how many layers of newspaper it takes to make something the depth of a couch?” I complain.
“I’m sure you’re counting.”
I was. But Davey added some layers when I was in the shower, and accuracy went out the window.
“That reminds me.” Woods retrieves his keys from his pocket, drops them on my stomach. “Grandy sent you her newspapers. And some aluminum cans. They’re all in my trunk.”
I drop the keys on his crotch. “On my bike, genius. You’ll have to drop them off later.”
We watch the book television some more. Woods changes the channel three times, lands on a cartoon. Mrs. Carrington finally stops vacuuming and starts clanking in the kitchen. I’m massaging my own shoulders thinking I’ll never finish anything. Woods has two vertical worry lines stretching from his eyebrows to his hairline. These occur every time he focuses on stuff he can’t control.
Is he thinking about me? Is he thinking about how terrible our kissing attempt was?
In an alt-universe, where Janie Lee said nothing the night of the fire, we would continue through graduation in normalcy. A single sentence set us on a course of redefinition, of pairs, of benefits. Benefits were always my lowest frequency setting. Now I think about them, well . . . frequently. And I think about them with everyone. Even Fifty. I want to Dial-soap my brain.
Dress Codes for Small Towns Page 10
