Soul Catcher (12 page)

We were getting to know each other, there was no way around it. We spent December always close, but two steps back, scrutinizing each other’s faces and words and silences. Finally, we formalized our exploration of each other into a kind of game.

It was an idea conceived in a moment of frustration. Silvera’s value judgements —
angel of addiction, girl in the black negligee -
irked me. I would lead Patrick in ridicule of the man, the fat man, frog king, monster blob, hypocrite, liar, fag. We were cruel. It was great. But sometimes Patrick would resist. It was on one such occasion, as we were walking up the icy hill after dinner, that he told me to ‘drop it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, hurt by his sudden withdrawal from comraderie.

He stared at me from within the cave of his army jacket hood. ‘Just forget it,’ he said.

‘What? Forget
what?
’ He started up the hill and I followed. ‘Forget what you just said? or forget that I’m trapped here?’

‘Trapped?’ he said. ‘If you’re trapped, you’ve done it to yourself.’

That stung. ‘If that’s what you think, then why do you hang out with me?’

‘If
what’s
what I think?’

‘That I’m making myself unhappy. I mean, doesn’t it occur to you that you’re making me unhappy, too?’

‘You don’t have to stay with me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got problems of my own. I can’t be responsible for your unhappiness, too.’

‘Too? I didn’t know you were so unhappy, you never expressed that to me.’

People were struggling past us on the narrow, semi-shovelled path, so we moved off to the side and stood ankle-deep in snow. And that was how it started: standing in the snow, facing each other, venting steam. After that, it became a planned ritual, a kind of joint therapy that we engaged in for about fifteen minutes almost every day between dinner and study hall.

We would go down to the snowy field behind the science building, and stand like two ice people, frozen still, facing each other. We made some rules: no touching (we did enough of that the rest of the time); no blaming; don’t default to love-related excuses like
I did it because I love you
or
it doesn’t really matter anyway because I love you;
be honest.

Snow flurried down, white specks flickering in the twilit darkness, drifting to earth. The science field was an expanse of untouched whiteness, like a blank sheet stretched flat on a windless day. Patrick stood straight as a pole an arm’s length in front of me, just too far to reach. His hood was gathered around his face, leaving only a small hole through which his eyes, nose and mouth were visible. He looked like a baby, all bundled up. Frozen clouds misted the air as we spoke.

He said, ‘Last night I dreamed I got up in the middle of the night and snuck into your dorm. I was looking for you, but couldn’t find your room and went into someone else’s
room by mistake. I got into someone’s bed knowing it wasn’t yours. Then the girl in the bed rolled over and it was you.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said, thinking he had seen
her,
my foe, in his own dream. ‘Tell me more.’

‘She was wearing pink.’

‘Did she have breasts?’

‘Two.’

‘But were they big?’

‘Average, I think.’

‘What color was her hair?’

‘She didn’t have any hair. That was the strange thing.’

‘Do you resent me because we haven’t slept together?’

‘I don’t know. I guess so.’

‘All this virgin stuff — I’m almost sixteen.’

He paused. ‘But to be honest, Kate, I don’t want to marry you.’

‘No one asked you to.’

‘I asked you. Remember?’

Lying next to each other in sleeping bags. The girl in the black negligee. I nodded.

‘You don’t care for me enough to make a commitment, I said. Theoretically, far in the future, I mean. But you desire my body?’

‘That’s not it. It’s just that I don’t know who I am.’

‘I know who you are.’

‘How can you? If I don’t know who I am, then you can’t know.’

‘What about me? Do you know who I am?’

‘Kate Steiner. My favorite girlfriend.’

‘Favorite?’

‘Only.’

‘Now.’

‘Are you jealous of past loves?’

‘I thought you told me you didn’t love any of them.’

‘Not really. Not like you.’

‘I resent that.’

‘What? That I had girlfriends before you? Big deal. It’s only normal. I mean, I’m a man.’

‘Boy.’

‘Male.’

‘I don’t like being compared. I hate being compared. Even if you say to me that I’m pretty, so much prettier than other girls you’ve known, or that you love me more, it’s no good because just bringing them up is a kind of betrayal.’

‘Bullshit, Kate.’

‘That’s what I think.’

‘That’s what
you
think.’

‘Thanks a lot for the consideration. What I really want to say is that I think it’s self-centered. You can be self-centered.’

‘What else can I be? Should
you
be my center?’

‘You could think about how I would feel when you make fun of something I say, or stop listening because you’re tired of it.’

‘Is that what I do? Why are you throwing that at me now? Why haven’t you ever said it before?’

‘Because it hasn’t come to mind.’

‘Then it isn’t so important to you.’

‘Yes it is. Don’t think you can tell me what I think just because you’re a man.’

‘Boy.’ He smiled. ‘Besides, I don’t do that.’

‘You put words into my mouth by dreaming about me,’ I said. ‘You build up expectations when you dream about me.’

‘You don’t dream about me?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Maybe it isn’t building up expectations, maybe it’s expressing desires. I
do
desire to sleep with you. I want to make love to the girl of my dreams.’

I thought about it. Who doesn’t want that? In my dreams of Patrick — and I never told him about them — I saw
her,
my rival. She was pretty, with a short black pageboy haircut, lily white skin and cherry red lips. She was taller than me and about the same weight, but more voluptuously built,
with a tight little waist fanning up into boobs and down into hips. She was a sexy girl, and she attracted him. He would go to her. Sometimes he would leave me altogether and sometimes he would keep her secretly. Either way, I would go looking for him and find her instead. She would tell me he had made his choice. I would tell her he had chosen wrongly. She would laugh at me as if I were naive, foolishly innocent. In the end, Patrick would return to me and promise his devotion. I would always wake up from these dreams feeling disturbed and convinced that, in time, he would leave me. In my dream he would return, but in real life, when it happened, he wouldn’t.

It was on the sixteenth of December, in the afternoon, that I decided to give him his dream so that I might have mine. I told him in the snow later that day. I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it. Make love to me for real.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve thought about it. Yes, I’m positive.’

We set the date for New Year’s Eve.

All we had to do was pass our midterm exams, before winter vacation. If you failed, you had to stay at school over the two-week vacation and take the exams again. We would have to study hard.

Gwen promised to help us. She was as meticulous in her day-to-day studies as she was in making sharp hospital corners on her bed. Because of her messy verbal onslaughts, people assumed she was an all-round slob. But Gwen had her world carefully worked out; she knew where everything was, from socks to information. Her perfect order and the aggression with which she pursued it was no mystery to me; I had been her pawn. She was still trying to make amends for that, which was why she offered to tutor us. She even threw in a guarantee that we would pass all our exams with at least a B.

‘Kate! When did the French Revolution start?’

‘Patrick! What forms the compound of nitric acid?’

‘Does anyone know why Madame Bovary wasn’t content to stay home?’

‘If three kids go to the store to buy seventeen loaves of bread and one kid has fifty-three cents, another has twenty-four cents and the third has seventy-five cents, how much does each loaf of bread cost if all totalled they end up with just a nickel between them?’

She also took over the daily cleaning of our room
and
the big Saturday cleanup. She was determined to win me back. But I didn’t feel I could trust her. She cleaned well and was a solid tutor, and I appreciated those things (who wouldn’t?), but she had put a big dent in our friendship and couldn’t just bang it out instantly with favors.

Mom was living in Manhattan with a roommate — another woman — and she had already invited Gwen for vacation. I was uneasy about letting her deeper into what I had left of a family. The Eddie incident still confused me. I could understand Gwen’s motives: the abortion must have been horrible, and to have gone through it all alone! But it frightened me to realize how fiercely self-protective she could be. How low would she stoop again, if circumstances dictated? Or had she learned something about the value of friendship? Could she, if I didn’t give her another chance? I couldn’t decide whether or not to let her come home with me; and when the subject came up, I wasn’t prepared.

One morning, as she moved efficiently across the floor with a broom, she stopped at my bed — where I was slowly waking up — and said, ‘Am I supposed to get a present for your mother’s roommate, or what?’

I sat up on the edge of the bed and tapped my feet on the floor in search of my slippers. Gwen broomed them over to me. I slipped my feet in and stood. She handed me my bathrobe.

She said, ‘So? Should I?’

‘I don’t know, Gwen,’ I said, and it must have sounded as uncommitted as I felt, because her face froze. Gwen was a wizard at reading between the lines — and using her
understanding to get her way. She pinned her eyes right on me, teasing out guilt by the pound.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just —’

‘Forget it.’ She grabbed her yellow jacket and dashed out of the room.

She didn’t mention it at all that day. But later that night, between curfew and lights out, she retaliated. It was inevitable; Gwen did not let things pass.

I was sitting on my bed, alone in the room, reviewing material from English Lit. There was a soft knock on the door and then four tiny brown fingers curled around the edge. A bright white sneaker toed its way in, followed by the leg, torso, shoulder, then face of Rawlene. She was wearing her fluffy blue bathrobe. Her ironed hair was molded into a reverse flip in the back, and her bangs curved up like a stiff gutter pipe. Her robe was slightly open at the bottom and I saw her red Be Here Butterfly dress with the black sequin trim.

‘You’re invited to a show tonight,’ she said. ‘Come on out, the BHBs wait for no woman.’

It wasn’t unusual for the BHBs to make surprise appearances — anywhere, anytime — so I followed her down the hall to the lobby.

A few girls sat around talking or reading. There was no sign of a show.

‘Wait right here,’ Rawlene said, and disappeared down the other hall way.

I sat in one of two beat-up vinyl chairs — one was pea green, and the other was Golden’s mustard yellow — and waited. A record scratched, and then guitars, pianos and drums harmonized into the Osmond Bros. There was a confusion of footsteps and then out they came: Rawlene, Nicole, Amy — and then Gwen. She wore the famous (or infamous) black negligee and stood in front of the Be Here Butterflies, swaying her hips to their rhythm and slowly opening her arms. Gwen handled the synchronized dance steps pretty well, and I was impressed. But it
was funny.
She
had the steps, not the style. Even the BHBs barely had style, but at least they had potential.

Rawlene suddenly shouted, ‘Yo!’ and the music snapped off.

The Be Here’s plus Gwen swayed to silence. Gwen fell back into the ranks. They all dragged one arm to the right, and the other arm to the left, so they were standing with their open arms crisscrossing each other’s. Then they started to hum and Gwen stepped forward. They sang:

Gwen: ‘One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch a girls,
oooh,
gimme one more chance —’

Amy: ‘Gimme!’

Nicole: ‘Gimme!’

Rawlene: ‘Gimme!’

They all took four tiny steps to the left, then four tiny steps to the right, clapped their hands twice and spun around. They came to a jolting halt with their legs spread apart. They threw their arms into Vs and raised their faces toward the ceiling.

I burst out laughing; it was just too weird.

Then, to my horror, Gwen lunged to her knee in my direction. The BHB’s fell out of formation.

Amy said, ‘Give it up, Kate. It’s time to forgive your sister!’

‘That’s right,’ said Nicole. ‘Gwen’s
askin’
you.’

Gwen was staring at me with the persistent, big-eyed face of a poster waif. I couldn’t believe it; I was being bamboozled, guilted into befriending her, refriending her. Not that we’d ever really stopped being friends, just absolute
best
friends. I could feel my resistance bending. Voices of the Be Here Butterflies echoed: ‘Sisters... fuckin’ Silvera... gotta understand... Superfly justice... gotta stand by your sisters... gotta gotta... do right...
yo.’

Finally I said, ‘Okay, come home with me if that’s what you want, Gwen.’ Home was relative now, anyway. As was friendship. As was love.

The room broke into applause. Gwen sprang up clapping.
She got that old cocky look on her face — eyebrows arching, a wide grin — and then she asked me, ‘So, should I get a gift for your mother’s roommate, or what?’

On the second day of midterms there was a storm: the sky turned pale green, snow flickered down like chips of granite. In the end, everything was white. Trees were crystal webs. Trails of footsteps mapped the school’s life.

Patrick and I studied so hard and were so sure we’d pass our exams, that we celebrated in advance. After study hall one night, we ran through the shimmering snow to the science field. The sky was pitch black, starless, and the snow covering the field was pure bleached heaven. We rolled snowballs into boulders and erected a snowman. Patrick gave him a cigarette and I gave him my blue and red striped scarf.