The Gospel of Winter (18 page)

“And what did the creature want most?” he asked the class.

“A partner,” I answered without raising my hand. Josie's shoulder bounced in front of me, and I knew she was smiling.

“Mr. Donovan, did you forget your manners over the break? We raise our hands in this class.” Mr. Weinstein rubbed the hollow of his sunken cheek. “That, and you're late. One more strike today and you'll be out of the class.” He paused and looked at my face. “Are you okay?”

I smiled.

It was soon clear that I had missed a quiz on
Frankenstein
the day before. I didn't raise my hand, and Mr. Weinstein didn't bother to call on me as he asked questions. I didn't take notes. I scribbled the pen down until it broke through the pages and left blue-black craters in my notebook.

The sunlight through the windows found the auburn hints in Josie's hair, and I played my game of watching the shades shift from dark to light when she moved her head, but when first period ended, instead of dashing out into the hall as usual, she turned around. “Hey,” she said. “It doesn't look as bad as I thought it would. We were all talking about you yesterday. We wanted to know how you were doing. We wanted to see you.”

“Like this?”

“Seriously, it's not that bad. It's kind of cool, actually.” She grinned and stood up. “You missed out yesterday.”

“Yeah? What did I miss?”

“Me,” she said.

I laughed. “That's true.”

“Or at least the new me,” she continued. “The single me. Dustin's history, FYI.” She bumped me with her shoulder. “So what's next? I guess my future's pretty open right now,” she teased.

“You're free,” I managed to say.

“For now.” She zipped up her bag and swung it over her shoulder. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you. See you around.” She left quickly and met Sophie outside the classroom door. They linked arms and headed off down the hall. It was a gift. She might as well have slowly unbuttoned her shirt and revealed the lacy edge of her bra. What was the point of dreaming all those dreams while I'd sat behind her if I didn't try to make them a reality?

I packed my bag slowly, however, and slumped out into the hall, because as much as I wanted to get excited about Josie, I couldn't help thinking about some of the other people I'd see at CDA. I made it through chemistry class only because there was a surprise quiz and I had nothing else to think about except formulas, but after fourth period Nick finally found me. I hadn't noticed him coming up the stairs in the stairwell by the gym. He threw his arm over my shoulder and walked us into the corner of the landing, by the window that looked out to the lacrosse and football fields. “You tell anyone I did that to you?” he asked.

It was tempting. Fighting, whether on campus or off, was automatic grounds for a disciplinary review at CDA. “No,” I said. “But I could.”

Nick looked around quickly. He pinned me back against the wall with his forearm. “Don't be a dumbass. If you say anything to anyone—any teacher, fucking Berne, anyone—I'll tell them and everybody else we saw you and your faggoty friend, Kowolski, up in the bedroom lathering up Feingold's naked ass and painting his drunk dick.”

“That was you.”

“No. We saw you. Get it? Fucking circle jerk over the passed-out kid. I'll tell everyone. Dustin will too. And Andre, and anybody else we make be a witness.”

I struggled against his arm, but he was too strong. “What the hell are you talking about? People saw us downstairs. I was dancing with Josie. People saw us.”

Nick grinned. “Your word against mine. And Dustin's, and anybody else he tells. Don't you get it? We make the rules. Not you.” He pushed harder. “I get to say what happened.”

My legs felt shaky. I might have collapsed if he hadn't had me pinned to the wall. He said something to me again, but I was somewhere else, back in the woods along the stream in Stonebrook, thinking about how a story can be rewritten. “Nothing happened,” I mumbled.

“That's right,” Nick said. He laughed. “Unless I say it did.”

“Nothing happened,” I said again.

Nick gave me one hard thump in the chest. “All right. Good. I'm counting on that. And for now, I'm not saying anything about what I saw up in Feingold's room, and neither is Dustin—got it?” He stepped back and crossed his arms. “Your secret is safe with me, lover boy.” A couple of freshmen passed us as they came down the stairwell. Nick glanced at them, and they kept their heads down. He looked back at me.

“Nothing happened,” I said so other people in the stairwell could hear. Nick's smile dropped. “Don't you get it? There's nothing to talk about because nothing happened.” I was shaking, and dizzy with a kind of weightlessness.

“You better not say a damn thing,” he said quietly. “Or I will make your life a fucking hell.”

“Nothing happened, Nick, so there's nothing to talk about!” I was shouting now, and Nick shook his head. He looked around at the other kids now filing into the stairwell.

“Freak,” he muttered.

I tried to find some quiet place to calm down. I was on fire, still riddled with fear from Nick's threats, but I knew that I'd scared him a little bit too, and deep down that felt good. I'd survived, and more important, I could again. I ditched lunch, but Sophie found me before last class and slipped me a note from Josie.
I've never kissed a guy with a black eye before, not until the other night. It was kind of hot. Do you have time for me this week?
I managed to nod and mumble
an affirmation. Sophie didn't notice; she giggled and took off down the hall with her message.

I was exhausted and sweaty as Dean Berne delivered the end-of-the-day announcements over the loudspeakers, and I drifted out of school like a zombie. Josie, however, caught up with me down by the junior parking lot. She had a bashful smile in her doughy cheeks, one that anyone would stop to appreciate to let it linger on him a little longer, as I did, slightly shocked that she had searched for me.

She looped her arm through mine and dipped her head against my shoulder. “I thought you'd nearly forgotten about me,” she said, looking up at me and veering us in a diagonal line until we nearly slipped off the sidewalk and into the trees beyond the lot.

“Just one of those days.”

“Oh, I know. Hey, I have to get home, but we can take a while to get there. You don't mind, do you?”

“I want to,” I said, and I kissed her. She hummed as our lips met, and it moved into me like the heat from a warm shower. We hadn't gotten all that far from the parking lot, and I was sure that people could see us. I didn't care. In fact, I wished we'd been even closer, right there in the middle of the junior parking lot, on the hood of somebody's car.

I didn't really know what I was doing, and after a while saliva smeared around our mouths and pooled on our chins. Josie pulled away and laughed. “Wow,” she said. “I think I need some air.” She turned away to dry herself, and
I did too, looking back into the parking lot. There were a couple of classmates, but mostly a lot of juniors leaning up against cars, talking. Others had formed a circle and were playing Hacky Sack, passing the beanbag from foot to foot in a slow, undulating dance. Riggs's car had the windows rolled down, providing the parking lot with a soundtrack, Bob Marley singing that the soul shakedown party was happening tonight, and standing next to Riggs, leaning against the hood, two girls who'd played on the field hockey team with Josie were pointing over at me and Josie. They weren't snickering, and it was a small victory I was glad to finally have. I felt like a new person—the kid with a black eye like an eye patch, writing his own new story for everyone to see.

“Come on,” Josie said, taking my arm again. “Let's get out of here.”

We walked out to Mulberry with a lazy stride, locked side by side at the hips, and even though my legs were much longer than hers, we found a rhythm that suited us. We stopped and kissed a few more times along the way, and by the third and fourth times we weren't slobbering all over each other. We found a calmer, slower pace, gently chasing after each other's breath. They were kisses mixed with smiles, and when I realized she had to push herself up on the balls of her feet to reach me, I cushioned one arm behind her head and the other around her back to support her, and we relaxed into each other naturally.

Between kisses, we fumbled our way through conversation, trying to find topics that would stick for long enough, but none of them did, and whether it was against a mailbox, beside a tree trunk, or right on the wide curb of Halverson Road, the conversation fell away and we pressed against each other, grinning in silence. We shared an unspoken understanding that the point of the walk seemed to be the kisses themselves and all the time in between a distraction.

“Did you read the article in the
Times
yesterday about face-recognition technology?” I asked after we peeled ourselves off the stone wall at the foot of her neighbor's yard. We were nearly at her house, and I didn't want the afternoon to end.

“No. That's so funny. Do you read the paper every day? You're like an old man. It's so cute.” She smoothed the lapel of my overcoat with her glove. She sighed and pecked me on the nose. “I wish my mother wasn't home.”

“Yeah.”

“She's going to hover over my shoulder all night to make sure I do my homework. It's like a prison in there,” she said, jerking her thumb toward her house. The trunks and limbs of a cluster of thick trees obscured a clean view of the house. A last dirty crust of snow still clung to the foot of the trees, and alongside one of the larger trunks a film of ice glazed the bark. Our faint gray outlines hung in the ice like smoke meeting smoke in a still and heavy air.

“She's even told Ruby not to let me have people over anymore on the weekdays,” she continued. “We're going to have to find someplace else to hang out. I don't know what her deal is these days, but she is going crazy. I wish she wasn't home. I'd sneak you in anyway.” She giggled. “That'd be fun.”

“What if your mother is one of those people who supports all this extra video surveillance? She could have cameras all over your house. She could have cameras down here. She could be watching us right now.” I ducked and pulled the collar of my coat over my head. Josie giggled again. She unbuttoned my coat and slipped in close, and I wrapped it around her, too. “She might have a camera in my coat,” I whispered.

“Then she's going to have to watch us make out for a minute.”

We kissed again, for a while. I shook the coat off my head, and we held each other tightly in the cold. Eventually, she stepped back and thanked me for walking her home, and I watched her head around the trees to her driveway and make her way up to the house. When she was gone, I looked back into the ice, but nothing was there now, only the rough bark beneath. A cloud had passed in front of the sun and absorbed all the brilliance. I almost didn't believe there had been a trace of us there before; I didn't see myself kissing Josie, it was too new for me to fully accept. But others had. They could be called upon as witnesses. There
was some record now, one I could cling to, a story I wanted to tell and wanted to believe.

That was all I could think about on the way home: the possibilities. It was suddenly easy to imagine Josie and me holding hands on our way down into the cafeteria, the way she might rub the underside of my chin in the hall when teachers weren't around, and her tongue moving gently against mine—all of it right out there in the bright sunshine. Mother wasn't home, but she left a plate of cookies on the butcher block with a little sign next to it that read
YOUR FAVORITE
. Cinnamon chip. It had been once, but I stuffed one in my mouth as if it still was and moved through the library to the foyer. I was about to swing up the grand staircase to the second floor when the doorbell rang. It was too late. I couldn't run. I'd already been seen. Father Dooley cupped his hand over his eyes and peered in through the window beside the door.

Contempt curled in Father Dooley's lips. “I wanted to stop by before afternoon Mass,” he said, walking past me into the house when I let him in. He placed his cane against the center table as if he was waiting for someone to take it for him with his coat. “I wanted to check in with you,” he added.

“I don't think I need it.”

“It's okay. Like I said, I thought it was important to check in on you.” He studied me. He was trying to find a tone of compassion but not quite locating it. He was patient, and
he let the silence hang between us. “I thought I could offer some advice,” he finally added. “If any was needed.”

“What's there to talk about?” I asked.

Father Dooley looked at me. “That happens, doesn't it, when someone hurts us? We say things to get back at them that we don't really mean. That is why I'm here,” he said. “To look after everyone in the parish. We all need a little looking after once in a while. We can't forget that.” Father Dooley rarely smiled, but he managed to pull one off. It was ugly and spoiled with insincerity.

“I don't want your help. I want to be left alone.”

“But I think you and I still have some things to discuss. Some loose ends.”

I couldn't understand what else Father Dooley wanted from me. Couldn't he understand that I hadn't said anything to Mother? Couldn't he understand that I didn't want to talk about it, or even think about it, anymore? Couldn't Father Dooley and I go about our lives and detach, like Old Donovan—just cut loose and not look back? I admired Old Donovan for a moment, his ability to create his own reality and force it upon the rest of the world. He didn't have time to quibble about details. He invented his own truth and stuck to it. There was something like a gunslinger's sense of justice about it, or a religious zealot's: All consequences be damned; they were meaningless when set against the importance of the cause.