17

Nico’s book landed on his desk with a whumpf, and he straddled his seat, peeling my hands from my face, prying them apart like shutters.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. His hands smelled like metal.

I blinked and shook my head. “Is that today?”

“Is that today?” he said, dropping my hands in mock disgust.

I sat up tall and stretched. “I’m just a little—”

“Out of it.” Nico gave Mike Stern a wave. He spoke to me, but his eyes darted professionally. Professionally because to some people popularity is a business. “You gonna get a rose in homeroom today? Or is your boyfriend anti-flowers?”

I lowered my head. “He’s anti-flowers.”

Somebody smacked Nico as he passed. His desk knocked into mine and my teeth jolted. “Watch it! Evie’s napping.” He tousled my hair. “Poor kid.”

Mr. Shepard entered, and I propped myself on one arm. I set my pen on my open notebook, and as he began to talk, the pen began to move, transcribing everything.

Louis-Napoleon, son of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland—in the hall a locker slams, a voice says Hey, Farrell, wait up—and nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, is elected emperor. In 1853 he marries Eugenie de Montijo. By the way, Montijo is not the name of a new Oldsmobile—moans, yawns, desks scraping, erasers whizzing—The Second Empire becomes one of the most productive monarchies in France—whooping howls from English 10 next door—

I was drifting, so I wrote my name, over and over. Eveline Aster Auerbach. I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, my name, how it promised to define me. Jack loved the way Maman used to say E-vleen, but he would never copy it because she was French and we were not. Nothing is more annoying than when people randomly insert exotic pronunciations into everyday talk. One thing Americans do best is mispronounce words they know nothing about. It’s a confession of sorts. It’s like saying, We may be stupid, but we’re not pretentious.

I wrote the letter A, several letter A’s, one leading to the next, charging forth like a locomotive, stark and emphatic, the way screams are discharged—AAAAAAAAAA. Just as the row neared the margin, my wrist dropped sharply to produce a single vertical line; then it retraced that line to the top, unfolding in a curve to the right, making a bubble and collapsing at last in a bar to the finish: R. I finished it off—o-u-r-k-e. It was true that I was tired, because when I looked at his name, at the way I’d written it, jittery and uncertain, I began to cry.

Stephen gestured to me, shaking one corner of a test paper. The class was going over the exam. I pulled mine from beneath my notebook. Stephen got a hundred. I got an eighty-nine, which was depressing since I hadn’t even studied. Being slightly better than average at schoolwork is like being a good soldier or a talented receptionist. Three minutes remained. I tore a corner from a page in my notebook.

J—I think I am shrinking. Someone told me that today is Valentine’s Day. I am sad because I have no gift for you. I’m sorry. I’m so tired. I love you, promise. E.

Mr. O’Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. “Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus, Cervantes?”

“Actually, I’m looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson.”

He paused somberly, toying with the tightly twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running—they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait; they will not be rushed.

“Let’s see,” he said as he puttered out, taking to the aisles with a trifling waddle, inching to a halt at the stack near the windows, “poetry. D, D. Well, here’s Baudelaire, Byron, Davies, Drayton. No, no, that’s misfiled. You see what happens when one sorts poetry helter-skelter? Let’s pull that out and replace it as so, and here we are, Dickinson, Emily.”

Next I stopped in the art studio for colored paper and scissors—later in study hall I would make cutout hearts to stuff inside the envelope. By the time I got to homeroom, I had just enough time to copy half of a poem on the bottom of my note to Jack.

It’s all I have to bring to-day.
This, and my heart beside,
This, and my heart, and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide.

E. DICKINSON, C. 1858

After the homeroom announcements, Mrs. Kennedy passed out roses wrapped in paper, like shiny green wands, strained shut and dirt-red. They looked like living headaches. Karen Drapier got one, and Missy Burke, and so did Warren Baxter.

“Mind if I keep it?” Mrs. Kennedy asked when Warren told her just to trash his.

Jack was not waiting as usual at the door of my English class, so I went to his locker and crammed the poetry and hearts I’d made through one of the slots. When he still had not materialized by lunch, I wondered if he had taken off. I vaguely recalled him saying something about fifty dollars and a homeopathic dentist in Connecticut. In sixth-period calculus, I observed the advance of the clock hands—three, four, seven minutes, and still no sign of him.

“All right, people,” Mrs. Oliphant called, “let’s go.”

She launched the door from its propped station in sync with the articulate prong of the late bell. The door whooshed, and just as it was about to click shut, an arm caught it—Jack’s. He was wearing a new sweater and jeans that were clean. Dan was behind him, looking handsome as well in a blue blazer, despite unwashed hair shaped in a flat jaunty spray on the left from the pressure of his pillow.

“Glad you could make it, fellows,” the teacher said.

“Glad to be here,” Jack said sarcastically, and everyone laughed.

He deposited an overstuffed envelope on my desk and sat behind me, his feet punching squeakily into the gap between the base of my seat and the attached book rack. I played with the little package, making lazy orbits with one finger. Sometimes it confused me to see him in school. It’s confusing to greet your privacy when access to it is prohibited. It’s like going home for lunch when you have to leave again. Mrs. Oliphant made a slanting series of numbers on the board, which joined together into the shape of a torpedo. I pulled the flap of the envelope from Jack, and it eased its way open. Nestled within imperfectly plied sheets of crepe paper was a dried flower, a kind I’d never seen, with elegant petals that faded in hue from tip to base—violet, lavender, white. Mustard anthers had fallen into the folds of paper, staining its crevices. On a second sheet was a meticulous drawing of the same blossom, shivery and crisp. And alongside it there were words.

For the girl. It’s called a camas. I slept in a meadow full of them on a mountain in Wyoming. The flower thrives when closest to the clouds, just like you.—J.

A shred of paper landed on my desk—a scrawled response to my Valentine’s note:

You’re small because you don’t eat. You’re too obsessed with your space needle set design. Dan and I are cutting out early so we can finish the music for that asinine play. How about something red for dinner?—J. P.S. Your eyes look bruised.

My head fell back through the air. My shoulders also flew, moving in reverse. I watched in despair as the halls of my mind blackened and grew cavernous, with rooms and vaults and doorways multiplying exponentially. I labored to stem the epidemic nothingness, to hold my focus, to return to some port or place of safety, but I could not find my beginning.

I awoke in pitch dark. The air was murky and cold. Denny was there, holding me. Behind his shoulders, I recognized the bare yellow bulb of the darkroom. I wondered who had moved the ceiling fixture to the wall.

“I’m going to lift you honey, okay? Ready, here we go.” I felt his arms slide under my back, and as he straightened his knees to raise my body, the bulb disappeared upward in a fluid arc.

He eased me onto the stool and asked what had happened.

I said I didn’t know. It was not good to sit. My head throbbed. I reached to touch the place that hurt, and it hurt worse. Denny moved my hand away and measured the knot. It seemed to be about the size of a lime.

“I can’t tell if it’s bleeding. I think it’s bleeding,” he said.

“It’s like a lime,” I asked, “isn’t it?”

“Okay,” he said, searching nervously around the unoccupied darkroom for someone to consult, someone other than me. “I’ve got to get you out of here.” He wagged his hand in front of his nose. “This air is poison. How many times have I told you—Solvents kill.”

Denny ducked beneath one of my armpits, and he lifted me. Denny was strong. When he hugged you, it was like entering a whole new room. Once he heaved Nico into the air and smashed his head three times against the lockers—boom, boom, boom—saying, “You filthy runt. You’re lucky I don’t toss you under a fucking car.” I didn’t see it, I just heard about it, not from Denny but from basically everyone else in school. Denny didn’t mention it because he was a gentleman, and it had to do with me. On the same day, L. B. Strickland got two broken fingers and a dislocated shoulder.

We stopped at the main office. Denny leaned me against the door frame while he ran in.

“How can I help you, Mr. Marshall?” one of the secretaries asked as he hustled past her to the nurse’s office.

“Just getting an ice pack, Mrs. Miller.” He went through the side door of the unattended infirmary and came out right away, blue plastic bag in hand. “No need to exert yourself on behalf of an injured student. Here,” he said to me, handing off the pack, sweeping up my body, glancing back over his shoulder and shooting a last look at the women inside. “God forbid they should burn a few calories.”

In the car I placed my head on his leg. During the drive home, he talked incessantly but lovingly, the way some dogs bark.

“You shouldn’t have been there alone. What if I hadn’t come? What if you tried to get up then fell again? You’re lucky you don’t have a concussion. And the chemicals! Don’t you know that every egg you’ll ever have is in your ovaries already? That room has no oxygen supply. Tack on your history of low blood pressure and sleep deprivation, and you’ve got the recipe for disaster!”

Denny was good in science, particularly in regard to the body and how it worked, but you had to be careful not to act impressed or say, You ought to be a doctor! Though all his test scores had been nearly perfect, he refused to consider a career in medicine. “I just spent eighteen years pretending to be straight,” he said the day we drove to the post office and mailed his application to Fashion Institute of Technology. “Medical school would kill me.” He acted like he was happy that day, but I knew he was not.

When he pulled into my driveway, he was explaining the phrase “mad as a hatter.” Something, something, he was saying, and, licking mercury.

“Okay. Time to get up.”

“But we just got here,” I said, looking up from his leg.

“I know, but now I’m late. I didn’t expect to have to stage a rescue this afternoon.”

“Late for what?” I asked. “Do you have a date?”

“I do,” he said with a nod.

“A Valentine’s date?”

“Yes,” he said, “a Valentine’s date. And you are not invited. Let’s go.”

I stirred, and the upholstery squeaked. He slipped carefully out, then bounded around to the passenger side to help me out. I tried to recall the last time I’d had as much energy. It seemed like such a long time ago that it must have been never.

“There, there,” he said, hugging then releasing me in one motion. He pointed me toward the house and gave me a tiny shove. I hit the hedges, missing the path entirely. “You’re breaking my heart,” he moaned as I stumbled along to the front porch. “Sneak in back. In back,” he directed, throwing a loud whisper over the top of the car. He waved his arm in frustration when I reached the steps, and in his normal voice said, “Too late. You’ll never sleep now.”

Kate was stretched across the couch in the living room, phone in hand. It occurred to me to run back out, but Denny was already gone. He’d tapped his horn before taking off down Osborne Lane. I shut the storm door behind me.

“Got to go,” Kate said. “Evie’s home.”

I waved, signaling to Kate that she shouldn’t get off the phone on my account.

She hung up anyway and sat upright. On the shoulder of her sweater was one of the Valentine roses from school. “I got it anonymously,” she said, coming to show me. “But I think it’s from Harrison Rourke.”

The lump in my head throbbed and also vessels in my temples. I wondered if it was possible for the veins behind my eyes to rupture. My scarf got caught in the zipper from my coat. I tugged at it, saying, “Shit.”

“I’ll do it,” she said, rushing over. I raised my chin and she patiently worked the zipper down to the base. Some girls are just good at things. Of course, those same girls are usually bad at other things.

I dropped the coat and made my way to the bathroom, where I ran the water and pretended to pee. Possibly Kate was right. I had no idea of Rourke, what he felt. In the mirror I examined the irregular terrain of my face, the pyramidal zones of shadow and light. Jack had looked handsome in calculus. Maybe there was another girl he liked, one with bruiseless eyes, like Nina Spear, who rode horses, or Joss Mathers, who had signed his cast and given him a blow job two days before he and I had met. I thought of Denny’s Valentine’s date and of Kate and her rose and how everything was bursting forth from the dormancy of winter. Everyone was falling in love, in real, active love, while I was trussed to my own axis, like some dead meat spinning.

Kate called through the bathroom door. “You hungry?”

I splashed water on my wound and mussed my hair in back to hide the gooey spot. Flakes of blood stuck to my fingers, staining the towel in dots. In the medicine cabinet was an old compact with powder clinging in a kind of deranged ring to its outer edge. I pried off a chunk and dragged it on my face. The edges of the hard powder were sharp.

“Not really,” I called. “Jack’s bringing food.”

“Oh. Maybe he wants to be alone with you. You know, for Valentine’s.”

I rubbed in the makeup, flinching somewhat. It really was sharp. “Jack? I doubt it.”

When I came out, Kate was preparing coffee—laying out cups and spoons, filling the sugar bowl, pouring milk into a little china pitcher.

I cleared my throat, saying tentatively, “So, did you say something?”

“To Jack? About what?”

“No, I mean, you know—about the flower.”

She regarded me with curiosity. “Are you wearing makeup?”

“Why?”

“No reason. You look pretty, that’s all. You always look pretty.”

I leaned up to turn on the light. It was early for lights, but I thought it would be good to move the day along. Just, like, get to night.

“Well, at rehearsal,” Kate began, “Harrison said, ‘Nice rose.’” She started peeling an apple over the trash. “And you know when someone is thinking something? Well, he was definitely thinking something.” Kate finished with the apple, went to the counter, and cut it. She offered me some. I said no, thanks. She continued. “So, I said, ‘I wish I had someone to thank, but unfortunately, there was no name on the card.’ You know, I sort of hinted around.”

The coffee was boiling; she moved to turn off the heat. I felt embarrassed—for her, and also for Rourke. Kate could be very coquettish. I rested my head in the basin of my arms. My chin touched the table; the glass was cold. I thought I might vomit.

“And he said, ‘I doubt whoever sent it will stay anonymous for long.’”

“And then what?” I asked.

“And then, well, that’s it.” She handed me a hot mug.

“That’s it?” I lifted my head.

“Well, Michelle had a flower, so did Ellie, but he only mentioned mine.”

I took a sip of coffee. It was hot but good, and I felt better right away. It was nice, actually, spending time with Kate.

The front door slammed and Jack stormed in. He dumped two pizza boxes on the table and popped the stapled lid of the top one. Inside, the pie was shaped like a heart.

Kate said, “Hey, that’s really neat.”

Jack gestured to the pies with annoyance as he wiped his nose with his sleeve. “All they had to do was cut the dough to make two lousy hearts, and they wanted an extra buck per pie. Fucking proletariat morons.”

“Was it crowded? They were probably just busy,” Kate said.

Jack chucked his coat onto the floor in the hall. “Nah. It was empty. They just figured it was for her,” he said, referring to me, “so they gave me a hard time.” He hopped onto the counter. With his sneaker, he opened the base cabinet door and rested his feet on its rim. “Save the second pie,” he directed. “For Irene.”

He shot his hand through his hair and examined the room angrily. Kate whistled cheerfully, thoroughly immune to Jack’s sullen influence. Her body grazed his as she slid three unmatching glasses from the cabinet behind his head. He pulled back. I considered what was between them. There’s always something between people.

Jack glowered in my direction and scratched his jaw. “You haven’t slept yet, have you?”

“Oh, I forgot!” Kate interrupted, thrusting her shoulder at Jack. “Did you see my rose?”

Jack contemplated her with extreme disinterest, his hand hanging frozen on his face. “I know all about it.”

“What do you mean, you know? How do you know?”

Jack capitulated, plunging his arm to his lap. “Because Dan’s been talking about it for three fucking weeks.”

“Dan?”

Jack said, “Yeah, Dan.”

Kate set her coffee down and shuddered slightly, repeating “Dan.” She stood and padded out of the room, saying “Dan” again. Moments later her bedroom door slammed, and there was the distant sound of sobbing.

“What the hell’s wrong with Dan?” Jack demanded. He leapt off the counter and moved to the table and began plucking mushrooms from the pie.

I rubbed my face in circles with both hands, wondering what to do. It felt a little perverse to be in my position. Jack was contemplating me. The longer I remained silent, the greater the opportunity for him to construe that silence as evasion. It was amazing, the work his mind could do. He let the pizza lid float to a close. Stamped in red ink on the cover was a mustached guy in a chef’s hat holding a steaming pizza. He looked happy.

Jack raised my coffee cup. “Caffeine? Are you trying to kill yourself?” The mug smacked the table and coffee looped over the lip. “Dennis called me. He said you fainted.”

“I guess I—I fell. Or fainted.” I wasn’t sure what had happened.

He was behind my chair. “Stay still,” he urged, then he tilted my head to examine it. “Christ, Evie, there’s blood on it. Where’s the first aid kit?”

“Upstairs. In the bathroom.”

“Well, I can’t go up there. I might slap her,” Jack said. “You’d better go.”

I headed up slowly. I thought it was contradictory for Jack to get so upset over blood and caffeine, considering the abuses he leveled against himself. Besides, I hadn’t caused myself to faint, it just happened. Some people get bloody noses, others sleepwalk. Marilyn can get the hiccups for three days straight and Dad sneezes in series of thirteen—I faint. I’ve fainted at the Guggenheim, at Woolworth’s on 23rd Street, and at an International House of Pancakes in Cape Canaveral. Whenever Dr. Scott checks my blood pressure, he says, “Eighty over fifty. It’s a wonder you’re alive.”

I nudged Kate’s door. She was in bed, crying. “You don’t understand,” she said.

If she meant I didn’t know what it felt like to be in love, and in love with Rourke, she was wrong. But if she meant that I didn’t understand her love for him, she was right. If it was love that she felt, it was the sort of love that conveniently bypassed natural law and practical reality.

I felt a little light-headed, so I moved to her bed. I looked back to the spot I’d been standing in. I tried to imagine what it was like to talk to me. Was it hard or easy? Jack had said the blood was fresh. Maybe it was running down my back like a mane or tail.

“You think you know everything,” Kate said.

I thought she was alluding to sex. I wondered if she felt it was time, that to venture further into virginity would be to attach unwanted magnitude to that state. Maybe she hoped to resolve it, just as some people have to get their driver’s license at sixteen, though they have nowhere to go. It’s a perilous business, devising to be taken—the flouncing and cuing, the skittish surrender of reason. Sex demands equality because sex involves the will—someone’s will, preferably one’s own. Maybe I didn’t know everything, but unfortunately, I knew that much.

“One thing’s for sure,” I said as I moved to get the first aid box from the bathroom. “He’s not crying right now. He’s not crying over the Valentine you didn’t send.”