Perfect, I think. Just perfect.
Today I feel like I’m floating outside of my body, hovering just on the periphery of life, watching myself feeling so happy. This moment, like a snapshot, will be frozen forever in my memory.
Helena, Damian, and I arrive at school early, a whole hour before the first bell, to tape up the posters that Helena and I painted last night and photocopied in the school office this morning. We are working our way through the corridors, from one end of the school to the other and have a system down—Helena picks a spot, Damian holds the poster in place, Helena rips the masking tape, and I roll each strip into loops and hand them to Damian, who carefully lifts each corner of the poster, places a loop of tape on it, then waves his hand over it, smoothing any creases and bumps.
We work mainly in silence, but every so often, Helena or I will murmur to Damian that the poster he is holding up is crooked, or he complains that his arms are falling asleep if I take too long to pass him a loop of tape. Then he shoots me a crooked grin and hangs his head between his raised arms as if unbearably weary.
“These posters look pretty good,” he admits in a teasing voice. “Even if they are starting to feel like they weigh a ton.”
ARTISTS! LGHS WANTS YOU TO BRING YOUR DRAWINGS,
PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND ANY OTHER WORKS TO A
CELEBRATION OF ART AND LIFE.
FEBRUARY 8, 6 O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
“Maybe you should start working out,” I joke.
“Maybe if you weren’t so slow—” I elbow Damian in the ribs, then fall against him laughing. He lets the poster he’s holding fall and wraps his arms around me. He’s so warm and solid. Suddenly I’m the carnation. I can’t imagine feeling brighter or more beautiful. And I can’t believe I could feel more at home anywhere.
“Hey, I hate to break up the lovefest, but the halls are going to start filling up in about ten minutes, so let’s get a move on and try to finish. We only have the D hallway left,” Helena urges, an impish smile playing over her lips.
“Okay, okay,” Damian says with a heavy sigh and a playful shrug of his shoulders. “The lady is a taskmaster.”
His silver eyes are dancing with laughter. I have never seen Damian so light of heart. It is contagious and it is wonderful.
We quickly finish papering the last hall just as the first bell rings. Waves of bodies pour into the D hallway as we gather the leftover posters and rolls of tape. We stand back and watch as, one by one, kids notice the posters and stop and stare, as if trying to puzzle out the answer to some complex math problem.
“Think people will show?” Damian asks, looking down at Helena and me.
“I do,” Helena says with certainty. “For sure.”
“Well, here’s hoping,” I add. Damian reaches over and squeezes my hand. My stomach flutters nervously. Excitedly. It’s as though a new page is turning over.
Later that afternoon, Damian and I are in the barn, sitting beside each other, staring at my map. Now that I am several feet away from it, my breath catches as I recall the plain board covered with gray smudges I found just half a year ago. Half a year. Time goes so fast. It’s almost a year since—
The map. The pieces of Lincoln Grove spring from the pine surface. The board is shaded over with greens and browns and yellows and blues, from pastel pencils and acrylic paints. The background colors and textures reflect the fields and roads, rivers, woods, creek, and pond. On top of the paints and pastels, I drew in some of the buildings and houses and streets of Lincoln Grove with charcoal and marker. Every single fragment of this town is there, painted and positioned in its proper place.
I’ve highlighted the spots from my list with all sorts of odds and ends: bits of earth, metal, wood, grass, leaves, cotton wool, and fabric. And I’ve drawn the scenes atop these materials with markers and paint. The schools are built of piles of pebbles, the baseball diamond a mat of grass, the Wyatt cornfields yellow flannel. I used moss and leaves for the park grounds and creek, a standing tree branch at the bend in the county road, blue mylar from a balloon for the swimming pool, cotton stuffing for the skating pond, and a black button strung from a tripod of paper clips for the tire swing. The details are intricate, and although the distances are not to scale, I can truly see my town in it. It is a living thing.
But, there is a hole in the northwest corner, where my house should rest. It gapes at me. I do not know how to make a house that no longer feels like a home. How do I render that?
Then I know. Seashells. Houses that are no longer homes.
I turn to Damian. “Where can I find seashells?” I ask.
“Seashells?” he repeats. He puts his fingers to his temples as he ponders the question. “There are clams in the pond. Would clamshells work?”
“Yes! You’re a genius!” I exclaim, and kiss him roundly on the lips. I pull back quickly, embarrassed by my forwardness.
“I know,” Damian answers smugly. He leans in for another kiss. It’s become completely natural, this kissing business. Still weird to me. But lovely.
“Fancy a trip to the skating pond?” I ask.
“I hear it’s beautiful this time of the year,” he replies. “Let’s go.” Damian extends a hand and pulls me to my feet.
“Beautiful it may be, but do you think we can find clamshells this time of the year? I mean, the pond is frozen over.”
“Maybe we should bring shovels, just in case,” Damian suggests.
“Where are we going to get shovels?” I grumble.
“Not to fear. I have a place,” he replies with a grin. We pile into the El Camino and roar across Union Street, keeping south of the county road. We’re passing houses that don’t look very dissimilar from mine, but some are slightly run-down. Soon, Damian pulls into a driveway. The house is painted a mustard yellow with green shutters, and although the driveway is cracked with weeds sprouting in many places, the house looks well kept.
“Welcome to my humble abode. Now, you stay here,” Damian urges me to stay in the car. But I follow him up the driveway and into the garage anyway.
Clutter. I’ve never seen so many things all in one place. It is practically filled to the ceiling, from wall to wall, with stuff. There are naked lamps without shades; there are lamps with shades that have turned brown and yellow with age; there is a pair of wooden chairs with red upholstered seat bottoms littered with holes and tears where the stuffing climbs out; there is a wilted cardboard box with a baseball bat and a collection of various balls—baseballs, basketball, soccer ball, football, tennis balls; there is a mustard yellow stove that is missing a burner; there is a crowd of vases and flowerpots, many of which are chipped and cracked; there is a dirt bike and a lawn mower and a tool bench and shelves of plastic containers holding nuts and screws and nails and bolts. The back wall is lined with a wooden plank to which hooks are nailed, holding up hammers and mallets and screwdrivers, two kinds of handsaws, and a drill.
My eyes have gone wide; they’re probably bugging out of my head like two brown dinner plates. There’s hardly space to walk through the clutter, and I look on as Damian twists and dodges, carving a path to a far corner where a snow shovel and a garden shovel are both propped against the wall. He takes both shovels then pulls a spade down from the tool board.
He finally makes his way back to me, shaking his head. “You’ve witnessed our dirty secret,” he says with a grin. “My mom is going to kill me. I keep promising her I’ll clean it out, that we’ll have a garage sale. It’s just that there’s always something else—something better to do,” he finishes ruefully.
“Maybe we could do it together?” I offer.
“My mom would clobber me if she knew I’d let you in here to see this mess, let alone allowed you to lift a finger to clean any of it.”
“I promise you, our basement is almost as bad as this,” I tell him, wrapping my arm around his neck. “Almost,” I add with a chuckle.
“Come on, let’s go,” Damian says, digging a finger into my side to t
ickle me and laughing at my answering shriek.
We climb back into his car. I still marvel at how he holds open the passenger door for me, watching to make sure my fingers, legs, and coat are all safely stowed inside before carefully closing the door.
Once we arrive at the pond, Damian takes the shovels from the back of his truck and I follow him past the ice-skaters and the hot cocoa stand, to the edge of the frozen water at the far end of the pond, where the ice stays thin. He drops the garden shovel and hands me the spade, then, with snow shovel in hand, bends, tucks the trowel into the ground, and lifts up a load of fluffy snow. He drops it behind him then goes in for another shovelful. Once he has cleared a bare patch of soil, I kneel down and begin to scrape at the hard ground with the spade. It’s tough going, and, even with wool gloves on my hands, my fingers are turning as stiff as the dirt. I drop the spade and flex my fingers, then start again.
“Here, let me,” Damian says, nudging me over and taking the spade from my frozen fingers. I stay next to him and look up to see several ice-skaters eyeing us curiously.
“What a strange pair we must make,” I remark.
“What do you mean?” Damian stops digging and drops the spade, turning to look at me. There isn’t a glint of a smile in his eyes.
“I just mean that we must look pretty weird, crouched here, digging.”
“Oh,” he says woodenly, then turns back to work.
What did he think I meant? I wonder.
All of our earlier cheerfulness seems to have been sucked away, as though someone pulled the plug in a bathtub drain. What’s worse is I can’t even say what changed. But something happened to create a chill that now hangs in the air between us. The cold seems to pierce my heavy down coat, clawing its way through layers of feathers and wool sweater and cotton shirt, burrowing deep into my skin. And suddenly our hunt for clamshells by the side of an ice-skating pond in the dead of winter feels worse than absurd. It feels childish. Foolish.
Has Damian just been humoring me these past few weeks? Has he grown tired of it, tired of hanging around with a flat-chested fourteen-year-old? A ball, heavy and bitter, lodges in the back of my throat. I look over at Damian. He is scratching at the frozen soil with a strange ferocity. Does he want to break up with me? We aren’t even officially dating, so I’m not sure that he would have to.
“We must look ridiculous—” I start, but am cut off by a vicious glare.
“You think we look ridiculous? Are you worried about being seen with the freak of Lincoln Grove?” he snaps.
I feel like I am reeling. His words might as well have been a bat brought down on my head.
“What?” I gasp.
“Oh, come on. You don’t want to be seen out here with me. Maybe you’re embarrassed by me. I don’t know. But don’t worry. I’ll save you the trouble.”
“Have you gone crazy? What are you talking about?” My poor mind is trying so hard to understand, but it’s like he’s speaking a foreign language. I can’t seem to put his words together and make sense of them.
“Crazy?” he snaps. “Yeah, maybe. That would make a whole lot of sense to everyone, wouldn’t it? Although everybody might be wondering about you. I mean, what are you doing hanging around with the crazy dude who killed your brother?” He’s yelling, and his eyes have gone narrow and look as hard as the frostbitten earth. Some of the ice-skaters have stopped skating and gliding in their circles to watch us.
“Damian, I don’t understand!” I sound like I’m pleading with him, but I don’t know what I’m begging for. It’s as though I need forgiveness, but I haven’t done anything. Have I?
“Don’t worry. I’ll spell it out for you. Really clear.” Damian springs to his feet, quick and fluid like a panther. Then he tosses the spade down to the ground, and it rings with a metallic hollowness and the sharpness of gunfire. He throws one leg over the wooden rails blocking access to this end of the pond. He kicks the rusty metal sign nailed to the post. NO SKATING. THIN ICE. He starts to walk toward the center of the ice, his trench coat billowing out behind him like a parachute. My heart has started beating a rapid staccato and I don’t think I’ll ever catch my breath again. What is he doing?
“Damian, come back here! What are you doing?” I scream.
He doesn’t waver, continues moving in a straight line toward the center of the ice. I can hear his heavy black combat boots crunching over the frozen surface. My stomach is churning, my brain is churning. Before I am even aware of what I’m doing, I have started after him. All I know is I have to get him back.
The ice is mostly covered with a light dusting of snow, but before I am five steps from the shoreline, my foot suddenly slides out from under me, and the rest of my body follows. I hit the ice hard, and my breath escapes in a grunt.
I am sitting on my bottom when I hear it. The worst sound. A thunderous cracking, like the report of a starter pistol, shakes me to my senses. I look down and see a long seam in the milky ice threading out from under me, snaking toward Damian. The white ripple grows like an arm, reaching, reaching. And it is crossed by a second fissure.
“Cora!” Damian calls. He turns around gingerly and I can read in the horror splashed across his face that things do not look promising. I glance down. The ice has begun to splinter, jagged branches radiating out from under my butt. “Cora,” he says, “look at me.”
It’s impossible to tear my eyes from the doom I see scrawled across the ice. Another gasping, tearing sound clenches at the air. I look up and find Damian on his hands and knees, crawling achingly slowly toward me, weaving around the fissures and cracks.
He comes close to me and reaches for my hand. “Cora, can you slide toward me?”
I shake my head. I am frozen; I think my bottom may be frozen, fixed to the pond’s surface. A crowd has formed at the far end of the pond. People point and shout, but I can’t focus on what they’re saying. We’re really a spectacle now.
“Hey, Cora, you can do this. Just look at me, and push off with your hands and slide.” Damian is coaxing me in the soft, lulling tone he might use if he were trying to soothe a wild animal. A crease of worry pocks his forehead. He reaches out a hand to me, and slowly, so slowly, I lift my hand, too.
The booming of another gash opening up spurs me into action. I plant my back hand on the ice, feeling the rough unevenness of the fractured surface through my glove. I begin to crab walk, moving deliberately as though in slow motion, toward Damian. My heart is beating an angry, frightened tattoo. This must be how deer feel when the rumbling explosion of a hunter’s rifle pursues them. Must move quickly, smoothly.
“That’s it, Cor.” He is crawling closer, then I feel the steadying warmth of his hand closed around my wrist. Then Damian begins to inch toward the shoreline, towing me after him. As we reach the bank of the pond, another rupture in the smooth, frosty surface follows us to the very edge. Damian quickly shoves me forward, and then I am splayed out on my stomach on the snowy bank. I feel him beside me before I can turn my head to look for him. “I’m sorry,” he gasps. “I’m so sorry, Cor.”
That’s when I realize I am shuddering with great, heaving sobs. I am lying facedown in the snow, and the cold damp is filling my nostrils, and I cough and splutter, and sit up before I drown in snow.
“What were you doing, Damian?” I manage between sobs.
“I—I don’t know,” he admits, his voice low. I cannot bring my eyes to meet his.
“Were you trying to prove something?” I ask. “Because I don’t know what you possibly could have been thinking. Or what you were trying to prove.”
“I can’t even remember now,” Damian mumbles. “I was so upset, and now…I just can’t remember.”
I look hard at him, study the right angle his jawline makes, the teardrop shape of his cheekbones, the line of his nose, the square of his chin. He is handsome, but maybe he isn’t for me. Not anymore, not after this. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I say.
“Cora, I’m sorry. I thought—”
“What? What could you possibly have thought to make you believe that walking out onto that ice was okay?”
“I thought you were ashamed of me, to be seen with me,” he replies, a deep blush staining his cheeks.
“What?” I splutter. “That is insane. Where could you possibly have gotten that idea from?”
“I don’t know. I guess…I guess I just don’t understand why you would ever want to be with me. I’m a total screwup,” he says. “I mean, look at me. Look at what I just did. Seriously, if you never wanted to speak to me again, I’d understand,” he tells me, disgust filling his voice.
“Damian, we’re all screwups. Each in our own special, stupid way,” I tell him. As I say the words, I realize how true they are. And maybe that’s the trick to getting through it, through life: realizing that everybody, including ourselves, is lugging around some kind of screwed-up baggage. Maybe we are put here to help each other carry the loads.
“Do you hate me?” Damian asks, his voice cracking.
“Don’t be stupid. How could I hate you? You’re the only one who gets me,” I answer ruefully. He puts his head down in the snow with a relieved sigh. I do the same, then he turns over onto his back and begins waving his arms and legs back and forth. “A snow angel?” I have not made one for years. I flip over onto my back, too, and move my arms and my legs in and out like a scissor. And there we lie, side by side, two screwup angels in the snow.
When we are too wet and shivery to lie there any longer, we roll ourselves up and Damian helps me to my feet.
“Thank you,” he says softly, then plants a kiss, soft as a snowflake, on my cheek. And we walk back to his car, hand in hand.
Chapter Fifteen
I am about to do something. Something bad. My whole body is trembling. Whether it’s with disgust or excitement or fear, I can’t tell. The permission forms for London are due soon, by March 15, but I can’t wait. I am sitting on my bed, the acceptance and registration papers balanced on my lap. Where I have the pen point pressed, the black ink bleeds deep into the fibers of the paper. I hold the pen there, willing my hand to steady itself. Then quickly I trace the swoops and swirls of my mother’s signature. There it is, Marie Bradley, outlined in heavy script, and I stare at the thick, familiar-looking letters. I can’t see anything else.