Precious (26 page)

“Evie’s got a date with poetry,” Greg says, inhaling. “She loves it.”

“Her sister isn’t the only one with a crush,” Brenda says.

“Maybe you could loan Eva your wedding dress,” a Mafia sister suggests.

Brenda grins now, her pleasure evident. “You know, Mr. Fulton had me stay after class once. The day of that big pep rally, remember? He
wanted to know what types of books I liked to read, but I think he just liked my cheering outfit.”

“You’re lying,” Eva says. Her laughter fades too quickly, as does her certainty. She feels insulted and bullied. She tries to regain her composure, save what of her self-pride she has. She tries to imagine the Mafia sisters at thirty and forty and fifty how their lives will be filled with boredom and fat husbands, how they will fawn over pool boys and young mailmen, regretting their spoiled youth, all while she and Peter will still be—somehow, miraculously—fresh and bright.

“I think you’re the one lying,” Brenda says simply, interrupting Eva’s thoughts.

“I don’t lie,” Eva says.

“Well, then, tell us. Let us in on the secret. It’s not like everyone hasn’t already guessed, you know.”

“I have a secret, too,” Sissy interrupts, giggling like a lunatic. “I love Greg.”

With that there is first a lingering silence and then snickers from the girls, from Greg himself. Confused, slightly out of sorts, Sissy looks around and then gets up and brushes sand off her knobby knees. Wobbly from the beer, swaying from the joint, she marches away like an ungainly soldier. Eva sees this and senses her disappointment. “Oh, Christ, Sissy. Come back! They don’t mean anything.”

Greg laughs again. “I love you, too!” he teases.

“Shut up,” Eva says. She watches as Sissy marches with an uncharacteristic bravery, her feet pounding into the hot sand. She will preserve her pride, such as it is, Eva thinks, and prove that whatever is said means nothing, really, that nothing in the entire world bothers her, even their laughter. Her walk says,
Leave me alone.

Eva thinks about running after Sissy, about running away with her, down the beach, into the cool woods. She looks around and senses everyone is waiting for that, and she senses, too, that if she leaves, she will only become the butt of their conversation and ridicule. She remains
seated on the blanket, the longing to go after Sissy dwindling as her sister moves farther from sight.

“We’re dying to know,” Brenda says, lifting her dress.

Eva leans back and takes a slow drag, the dizziness coming over her in greater force. She feels as though she is on a ledge. If she says nothing, they will think she is making up a story. If she says nothing, they are already swelling with conversation, eager to fill in anything that Eva herself does not say. Feeling the sense of risk, she pushes forward. She waits while the silence grows so tangible it holds under it a growing buzz.

“Well?” Brenda says.

“Well,” Eva says knowingly. “Here’s the story with Peter Fulton. Here’s what happened the day I bumped into him at the library …” She tells them of things she should not know, describing Peter in much the same way she imagines she has been described by if not Peter, then the boys—the shape of him, the way he moves when he comes to her, the way his stomach muscles tense up when he’s over her. “He’s wonderful,” she says, inhaling. “You have no idea.”

“You’re lying,” a Mafia sister tells her.

Brenda raises a slender eyebrow. “Scandalous,” she says.

“The guy is a dick,” Greg says. “And you, Eva, you’re fucking stoned.”

Eva, quiet now, senses a sly subterfuge of the moment, and her excitement, her secret pleasure at the telling, wanes; her thoughts turn ruinous. She registers Greg’s caution. But still it feels so good to make mistakes. It feels so good to tell people what she’s held inside, what she’s wanted everyone to know. She wishes everything could be like that.

“Don’t say anything,” Eva tells them all. “I mean, if it got out, it would require the United Nations to intervene.”

“Oh, no, we won’t tell,” they say. “We promise not to tell.”

It is bad enough to be embarrassed publicly, to suffer humiliation in front of one’s beloved. It is bad enough that the adult world remains mired with inconsistencies and complicated discussion, that the world outside Sissy Kischs fingertips is incongruous and unpredictable. But that she will also now have to commit the moment to memory—her utterance of love, followed by their snickering laughter—is nothing short of horrific. She only spoke a truth, and in doing so, she felt the wonder of lightness grow inside her. And then, from those she believed to be new friends—the glances from those girls, and Greg’s bemused expression—looks that said a defense or denial from Sissy would have been futile and would have rendered the point even more amusing.

She can no longer bear to dwell on the moment, and yet as she marches along the path, through the overgrown brush, as she pushes away the occasional low-slung branch that lashes at her, thin as a whip, she can do nothing but think on the moment. The path in the woods
appears to her as a graveyard: a discarded buggy to her left, old newspapers, some empty water jugs long ago forgotten. Beyond the warm breeze that catches the leaves and tosses them like wishes, she hears— almost imperceptibly—the sound of her heart, still beating despite everything, still clinging to love because it is the heart that is assigned the burden of such a task. So often forsaken when it risks, when it favors not
tomorrow
or
someday
or
once upon a time
but the moment—the actual, unfolding moment—it is the task of the heart to uncover itself and break and mend. It is the task of the idiot heart to recover.

But now Sissy believes she will never recover. It is all too difficult, this process of growing up. Thinking on this, puzzled, she is a girl suddenly too proud for tears. Pollen drifts up from the disturbed branches. She sneezes, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Smoke clings to her T-shirt and she is dizzy, the woods around her a twirl, a blur, a high spin. For the first time since she left the beach she realizes that not only is she brokenhearted but she is also terribly, ravenously hungry. She is so hungry she could snap a branch and gnaw on bark and pulp.

Still, no matter how hungry she is, no matter how thirsty she becomes, she vows not to go back to the beach and their smoke-screened laughter. She would rather be ravaged by wild boars. She would prefer to be lost in the forest than face the horrible, confusing repertoire of teens.

Just let them come and find her—she will be gone, just like Vicki, her best friend! (How mythic Vicki Anderson becomes in the light of memory, how reinvented.) Sissy will hide in the woods forever, and never go back. Thinking on this sweet victory, Eva and Greg suddenly regretting their selfishness, regretting the loss of Sissy Kisch, future performer, future ghost detective, keeper of a hundred dogs and cats, tamer of everything wild, she feels immensely satisfied. Emboldened, she lets out a barrage of curses that improves her stride and momentarily firms her resolve. But, when she hears a noise—the flurry of squirrels over leaves, the break of twigs—she stops, suddenly worried that Eva is correct—that their father may indeed be omnipresent, or that maybe a
madman lurks by the water, waiting to grab her suddenly and make her scream. She looks around and tells herself:
No one is here. No one will care.
The fractured light pours down through the branches and the clouds dot the sky, a spattering of thumbprints.

She does not stop until she follows the path back toward the park, to the swimming hole that she and Vicki Anderson visited—empty today. She bends down, plucks some ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits that carpet the banks under willows. She finds berries that are bloodred, positively poisonous. She picks them anyway, careful not to squeeze so hard that juice stains her fingers. She takes all these things to the river’s edge, letting her feet sink into the mud as she releases them. She says an incantation, garbled but well intended.

She will never go back. She will journey onward, forever. She thinks:
I am never, ever going home again.

“Fuck them all,” she whispers.

The thing that happens when you denounce the everyday world, the thing that happens when you deem everyone except yourself irritating, is that you are faced with the prospect of an incredibly lonely existence. Sitting on a limestone, Sissy listens to the birds that sing eerily overhead and to the rippling water that pools into rapids. The slanted light dances on the water, speckles it like a luminescent wing.

She pulls a thin branch from the overhanging limb, checking to see if it might support her weight. It snaps easily and falls into the water. Across the bank, the peeling birches form shapes of lids and dark chestnut-colored eyes. The knots lapse into uneven circles. The tall grass trembles.

If the everyday world fails her, there is still another under the water, a pulse of music, an ancient place that always beckons, a world not like her mother’s swirling ash, not like the gray moths that float into nothingness, but something else, a world Sissy is already creating for herself, a world she is already shaping into existence. Sissy closes her eyes, and
there, on the facing bank, stands a majestic white horse, its harness adorned with a feathery plume. The horse whinnies and snorts before galloping off into the woods, between the thick trees. There on the facing bank, below the trees with their ropey vines, there in the tall grasses, she spots the shape of the golden, chatoyant eye. A lion rises and paces before bending its head over the river and lapping up water. It roars. A thrill moves through Sissy, electrifies her skin.

And there, again, Vicki Anderson appears from seemingly nowhere, thin and pale in the light, stranger and more ghostly but also perhaps more beautiful, an alabaster shape, a moving statue. It seems as though she has always been here, waiting for Sissy in the ferns, somewhere near the edge of the water. “You’re not dead,” Sissy says. “I didn’t want you to be dead, dead. I haven’t forgotten you.”

Vicki bends down and picks ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits, tossing them into the water. She pets the lion, running her hands through its fur. If it is a dream, if it is play the dream is still elusive. Sissy senses it might be pulled from her, easily, as one might pull a thread and unstitch a garment layer by layer, piece by piece. She wants to slip off the rock, swim over to the adjacent bank, and touch Vicki. But it is a growing knowledge that holds her here and keeps her hands planted firmly under her buttocks. If she moves, everything will be broken. If Sissy reaches Vicki, Vicki will disappear. Instead she tells her, quietly, the things she’s wanted to say, which is finally, mostly, only that she’s sorry—sorry about cutting her hair—it
was
an accident; the blade seemed to go down on itself and that was that—and sorry that she didn’t call to Vicki that day she saw her on her bike, heading down to the park. “Would it have made a difference at all?” she asks. “Would you have even turned around?” And she asks, finally, about God and if death really does or doesn’t exist and if heaven looks like Valley Forge, the way she always imagined. She wants so many answers, she is breathless. She wishes she had someone to talk to, someone who would talk back.

This is the way the story goes, Sissy thinks. Vicki Anderson walked through the forest. Vicki Anderson marched down the weedy paths to
the river, sad because of a boy, sad because of her mother. She wanted to hurl herself into the cool water and let it take her in completely. She wanted to drown in the water. She heard a bird’s sound and turned to find a crow, fluttering its wings, hopping along a nearby branch. The crow had muddy eyes. She reached for it and it disappeared. She looked at herself in the water, her face rounded, her freckles gone. She dove into the water, but instead of sinking she floated, the force of the water lifting her until she floated above it, until she realized that she didn’t have arms anymore but wings. This is the way, Sissy decides, the story will go.

She sits quietly for an hour, composing a tale she can believe. She sits until she hears noises and sudden laughter: high-pitched, squealing laughter, and for the first time, she realizes that it has started to rain. “Sissy!” she hears in a chorus of voices. “Sissy Kiss,” she hears from Eva. Their tone not unkind. “Come on, Sissy Kiss,” she hears. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming! We’re coming to take you home.”