Soul Catcher (3 page)

‘Where are you from?’ I changed the subject.

‘Right here on Long Island. Only child, nice house, parents divorced. I’m your typical suburban boy.’

‘I don’t think so. I mean, in my town the boys from broken families are different.’

Patrick seemed to enjoy this. ‘How?’

‘They hang out all the time in town, you know, drinking and getting high. They’re really gross. I hate them.’

‘It’s good not to be like them?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Well, you’re not like the girls from here.’

‘But they seem nice.’

‘Nice.
That’s not the word for them. You’re nice, really nice. I could tell the first time I saw you.’

I felt like asking: If I’m so nice, why did my parents send me here?

Patrick slid off the log and bowed at the waist. He offered me his arm, and said, ‘This must be our song.’

‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said.

‘Dance with me anyway.’

We let ourselves go, twisting and hopping and jumping and having more fun than I ever expected on my first night away from home. Patrick was easy to be with. He was gentle and direct and an even worse dancer than me.

Our first kiss!

Patrick sat on the fence and I stood in front of him. It was a chilly autumn night and we were bundled up in sweaters, hugging for extra warmth. He rubbed my back and looked
into my eyes and didn’t speak. Patrick had a sexy silence; he didn’t say much, but when he looked at you and touched you, he just filled you right up. I could tell he was building up to a real kiss. But every time he moved his face a little closer, Scottie Hendrick — known as Major Loony — waddled by, singing: ‘1969! 1969! 1969!’

Scottie was disturbed but perfectly harmless. There were a few kids like that at Grove. Neil Benson, a.k.a. Ford Highway, was another: a skinny boy with a protruding chin bearing approximately nine whiskers, whose obsession was cars. Every time a car passed on the road during school break, he would leap high into the air and call out the year and make of the car. The Smoking Circle would break into applause. Then there was Harold O’Leary, who walked on the balls of his feet and carried a conservative brown briefcase. And Ned Jones, who lurked around campus and told gruesome stories about how he murdered people’s pets. And Suzie Zuckerman, who was tall and heavy and wore a black wig lopsided on her head and heavy beige makeup that got all over her clothes. She made loud, abrupt statements that would surprise people, but when you thought about it she almost always made sense. Peter Prentice, another oddball, practiced Zen, swallowed raw grain like pills, and had this crazy fantasy of building a big geodesic dome for no apparent reason.

‘Take a hike, Scottie!’ Patrick said.

‘Hike to where?’

‘To the moon for all I care.’

‘Hmm. I don’t know if I could get there in time.’

‘In time for what?’ I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

‘1969!’

We laughed.

‘What happened in 1969?’ Patrick asked.

Scottie beamed. He folded his short arms over his rotund stomach. ‘Nixon was President and
To Tell The Truth
went off the air.’

‘Good,’ Patrick said. ‘Now leave us alone.’

Another couple down the fence called him over and he waddled away, singing, ‘To the moon, to the moon, to the moon!’

By now it was a quarter to ten. Patrick sighed, rolled his eyes and pulled me to him in a hug. He kissed my neck and from there moved with tiny gentle kisses over my cheek to my mouth. I puckered my lips to let him know it was all right. He pressed his lips hard against mine, flattening them, and I felt his tongue running over my teeth. After a minute he slipped his tongue right into my mouth. The sensation was not as strange as I had expected it would be; I knew how my own tongue felt and his felt about the same, just a little thicker and wetter. The real difference was having two tongues in my mouth at one time. They moved in a kind of dance. Kissing Patrick for the first time was like underwater ballet: grace without gravity: heaven: dreams. For me, this was the music of Grove: Patrick and our late-night, speechless harmony.

But dreams are only that, dreams. There was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that failures of self could qualify love, nor that love could contain them. I didn’t know that Patrick had his own crazy dream, and that it would come to involve me. And I didn’t know how soon.

I
t was on a brilliant October afternoon that I first spiralled into Patrick’s world. Red and yellow and orange leaves basked in the clearest of light. We went to our afternoon activities as usual. Gwen was with us. She and I were taking ceramics, and Patrick was taking basketball. The gym was next to the shed where ceramics was taught, across the street from central campus. Crossing that road was the one time, other than the weekly trip to the mall, that you were technically off campus without breaking any rules. We always got a thrill crossing it and would walk very slowly. Sometimes Patrick would walk back and forth until a car came. It was one of our jokes.

Once across, Gwen ran off to the whitewashed shed where Louise taught ceramics. Gwen liked to be on time. Louise, who was also the French teacher and dorm mother of Lower Girls, was engaged to marry Jimmy, the basketball coach, math teacher and dorm father of Upper Girls. Gwen had a theory that if she kept in ‘ultra good standing’ with Louise, positive (meaning lenient) dorm treatment by Jimmy would naturally follow. I think Gwen was also careful about spending too much time with Patrick and me. She would join us in the Smoking Circle or at the canteen and then abruptly leave. Most of my friendship with Gwen took place at night,
after lights-out, in our closet. We would close the door, turn on the light, and sit facing each other on the floor in our nightgowns. We’d talk. Other than Patrick, a frequent topic was a boy named John. He was tall and skinny, wore raggedy jeans and had long stringy blond hair. He reminded me of the grubby kids from my hometown who would hang out, cursing at traffic and smoking pot. Of course, that was the kind of boy Gwen liked, the dangerous, risky type. But we couldn’t tell if John liked her back. We would mull over these and other life issues until we were too tired, and then we’d turn off the light and slip into our beds.

Patrick’s best friend, besides me, was Eddie. He was short and flabby and an obnoxious jerk, as far as I was concerned. He was always telling dirty jokes, which I ignored and Gwen rebutted with sharp remarks and rolling eyeballs. People laughed at him but it seemed that no one, other than Patrick maybe, really liked him. Eddie had requested Patrick as his roommate and Patrick hadn’t objected, which was as good as announcing they were best friends. It bothered me that Eddie’s bad taste might creep into their private conversations. I trusted Patrick, but he was a boy, and Eddie had a way of bringing out the worst in people. He would nudge and prod until a perfectly nice person would spit out something cruel. Like the time Ted, another Upper Girls dorm parent and generally acknowledged as one of the school’s nice guys, refused to let Eddie sit at his table at dinner because he was a ‘parasite’. But he was Patrick’s friend, so I tried to tolerate him. He often sat with us at meals. He was also taking basketball, which meant I had to put up with him when I went with Patrick to the gym. Luckily, Eddie went down to the gym early every afternoon, and not with us. He had a mission, a stupid Eddie joke. Amy, the fat Be Here Butterfly, had signed up for basketball in her quest to lose weight, and Eddie appointed himself her tormentor. She would dribble the ball around the court for fifteen minutes before activities started, and Eddie would chase her. Sometimes she got so mad, she turned
around and threw the ball right at his head. He spread a rumor that they had sex in the woods at night.

I went to the gym with Patrick and watched him take off his clothes. He had his basketball uniform on underneath. His long legs were covered with curly orange hair; hairy legs meant a boy was growing up. But his chest was smooth and his arms were slender and white, except for a recurring rash in the insides of his arms, which he told me came from sweating. He jogged over to Eddie and Amy and hopped and sidestepped and reached until he confused the ball away from them. He jumped up, and snapped the ball into the hoop.

I ran over to the ceramics shed and could tell by the silence that the period had already started. I crept in and sat down next to Gwen, hoping Louise wouldn’t pay any attention. She was in the middle of demonstrating how to make a tall vase. But when she heard me, she looked up and her creation took a U-turn. The wheel slowed to a stop and she stared at me with squinty eyes. Her long brown hair hung in front of her narrow face. She wore black eyeliner and pink gloss on her lips.

‘Hello Kate,’ she said.

‘Sorry.’

She shook her head as if she just didn’t want to hear it. Personally, I think she understood; being in love herself, she knew how hard it could be to tear yourself away. For all the times I was late to ceramics, she never once reported me.

She tossed the ruined vase into one of the large bins by the wheel and scooped up a fresh lump of wet clay. She kicked and the wheel spun, and as the lump took form, growing narrow, hollow and tall, she doled out directions and advice. The trouble was that Louise didn’t know much more about ceramics than we did. Ten minutes later, she had finished her demonstration and produced a rough, lopsided vase with such a tiny opening it probably would have strangled a flower.

‘Now,’ she said, as the wheel spun to a stop, ‘let’s see if you guys can make one like that.’

There were seven of us and only one wheel. Louise watched over each of us as we took her seat and tried to make a flower killer. One girl actually made a nice vase. A kid from Upper Boys made a bowl that he insisted was for low flower arrangements. Because it was getting late, Louise let it go.

I took my turn next and made the fastest vase in the east. It came up from the wheel like a time-lapse blade of grass, tall and straight and solid.

Louise looked at it and said, patiently, ‘It’s supposed to be hollow.’

‘But it’s
art
.’

She let that one go, too; in three minutes the period was supposed to end, and Jimmy would be waiting for her.

Troy was last. He was tall and beefy, with a head of long black hair that he never washed. He had this bad case of acne; he probably never washed his face, either. But he was the best friend of John, Gwen’s fantasy Romeo, so we were both nice to him. Like mine, Troy’s vase was tall and straight, but he managed to make his hollow. He poked two holes in the side with his finger.

Louise walked slowly around the wheel.

‘It’s a bong,’ Troy said. He was kind of cute when he smiled. His face would glow and his brown eyes would turn up at the corners and look almost Oriental.

‘I know what it is.’ Louise pressed it back down into a blob of clay. ‘Try again.’ She looked at her watch. ‘All right, the rest of you can leave, it’s already late.’

That was a relief; we’d gone almost ten minutes overtime. I took off my clay-spattered apron and waited for Gwen. She was hovering around Troy, making noises about how unfair it was he had to stay after.

As we rushed to the gym, I couldn’t resist telling her that I thought her publicity maneuvers were a little obvious. ‘Troy’s never going to talk to John about you, anyway.’

‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘It couldn’t hurt.’

‘It’s tacky.’

A few sweaty kids from basketball were standing in front of the gym, talking. I started to run, hoping Patrick hadn’t given up waiting for me.

‘V.J.!’ Gwen called, running after me.

V.J. meant
value judgement.
Just the night before, in his after-dinner announcements, Silvera had declared that value judgements were bad and to be avoided. And so all day, people had been shouting V.J. at each other for the smallest things.

Eddie was inside the gym, sitting on the floor, tying his sneakers. His stomach bulged over his gym shorts. His short, heavy legs were pale and covered with dark fuzz. His wavy brown hair fell over his eyes and his thick lips pouted in concentration.

‘Have you seen Patrick?’ I asked him.

He looked up and shrugged. ‘I dunno. I think he went to the woods to take a leak or something.’

‘First you say you
don’t
know, then you say you
do
know,’ Gwen spat at Eddie. ‘Hey man, do you even know where you are? I mean, like, what a shmo.’

‘V.J., bitch!’Eddie said.

I left the lovebirds to go look for Patrick. I was just coming around the side of the gym to the small field that led to the woods, when I saw him. I thought he must have fallen down, because he was struggling up from the ground.

‘Patrick!’

He tucked in his shirt and walked toward me with what seemed like a great effort. As he came closer, I noticed that his skin, which was usually pale, was so colorless it looked grey. His eyelids were heavy, and he was having trouble staying on his feet.

I put my arm around him and he leaned on me. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m fine.’ His voice was slow and thick, syrupy.

‘You’re not feeling well? I wish we had time to sit down, but we’ll be late for dinner.’

He leaned so much of his weight on me that I thought I’d collapse. I had no idea what was wrong with him. The flu, maybe, or stomach cramps from too much running. Whatever it was, he was in bad shape, and I was afraid we wouldn’t make it across the road.

‘I love you,’ he hummed.

I felt a rush. He hadn’t told me he loved me since the time we were standing in front of Girls Dorm, just before ten o’clock, when he whispered ‘Te
amd”
and kissed me. Since then, there had been moments I was afraid he’d stopped loving me. I wanted to tell him I loved him too. But before I could say it, his knees buckled and he was lying in the road. His eyes were glassy, staring at the sky.

‘Are you going to be sick?’ I said, leaning over him.

‘I’m fine, just give me a minute.’

That’s when I heard the sound of an engine coming toward us, and panicked. I said, ‘Hurry up, a car’s coming!’ and tried to pull him up.