Here So Far Away(46)

After the set, I sat a while longer in the silence. The snowflakes were fatter now, settling thickly on my jacket and my hair. I might have let myself disappear beneath them had “Sweet Home Alabama” not poured out the window.

He came around the building as I was brushing the ash and dirt off my jeans. He was frowning in the orange light when he grabbed me, and suddenly we were tangled up together, his back sliding down the brick wall, me sliding onto his lap, biting into each other under the canopy of my hair. And then we were in it. We were so, so in it.





The Cheese Stands Alone





Twenty-Two


January 1993


Snow fell steadily outside the classroom window, shin high already. We’d had a green Christmas, which my mother kept apologizing about as though it were somehow her fault, and then the new year came, thick and furious.

Miss Aker had invited the editor from the local paper to talk to our class, a balding middle-aged guy with a thick, tidy moustache that rested heavily on his upper lip like a page-boy haircut.

“How many of you want to be writers?” he asked.

A few hands went up, none of them mine. Shelley-with-an-E was waving hers confidently, as though she expected him to ask her to stand up and give an inspiring monologue about her true calling.

“Reporting is not for you,” he said.

Her hand dropped into her lap.

“It’s not about your story. It’s about the story. It’s about recording the truth, without shaping it into what you wish the facts could be. Clearly. Accurately. Precisely.”

“His mouth has bangs,” Lisa whispered to Bill, and I barked a loud laugh before I could help myself.

Shrunk down in my seat, I pretended to take notes, starting with a clear, accurate, and precise sentence: I would rather be anywhere but here.

I was on my feet as soon as the bell rang. I had to get up the highway to a parking lot behind an abandoned building to meet Francis before his shift started at six thirty. This was our only chance to get together before Saturday, when Rupert would be around. It wasn’t like we could call each other if we wanted to talk, not if we didn’t want to be found out.

There were weeks when all I could expect was a hand resting briefly on my back or a slight rub of his hip against mine as he moved past me in the farmhouse kitchen. One afternoon when we were standing over Rupert—who had managed to get himself down on his knees to show us how to clean Shaggy’s ears—I felt Francis’s finger barely grazing the inside of my wrist. I don’t want to get overly poetic here, but give me an inch of Francis’s skin brushing against mine over a chesterfield jackhammering by some East Riverview boy any day.

Francis and I hadn’t had sex yet, didn’t have a place to do it or enough time to make it special. He knew I wasn’t a virgin, but seemed to think it needed to be a more tender event than I was hoping for. That afternoon I planned to set him straight.

“George?” Miss Aker was sitting on the edge of her desk wearing a pale denim jumper, argyle knee socks, and a look of kindly concern.

“Sorry about the laughing,” I said. “I just remembered this joke I heard.”

“What was it?”

“Actually, it wasn’t that funny.”

“I see. Well, George, I was wondering what you thought of our guest speaker. I saw you taking notes.”

“I liked what he said about telling the truth.”

I wasn’t sucking up. The truth was starting to sound real good to me: no subtext, no double-talk, no trying to impress people, just the facts. Lying had stopped being fun a long time ago, once it became something I had to do constantly.

Miss Aker smiled, a very pretty smile apart from her two perfectly yellow canine teeth. “A better fit for you than poetry, I expect. Although your exam essay—that wonderful idea that being sentimental can be brave—was very nicely articulated. I hope you’re doing as well in all your courses.”

“I am, thanks.”

Sort of. My first-term grades had been solid, thanks to all those hours with my textbooks open at the lighthouse and all those nights when it was Lisa and Nat’s turn to hang out with Bill. Mum cried when I sent off my applications to Noel, Aurora, and two other city universities; I had a real shot of being the first person in her family to get a degree. Even Dad looked a little misty. But lately I’d been spending more time on the logistics of being with Francis than I had studying.

On the other side of the window, the snow fluttering around him like he was inside a giant snow globe, Bill held up a plastic lawn chair.

“George, is everything alright?”

I snapped my focus back to Miss Aker. “Yeah—absolutely.”

“You’re distracted lately.”

“Um, just family stuff.”

She nodded. “I’m sure we’ll see your father back at the regatta next year.”

I quickly got my things from my locker and jogged toward the school entrance, stopping at the distinctive sound of valley hooliganism on the other side of the auditorium door. Inside, Lisa was sitting onstage, cross-legged, staring at a script in her lap, while twenty, thirty Elevens were practically swinging from the rafters.

Lisa used to say that a theater production was all about the director’s vision for a play, but when had she ever had an original thought? She got her style from magazines, her music from the radio charts, and she parroted back whatever our teachers said. It didn’t seem like she had a blueprint for this circus play, or anyone trying to help.