Girl in Snow(53)

CELLY


That’s not what I meant.



We weren’t friends at first. Zap had the three thirty slot for piano lessons, and I had the four o’clock. Our teacher was named Erin and she had three cats—they would sit on top of the piano during lessons, letting the sound reverberate across their furry stomachs.

Erin always ran late, so Ma would sit in the living room and make small talk with Mrs. Arnaud. They were new to town. Ma invited them over for dinner one day after piano lessons.

That summer, we rode bikes. Around the cul-de-sac, through the swamp on the outskirts of the neighborhood where the irrigation system had flooded a concave field. The town didn’t have the funds to clean it out. We collected sticks and pretended they were fishing rods, dunking them in slimy water. We caught toads in buckets and hid them in Amy’s room. One died in her closet. I was grounded for three weeks. We read easy novels in Zap’s backyard hammock, picking aphids off the white rope.

I spent most of my days in Zap’s clean, well-decorated house. The Arnauds had this grandfather clock they’d brought over from France, a family heirloom—I remember thinking how cool that was. How genuine. My family would never do such a thing. Garbage, Ma would say, with a pull of her cigarette.

Zap became obsessed with astronomy after the fifth-grade trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They had this giant planetarium, and the guide bombarded us with facts that Zap wrote down in the miniature notebook he kept in his back pocket. There are fourteen known black holes in existence, and The Big Dipper is an asterism, not a constellation, and You can’t hear a scream in outer space. He typed all these facts up on his parents’ computer, 16-point Verdana, and hung them on his bedroom wall, adding to the list every time he found something new or noteworthy. Soon, his room was covered in charts and diagrams, in pictures of astronauts in marshmallow suits bouncing across the surface of the moon. He was going to be an astronaut, he said, and even though it sucked because he’d be gone for years at a time, he promised he’d bring me back rocks from as many planets as he could, to add to my collection.

Our parents had dinner—usually at the Arnauds’ house—while Zap and I disappeared upstairs. We played Pokémon cards. We watched the neighbors with binoculars. They’ll get married one day, our parents used to joke.

Ninth grade, a week before Christmas, Louis Travelli nudged Zap as we walked down the hill toward my neighborhood. Into fat girls, eh? Louis said, kicking the bottom of Zap’s backpack. Zap looked at me with this twisted face: anxiety to such an extreme, it could have been disgust. I should go home, Zap said, once Louis had gone. I have a lot of work to do tonight.

We didn’t speak for days. It felt like when you accidentally jump into the deep end of a swimming pool: you expect concrete beneath your feet, but instead you flap, panicked, toes grazing water and water and water.

After Christmas break, the spell lifted. He called me one Saturday. Let’s make a fort, he said. We gathered all the blankets and pillows in the house, rearranged the furniture in the living room. We pressed the couch against the wall, moved all the dining-room chairs to the front of the fireplace. We built a castle out of floral-print sheets and down comforters, lining the different rooms with Persian rugs. When it was finished, we climbed into the “master bedroom”—the largest quarter of the thing, roped off with cream-colored sheets, and we lay down side by side, gazing up at white cotton.

“People have been talking, you know,” Zap said.

“About what?”

“About us. It’s getting pretty annoying. Like Louis the other day. I keep telling them there’s nothing going on, but they won’t believe me.”

I wondered if I was going to be sick. It wasn’t a bad thing I felt then, as he folded his glasses and set them on his stomach. Zap’s elbows were filling out, gaining the muscles and contours I’d come to recognize on grown men. I watched them, his elbows, in the hazy pink light of the fort, and I thought about how you could know someone really well, know everything about them—how they tuck in their sheets, messy in the morning. How their legs bleed when they run through tall grass in summer. You can know all these things, but you’ll never know how it feels to be them: to inhabit their space, to exist in their skin, to grow into their elbows.

I’d seen movies. I’d watched people kiss. I knew how it was supposed to work, kissing, but it always seemed so unnatural to me: pressing parts of your two bodies together, feeling someone else’s wetness against yours. Zap’s mouth was very close to mine, and for the first time, the reality was palpable. Someone else’s teeth were so close, someone else’s tongue. I wanted it. His lips were full, in the dim light of the overhead lamp that filtered through the sheets. Our bodies were cast in this creamy glow, thick with some surging emotion I didn’t recognize.

He felt it, too. When I think about what I’ve lost, it’s not the end I drift back to. Instead, this: Zap’s neck stretching closer to mine, the hollow space above his collarbone, and the seam of his red T-shirt nearly brushing the tip of my chin. He wanted it, too.

Zap sat up, so fast that the top of his head caught the sheet and it engulfed him like a hood. He was a ghost. A corner of the fort fell, leaving us gasping, feeling much older than we were supposed to.

I went home. We didn’t speak for another two weeks. For a few months, our friendship went on as it had, but by the time summer came around, he stopped calling entirely. That’s how it goes. People change, they grow up, I understand. But sometimes it’s like I can still feel the heat of him, can still feel our young stupid hands reaching for one another, shaking with some sort of bewildered love.