Among the complicated legacy of Dana, the most tangible thing she left was a four-foot corn snake named Sawmill, and Lucy got stuck with it. What else could she do? Her mother wasn’t going to take care of it. Week after week she thawed the frozen mice and fed them to him with abiding discomfort. She dutifully changed his warming light. She thought maybe Sawmill would die without the animating spirit of Dana in his life, and one time she saw a desiccated, inert version of him in his glass box and for a moment believed—with a mixture of horror and relief—that he had. But it turned out he had only molted. He was lounging in his hollow log, looking fresher than ever. Lucy suddenly remembered the dry gray skins Dana had thumbtacked to her wall, her only effort toward home decorating.
Eleventh grade was the first year Lucy allowed herself to be something other than Dana’s sister. Because she was pretty, the boys forgot faster than the girls, but they all came around eventually.
Lucy was elected junior class secretary in the late fall. Two of her clay pieces, a vase and a bowl, were chosen for a statewide art show. Every moment of freedom or success was outmatched by a moment of guilt and grief. She hated that she wanted anything from them, but she did.
“You know, Lu, I don’t have a single friend at that school,” she remembered Dana telling her once, as though that was a real surprise.
“ HE’S PROBABLY NOT even going to show up,” Marnie announced over the phone as they were both getting ready for the Senior Ball, the final event of high school.
“He will if he wants to get his signed diploma,” Lucy pointed out before she hung up the phone and went back to her closet.
Marnie called a second time. “Even if he does show, it’s not like he’s going to talk to you.”
“Maybe I’ll talk to him.”
Lucy carefully took her new lavender silk slip dress out of her closet and undid the plastic. She laid it with care across her bed while she changed from a regular bra into a lacy cream-colored one. She painted her toenails pale pink and spent a full fifteen minutes at the sink trying to clean the clay and gardening soil out from under her fingernails. She used a curling iron, knowing the curls would fall out of her straight, slippery hair within the hour. As she drew black eyeliner along the edge of her top eyelid, she pictured Daniel watching her and wondering why she was stabbing herself in the eyeball with a pencil.
She often thought of that. Embarrassingly often. Whatever she was doing, she would imagine Daniel there with his thoughts and opinions. And though they’d never really spoken, she always had a clear idea of what he would think. He wouldn’t like a lot of makeup, for instance. The blow-dryer would strike him as loud and pointless, and her eyelash curler like a torture device. He liked her sunflower seeds but not her Diet Pepsi. As her iPod shuffled her songs, she knew the ones he liked and the ones he thought were stupid.
He liked her dress, she decided, as she pulled it carefully over her head and let the delicate fabric settle over her body. That’s why she’d picked it.
Marnie called again. “You should have gone with Stephen. He asked you nicely.”
“I didn’t want to go with Stephen,” she said.
“Well, Stephen would bring you flowers. He’d pose for good pictures.”
“I don’t like him. What would I want those pictures for?” She didn’t mention the main trouble with Stephen, which was that Marnie obviously admired him.
“And he’d dance with you. Stephen’s a good dancer. Daniel’s not going to dance with you. He’s not going to care if you are there or not.”
“Maybe he’ll care. You don’t know that.”
“He won’t. He’s had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn’t.”
After Lucy hung up the phone for the last time she stood in front of the mirror. She did rue the lack of flowers a little. She clipped three small violets from the pots on her windowsill, two purple and one pink. She attached them to a hairpin and tucked them an inch above her ear. That was better.
Marnie came to the front door at a quarter to eight. Lucy could read the expression on her mom’s face as she came down the stairs. Her mother had been guardedly wishing for some version of Stephen, a handsome guy in a tux wielding a corsage, and not just Marnie again, in her ripped black stockings. She’d had two lovely fair-haired daughters and not one eager boy in a tuxedo to show for it. To look like Lucy had been enough in her day.
Lucy felt the old pang. Now she knew what she wanted those pictures for. Her mother could use them to remember a better outcome than she’d had. Lucy appeased herself with her usual litany of guilt reducers: She wasn’t taking drugs. She wasn’t piercing her tongue or getting a tattoo of a spider on her neck. She was wearing a lavender dress and pink toenail polish and violets in her hair. She couldn’t do everything right.
“Oh, God,” Marnie said when she looked Lucy over. “Did you have to do all that?”
“All what?”
“Never mind.”
“All what?”
“Nothing.”
Lucy had tried too hard. That was it. She looked down at her dress and at her gold shoes. “This might be the last time I see him,” she said plaintively. “I don’t know what will happen after this. I need to make him remember me.”
“I HATE THIS SONG. Let’s go outside.”
Lucy followed Marnie out of the school auditorium. Marnie hated every song, and Lucy creaked back and forth on her gold shoes, watching the dark red ring of lipstick on the filter of Marnie’s cigarette. Marnie hunched down to relight, and Lucy saw the tender yellow roots at her part, pushing away the dyed-dark hair.
“I’m not seeing Daniel,” Marnie said, more grumpy than triumphant.
“Who’d Stephen come with?” Lucy asked, meaner than she should’ve been.
“Shut up,” Marnie said, because she had her disappointments, too.
Lucy did shut up for a while, watching the smoke climb and dissipate. She thought of Daniel’s diploma left on the table along the wall of the gymnasium, and it felt like a rebuke to her. He really wasn’t going to come. He really didn’t care about her. Lucy felt as though her makeup was stiffening on her face. She wanted to wash it off. She looked down at her dress, which cost her an entire semester of Saturdays working at the bagel shop. What if she never saw him again? The thought gave her an almost panicked feeling. This could not be all there was.
“What was that?” Marnie turned her head abruptly.
Lucy heard it, too. There was shouting inside the school, and then a scream. You hear plenty of screams in the vicinity of a high school party, but this was one that made you stop.
Marnie stood with a look of surprise Lucy rarely caught on her face. People were piling up at the main doors, and you could hear the shouting. Lucy startled at the sound of glass shattering. Something was really wrong.
Who do you think of when glass is breaking and people are screaming real screams? That was a telling thing. Marnie was right there and her mother was home, so Lucy thought of Daniel. What if he was in there somewhere? The crowd was piling up thick and wild at the main doors, and she needed to know what was going on.
She went in through the side door. The hallway was dark, so she ran toward the shouting. She stopped as she intersected with the senior hallway. She heard more glass breaking in the distance. She saw dark streaks on the floor and instinctively knew what it was. More blood pooled and rolled down the senior hallway, and she would have thought, she observed numbly, that that floor was flat. She took a few steps and froze. Somebody, a boy, was lying there mostly in the dark and everybody else was running away. It was his blood that was creeping down the hall. “What is going on?” she shouted after them.
She felt for her cell phone in her bag with shaking hands. By the time she’d opened it she heard the sirens, and there were many of them all at once. Somebody grabbed her arm and pulled at her, but she shook him off. The blood crept toward the toe of her gold shoe. Somebody stepped in it and ran away, making shoe prints on the linoleum, and that just see
med wrong.
She made her way toward the body on the ground, trying not to walk in his blood. She leaned down to see his face. It was a boy in the junior class, a face she recognized but didn’t know. She crouched beside him and touched his arm. He was groaning with each breath. He was alive, at least. “Are you all right?” It seemed obvious he wasn’t. “Help is coming,” she assured him weakly.
Suddenly she heard an explosion of shouting and footsteps coming toward her as the police arrived. They were yelling at everybody. They blocked the doors and told everybody to calm down, though they themselves were not calm.
“Is there an ambulance?” she said. Not loud enough, so she said it again. She hadn’t realized she was crying.
Two policemen rushed to the boy, and she stepped back. There was another eruption of shouting into radios. They made way for the EMS guys to get through.
“Is he okay?” she asked, too quietly to make any difference. She backed up farther. She couldn’t see anything anymore.
At that moment a policewoman pulled at her roughly. “You’re not going anywhere,” she commanded, even though Lucy wasn’t going anywhere. She directed her down the science hall and pointed to a door on the right. “Go in there and stay until we can get a detective in to talk to you. Don’t move, do you hear me?”
She pushed open the door to the chemistry lab where she had done experiments on the Bunsen burners in tenth grade.
Through the windows she first saw all the red from the lights of the police cars. She waded through dark chairs and tables to see out. There were probably ten police cars parked at odd angles on the patch of grass at the back of school where they spent free periods in good weather. When the lights flashed over it she could see how the tires had chewed up the grass, and that seemed like a further dire thing.
She made her way to the classroom sink more by memory than sight. She could have found the light switch, but she didn’t feel like exposing herself to all the people bustling outside the windows. She turned on the faucet and bent forward, washing away makeup and tears. She dried her face with a stiff brown paper towel. Her violets drooped. She’d thought the room was empty until she turned around and saw the figure sitting at a desk in the corner, and it scared her. She walked closer, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness.
“Who is that?” she asked in a voice just above a whisper.
“Daniel.”
She stopped. The red glow filled in parts of his face.
“Sophia,” he said.
She came closer so he could see who she was. “No, it’s Lucy.” Her voice shook a little. There was a boy bleeding in the hallway, and she felt a gathering disappointment that he still didn’t know her.
“Come sit down.” He wore a stoic expression, a look of resignation, as if he would rather she were Sophia.
She skimmed along the edge of the room, picking over chairs and jackets and bags kids had stowed there. Her dress felt insubstantial for this kind of night. He was sitting back against the wall in one of those desk/chair combinations with his feet crossed as though he was waiting for something.
She wasn’t sure how close to sit, but he pulled a desk/chair toward him so the two right-handed desks faced each other like yin and yang. She shivered as she got close. She felt the goose bumps on her bare arms. Self-consciously she pulled the violets from her hair.
“You’re cold,” he said. He glanced at the little flowers on the desk.
“I’m okay,” she said. Most of the goose bumps were owing to him. He looked around at the piles on the stools and chairs and desk-tops. He pulled out a white sweatshirt with a falcon on it and held it out to her. She put it over her shoulders but did not contend with the sleeves or zipper.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked, leaning forward, her hair brushing past her shoulders so it almost touched his hands.
He spread his hands out flat on the desk as she’d seen him do many times in English class. They were the hands of a man and not a boy. He seemed to be steadying them for something. “Some juniors crashed and vandalized the senior lounge and hallway. A couple of them had knives, and there was a fight. I think two of them got cut and one kid got stabbed.”
“I saw him. He was lying on the ground.”
He nodded. “He’ll be all right. It’s his leg. It’ll bleed, but he’ll be all right.”
“Really?” She wondered how he knew.
“Did EMS get there yet?”
She nodded.
“Then yes. He’ll be fine.” He looked as though he was thinking about something else.
“That’s good.” She believed him whether he deserved it or not, and it made her feel better. Her teeth were chattering, so she closed her mouth to make it stop.
He leaned down and lifted something from a bag on the floor. It was a bottle of bourbon, half full. “Somebody left their stash.” He went over to the sink and took a plastic cup from the stack. “Here.”
He was pouring it before she said yes or no. He put it on the desk right in front of her, leaning so close she could feel his warmth. She felt breathless and light in her head. She put her hand to her warm throat, knowing it was turning red, as it did in moments of deep agitation.
“I didn’t realize you were here,” she said, forgetting to think how she revealed herself by saying so.
He nodded. “I came late. I heard the screaming all the way from the parking lot. I wanted to see what was going on.”
She would have taken a sip of the bourbon, but her hands were shaking and she didn’t want him to see. Maybe he understood this, because he leaned away from her toward the counter, where he switched on a burner. She watched the dots of fire flicker around the rim before the flame took hold. It reflected off the glass door and made a faint quivery light through the room. She took a quick sip and felt the sting and burn of it in her cold mouth. She tried not to wince at the fumes. It wasn’t exactly her custom to drink whiskey.
“Will you have some?” she asked when he’d settled back into the desk/chair contraption. His knees brushed against hers. She didn’t think he’d been intending to drink any. But he looked at her, and he looked at the cup. He reached for it, and she watched in amazement as he put it to his lips just where her lips had been and took a long sip. She’d imagined he might pour himself a cup but never that he’d share hers. What would Marnie say to that? This was intimacy she couldn’t quite believe. She was sitting with him, talking with him, drinking with him. It was happening so fast she couldn’t quite take it in.
She took another sip, recklessly. If he saw the shaking, she didn’t care. Her hand was where his hand was and her lips over his lips.
Do you have any idea how much I’ve loved you?
He sat back again. He tipped his head to the side and studied her face. Their knees touched. She waited for him to say something, but he was quiet.
She squeezed the plastic cup nervously in her hand, bending the circle to an oval and back. “I thought the year would end and we would all go our separate ways and we would never have talked to each other,” she said bravely. She felt like her words echoed in the silence, and hated being stuck with them for so long. She wished he would say something to cover them over.
He smiled at her. She thought she had never seen his smile. He was beautiful. “I wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said.
“You wouldn’t?” She was so genuinely surprised she couldn’t help asking. “Why not?”
He continued to study her, as though he had many things to say and wasn’t sure he was ready to say them. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said slowly. “I wasn’t sure . . . when the right time would be.”
In a completely juvenile and heady way, she wished Marnie could have heard him say that.
“But this is a strange night,” he went on. “Maybe not the best time. Tonight I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“You did?” She was worried her face was so eager as to be pitiful.
He smiled in that same
way again. “Of course.”
She took another sip of bourbon and giddily passed it to him as if they were old friends. Did he have any idea how much time she had spent thinking about him and fantasizing about him and parsing his every glance and gesture? “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Well.” He was trying to measure something about her; she didn’t know what. He took another long swig. “I probably shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t know.” He shook his head, and his face was serious. She wasn’t sure if he meant drinking bourbon or talking to her.
“Shouldn’t be doing what?”
He looked at her so hard it almost scared her. She wanted nothing more in the world than to have him stare into her eyes, but this was too much to take in. It was like buckets of water spilling off of parched soil.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. There are so many things I’ve wanted to say to you. I don’t want to”—he paused to choose his words—“overwhelm you.”
She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known.
She swallowed hard to keep herself down. She felt she could turn inside out and show him her kidneys if she wasn’t careful. She would hold herself together, but she wouldn’t leave him out there on his own. “Do you know how much I’ve thought about you?”
They were sitting knees to knees, pressing them together, so when he split his legs hers went right through until they were practically joined. Her knee was nearly in his crotch, and his was in hers. Her knee was bare, and his knee was deep under her dress, pressed against her underwear, and her nerves were thrumming. She had a feeling of disbelief. She was suspicious that her imagination was choreographing this out of pure desire and that it wasn’t really happening.