“And spare me any details about water depth and oxygen requirements.”
Took the words right out of my mouth.
I act like I’m examining my artwork.
“And for your future information, Trammel, where isn’t as important as how,” she says, so I know she’s decided to let the scuba thing go for the moment. “What matters to the girl is that you take your time and do it right.”
“No argument there,” I agree. I act like I’m brushing off eraser flecks, though I haven’t erased anything.
“Most guys…” Chlo pauses—but then she goes on. “Most of the guys I went out with before Bri didn’t have a clue. No finesse. I always felt like a melon or something.”
“A melon?”
“You know. Like your breasts? Just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.”
I’m wondering what else there is to do to breasts. I’m wondering if the girls I’ve been out with thought I was some kind of spaz, because all I did was squeeze.
I don’t say anything, though, because I don’t want to lose my credibility with Chlo. If I have any left.
I just get a firm hold on my pencil and add the word me. It’ll say “GoAt me,” and everybody’ll think there’s a new obscene saying they never heard of.
Chlo bends her head over her book again. We work in silence for a while.
“You know,” she says suddenly, “when you were asking about the picture in my head?”
“Huh?”
“The picture. Remember, we were talking about Byron and ‘She Walks in Beauty’?”
Oh. “Yeah.”
“The picture I get is of the first time Brian and I made love.”
I drop my pencil.
Chlo doesn’t notice. The look on her face is a little frightening. Not dreamy. Her eyes are narrowed a little. She looks…hungry. “It was in his room. The lights were out, and the moonlight came in the window. He was all silver and shadows. I wrote a poem about it.”
“A poem,” I echo. The news is flashing, all through my body—This Girl Loves Sex.
“It was like the tide coming in and going out.”
Across the table from me I can’t see any body parts that I don’t normally see. But with her hair cut short, I can see the line of her neck, I can see tiny earrings I never noticed before, made of the same milky stone as her ring.
“What kind of earrings are those?” I ask, to get her talking about something else.
“What?”
“Your earrings.”
“Oh. Opals.”
I nod. I wonder if Brian gave her the earrings. I wonder if Brian kissed her neck, right there where her hairline swoops down behind her ear.
Probably. He probably did everything. Except squeeze.
I duck under the table, looking for my pencil. By the time I come back up, Chlo’s deep in her book again.
I don’t write again. I just sit there, hoping to God I haven’t made an asshole out of myself with every girl I ever touched.
Don’t squeeze. I file it away, thinking about Grace. They don’t like to be squeezed.
Over the next few days I pick up the phone exactly three times. Even dial half Grace’s number once.
But I don’t call her. Don’t speak to her at all. It’s a record. I’ve never lasted this long before without doing something stupid that I was sorry for later.
I keep saying to myself, Who’s the one girls say is cute? Who’s the one with messages on his answering machine all the time? Who’s the one with love notes left on his windshield after games last year?
Colt Trammel, I remind myself. That’s who.
WEEK FIVE
CHAPTER NINE
He Died Slowly, Coughing Up Blood
On Thursday I’m coming in from lunch. I know that Grace is on her way to biology, so I’m going to be a good boy again today and not go anywhere near the science hall.
Only it turns out that what I know is dead wrong.
I see her as I’m turning the corner to head down the English hall. Grace and…
Jordan Palmer?
My feet slow and stop. People brush by me, but I’m stuck now, drilled to the floor by the sight of them.
Jordan Palmer!
She’s leaning back against the wall by his locker. They are very close. Jordan is leaning over her, braced by one hand on the wall, and their faces are just inches apart while they’re talking and smiling at each other.
Or actually, Jordan’s talking. Grace is listening.
Really listening. She’s looking at him like she’s got to memorize every bit of his face.
If you’ve never experienced something like this situation, I’ll tell you how it feels. You wish a giant meteor would shoot from the sky and turn the earth backward for a few seconds and rewind time so that you could change everything that you just saw. And since that’s not possible, you wish the giant meteor would cut off the top of your head and take away the memory of what you just saw.
And since that’s not possible, you just wish the giant meteor, or anything else heavy like an iron or a baseball bat, would fall and squash you like a bug on the spot.
Palmer acts like he doesn’t even notice he’s got the undivided attention of the most beautiful girl in the sophomore class. He’s used to that kind of thing.
He’s talking—whispering, looks like, and whatever it is he’s saying, she’s looking straight up into his eyes like she’s the only girl he’s ever talked to this way. Like she really believes he sees only her. Like she’s not just one more in the long line of girls that Palmer’s leaned over and whispered the right words to.
My Grace isn’t that stupid. To believe that Palmer is anything but some horny senior who’s turned on the charm. No way.
Grace is an intelligent girl. A lot smarter than me. I know that. I know her.
I know her.
I keep putting one foot in front of the other. I’m breathing hard through my nose, fighting this urge to go back and look down the hall to see if they’re still together, the same way I’ve seen girls fight not to peek through covered eyes during the worst part of a horror movie.
Whack me in the head with that hammer again, please. It didn’t hurt enough the first time.
I’m fighting it all the way down the hall. I know it’s loud in here as usual, but inside my head it’s quiet.
Too quiet.
Sinking-in quiet.
“Ready to try some Keats?” Chlo says. She’s got her hand on her book.
“No.”
“He’s not so bad. And remember, you ended up liking Shelley.”
“Not his poems. His poems suck.” The reason I liked Shelley is that he was this atheist who got kicked out of school and ran off with jailbait, so his wife drowned herself and then he drowned, and his new wife took his heart and put it in a box.
“Would you rather skip it today? I take it you’re still having girlfriend troubles,” she adds.
I would rather skip it. But I shrug and say, “Go ahead and read it,” because I don’t want to hear or talk about or admit to girlfriend troubles.
She starts “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” out loud like she always does.
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales or Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?—”
“What crap,” I interrupt. “This is torture.”
“It’s a little difficult.”
“You think I can pass without knowing this one?”
“I don’t know. It’s up to you whether you want to try.”
“The words are too big. I don’t know what they mean
by themselves, much less together.”
“Which ones?”
I scan the page. “All of them. Unravish’d. Syl-van. Historian—no, wait, I know what that is. Freengd—”
“Fringed,” she says, with a j. “Like tassels. You know?”
“Dytees,” I go on, clenching my jaw. I hate it when people correct me.
“Deities. That means gods.”
“Tempe,” I say, triumphant. “Ha. I know that. That’s where the Cardinals play.”
“It’s a valley in Greece, Trammel. See the footnote?”
I don’t want to see the goddamn footnote. “This,” I announce, shutting the book, “is bullshit.”
“Why don’t we trying breaking it down?”
“It’ll just be broken-down bullshit.”
“Does it help to know that it’s about a vase?”
Today sucks so bad. And I look at the closed book, with that stupid poem inside, and all of a sudden it’s like there’s a sizzling filling my lungs. Every page is written in a foreign language that everybody understands but me. It’s like some club, and people like Jordan Palmer and Grace were born into it, while I’ve been shut out from day number one. Without even a chance to get in.
And it’s not fair that I get to be stupid and at the same time know how stupid I am. It seems like if you’re stupid, you shouldn’t have to know it.
“The writer,” Chlo continues, “is looking at this old vase with pictures—”
“How do you get that?” I burst out—I feel like I’m going to burst a vein. “Is it in some kind of code? Jesus, there wasn’t a thing in there about a fucking vase.”
“It’s in the title. An urn is a vase.”
I slap the book off the table. Bang! It hits the cabinets—Chlo flinches—and then, with a fluttering of pages, it falls.
“This is useless. You don’t know how hard I work,” I tell her, and I don’t bother to keep my voice down. “I work my ass off to learn one tenth of the stuff everybody else was born knowing.”
“Trammel, everybody has to study.”
“Yeah?” I lean forward, jabbing the air in front of her face with my finger. “I’ll bet you never had to study all these words. I’ll bet you already knew them all. I’ll bet you never had to study urn!”
She’s looking over the table at me, wide-eyed.
And then her mouth quivers.
“Go ahead,” I tell her, as she starts laughing. “I know it’s funny. It’s real funny, that I’ve got a defective brain.”
I stand up, kick my chair out of the way, and head for the door.
“Trammel,” says Chlo. “Hey. Think of it like baseball.”
I stop, hand on the doorknob.
“You’re in baseball, right? You don’t go straight to the stadium and walk onto the field and start playing right away, do you? No, you get to the park early and make sure you warm up real good. You do your windmills and your back bends.”
I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.
“And if you think you might be getting into a losing streak, you don’t stop doing all those warmups, do you? No, you take even more care. You do the extra jumping jacks, you do the extra toe touches.”
Toe touches? I can’t help it, I make a face—not to where Chlo could see, but at the door. “You don’t know shit about baseball, do you?”
“No. I’m stupid about baseball. Everybody’s stupid about something.”
I let go of the doorknob. My hand drops down to my side.
“So you going to stand there? Because I’ve got a book I could be reading.”
I don’t say anything. I just turn around and come back. I pick up my English book, but I don’t open it, just toss it on the table in front of Chlo.
My chair fell over; I pick it up, too, but I turn it around and straddle the seat facing the chair back, to show that I’m done reading and writing and thinking today.
“Okay, Chlo,” I tell her. “Warm me up. Warm me up real good.”
She gives me an over-the-glasses look, but I keep my face straight.
So she tells me about Keats, who loved this one woman, Fanny Brawne, all his life, and how he died slowly, coughing up blood, so that he knew he was going to die. And how he realized that this vase with pictures on it would outlast him, and how maybe he got comfort from the fact that something beautiful could last forever.
“Fanny?” I blurt. “Isn’t that another word for—”
“I think it’s short for Frances.”
“Fanny. God. Why didn’t they just name her Assy? Or Butty. No, Butthilda! ‘Oh, Butthilda,’” I say, in the same slow voice Chlo uses for reading this shit, “‘thou dost freeng thy dytees in Tempe.’”
Chlo actually cracks a smile. Her teeth are straight, like someone who’s had braces. “Trammel, you’re a case.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty hopeless,” I agree—but then I realize it’s true. I’ve been smiling, too, but now the smile dies. “And I’m tired of English.”
“I know.” She doesn’t say whether she knows I’m hopeless or I’m tired. Both, probably.
I reach around, pull out my wallet. Start digging in for her fifteen bucks.
“You going to remember any of this?” she asks.
“No.”
“Then save it.”
“I don’t mind, Chlo.” I look at her, she’s just watching me, arms folded.
“Save it.”
I shrug and stuff the wallet back in my pocket. I get comfortable, rest my arms on the chair back in front of me, because it’s probably a few minutes till the bell. I’m expecting Chlo to open up her book and disappear.
She doesn’t—she just sits there, arms still folded, like she’s expecting me to say something.
She thinks this is a real conversation.
I drop my chin down onto my arms. It’s one of those moments like when you’re dropping a girl off at her front door on a first date. It’s that pause when you don’t know whether to say good-bye, or start talking again, or just kiss her. Any one of them could be wrong.
“Your boyfriend okay with your hair now?” I ask.
“Yeah. He said he was sorry. I was just pissed.”
“You didn’t seem pissed. You seemed sad.”
“That too.”
“If he said he’s sorry, maybe you don’t have to dump him after all. Maybe he just blurted the Peter Pan thing out without thinking about it.”
“Probably.”
“I know, because I do that kind of stuff. Blurting.”
“I noticed.”
“You really do look good, you know. Your hair. Like that.”
“Thanks.”
The bell rings. Thank God. Now I don’t have to figure out what to say next.
Now it’s athletics and I’m standing near the sit-up board, getting ready to do some abs.
Or really, I’m thinking.
Palmer’s in the smart classes. That doesn’t mean much. Most of the people in the smart classes are in there just because they’ve always been in there. That’s the way it is; ever since I was a little tyke trying to figure out p, q, b, and d, the smart people have been in the smart classes. But most of them aren’t into the intellectual stuff like Grace is. Most of them don’t even like to read. I know, because she complains about them sometimes.
On the other hand, if Jordan’s even a little into the intellectual stuff, that’s more than me.
I watch Palmer out of the corner of my eye. “Bottom line: you got to go with whoever’s making the plays,” he’s saying to Gutterson.
I sit on the slanted board. “Hey Palmer,” I burst out. “You into poetry?”
Palmer stops talking and turns to stare at me. “Poetry? No. Why?”
“Just wondering.” Gutterson’s staring at me too. I know my face is getting red.
“Why were you wondering?”
I loosen one of my weight-lifting gloves, act like I’m pulling it tighter. “Um.” Think fast. “I was thinking if writing a poem to a girl
might help me get laid.” Ooh, that’s just great, Colt, you dumb fuck. Act like some virgin asking the pro for advice.
“Oh.” Palmer grins. “Sure. Just give me a second. Let me think.” He stares at the ground for a moment, like he’s thinking. Just a moment, then his head pops back up and he’s got this sincere look. “How about this:
“Violets are blue,
Roses are red,
I’m desperate and horny—
Willya give me some head?”
Palmer and Gutterson about fall over, laughing.
I’m not laughing. The scary thing is how fast he came up with it. This guy is smart. Evil and smart. That’s a bad combination.
“Big help, Palmer,” I tell him, sitting on the board. I slide one foot under the bar. “Thanks a lot.”
They go on about their business, and I go about mine. But when it’s time to quit, when I’m putting up my weights and Gutterson heads out to the locker room, Palmer walks over to where I’m putting the weights back on the rack, and says in a low voice, “Hey, Trammel.” And when I look up, he says, “Try this: ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old time is still a-flying.’ Short but sweet. It might be in your English book. ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,’ by Robert Herrick.”
“Oh. Yeah. That sounds good. Thanks.”
“No problem, Trammel my boy. Good luck to you.”
He walks out, and all I can think is: Holy shit.
CHAPTER TEN
No Matter How Hard You Try
I see Grace the next day.
I’m sure it’s her. I’m heading to fifth period from my locker, and down the hall, among all the other heads bobbing along, I see a blond one, one I’d know anywhere.
Something inside slips out of gear—I’ve got to make everything right, that’s all, just make everything back the way it was.
I tell myself it’s going to be okay. Even though with each step a little more panic overtakes me.
“Hey,” I call. She doesn’t hear me, doesn’t stop, and as I shoulder other people aside to catch up to her, my heartbeat revs up so much, I think my voice is going to come out as a high-speed stutter. Inside I’m shouting at myself: Moron, don’t you crawl!
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