All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(85)

I didn’t know what to say, so I lay there and listened to the whisper of covers moving over her flannel nightdress. Tiny sparks leapt like lightning in a petri dish meadow. Wavy sighed and shivered and hiccupped. After sharing a room with her for three years I was used to the sound of her masturbating. I never got used to the sound of her crying.

*

I lost my own virginity at a party four months later. It involved a nice guy named Marcus, who thought he was in love with me, and too much alcohol. I felt like such a coward about that. Instead of going into it with my eyes open, I lied to myself. I thought if I was drunk it would be this magical thing that just happened.

I’d had a huge fight with Angela, who was going to a different college on a track and field scholarship. She kept saying, “We’ll visit each other,” but then I found out she was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, who was going to the same school. Her ex-boyfriend who hated me. I knew we would never visit each other if she was dating him. When I told her she deserved better, she got mad.

“You don’t own me,” she said.

I felt like my heart had been ripped out, and when Wavy and I got to the party, Marcus was there. I wanted it to be wonderful, like Wavy said, but it was awkward and painful and embarrassing. I was so drunk that after Wavy and I got home, I was sick. We managed to sneak past Mom and into the bathroom, where I vomited my guts up and cried.

“I don’t love him,” I sobbed. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. I wasn’t even attracted to him beyond the fact that he had good hygiene. I thought it meant something that he was in love with me, but it only means something if you love the other person. And I loved Angela.

“It’s over,” Wavy said, as I lay on the floor with a cold washcloth on my forehead. I thought she meant the puking, but she said, “Nothing left to be afraid of.”

I’d been afraid of so many things: sex, graduating, college, leaving home, falling in love. Life. Now I’d fallen in love, gotten my heart broken, and had meaningless sex. Those scary things were over. In three months I would leave for college. There would be other things to be afraid of later, but lying there, drunk and hurting all over, I wasn’t afraid.

I wondered how it was for Wavy. She’d fallen in love, had her heart broken, almost had sex, and had her whole family taken away from her. Did she still have things to be afraid of?

That Kellen wouldn’t love her long enough. The years were adding up. Mom thought Wavy would get over it, but she was wrong. Wavy still loved him, but when he got out of prison, would he still love her?

Wavy made her way as best she could, found ways to fit in on her terms. For instance, she didn’t go to her senior prom, but she was the chairperson for the decoration committee. The prom was Valentine’s themed: red and pink, with hearts and hundreds of hand-tucked crepe-paper roses with green sisal stems. Things like that always looked effortless in Wavy’s hands.

She strung elaborate garlands along the edges of the bleachers, and in the corner where prom pictures would be taken. The garlands were pink and red with bits of gold foil, alternating reversed hearts. Everyone assumed they were hearts, until halfway through the prom, when one of the parent chaperones admired the decorations at just the right angle. That year none of the prom pictures could be used in the yearbook. “Obscene,” the school board called them.

Instead of hearts, Wavy had very skillfully alternated between erect penises and curvaceous rumps that narrowed to delicate but well-defined vulvas.

The school board threatened to keep her from graduating, but in the end, Wavy got to walk across the dais in her big boots. She accepted her diploma from the principal’s grudgingly outstretched hand, and walked to the other end of the stage. From up in the stands, home from my first year of college, I watched her kiss Kellen’s ring.

Four years into a ten-year prison sentence, did he feel the same?





13

KELLEN

June 1987

The hearing room was small, the same gray cinder block as my cell. There was a table for the parole board, another for me and my lawyer, and some folding chairs along the wall for witnesses. I had to wear a leg iron, hooked to an eyebolt in the floor, but at least they didn’t cuff me. The room was too warm, close enough quarters I wondered if Wavy would be able to smell me. I’d showered like she might, trimmed my hair, shaved, and tucked my shirt in. Not to impress the board. I didn’t figure there was much I could do to make them like me.

Heading into my fifth year, I was tired. I’d spent four years sitting around, reading, lifting weights, and sleeping. Four years thinking about Wavy, because I didn’t have enough to do with my hands, especially in solitary. Odds on I was gonna do another year before my next hearing. Another year before I might get a chance to see Wavy again.

After my lawyer, the parole board showed up, then Old Man Cutcheon, who I couldn’t hardly believe had come all that way for me after the trouble I’d caused him. Then Brenda Newling walked in. Seeing her looking older, I wondered what Wavy looked like now.

Brenda glared at me like she wanted to burn a hole in me, but it didn’t. Wavy hadn’t come, and if she wasn’t there, I didn’t care what happened. I knew the fight was gonna come up and that was the first thing the parole board mentioned.

“I see you had an altercation with a fellow inmate six months ago. A pretty serious one. The man ended up in the infirmary, and you’ve been in administrative segregation since then? That doesn’t exactly suggest you’re ready for parole. Would you like to tell us about that?”