History of Wolves(7)

Sometimes his mother came out in a ski cap and readjusted the tripod, raising the tube and peering through it herself. She rested one gloved hand on the boy’s head. Then, as the evening turned its last shade, I watched them go inside again. I watched them unwind the scarves from their necks. I watched them cuddle the cats, wash their fingers in the tap, heat water in a kettle. They didn’t seem to have blinds on their enormous triangular windows. I saw their dinner like it was done just for me. I sat on the roof of our shed with my dad’s Bushnell binoculars, turning the sticky barrels, warming my hands against my neck. The kid sat in his cushioned chair on his knees, rocking. The mother barely sat at all. She went to the counter and back, she sliced things on the boy’s plate. She made wedges of green, triangles of yellow, discs of something brown. She blew on his soup. She grinned when he grinned. I could see their teeth across the lake. The father seemed to have disappeared. Where had he gone?


Early spring brought more icicles. They oozed blue-black water from the school roof. They dripped away the afternoons, synced to the ticking clock, then going as fast as my heart, which I could feel when I pressed my fingers to my clavicle. I was doing poorly in school, as always, and as the hockey players dreamed us backward toward December, and the debate kids memorized the reciprocal identities, I watched Lily Holburn get abandoned—one by one—by her friends. She’d always been Number Two in a group of four, but since the start of winter she’d become Number Five. It was hard to pinpoint what had changed. It was hard to say exactly when the rumors about her and Mr. Grierson had started. But by March, a space had been cleared around her—like a forest after a fire—and her silence no longer seemed particularly dumb. It was unsettling. Skank, her old friends sneered, under their breaths, behind her back. It was the same thing they used to say to her face when they were joking with her after class. Because of her ripped-up jeans, because of her cheap tight sweaters. Now they were strictly sweet when forced to acknowledge her. They didn’t laugh when she showed up to class without a pencil, or give her grief for forgetting her lunch. They loaned her money when she asked for it. They handed her toilet paper under the bathroom stall when she was out, whispering, “Do you need more? Is that enough?”

In the halls, though, they walked right past her.

I had news for her. I wrote it on a note, which I passed to her when the stack of worksheets came gliding down our aisle one afternoon: I don’t care what they’re saying about you and Mr. G. It wasn’t that I wanted to defend her—we’d never been friends, we’d never been alone in a room together—only that her name had somehow gotten yoked to Mr. Grierson and I wanted to know why. But Lily never wrote back. She didn’t even turn around to look at me, just hunched up in her seat and pretended to understand square roots.

So I was surprised to find her waiting for me by the back door that day when school let out. She wore an elaborately wound scarf, a red one, and a strange kind of jean jacket that buttoned like a sailor’s slicker from knee to neck. I was caught off guard. As casually as possible, I took out a cigarette and lit it—but when I handed it to her she shook her head and stared out at the glistening, glittering, melting world.

“What a mess,” I said, to say something.

She shrugged—very Lily-like, very sweet—and I felt a twinge of exasperation.

I could see her long white throat peeking from beneath folds of red. It made me glad to see that her jacket was shabby up close, the hem torn and dragging in a puddle behind her. For all her experience, Lily had always struck me as inexplicably innocent. And now she seemed inexplicably superior, drifting just past everyone. Say Mr. Grierson, and up she went. Like a balloon.

I took a chance. I whispered, “What’d he do to you?”

She shrugged again, eyes widening.

“Where?”

“Where?” She seemed confused.

I took a step closer to her. “I knew something was up. I could have warned you.” She wasn’t looking at me, and I could see that her hair had been barretted back so one ear was exposed. That ear was bright red in the cold—shiny and strangely lip-like. I had a new thought. “You made that stuff up.”

Though she didn’t say anything, I knew by instinct I’d hit the mark.

“About you and him.” I swallowed.

“Yep.”

We might have been merely standing next to each other on the curb, waiting for the traffic to pass to go our separate directions. We might have been carefully ignoring each other: me with my cigarette, she with an open can of Coke, which she lifted delicately from her jacket pocket. Still, for the moment, I felt very close to her, and it seemed unnecessary to say anything else. The silence between us filled with possibilities. We could hear the trickling of unseen streams, rivulets coursing down the street and sidewalk. We could hear the salt crystals crunching under car tires. Then Lily shook out her Coke in the snow, and it occurred to me that she’d spoken without any sense of occasion at all. It occurred to me that she’d only told me because I had no one to tell. It was like dropping a secret into a snowbank.

My lips felt clumsy around my cigarette. “It’ll pass, you know. People’s talk.”

She shrugged a third time. “You think so? I don’t think so.” She crushed a lump of slush with her boot, pulled at her scarf till she was pretty as anything, long bent arm cutting geometrical shapes in the sky.