A Density of Souls (9 page)

Stephen nodded. “Sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry for?” Monica asked.

But they both knew. It was an unwritten rule that Stephen never ventured into his father’s study, especially when his mother was in it.

“Let’s go to lunch,” Monica said, standing abruptly and glancing at the office around her as if it were a foreign landscape.

“All right,” her son said and then disappeared from the doorway.

Monica felt strangely guilty as she heard the rush of water through the pipes and into Stephen’s shower a floor below. She knew she could not tell Stephen that she had his car dumped in front of Elise Charbonnet’s house—not simply because she knew Brandon Charbonnet had probably been one of its violators, but because something had happened between her and Elise years before, before either of them had children whose wounds could drive them to a night without sleep.

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J
eff Haugh had taken up his post on an ice-cold stone bench just outside the door to the locker room. He had brought no book with him to feign studying (which Julie Moledeux and Kelly Stockton were doing quite nicely at the adjacent table, as they chewed over the latest Cannon gossip). To keep his mind from freezing up with nervousness and anticipation, Jeff ran through all the things he should have been doing instead of waiting. He had a calculus test tomorrow morning. The first playoff game of the season was Friday, but he refused to join Cameron and the other guys who had coagulated on the far side of the courtyard to debate strategy against the Thibodaux Boilers, a team Cannon had not defeated in over a decade. These obligations were white noise as he waited for the door to the locker room to open.

“Aren’t you cold, Jeff?” Julie finally asked. Her AP Biology textbook was spread open on her lap to justify the past fifteen minutes she’d spent getting Kelly’s opinion on whether or not patent leather was too 1950s. He knew that Julie’s eyes said another thing entirely—“I’ve been trying to blow you in the front seat of your car for two years, and I’d like to know why you haven’t even given me a ride.”

“I’m all right,” Jeff said, with an obligatory smile.

Julie smiled back. She was a smiler by nature.

“Psyched for Friday?” Kelly asked.

Jeff almost asked what Friday meant before he remembered the playoff game, which could keep Cannon out of the finals. He nodded, and then sucked in a deep breath. A shiver shook his entire body. Julie frowned at him. The first warning sparks of what he called his “stomach problem” ignited at his sternum.

“Jesus, Jeff . . .” Julie said.

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“If you get sick, the team’s screwed. Just go inside,” Kelly said.

“I think I will,” he answered weakly. He rose from the bench and crossed the Senior Courtyard, giving Cameron a high-five as he passed. He mounted the steps, pausing to look back as the English Hallway door glided shut behind him. Stephen Conlin had just walked out of the locker room. Damn.

Three days later, after a grueling practice, Jeff sat in his idling Honda outside of the annex’s single gate. The faculty parking lot had emptied out an hour earlier. Jeff’s stomach had threatened to act up twice during the scrimmage. But worst of all, Brandon Charbonnet had opened his mouth in the locker room once again, and the only thing he had talked about was Stephen Conlin.

Something was happening to Jeff. It started with small tongues of acidic warning he could feel just above his navel, a replay of the sensation he’d felt when he watched Stephen Conlin walk down the middle of the English Hallway with *FAG* taped to his book bag.

Now, almost a full year later, acid seemed to coat his entire stomach, as if a bottle of vodka had suddenly been uncorked inside of him.

He used to be ravenous after practice. He’d devour four Quarter Pounders in a row, consuming them in a heated rush. Now he was afraid to eat at all. Eating provoked a revolt throughout his body.

Minutes earlier, in the locker room, Brandon had all but declared he was the one responsible for defiling Stephen Conlin’s Jeep three months before. His swaggering acknowledgment got lost in the locker room chaos Brandon often dominated—and those who did listen reacted less than Jeff expected. It wasn’t that Brandon’s teammates had suddenly decided to have sympathy for the wispy kid who performed in plays. It was more that Brandon’s and Greg’s harangue had gotten boring. If Brandon and Greg wanted to keep everyone laughing, Jeff thought, they would have to pick a more imposing target—someone the team thought was worthy of their contempt.

That afternoon, as Brandon had concluded his monologue with

“Too bad his mommy has to pick him up from school!” a brief silence fell. Then Jeff slammed his locker door and the room lurched back into its usual melee, voices rising and towels tapping.

Jeff had pressed his ear to the freight door. On the way to his car, he had heard voices singing and tried to determine if one of them was 64

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Stephen. He couldn’t. He had driven his Honda into the parking lot, headlights strobing on the back wall of the Theatre Building.

The sky was washed in winter darkness. He slouched forward, his bent arms bracing his stomach against the steering wheel. Waiting.

He heard the horn honk before he realized he had pressed it with his chest.

When he looked up, he saw Stephen Conlin staring back at him, caught in the glare of the Honda’s headlights. Stephen was squinting.

He was facing the headlights without wavering, as if prepared for a fight.

“Do you need a ride?” Jeff asked.

All the windows were rolled up. Jeff muttered a curse before popping open the door and craning his head out of the ear. “Do you need a ride?” he asked again.

Stephen said nothing.

“I heard about your car,” Jeff offered.

Meredith stared ahead through the windshield as Greg drove and talked about the game. The passenger seat of Mr. Darby’s Bronco felt like a padded leather prison cell. The wipers squealed at the thin splat-ter of rain. According to Greg, there was no good reason he shouldn’t be starting quarterback. Jeff Haugh wasn’t better, he was just a senior.

Boredom led Meredith to interrupt him.

“You shouldn’t have done that to Stephen’s Jeep,” Meredith said.

In the brief silence before he punched her, Meredith could feel the air around her shift and make way, as if the interior of the Bronco were expecting Greg’s fist to cut a swath through it. His knuckles dove into the soft part of her cheek, against her molars, bringing blood to the surface. Her forehead struck the window before the rest of her face followed, and she felt the strange warm sensation of her own blood matted to her skin by cold glass.

She opened her eyes.

Stephen stared back at her.

As their eyes met, she thought she was hallucinating. But then Greg pressed his heel on the gas and Stephen’s face, framed in a car window, slid instantly out of sight.

“Fuck you, Meredith!” Greg bellowed.

“Take me home,” she mumbled.

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“I mean, shit . . . Meredith, God . . .” Greg was nearly hysterical.

“Greg, take me home or I’m jumping out of the fucking car right here!” she hissed, parting her lips enough so that Greg could see the blood smeared across her teeth.

Jeff heard Stephen make a sound that caught in his throat. He turned and glanced at Stephen in the passenger seat as the Bronco that had been waiting at the stoplight next to him surged forward through the intersection.

Jeff looked away. St. Charles Avenue stretched ahead of them in a dark tunnel of oak branches that obscured most of the street lights. He felt a pang of guilt for having looked away from Stephen so quickly.

Stephen was behaving like someone who had just confessed a guilty secret and was hesitant to speak again.

“What play are y’all doing?” Jeff asked.

Stephen looked at him as if startled out of a trance. “Carousel,” he muttered.

“Don’t know it,” Jeff said flatly.

There was another silence filled only by the rush of tires over pavement.

“You used to do plays,” Stephen said quietly.

Jeff knew this wasn’t a question. “Yeah, I saw you that day . . .” he stammered.

“Right,” Stephen finished for him.

There was another silence. “How did you know about my Jeep?”

Stephen asked.

“A lot of people talked about it,” Jeff said.

He heard the sound of Stephen slumping back in his seat. Stephen held his face to the window as he started to cry.

“Hey . . .” Jeff recognized the tone of his own voice. It was the tone his father had used when Jeff told him he hadn’t been cast in his first musical. It was the “hey” of other things—there’ll be other plays . . .

you’ve still got football . . .

“Take a left on Third,” Stephen said, his voice choked and his face still pressed to the window.

“You ever been to the Fly?” Jeffasked.

For a moment Stephen looked like he was collecting himself. When he finally turned his face to Jeff, his eyes were so blue and lumines-66

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cent with tears that Jeff almost gasped. He realized his face had gone lax at the sight of Stephen’s eyes alone and found himself fumbling for his next words.

“I totally hate it when my parents see me cry,” Jeff managed. “I can pick up some beers and we can go to the Fly for a little while. Watch the river. Just till you chill.”

Stephen nodded, slowly, trying to conceal his amazement. “All right,” he answered.

Cameron had made Jeff’s fake ID because he possessed the secret knowledge required to pry the lamination apart and alter the final digit of Jeff’s birth year. The woman behind the checkout counter at the EZ Serve gave it a bland look before accepting the wad of crumpled bills Jeff handed her. He slid the case of Bud Light under one arm and left the store, forgetting to get his change.

As he approached the Honda, Jeff saw that Stephen’s head was slumped back against the headrest as if with weary fatigue, although his eyes seemed sparklingly alive as he watched Jeff’s approaching steps. Jeff averted his gaze as he rounded the nose of the Honda, guess-ing that Stephen’s eyes were following him with each step.

He slid into the driver’s seat and, rather than passing the case off to Stephen, turned and dropped it on the backseat. When he righted himself, he saw that Stephen’s eyes were locked on him. Jeff caught their pointed glare, which seemed suspicious, and managed a smile as he started the Honda’s engine.

Swept desolate by the icy winds off the river, the Fly had become a shadow play of jungle gyms and grassy sloping lawns running along the bend in the dark river. Jeff parked his Honda with its nose to the curb, his headlights shining out over the several steps of rocks that lead down to the lapping bank of the river.

They sat on the Honda’s hood, both of them safely fixing their gaze on the river. Stephen had obviously never had a beer before. He drank it from the can as if he were sipping from a wineglass. Jeff suppressed a chuckle, which he knew Stephen would take as an insult, and which Jeff suddenly realized was more truly tender affection. Jeff had pulled on a pair of sweats from the backseat, but they were both shivering and the beer cans tucked between their thighs rattled slightly against the Honda’s hood.

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“I used to be friends with them,” Stephen said.

“Who?” Jeff asked.

“Meredith Ducote . . . Brandon Charbonnet . . . Greg Darby.”

Jeff could only nod. The massive black hulk of a cargo ship eased by them, its engines churning a dull roar beneath the whip and snap of the wind. Its wheelhouse towered above them, a suspended island of light.

“My dad has this room . . .” Stephen said, “well, it was like his office before he . . .”

He paused. Jeff knew the story of poor suicidal Jeremy Conlin. Every Cannon student did.

“Sometimes from his room you can see over the tops of the trees,”

Stephen continued, “and all of a sudden, I’ll, like, see this building that starts moving, before I realize it’s the top of a ship passing down the river.”

The beer was warming Stephen. Jeff could tell. “Brandon’s afraid of you,” he said in almost a whisper.

Stephen shot him a sudden, violently incredulous look. His features curled into a sarcastic, offended sneer.

“Just trust me . . .” Jeff said. “You never hate someone that much unless you’re afraid of him.”

Stephen shook his head, studying the beer can between his thighs.

He lifted it in both hands as if warming himself with a mug of cider. “I just have to wait, right?” he snapped.

“What?” Jeff asked.

Stephen slid off the car’s hood. He moved away from Jeff toward the bank, balancing on the curb before the several steps leading down into the river. He held his back to Jeff.

“Now I might just be some little fag who does plays. And who hates PE. But my day will come. I just have to wait!” he said the last word through clenched teeth, and Jeff heard the sound of the beer can crumple in one of Stephen’s fists before he hurled it into the air.

It took a moment for Jeff to realize that Stephen was walking away down the curb. Something in Jeff murmured, Wherever he’s going, don’t let him go there. His legs tensed up, forcing the beer can to up-end and clatter to the asphalt. Jeff was about to reach for it when he saw that Stephen had stopped several yards from the Honda, his head cocked toward the night sky. And then Jeff saw it, too.

Jeff’s first thought was: Impossible.

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The halo of the streetlight just beyond Stephen was frenzied with flecks of white. They looked like moths. Jeff felt icy pinpricks across the back of his neck. He reached up instinctively and brought his hand away: moisture on his palm. Stephen was set in place. The air was filled with it, tumbling flecks of white that dappled the pavement around them.

“Snow,” Stephen said, his voice resonant with revelation. He reached out and lifted his head, squinting. Laughter broke from within him.