She blinked at me. “You want to play in a sport?” she asked. “You gave up ballet lessons so you’d have more time to study.”
“Never mind.” I smiled and let the door close.
I tried not to make eye contact with the other students, embarrassed not to know their names or which ones would expect to be my friends. I went to the administration office and waited at the counter until the receptionist, Miss Lopez, hung up the phone. Mr. Brown called her Olivia.
“What can I do for you, Miss Thompson?” she said.
“May I have a copy of my class schedule?”
She looked curious. “Who’s it for?”
To my surprise, a spontaneous lie rolled off my tongue. “Church.”
“No problem.” Olivia glided her rolling chair to the computer on a table against the wall and typed in a few words. The room smelled of glue and spilled ink.
I felt my heart skip a beat as a familiar voice struck my ear.
“Any messages?” asked Mr. Brown. He leaned over the counter as Olivia handed him one small slip of paper from the slot marked M. BROWN on the wall.
“Thanks,” he said.
I looked up at him. He stood right beside me reading the note, holding his briefcase, wearing the blue shirt he so often wore on Mondays. He looked like he always had to me, but now I could feel the faint heat of his body, smell the leather of his case and even the soap he’d showered with, like sage. I was stricken by his solid, textured complexity. I could tell he hadn’t brought his novel with him. When he had the box squeezed into his briefcase, the latch nearly wouldn’t close. Today his briefcase was light and empty. For this I felt sorry. But I was thrilled to be standing so close to him. I took a breath, meaning to speak to him, but remembered suddenly that he wouldn’t know me. He may not even know Jenny. Without glancing up, Mr. Brown turned and walked out. Although I had become as tangible as he, I was just as invisible to him as I had been before. Olivia was on the phone again.
Next I glanced out the window. There was James, standing on a stone bench, scanning the crowd of students. Blood surged into my cheeks.
“Here you go,” said Olivia, handing me the sheet of paper.
I practically ran out of the building and into the quad, but James was nowhere to be found, I was the one scanning the crowd now.
I knew the school, the numbering of the rooms, and the names of some teachers but not many students. Two girls I couldn’t place greeted Jenny as they passed, but I only smiled. I sat dumbly through a lecture on sediments, Building A, room 100. I jumped so when the passing bell rang that the boy sitting behind me laughed.
I was making my way through the crowd toward Building C when I saw a familiar head in the distance, the dark hair blowing. James was turning around, stretching on his toes to see over the others. I was paralyzed with excitement, standing perfectly still until he had turned toward me. He froze when he saw Jenny’s face. I watched while he wove through the crowd in my direction. Finally I started to weave too, losing sight of him at once because I was not tall enough.
When he sidled around a group of girls and was suddenly standing only a few feet in front of me, I stopped short.
“Helen?” he asked.
I nodded. There was an odd moment when I didn’t know whether we should pretend that we were just meeting each other. It lasted only a heartbeat. Both our book bags hit the ground, and he pulled me into his arms so hard the breath went out of me. It was overwhelming, actually feeling his face pressed to me and his arms so hard and his heart beating. The scent of his hair. The heat of his skin unlocked my tears. I heard a few students make rude noises and one girl laughing. James let me go, but took my hand, pulling me along through the crowd. I had to run to keep up. He swung me behind the recycling bins where we had first spoken, took my face in his hands, and kissed me, struggling in wonder at my realness—probing at the muscle and bone and moist moving warmth of me.
We stopped when the bell rang again. This could have been an hour or five minutes, I couldn’t tell. He was pressing me against the wall and put me on my feet now. We were both out of breath. James glanced toward the pathway to see whether we were being watched, but the few students visible there were running to their classrooms. I had no restraint. He was better than food. Tasting him only made me hungrier. I threw my arms around his neck again and breathed him in.
A jolt of memory hit me—my fingers in wheat-colored hair and a whiskered throat with a tiny half-moon scar. The sensation was chilling. I shook the image off, and there was only James, his dark hair fallen over one eye. I slid my hands under his shirt, feeling the smooth heat of his back. I pressed my face to his chest, but he took my hands and held them in front of him.
“Wait,” he said. “What class do you have now?”
It took me a moment to remember. “Government.”
He was still breathing hard. “What about third period?”
“Library Practice.”
“What about fourth?”
“Study hall.”
“Meet me right here before study hall.”
Our book bags were, fortunately, still lying on the ground where we had abandoned them. He picked mine up and put the strap over my shoulder.
“James,” I said. I just loved the way it felt to say that word out loud.
He smiled. “Do you know where your classroom is?”
“I’ve been at this school longer than you have.”
“I forgot.” He glanced quickly around and kissed me again, his hand on the back of my head. He pressed into me deep, as if he had to make sure I was real. Next moment, he had turned and was running up the path.
I managed to find my next class, but when I walked in, everyone stared.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, giving a small curtsy. Someone laughed and the teacher made a mark in her attendance book, but that was the extent of my punishment. I sat in the back and never heard a word. All I could think of was the way his skin was so tender over the hard muscle of his throat under my lips. And the clean cool forest scent of his hair.
I held my textbook open, but the words were as meaningless as mouse prints. I stared at the white space between the pages. I noticed how childlike my slim wrists and small hands appeared. It seemed scandalous for such a young body to be clicking with desire. Had I been many years older when I had first felt this way? When the bell rang next, I walked to the library, searching for James with a savage thirst but not finding him.
Library practice consisted almost entirely of shelving books. I rolled the loaded cart up and down the aisles. A handful of students taking independent studies sat at desks or at the long tables in front, reading or writing. One was sleeping. When I had shelved my books, I chose an armful of novels and poetry. I deposited them on the front counter and peered over the pile. “How many may I take out?”
When James found me waiting beside the recycling cans, I was standing next to my bulging book bag. He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag.
“My God,” he said. “What happened?”
“I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.”
“They make soft-cover books now, you know.” He handed me his own bag and picked up mine with both hands. “Come with me.”
I followed him behind the auditorium to where a fire exit had been propped open with a wooden ruler. He opened the door for me, making sure no one was watching. It was very dark. I touched his face, but he said, “Wait.” Taking my hand, James led me into the school’s theater, through the narrow pathway backstage that was lined with ladders and tall canvases stretched on wooden frames. It sounded hollow as a cave and smelled of mildew and wood shavings.
At the base of a built-in wooden ladder, he took both our bags and pushed them under a table. He pointed up and, without hesitation, I started to climb. At the top was a platform already spread with a thick black curtain like
a velvet bed. The floor was as wide as a rowboat and, although I could stand without crouching, James had to duck his head. It was like a tree house. I had never explored it in my spirit form. I stepped out of my shoes and felt the cloth with my bare feet. The stage, twenty feet below, was a beautiful lake of darkness.
“Miss Helen,” said James, “I don’t want to compromise you.”
He stood, his head bowed and one hand holding the crossbeam above him.
“If I am in any way taking advantage of the situation...”
“As far as I know,” I said, “we are the only two of our kind in the whole world. Who could be more mated in God’s eyes?”
That was all he needed to know. There was a confusion of clothes among our kisses. He was trying to the take my dress off over my head while I struggled with his denim pants, which had far too many metal buttons. One of my shoes slipped off the platform and hit the stage, with a bang like a rifle shot.
How strange it was to open his clothes without shame. I was often shocked when modern women in books and movies became the aggressors, pushing their partners onto beds or stopping elevators between floors. Even Mrs. Brown would startle me by her sudden seductions, rousing Mr. Brown’s interest so quickly that I hardly had time to escape. Although I could not recall who had taught me as a girl or what words had been chosen, I knew the etiquette—the bride waits, seen but not heard, ready to open at his command. His pleasure is the goal, and hers, if any, is the secret. But this was new. Everything seemed new with James.
Now I marveled at my own boldness. When we lay down in the bed of black drapes, there was only skin between us. He put his hand down to guide himself into me, and a sharp pain made me gasp.
“Is this your first time?” he asked.
“No.”
“I meant for Jenny.”
“Oh.” I could feel his whole body trembling, but he waited. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked. “I’m all right.”
With relief he pushed in. A small sound from my throat came back to me, a sister echo out of the cathedral darkness. A deep recall made me squirm into the shape of him and cling. All around us the shadows pulsed with the rhythm of his sounds, a whisper breath with each thrust. My answers as soft as bird talk. The invisible depths above shifted with hidden ropes and dark lights like the hushed sway of limbs in night trees. As I pressed his lower back to me, my vision went white and a wave of sweetness rushed everywhere, even into my scalp. I didn’t know I had cried out until I heard the echo. James covered my mouth with his, then broke off the kiss when his body arched. He lifted me off the cloth with his arms around my waist.
“James,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He rocked with me for a moment. “Was that your first time?” I asked.
He finally started breathing again and blinked at me. “I don’t know.” Then he laughed.
We lay braided together, but our teeth started to chatter. Our skin was wet and there was a draft in the loft. He pulled his shirt and my sweater over us like blankets. I felt almost dizzy, imagined the loft was rocking on a river, taking us downstream under a moonless sky.
“How did you take the body?” he asked me.
I shocked myself by laughing about it. “I went into her at a church picnic during the prayer.”
“You didn’t.”
“They thought I’d had a holy vision.”
“Where do you live?” James asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, having forgotten to take notice. “I don’t know my phone number either.”
How amazing, how unexpected, that after my heart had stilled and my body had relaxed, he was still holding me, so intent on my every word and gesture. Why I had anticipated loneliness afterward, I couldn’t say.
“Have you started to remember things yet?” he asked.
“Only glimpses.” I didn’t like the feelings that went with most of my moments of recall. “Tell me what else you remember,” I said.
“Let’s see.” He was staring at me, tracing the shape of my jaw and collarbone with his fingertips. “This morning I remembered that my mother had half her finger missing, here.” He held up his right hand, the index finger bent in half. “When she did up her apron, she flipped the ties in this funny way.” He tried to demonstrate the little dance of her hands. Then he put his face to my neck and breathed in.
I jumped when the bell rang.
“We both have second lunch,” he said, kissing my throat. “We can stay here until one o’clock.”
“And miss lunch?” I sat up. “I still haven’t tasted an apple.”
We dressed each other and then James climbed down first, holding one of my shoes. I climbed down the ladder barefoot. He had found my missing shoe on the stage, because at the bottom of the ladder, James knelt in front of me and placed both on my feet.
When we’d picked up each other’s book bags again, he looked at me with a peculiar smile.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You look mussed,” he laughed. “It looks as if someone has been doing this—” He put his hands on either side of my head and kissed me deeply while moving his fingers into my hair.
When we reached the courtyard, it was already filled with students sitting at tables, on benches, and on the grass, eating sack lunches and from cafeteria trays. We stopped under a tree.
“Do you have a lunch ticket?” he asked.
I searched the purse in my book bag. There was a comb, a small cloth bag, a mirror, a tissue, a thin box of chewing gum, and a wallet. I opened it and James pulled out a plastic card with a black band on the back and the school crest on the front.
“This is it,” he said.
“I live on Lambert Drive,” I said, having found my driver’s license.
“You must have flunked your driving test,” James told me. “Otherwise you’d have a photo on your license.”
I put it away, pretending to be insulted by the suggestion that I could flunk anything. Something about the license bothered me, though I didn’t know what.
“So what’s your last name?” he asked me.
This amused me, considering what we had just been doing.
“Thompson,” I said.
“Well, Miss Thompson of Lambert Drive,” said James. “Would you have lunch with me?”
In my girlhood it was rare for a bride to see her groom’s bare arm or a groom his bride’s naked ankle before the wedding night. The Bacchanalian abandon with which modern young people explored each other still shocked me at times—the dance of mating without courtship. Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsy attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated.
But with James there was nothing careless, not a movement wasted. His desire was shameless, because it was offered completely. His passion was so guileless, I could not muster the least bit of embarrassment about my lust for him.
We left the book bags under the tree, and James gave subtle suggestions as we passed by the foods in the cafeteria line.
“Don’t touch that,” he said, as we approached three steamy trays of brown gravy over something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“No one knows.”
I chose a hardboiled egg, a roll, a large red apple, and a small carton of milk. James chose a sandwich and an orange. We sat on the grass, and he watched me eat with amusement. He let me have a section of his orange, and I almost swooned. I peeled and ate my egg slowly and then my bread, lingering on every bite. I reached over and rubbed the plastic wrap from his sandwich between my fingers, fascinated by the softness. Then I tasted the milk. “It’s different,” I said.
“Modern cows,” he explained.
A sudden, short sorrow kicked at my heart. I had been struck by several of these flashes since I’d met James. This vision was of a wooden milking stool, worn smooth with use. I was brought back by James
taking a drop of milk from the corner of my mouth with a kiss. I heard a few students behind me hoot and laugh at this, but James ignored them, so I did as well.
“I should probably warn you that my family is very religious,” I told him. “Don’t be shocked.”
“Are you implying that your family is more shocking than my family?” he asked.
“In a different way,” I told him.
Biting into the apple brought tears to my eyes. Again a flash—maple leaves, large as your hand and deep orange, flour on a wooden table, smoke from a gray stone chimney. I shuddered. James stared at me, enthralled, it seemed.
“Did you love the taste of things this much when you first became Billy?” I asked.
He lay on his side, propped up on his elbow. “No,” he said. “But I should have.”
After lunch James decided I couldn’t drag my book bag into every class.
“Where’s your locker?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s written inside your wallet,” said James. “That’s where I found the combination to Billy’s locker and his bicycle lock.”
I looked at everything in Jenny’s wallet. There was only a school ID, a lunch pass, a license, a phone card, and a twenty-dollar bill folded into fourths.
“Oh dear.” I suddenly stopped. “I don’t even know whether my mother drives me home from school. What if she doesn’t? I don’t know how to walk home. I have no idea how to get there.”
James smiled. “Maybe we’ll have to spend the night in the auditorium.”
He came with me and waited outside while I went back in the office. Olivia, the receptionist, was drinking a cup of coffee.
“Hello again.”
I smiled. “May I have my locker number and combination, please?”
She stared at me. “For church?”
“Actually,” I said quietly, leaning toward her, “I’m in love and it makes me dreadfully absentminded.”
She gave me an odd smile and then looked through a notebook, copying down the information on a slip of paper and handing it to me. “You be careful with your heart now,” she warned. By her tone I thought she was joking, but there was a worry behind her aging eyes.