***
I picked up a pair of latex gloves from the desk at the front of the laboratory and began to make my way to the bench under the large windows at the very back of the room. After weeks and weeks of classroom lecturing, it was finally time for my chemistry class to move into the lab.
“The usual lab seating plan, please,” the chemistry teacher called out over the buzz of the classroom.
I stopped in my tracks. Usual? What the heck did he mean by that? Why didn’t anyone ever bother to properly explain anything in this town? I stood looking lost between the rows of high stools long enough to hear someone whisper-calling, “Hey. Hey, MacLean.”
I startled and spun around. No one in Upton ever called me by my surname alone. MacLean, Mack – had my two lives finally collided?
“Hey,” the voice came again. “Heather. Hea-ther.”
I found the source of it this time. It came from a pretty, brown-eyed girl already seated at a lab bench, gesturing at the empty stool beside her. Even though she’d been in my class all semester, I’d never spoken to her before. But my small-town collective consciousness was somehow well developed enough to know that her name was Tannis and she was supposed to be a shy girl.
“He means he wants us to sit in alphabetical order. It’s how Mr. Henderson assigns lab partners every year,” she explained as I approached her. “And my last name is Morgan so...”
“Oh, okay,” I nodded. “Sure, that sounds right. This place still takes a little de-coding sometimes.”
Tannis Morgan smiled at me. She didn’t seem very shy to me as she nodded and said, “Yeah, no doubt.”
Our lab assignment was to do some kind of crazy chemical titration, plying delicate instruments until the clear fluids in their glass tubes and vials changed colours. It was all rather fussy and our teacher made sure anxieties stayed high by regularly reminding everyone how much money we’d each owe the school board if we broke any of the expensive glassware. Tannis and I wound up dealing with the tension by laughing a lot.
“Everything all right there, Heather?” the chemistry teacher asked after one particularly loud outburst from our lab bench.
I hurried to assure him we were fine.
“You’re getting me in trouble,” Tannis snickered. “I never get in trouble. I kind of like it.”
“You like it? What is the matter with you?”
Tannis shook her hair out of her face. “A million years ago these people here,” she jerked her elbow outward, in the direction of our classmates, “they decided I was quiet and boring. And I’m sick of it.”
“Well, I harbour no such preconceived notions about you,” I said, carefully swirling fluid inside a volumetric flask.
She set down a plastic bottle of distilled water heavily against the tabletop. “You don’t think I’m boring?”
“Dude, you just about stained my whole hand permanganate purple a minute ago. It was the most harrowing moment I’ve had all week.”
Maybe it was all those chemicals or maybe there was just something special about Tannis but I came out of the lab with the distinct impression that we were getting along, as my grandmother would say, like a house on fire.
As we stepped out of the lab together, an announcement croaked out over the Upton High School public address system. The next block of classes was cancelled and in its place, a school-wide pep rally was about to begin in five minutes. I always interpreted those announcements as permission for me to excuse myself early from school.
“What? You can’t leave now,” Tannis protested as I moved toward an exit.
“Why not? I’ve been at this school for six months already and in that time I haven’t set foot in a pep rally even once.” I was totally bragging.
Tannis faked an exasperated sigh. “How are you ever going to learn to sing all the words to ‘Sons of Upton’ if you keep skipping all the pep rallies?”
“Somehow, that’s just never bothered me,” I laughed.
Outside the gymnasium, another girl had come to stand beside Tannis – a wide-eyed blonde girl who seemed to be trying not to look too alarmed that Tannis was talking to me.
“Tannis,” she beckoned to her. “We’re all heading inside the gym now so...”
Tannis turned her head toward the gym doors. “Okay. Save me a seat, Joelle.” Tannis looked back to me. “Are you sure you’re not coming?”
“Positive,” I said. “Give the basketball team my fondest regards, will ya?”
I veered out of the crowd milling its way into the gymnasium and quietly opened the door of a little-used emergency exit beside the school’s mechanical room. Outside, I tucked my chin into my chest, partly to preserve my anonymity from any stragglers left to look out the school’s windows but mostly to protect my face from the high springtime wind blasting at me over the yellow football field.
The wind broke a little as I crossed the street and passed into the blocks full of old poplar trees, split level houses, and saggy backyard trampolines. It wasn’t until I reached the quiet of this scruffy windbreak that I heard a voice calling behind me.
It was Ben Jones. I stopped and waited for him to catch up, tossing my head until I found the angle where the wind would blow my hair out of my face and straight behind me, like a tattered flag.
“Heather MacLean – you must have a very important appointment to be leaving school right before an Upton Rockets’ pep rally gets underway.” Ben Jones grinned, even though he knew I had no excuse for leaving school except a chronically bad attitude.
I laughed. “Not exactly. What about you? It’s not like you to miss a chance to pay tribute to our oh-so deserving high school basketball team.”
Ben Jones snickered. “No, but I do have an appointment, actually. I’m going to the optometrist. See?” he showed me the note, written in his mom’s neat, feminine handwriting, instructing the principal to please excuse Ben Jones for the rest of the afternoon.
I pulled the note out of his hand in mock awe. “Wow, a legitimate excused absence,” I raved. “I’ve heard legends about these.”
“Do you seriously skip a lot of school?” Ben Jones asked, taking back his mother’s precious note and folding it into his pocket.
I shrugged. “I guess I do. But it’s mostly just so I can get my homework done. It’s hard to find time for schoolwork in the evenings, what with my job and church and my dad being away at border security training school and all that. The principal’s pretty good about just looking the other way.”
Ben Jones smirked. “Well, it’s not like they can make one of those grave phone calls to your parents to complain truancy is hurting your grades – jeopardizing your bright future, etcetera.”
I shrugged again, remembering what Tawny had told me in the back of the grain truck at the beginning of the school year about the prospect of mayhem if an outsider new girl became the valedictorian of Upton High School. “I’m not sure anyone would mind if my grades started to slide.”
Ben Jones looked straight ahead, down the length of the cracked concrete sidewalk. “Tawny must have been a good tutor if you got your math mark up so fast. Now you’re a threat to her academic supremacy in your class. Is that irony?”
“It might have been if I’d let Tawny help me,” I said. “But I got caught up on my own.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Impressive.”
I didn’t want Ben Jones to think Jeff was stupid for needing his help when I didn’t need Tawny’s. I quickly added, “Of course, it’s totally different for Jeff. I hear eleventh grade math just isn’t as tough as it gets in the twelfth grade. It’s great, what you’re doing for him.”
Ben Jones shook his head. “At this point, Jeff helps me every bit as much as I help him. He’s really bright. And it’s been good getting to know him – the both of you, really. Sometimes, I feel like I know you guys better after seven months than I know some of the people I’ve gone to school with my whole life.”
> “Aw, thanks,” I said. “You too.” I didn’t drop my eyes from his face right away. I felt the same small, internal tremor that always shook me when he said things like that. It was really too bad Ben Jones was so far out of my league.
He cleared his throat. “So, since we’re friends and everything – I hope you don’t mind if I talk to you about something personal.”
“Sounds ominous,” I said.
Even with the wind in my ears, I heard him swallow. “Well, Jeff says some of the guys you work with are kind of...”
“Trying to date me?” I finished.
“Yeah,” Jones said, squirming inside his jacket. “Just like I told you they would, months ago.”
I remembered him saying it now. It was in our basement, the morning before Crystal came to visit me in Upton for the first time. I nodded my head.
“Now,” Ben Jones continued, “clearly, I don’t know anything at all about teenaged romance –” He was embarrassing both of us and I groaned and rolled my eyes. “– But I do know about people, and good and evil, and what might really be at work here.”
“A-ha,” I said. “So someone is finally going to explain to me why after a lifetime of grossing boys out I’m suddenly getting some male attention at TacoTown?”
“If you’re interested,” he stammered.
I rolled my eyes again. “Sure. Let me have it.”
“Well, first off,” Ben Jones began, “never underestimate the power of long blonde hair.”
I knew he was just trying to smooth over the awkward start of the conversation with a little flattery. But I didn’t like feeling out of harmony with the only real friend I had in Upton so I played along and restricted my protest to simply coughing out a harsh little laugh. “Hair? Seriously?”
He nodded. “Definitely.”
“That’s just stupid,” I insisted.
Ben Jones shrugged and reached out to catch a finger-full of my flying, windblown hair as it streamed behind me. “Maybe so,” he allowed as he tried unsuccessfully to tuck the strands behind my ear before snatching his hand away and burying it in his pocket.
“Secondly...” I prompted, smoothing back my hair myself.
“Secondly, you’re a toucher – as in, you touch people, like, with your hands. Most everyone in Upton is a toucher. I think it comes from living in big, affectionate families with lots of little kids in them. Thanks to that, I’ll bet we’re used to getting more incidental physical contact during a day than most other people,” he explained. “A casual touch might not mean as much to you as it would to someone with a different kind of family life.”
It was an interesting observation. “Hmm,” I said. “Yeah, most of these non-member guys at work, they have small families and fathers they haven’t seen since they were toddlers. One of them is even an only child.”
Ben Jones picked up the thread. “Right. A guy like that could conceivably go for days without ever touching another person. Can you imagine what that must be like?”
I shivered a little, taking in a realization about a part of Darren’s life I’d never considered before. “Sad,” I agreed. “Is that it?”
“No, the biggest reason for all the attention is this,” Ben Jones stopped walking and turned to face me on the sidewalk as if he didn’t even care if Sister Lowe might be looking out her window to watch us. The wind rushed past, racing toward the east, tossing the bare poplar boughs over our heads. The air was moving and alive and I knew I was about to see the heavens open and watch something reveal itself. But all I saw was Ben Jones’s face and all I heard was his voice.
“You are good,” he said, clearly and firmly. “And all of creation craves goodness.” He glanced up at Sister Lowe’s picture window and started walking again. “I think it’s especially true for young people, whether they understand that about themselves or not.”
“Goodness,” I echoed.
“You’re clean,” Ben Jones continued. “Your language is clean. You try to be kind to people. And most of all, you have the right spirit about you. The people you work with can feel that, even if they can’t say what it is they feel. Naturally, they want to feel it all the time. And when they don’t know how to get it, they can confuse that longing with wanting something else, something they can see and touch like —“
“—Me.” It was all ringing true. That explained it: a simple case of mistaken identity. “You know, it always bothered me,” I began, “when I’d hear people imply that people outside the Church try to date us because they’re on some kind of evil anti-mission to lure us away from the right path. I mean, there may be some of that going on but you’re saying –”
“That they’re not attracted to you because they’re bad, but because they’re basically good,” he finished.
I smiled into the wind. “That’s great,” I said. “But then again, it’s not. What the heck am I supposed to do to protect myself from this noble but misguided search for goodness? Should I cut off my hair, keep my hands in my pockets, start swearing my face off?”
It was a glib question but Ben Jones wasn’t smiling. “Of course I don’t mean for you to downplay your best qualities. You know that’s not the answer.” He stopped on the sidewalk again. We were shaded from the windows of the house beside us by another one of Upton’s huge caragana hedges. It’s one of the few types of hedges strong enough to live through the town’s horrible cycles of cold and drought without much fuss. Even without its leaves, no one could see us through the hardy hedge and maybe that’s why Ben Jones risked reaching out and taking hold of my sleeve.
At the touch, I looked up at him. In the hard spring light his pale face was lit up above me, the freckles on his nose and cheeks glowing like faint, golden constellations beneath the rims of his glasses. And I realized what none of the other Upton girls might ever know. Ben Jones was beautiful – in a sublime way that had so much more power to it than what could be seen in his physical features. He was beautiful – too beautiful, of course, to ever want someone like me. I had to look away.
“Heather,” he said, his fingers still clasped around the fabric of my sleeve. “All I really mean to say is – don’t give in.”