Lake Overturn (39 page)

But then, when Liz opened her locker to drop off her books before heading to lunch, there it was. She unfolded the paper.

I can’t. I’m not allowed.

Sarah hasn’t allowed him
, Liz thought.
Life hasn’t allowed him
.

But then, as if Liz had been shut in a closet and her eyes were only now becoming accustomed to the dark, the note’s true meaning became apparent. Only two people at Eula High weren’t
allowed
to go to Lunch at Church: her brother and Jay.

Jay.

It all fit. It couldn’t have been anyone else. “I’m like your eyelashes,” he had said, “too close to see.” And he had been right.

If she had looked up at that moment, she might have spotted Jay himself, half-hidden in the phone booth under the stairwell.

This time Liz didn’t wad up the paper, but folded it carefully up and held it for a moment, as if it were a card she was about to play, to end in victory or defeat a high-stakes poker game. A faint depression appeared along her jaw, then her pale cheek was smooth again, and she hooked the silk drape of her hair behind her ear and set the note delicately on the shelf in the locker. It was maddening how, at a moment like this, a face could reveal only the depth and not the nature of an emotion. She was moved, but how? And then, still frozen before her open locker, Liz moved her lips. She said something to herself, and her eyes became glassy with sadness, or fear, or love. What had she said?

Liz had realized that she needn’t go to church for lunch now. She had no plans, no one to eat with, and what she had whispered was, “Abby, come back.”

. . . .

M
AYBE IT WAS
the blood that was at last coursing with some speed through Enrique’s veins, as his biking time cut into his reading and television-viewing time, that set off the growth spurt. That spring he shot up a full inch in height and became longer in the face. Enrique certainly didn’t look athletic, but neither did he look teddy-bearish anymore. His jeans were too short now, but this was easily disguised. The more daring kids at school were “pegging” their jeans by folding them over at the cuff and rolling them up, so Enrique joined them. His wrists, with bony knobs now, appeared from the cuffs of his shirts, and his cheeks, having lost their fullness, no longer reflected a sharp point of sunlight when he smiled. At last, Jay and Enrique were recognizable as brothers.

Mr. Dodd, who taught history and coached track, seemed to notice. While he had always appreciated Enrique as a good student, now he began to tease him in the familiar way he did the more athletic kids. Enrique encouraged this by smiling wryly and ignoring it, the way he had seen the older boys do when Mr. Dodd harassed them in the hallway. In addition to being the coolest junior high teacher, Mr. Dodd was also the easiest. His class was final period, and he seemed to enjoy easing his students into the leisure of the afternoon. While other teachers got after kids for slumping in their seats—Mrs. Neeley liked to creep up and swat a nearby desk with her grade book, causing the offender to jump—Mr. Dodd encouraged it. He dragged his own chair from behind his desk and reclined in the corner, balancing on the back two legs. One day Mr. Dodd conducted an ungraded, verbal pop quiz on the Civil War. He spat out questions to his students, who were supposed to either answer quickly or say “Pass.”

“Angie, who led the march to the sea?”

“Sherman.”

“Wally, the Battle of the Merrimack and the what?”

“Pass.”

“Cindy?”

“Monitor.”

“Good.”

This “test” bore a clear resemblance to tennis, which Mr. Dodd coached for the city league over the summer.

“Enrique,” he said, “how fast can you run the 440?”

“Pass,” Enrique responded without missing a beat. The class laughed.

Mr. Dodd didn’t relent, but served again, still in his quiz-voice: “Enrique, are you going out for track-and-field this year?”

“No,” he said.

On his bike ride home, Enrique revisited this little exchange. Mr. Dodd had, by joshing Enrique, shown the class that Enrique was
in
with him. While in previous years this would have so excited Enrique that he would have spazzed and missed the ball, now, after a good six months’ practice being a man of few words, Enrique was steady enough to volley back and had made the class laugh. On top of this, Mr. Dodd was inviting Enrique to be on his track team. Enrique would never join, of course. Despite progress in some areas, Enrique was still secure in the knowledge that he was not athletic. He could see himself running around the track, heavy in the foot and light in the hand, swishing over the finish line long after everyone else, causing Pete Randolph and his gang to laugh from their perch high in the bleachers.

One day Enrique lingered after history class, chatting with Tommy Hess. Over the year, Tommy had become well-liked among their classmates, verging on popular. He was an expert at the well-timed caustic aside, which teachers never punished him for because of his goony good nature. Mr. Dodd came up and said, “Tommy’s going out, aren’t you?”

“For track? Sure,” Tommy said.

Mr. Dodd spread one hand, and used the extended thumb and pinkie to pull the two curtains of his hair out of his face. They promptly fell back exactly where they had lain before. “So, how about it, Enrique?”

“I’m not the most athletic guy, Mr. Dodd,” Enrique said.

“Track-and-field is perfect, then. You can sign up for as many or as few events as you like. I see you in the 440. I’ll bet you have good lung capacity. Just sign up for the one event, if you want. You can spend the rest of the track meets just hanging out on the grass.”

“My brother told me it’s pretty fun,” Tommy added.

“Do it as a trial membership,” Mr. Dodd said. “Come to practice for the first week or two. Train a little, and if you like it, you can compete; if not, you can quit.”

Enrique opened his mouth, and was a little surprised by the word that came out: “Okay.”

The population that comprised junior high track-and-field couldn’t have been more perfectly assembled for Enrique’s comfort. The jocks, including Pete Randolph and his crew, had all gone out for baseball, which meant they were practicing in a nearby city park. The male members of the track team were generally the smart boys who disliked team sports but knew athletics would be an important part of their college application. There was no alternative sport for girls, except for dance team (cheerleading, but without a sport for which to cheer), so all the truly athletic girls were here. Most of them were already Enrique’s friends.

Mrs. Wheeler, the girls’ coach, was a stocky woman with a voice like a whistle. She didn’t walk, she charged, her torso and hips twisting in opposite directions back and forth like a pepper grinder. And although she and Mr. Dodd seemed to get along—their brief interactions in passing were full of elbow-jabs and muttered jokes—their coaching styles couldn’t have been more different. Mr. Dodd gently prodded his boys to raise the bar or decrease their time, but only when he wasn’t reclined in the bleachers with his ankles crossed, chatting. Mrs. Wheeler sorted out the real athletes and proceeded to ride them hard and ignore the other girls. That she never grew hoarse seemed due to the fact that she sang, rather than hollered, her refrain: “Faster, Jenny, faster! Faster! C’mon! Faster!” No sound could have been more out of place over the lovely buzz of locusts from the field and warbling birds in the sumacs by the road.

And so practice was very nearly what Mr. Dodd had promised. After Enrique changed into his sweat suit, he, Tommy, and the other long-distance boys ran for a while on the track (Mr. Dodd’s only requirement was they run farther than the day before), then he’d relax until his event was called. He’d race three other boys one lap around the track and, shockingly—maybe it was because of the energy he conserved, or maybe Mr. Dodd was right and he was a natural—he won about half the time. He spent the rest of track practice at the center of the field, where the kids laid their jackets out in a colorful patchwork on the grass. They gossiped and joked, wrote on each other’s arms with dandelion heads, shared answers for homework, and generally enjoyed each other’s company in the absence of the more grating elements of junior high—abusive jocks, squealing cheerleaders, grumbling dirtbags, and strutting cowboys. In the middle of telling a funny story one afternoon, Enrique looked around at the amused expressions and realized that he was breaking a rule he had made the previous fall,
Don’t talk to groups
. He went further. His laugh loosened a bit. He allowed himself to tease his new friends and be teased by them. He became an expert at undoing girls’ bra straps, quickly, through their shirts, with a quick pinch. Some of the old, giggling Enrique showed himself in the new Enrique, and it was all right.

There was also the advantage that Enrique got to spend his afternoons looking at athletic boys in sweat suits. His bedtime fantasies began to change yet again. The various scenes of intimidation and punishment gave way to one quiet, even romantic, fantasy: in the dark, Enrique was embracing a boy, feeling the boy’s hair against his cheek, his breath in his ear. Enrique couldn’t see the boy’s face—that would have made it shamefully intimate—but he did let his hands move down the boy’s back and rest on his buttocks, which felt like two volleyballs—hard, in comparison to the boy’s soft mouth, which searched Enrique’s face and found his mouth and mashed against it.

M
ELISSA CALLED
W
ANDA
late in the month with an offer. “I don’t know how it seemed to you,” she said in her business voice, “but to me the insemination procedure seemed pretty simple. I was thinking, if you feel comfortable with it, maybe we can do it here at home.”

“With what?” Wanda asked.

“Well, use your imagination,” Melissa said, then she paused. “These seven-hour bus rides can’t be very fun for you, Wanda, and the appointments at the clinics are pretty pricey. With the money we save by doing it at home, we could fly you here.”

“On an airplane?”

“No, on an albatross. Of course on an airplane!”

Wanda giggled. “I’ve never been on one.”

“All the more reason.”

“What do you wear?”

“Oh, Wanda.” Melissa laughed. “You’re too much.”

So, a week later, Wanda, her face pressed against the window, watched Boise drop beneath her and the Interstate become a thread and the pale brown patchwork landscape pass behind her as she moved over the treeless Owyhee Mountains, where the wrinkled-leather earth was veined with dry rivers. They passed a squiggled border, where the leather seemed to have been bleached. Snow. The stewardess came by and served Wanda a Coke, and before she could finish it, the descent began. Wanda pulled at her earlobes and yawned to ease the pain in her head, disappointed that the flight had gone so quickly.

They did it every morning for a week, in order to better their chances: Melissa timidly woke Wanda in the early morning and handed her a little plastic syringe full of milky liquid on a neatly folded towel, then left her alone. Wanda slipped off her underwear, elevated her feet on some pillows, and emptied the syringe into herself. Then she dozed off for a while with Simon at her feet. By the time she went downstairs, Melissa and Randy were gone, having left breakfast for her on the bar. Wanda spent the day watching TV and taking the dogs for walks through the woods. At night, they had conversation over dinner, like a family.

“Catherine and I went to see this band we like,” Melissa said the last night. “Catherine’s a lawyer for Legal Aid. And this big tattooed guy offered to buy me a drink . . .” The story went on; but the idea of two wealthy, successful women, still young enough to go to rock shows and attract men, one with a husband at home, so gentle and adoring that he could hear the story with a cocked head and amused smile . . . the idea had so overwhelmed Wanda that she missed the rest.

In the car the next morning, Melissa slipped a wad of bills into Wanda’s hand and kissed her cheek. “I realize you missed a lot of work this week. Keep this. It’s not an advance, it’s reimbursement.”

Wanda thanked her, then ran across the rain-glazed lot into the airport.

This time the plane passed through a bank of gray clouds on its way up. Water beaded and flew away, leaving horizontal streaks on the window. Wanda worried that the pilot would get lost and crash into a mountainside. Then they burst out into sunlight. Above the clouds the weather was fine! As soon as Wanda realized this, she wondered if it was something she had always known.

“I
FIGURED OUT
who my secret admirer is,” Liz told Abby over the phone.

“
Real
ly,” Abby said, allowing herself a teasing tone. Liz hadn’t mentioned to Abby anything other than the fact that he was back. “Well, who is it?”

“It’s not good.”

“Who?”

Liz whimpered, “Jay Cortez.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Wow.”

But Abby’s
Wow
was different from Liz’s. Her impression of Jay had been based on the day years ago when he and Winston offered her a Hershey’s Kiss and she had opened the bag to find a dead mouse among the silver-wrapped chocolates. This and a hundred other incidents had driven her and Liz gradually to change their after-school hangout from the Padgetts’ to the Halls’. Jay was Winston’s sarcastic crony with toothpick legs in basketball shorts, and Abby would have left him to his meager Idaho fate, had it not been for the afternoon she came over to see Enrique’s diorama. “Hey, Abby. Hey, little brother,” he had said. Jay was this sweet boy’s brother, and he had become very, very handsome.

In this small way, Jay had accomplished his goal that afternoon.

“Well, Liz,” Abby said, “he’s pretty cute.”

“Abby!” Liz whined. It was clearly not what she wanted to hear, but only, Abby suspected, because it was true.

“What do you want me to say?”

Liz, sitting on her bed among an array of tarot cards, which she had put out not to read but just to be surrounded by pictures that were simple even if their meanings were mysterious—swords, cups, moons—wondered quietly, what
did
she want Abby to say? She wanted Abby to tell her to forget about Jay Cortez and Eula, Idaho, because they would be together at Stanford soon. And Abby
would
have told her this, Liz felt, if they were face-to-face, if they didn’t have to talk over the phone, if all this were done already.