In Zanesville (30 page)

On the kitchen table, along with her cigarettes, is a tablet with my dad’s notes to himself, mostly recording the weather,
certain birds at the feeders, and things reported on the radio, all set off by wild punctuation, underlining, double underlining,
anything to fight the utter boredom of it.

“Partly ‘Cloudy’
Overnight
w/Snow SHOWERS (?) Likely By Morning*!!!!!!!!” [*!…
Sunrise
@ 6:10…!]

Old Milly back from CALIFORNIA Gift for feeding “CURLY” {Orange Marmalade}!!

“Gray SQUIRREL drives away ‘red SQUIRREL’ ~~ {But… only to
Locust Tree
!!!}”

[~ Black-capped Chickadees ~
14
15 in 1 minute!!]

Out the back window, birds land on the empty feeder and take off again. Tammy stands at the end of her chain, watching the
house. Next door, Curly sits alertly, also staring at our house. Everyone is waiting for my dad to come back.

When the phone rings, I’m standing right there and I pick it up without thinking.

“I was going to see if you wanted to come over to Luekenfelter’s and then go to that party,” Maroni says.

All over the front of our refrigerator is grime. Fingerprints, smudged food. You don’t see it unless you see it, and then
you can’t not see it. I get the dishrag and start scrubbing on it.

“What are you doing?” Maroni asks.

“Scrubbing at stuff on the refrigerator.”

“Oh.”

“Well… I might not be able to go to the party. My mom is in a bad mood, but if I can get out, I’ll probably just go alone
and run into people there.”

“What do you mean, alone?” Maroni says. “By your
self?
”

“Yeah,” I say, “or… maybe with Cindy Falk.”

“That honky bitch!” Felicia pipes up.

“I knew you were on the extension,” I say.

“How did you know?” Maroni asks.

“Get off, Gina,” Felicia says.

“Bye,” Maroni says, and hangs up.

Silence. The refrigerator is spotless now. Raymond comes in looking for the cigarettes and I hand them to him.

“You would never be going to a party alone in your
life,
” Felicia says.

Silence.

“You pretend to be shy and backward but you aren’t
at all,
” she says.

Silence. Chickadees landing and taking off.

“This is so sad,” Maroni says.

“Gina,
get off,
” Felicia says in a strangled voice, and then one by one we all hang up.

“I wish someone would stay home here tonight,” my mother says, watching while I search everywhere for first my
mittens and then my scarf. There it is, under books on a dining room chair, just a corner of its purpleness showing.

“I can’t,” Meg says.

“I can’t either,” I say.

“No, nobody can,” my mother says, sighing. Raymond is sleeping over at a kid’s house and Meg is supposedly going to a surprise
party, although that’s not what it is—I know from hearing her talk on the phone.

“Are you taking a present?” my mother asks.

“We don’t take presents, Mother,” Meg answers. “People just say Surprise, and then Happy Birthday, and that’s it.”

“Well, will someone bring a cake?”

“That, I doubt,” Meg answers, staring at herself in the shaving mirror hanging by the basement door.

“And I don’t even know who this girl is you’re staying with, or where you got that coat,” my mother says to me. “Why don’t
my kids tell me anything?”

“We tell you but you don’t listen,” I say. “This girl is really nice, but a little quiet. The coat was given to me by another
girl who wanted me to have it. What else do you want to know?”

“Nothing, I guess,” she says, staring out the window toward the garage. It’s nighttime, though, and the window is black. All
she can see is her own kitchen.

The sky is immense and beautiful, more so than usual; it might have something to do with my boots. I sing while I’m walking
in them, one of my old favorite songs:

Ooh, child things are gonna get easier

Ooh, child things’ll get brighter
…

At one point, Felicia and I liked this song so much that we named a rag doll after it. This was the rag doll that, if Felicia
ever cleaned her room and made her bed, would be set picturesquely against the pillows. During moments of high hilarity, we
were known to attack Ooh Child, kicking her around the room like a soccer ball.

The other song we liked was “Ben,” a lullaby to a rat. If you were trying to get your rodent to fall asleep, that was the
song to sing to him:

Ben, the two of us need look no more,

We both found what we were looking for
.

Cindy Falk lives on the other side of Monroe Park, through the teacher part with the shrubbery and through the part where
you have to walk in the street and through the part where you have to cut across three broad, manicured yards to arrive at
a little lane leading to several houses on a bluff, including Cindy’s, rambling brick and glass, which is supposedly shabby
on the inside but turns out not to be at all—it’s just extremely messy. Her dad is tall, with a straight spine and very short
hair, like an army colonel.

“They’re in her room playing records. Go on up and knock. You can just kick those to the side,” he tells me as I try to step
over dirty laundry that it looks like someone has dumped over the banister from upstairs. The part of the house that isn’t
messy is everything from head height to the tall canted ceilings—a large, airy space that makes you think of Chicago or Philadelphia,
or some other place that isn’t Zanesville.

Upstairs is a long corridor with closed doors, but I can hear where the music is coming from.
I started a joke which started the whole world crying.

“Get in here,” Cindy says, shutting the door behind me.

Huge, the room is, and clean, or cleaner. A canopied bed and a rocking chair, a vanity with a three-tiered mirror and a cushioned
bench, a built-in cabinet with a stereo and records, a window seat, and its own bathroom, which Gretchen is in, peeing.

“Hi!” she calls, waving.

In the middle of the room, a grizzled wiener dog sits atop a basket of laundry. The rocking chair is filled with stuffed animals,
and from one of the bedposts, toe shoes hang from pink ribbons. I’ve never seen toe shoes in person before; they’re sturdy
looking. The wiener dog hops down and comes over to greet me.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Heinzie,” Cindy answers, sitting down at her vanity. “Do you want perfume? Because we’re putting on perfume.”

“No, thanks,” I say.

“Me do!” Gretchen says, emerging from the bathroom. She’s so cute it’s unbelievable. Her hair is literally gold.

Cindy sprays her on the neck and then turns to me. “Give me your wrist,” she orders.

I get sprayed on one wrist, rub it on the other, and then, when they’re not looking, rub both on my pants. For some reason,
I can’t stand perfume—I’d rather smell a garden full of puke. All my other friends know that.

“Hey, Heinzie,” I say, but he wanders back over to his basket and hops in.

They put their coats on and we look at ourselves in Cindy’s mirror. Two extremely good-looking girls with me in the middle.
Before we leave, Cindy tries a stocking cap on my head but then takes it off again, and I have to refluff my hair by bending
over and swinging it down and then swinging it back up, leaving
me with the sensation I had earlier in the week, of my hair floating around above my head.

“First we go into the living room, where my dad is, and then we go to wherever my mom is,” Cindy says. “And whatever I say,
you agree with. Just nod, don’t even talk. Okay?”

We nod.

We’re walking on a limestone path under the cold stars, taking the back way along the bluff to Prospect. The path gets skinny
at one point and we have to go sideways, holding hands, until it widens again. I’ve seen this from below, the sheer rock face
with a fringe of trees at the top, like a crew cut. It would be impossible during the day, but this is night and nothing is
real. We creep along the rock’s hairline, Minonk Road and the river roaring along somewhere below, and those two engaged in
a conversation about how Jon G. treats Kathy Liddelmeyer like dirt.

“He alway make Liddy-biddy cry,” Gretchen says.

“She makes herself cry,” Cindy says.

I know one thing: this path is perfect. Wherever it leads, you want to follow. The trees, the pale strand we’re walking on,
the voices of the girls ahead of me. It’s like passing through a black bead curtain, giving yourself over to the night, the
sky. As soon as you do, things happen. Freddy Man materializes on a converging path, scaring us half out of our wits.

“Freddy,
shit,
” Cindy cries.

Behind him is Tommy Walton, who nods at me.

“Hi,” I say. He sits behind me in history.

“No boys allowed, Thomas,” Cindy says primly. Sometimes they like each other and sometimes they don’t.

“No boys!” Gretchen cries, running around behind me and peering over my shoulder at Freddy.

“What about men?” Freddy asks.

“Let us know if you see any,” Cindy says, and pulls Gretchen and me along.

We have to go down a slope and through a frozen bog, the boys following, then up the other side of the slope, where a bonfire
and a lot of flickering people come into view. Suddenly my shoulder is tapped.

I look back and Freddy Man points his thumb at Tommy.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Tommy says. “How’s the Magna Carta?”

We don’t really talk in history, but occasionally he’ll poke me with his pencil eraser and, when I turn around, show me things
he’s done to the pictures in his textbook. I never know what to say, just like now.

“You tell me,” I try. “You’re the one listening in there.”

“I’m never listening!” he protests. “
You’re
listening.” And then Tommy Walton, the second-most-popular boy in our school, tugs on my hair.

People are just their faces and the fronts of their coats, whatever is lit up by the bonfire, nobody I know yet. Then we’re
there and it’s like entering a dark forest except the trees start talking to you.

“Hi,” says a girl I’m partners with in gym sometimes.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” says someone else.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” says Jackie Lopez. She’s hanging on the arm of Whitey Pelletier, who moved to Springfield but is frequently seen back
here. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi, hi,” I say.

“She saw me the other day with pie on my shirt,” Jackie tells Whitey.

“Did it look good?” he asks me, and Jackie punches him in the arm.

“Ow,” he says.

“Hey, where is everybody?” says Deb Patterson. She’s wearing eyeliner and a hat like the one they tried on me. It looks good
on her.

“Hi,” I say.

“Where is everybody?”

“Hi,” I say.

“
Hi.
Where is everybody?”

“Through there.” I point to a knot of people, and Patterson shoves past me and into them. They scatter for a moment and then
move back to where they were. One looks over, a girl in my Shakespeare class, and waves. In her other hand she’s holding the
same paper cup a lot of people are holding.

I wave back.

“Hi there,” says a girl.

“Jane!” I say. She looks different somehow, now that her mother is dead. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she says nervously, looking around. “Everyone’s over by the fire, sitting on a log.” She seems to be walking around
with Mark Johansson, a boy who is very cute but obscure; there’s some reason he isn’t more popular, which nobody can put a
finger on.

“Let’s go,” he says.

“We’re looking for the punch,” Jane explains.

“I like your hair,” I say, because that’s what’s different—she has bangs now. They make her look like the picture in the locket
her mother was wearing.

“Oh, it’s just these,” she says, touching the bangs, which are sort of short.

“Let’s go,” Mark the Obscure says.

Everyone is over by the fire, sitting on a log.
If they see me in this jacket, we’ll all feel terrible. Why didn’t I figure something out, stow another coat behind the pavilion
or something, or not come at all? That was the only real solution, and I could have done it—my mother needed me at home. She’s
alone there now, at the kitchen window, smoking and waiting for one of us to come back. The sky suddenly feels crowded and
awful, too many stars, and now the moon too, which wasn’t there before.

“Hi,” says Freddy Man. “What did he call you?”

“Who?” I ask.

“Tommy—he called you Magnet, or something like that.”

“Oh. Magna Carta. It’s a thing from history,” I say.

“Oh,” Freddy Man says, nodding, and then just stands there.

The party mills around us, but it has a rustling quiet, like being in a field of cattle in the middle of the night. If it’s
dark enough, the cattle are just presences, big mounds shifting as you walk through them. Except for the cow pies, it’s magical
and strange.

“Did you see where Gretchen went?” Freddy asks.

“Maybe over there?” I point to a knot of people.

“I already looked over there,” Freddy Man says.

“Maybe over there?” I point to the bonfire, and standing beside it, poking a stick into the flames, is the boy Hector. The
same farm jacket and black cap, the same eyes.

“Where did you go?” Cindy says. “You were supposed to be following us.” Behind her are Patterson, Kathy, Cathy, and Gretchen.

Where did I go. “I don’t know,” I say. Hector lifts a big piece of firewood and lays it on top of the bonfire, loosening a
torrent of sparks. For a moment his face looks bright and hot.

“No boys!” Gretchen cries, running behind me to peek at Freddy Man, who looks horribly miserable all of a sudden, like he
might cry.

“Where’d you get that punch?” Cindy asks Kathy.

“Over there,” Kathy says, taking a sip. “By that log where people are sitting.”

“Where Freddy Man?” Gretchen says, looking around.