Rats Saw God (27 page)

The light came from candles.

This time I didn't cry. I stared at the irregular rhythm of shadows against the curtains. I imagined shrinking, crawling under the windowpane, and watching unnoticed from the ledge. Seeing Dub make those faces that I thought only I would see. Was Sky calling her “Irresistible” in that ocean of a bed? I kept thinking that if she left in the next ten minutes, everything would be fine. But she didn't leave, and I'd give her another ten. I tore open my glove box, hoping to find something sharp. I wanted to hurt myself. Cut my throat with a screwdriver. Drink a can of STP. All I could find was a pair of pearl earrings.

At dawn I staggered like a drunk to Dub's car and left the small box under her windshield wiper.

I quit going to creative writing. No one in the attendance office caught on, as Sky never checked roll. I volunteered for every shift available at the 'Plex and worked every night. I knew Dub's class schedule. Avoiding her was easy enough, though in
an unscheduled trip to the parking lot in April, we almost bumped into each other. For the second and final time, I saw her stammer. I walked away without speaking.

During spring break, with most of Grace's students elsewhere, Ronnie, a twenty-three-year-old who I supervised at work, turned me on to getting high. I got fired two weeks later when Donna busted me for smoking in the projection booth. My grades turned to shit, but my previous averages saved me from failing anything but English. I left Houston immediately after my last final, driving nonstop to San Diego.

It didn't take me long to find people who shared my newest hobby.

Summer is here. Though today is the last day of classes, teachers stopped teaching weeks ago. Students stopped learning months earlier. Oddly, I've been one of the score of seniors still showing up regularly to classes. I've wagered a “Night of Infinite Pleasures” with Allison that I can make straight A's during the final grading period without her help. I'm not worried so much about not being able to keep up if I miss a class; I'm afraid ditching would remind teachers of my earlier sporadic-at-best attendance. Come grade-giving time, I want them thoroughly enchanted by my bushy-tailedness.

I printed out the final pages of my epic, tentatively titled “Knee Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and handed them to DeMouy. I had never stuck around while DeMouy read my prose. Today was different. Today it was over. A herd of gazelle thundered across the Serengeti that was DeMouy's stereo. Elephants trumpeted
my impending release. While he read, I brewed myself a cranberry-apple tea. I smuggled the mug out of Cap's weeks ago for this express purpose.

“So that's how you ended up here,” DeMouy said after flipping the final page.

“Sad, but true,” I said.

We sat there for a moment, but the silence didn't seem uncomfortable. If there was a place I was cozy in this diploma factory, it was this chair. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

“Have you made a final decision about school?”

“I had Mom send in my housing deposit for the University of Washington.”

“No beach.”

“Yeah, but there's water. And plenty of ships leaving the harbor. All day. All night. They've got great bands, great coffee. They're giving me a shitload of scholarship money.” I took a slug of my tea. “Plus, I've got some relatives, distant ones, up there.”

“Still interested in that career in counseling?”

“It's taken me four years to get out of high school. I will neither require, nor request, a bathroom pass again in my life.” I looked across the desk at DeMouy. “If you could do it all over again, would you still be a counselor?”

“I don't know. I miss the classroom sometimes.”

“But you'd go into education again? Man, I don't get it. I watched you at the end of the year assembly. How can you put up with getting no respect from a bunch of seventeen-year-olds? Kids fight in your office. They puke on your shirt.”

“Every time I have a bad day, like those you're so kind to
remind me of, something happens that turns it around. We get someone into college who didn't think he'd make it. We find scholarship money for someone who needs it. I see kids who should never graduate—because they're getting beaten up at home or because they've got a learning disability or because they get pregnant—make it across that stage.”

DeMouy opened the bottom right file drawer of his desk. He pulled out a bulging folder labeled Y
ORK,
S
TEVEN
R. I hadn't seen it since my first trip in. From within the folder he pulled out a transcript. He pushed it across the desk. I scanned it and discovered the modification. My failing grade in English had been changed to an A. DeMouy's signature appeared by the new grade.

“Sometimes I get to see sharp kids put their lives back together.”

Toby the Party weaved in and out of the line of soon to be graduates all standing in gowns, awaiting the signal to file into the auditorium for the commencement ceremony. Toby was going to have to take a second crack at his senior year.
There but for the grace of… oh, whatever,
I thought, amusing myself.

“You look stoked,” I said to Toby when he made it to where Tonya Zapruder and I moored the graduates.

“Jesus, York, where have you been hiding? We better see your ass out tonight. It's party season. There'll be weed, speed, and need out on the beach tonight, boy. What have you been up to lately? Are you really hangin' with that Kimble chick? Tell me it ain't so!”

“'Fraid so, Tob.”

Toby shook his head. “Chicks, man, chicks.”

As he spoke, tubas called on us gowned ones to begin our crawl through the visitors' portal. Allison and I were separated by literally hundreds of graduates. She landed a front-row seat by graduating in the top 10 percent of the class. She was probably already seated while I was still considering buying a bag of cherry sours from the candy machine in the gym tunnel. I spotted the family—Cindy, Chuck, Sarah, and Danny—almost immediately upon emerging from the portal. Sarah waved frantically, and I winked at her. I'd received a telegram earlier in the day from the astronaut, saying he would be unable to attend because of a conflict with work. I told Sarah she could have the extra ticket for Danny. I'm sure Danny was elated.

The choir sang and the band played. The principal swelled and our valedictorian urged. The class in question slouched. Finally, it was time for the big walk. I cheered when Allison was called across the stage. I scanned the audience, but I didn't see anyone I guessed to be her father. My contingent, however, helped make up for his absence. A full thirty minutes passed before I had to leave my seat. I tried to open my senses to every vibration, every smell and sound. I attempted to channel relevant images from my past—studying Latin as an eighth grader, typing homework as a freshman, falling in love as a sophomore, throwing away my junior year, trying to put my life back together as a senior. When I came back to reality it was time to climb the steps to the stage. I shook hands with a couple of school board members. They congratulated me. Then I heard my name,
“Steven Richard York.”
I discerned Sarah's scream. Allison's wolf whistle from the front row was out of character and perfectly timed. I shook hands with the principal.
DeMouy held my diploma at the end of the line.

“Here, you deserve this,” he said as he presented the document.

I didn't know how to respond. I shook his hand firmly. I felt like a man. “DeMouy, I…” But I couldn't finish. He had to pick up the Zapruder diploma, the last one on the table.

Before Allison and I drove out of the parking lot that night, I wrote a note on the back of a book cover. I left it under the windshield wiper of DeMouy's Plymouth Reliant.

J. D.—You never let me down.—S. Y.
P.S. Boss ride!

Allison left for Cal Berkeley, DeMouy's alma mater, today. They're paying for everything, full ride. It's hard to picture her walking down Telegraph Avenue in her khaki skirt and Top-Siders. Maybe she'll change. I sometimes think she groomed her image here to keep Wakefield at a distance. It worked with everyone but me. We spent a lazy three months together since graduation. By the time she left we were both prepared. We made no promises. We thanked each other verbally and nonverbally. I knew I'd miss her.

She invited me over for dinner one night not too long after she paid off her “Night of Infinite Pleasures” score. It was a sort of a “Well, Dad, here he is…” evening. I prepped myself for a fatherly interrogation. I invented possible careers. I memorized league standings from the sports page. I practiced my
handshake. I needn't have. Terry Kimble had the grip I would imagine from Marie Antoinette. I spent the salad-to-lasagna lull trying to draw responses from him. All I could get him to talk about was Texas.

“Mom and Dad lived in Beaumont right after they got married,” Allison explained.

After a meal every bit as good as one of Mom's and Chuck's all-day-in-the-kitchen affairs, we did dishes as her father fell asleep to
The People's Court.
Wrinkled hand to wrinkled hand, she led me into her father's bedroom. Propped up on his nightstand was a family photograph. Her handsome mother and brother—then a fourteen-year-old—caught my attention first. I grinned at Allison in pigtails, but it was the sight of her father that stunned me. It was hard picturing the man in the photo as the same one snoring on the sofa. The man in the picture was thin, smiling, proud. The clean-shaven patriarch had one hand on his daughter's arm; his opposite shoulder seemed to wrap around the rest of the family. They were safe with him.

“That's how I remember him,” Allison said.

As I took Allison to the airport for her flight into San Francisco and the rest of her life, I thought about how lucky her father and I were to have had her in our lives. My time with her was over, though I was sure we would stay in touch. I kept thinking I should be sad, but I felt content more than anything. Now, I'm not saying I won't want to call her every day, and she'll probably die without me, but why ruin something so perfect trying to stay together?