“I know that you’re a person,” William says. “Of course you are a person.”
“Well, you’re not. You’re a jerk who only wants to nail me.” Bridget finally stops surging forward, at the edge of the park now. She pauses and turns to him and now they are back where the streetlights are working. Her eyes are very shiny. “What I want to know is, who told you I was going to be a nun?”
“Whoa!” says Paula, rising up out of the darkness. Bridget startles and stares at her, openmouthed. Paula has left the Casters’ backyard quickly, as instructed, in case the police come. She must be on her way to see how the sex ambush is going; so far, it is an abysmal failure. “You’re going to be a nun?”
Bridget doesn’t answer. She takes one stamping step back toward William, ponytail swinging, and her words are only for him. “I already went through all this ‘get in the nun’s pants’ stuff at my last school. How did you find out?”
She is so fierce, her shoulders braced, her neck extended. This anger, so complete, it is as self-contained and lovely as her joy. William swallows and simply looks at her.
Finally, she shakes her head, and turns away. She stomps off, and William and Paula stand there, silent, watching her go.
“So, that went well,” Paula says, when Bridget is out of earshot.
William asks, “What does it say about me on the second-floor girls’ bathroom wall?”
Paula turns to him, surprised. “Man, for a new girl, she picks up on stuff quick, huh? It’s this thing I wrote in Sharpie last year, after we hooked up. A silly thing.”
William waits.
“It’s nothing,” Paula says, but he is still motionless, waiting. “Fine. It says, ‘Honk if you’ve ridden Space Mountain.’ ”
It takes him a few seconds to get it, and then he asks, “I’m Space Mountain?”
His lungs feel small and his body wants to rock itself. His last nickname was back in middle school. They called him Moosetard, and he hated it.
“Oh, stand down, Bubba, it’s a compliment,” Paula says. “It means, like . . .” He won’t look at her. His skin feels hot. “Space Mountain is the best ride in the park.”
William sucks a piece of his inside cheek in between his teeth and bears down, hard enough to hurt. He’d spit his penny out in the Casters’ yard because he thought there might be kissing. That has not worked out.
He fishes in his pocket, but the only penny he has is from 1970. No good. Pennies minted before 1982 don’t taste right.
Paula blows out a short huff of breath and shuffles her feet. “Stop swelling like a mad toad. I’m going to say a nice, true thing to you now, William. So don’t you ever give me shit about it, okay? I call you Space Mountain because back when you and I did it, you were nice to me. The whole time you were nice, and you didn’t even love me. The next day, you acted like we were friends. In public. Guys never do that after. Before, sure. When they have you off alone and they want something. But you were my friend, after.”
He can look at her now, but her whole face is crimson, and she won’t look back.
“I started calling you Space Mountain. The ho brigade got interested. That’s why Denise and Amy and that Michelle girl all hooked up with you. You were nice to them, too, I guess, and damn, but you can use that body. So your legend grew. Then one day at school—I may not have been wholly sober—I wrote the honk thing. It caught on. Girls started writing ‘Honk!’ and the date they’d been with you under. There’s like thirty honks there now.”
William’s eyebrows rise.
“Are we okay?” Paula says, with her shoulders hunched up around her ears.
William shakes his head, but not to say no. He shakes it because the math is wrong. “There should only be eight honks.”
Paula smiles and the tension in her body eases. “Girls lie about sex, just like boys do. So, Bridget saw all the honks, and now she thinks you’re this enormous man-whore, out to nail a future nun.” Paula has breezed right past whatever complicated girl-feeling she just had, and now she is back on topic. It is his favorite thing about her, this ability to stay on point. Her brain is really quite fine. “Do you think she was serious? About the nun thing?”
“Yes,” William says. It explains a lot, actually.
“Well, I’m sorry I told everyone you were this amazing lay,” Paula says. When he doesn’t respond, she makes a finger hook and waves it in front of his eyes. He stares up the street after Bridget, and she puffs out an exasperated sigh. “I really am sorry, Bubba. I can fix it, though. I’ll talk to her.”
“No,” William says. “I will.” He starts down the road.
“Now?” Paula says, starting after him.
In answer, he breaks into an easy run, loping fast up the street after Bridget, who is a tiny figure under a streetlight four blocks up, turning right and disappearing. Paula sprints and keeps up with him, barely.
“Oh yeah, this is going to go well,” Paula says, and even though she is huffing, she exaggerates her inflection to leave him with no doubt that this is sarcasm. He speeds up.
When he rounds the corner, he sees Bridget has stopped about a block ahead of him. She is sitting on one of a pair of brick posts that stand on either side of someone’s driveway. She is scrubbing at her eyes. She looks up as they get close; Paula is huffing very loudly now. She’s fallen a few feet behind.
“You followed me? Really?” Bridget says. Her nose is swollen and very pink.
He shrugs and then sits on top of the other post. Paula stops and bends at the waist, trying to get her breath back.
He says to Bridget, “It wasn’t because you want to be a nun. I didn’t know.”
She pushes at her last tears, shoving them off her cheeks with mad, flat hands. “Well, now you do.”
“I wasn’t only trying to nail you,” he says, and she lets out a startled bark of laughter. “I wanted to make something nice for you.”
“Why would you do all that?” Bridget asks. She is really talking to him now. Not angry talk, and the crying has stopped. This is a conversation, and he is having it with Bridget. His veins fill up with fast, red blood, and he is glad to have Paula standing by, like a referee or a coach, ready to step in when he begins to fuck it up.
“I saw you tearing out the phlox, in the park,” he says. He spreads his hands helplessly.
It is a bad answer, incomplete, but she doesn’t say that. Instead, she says, “Last year, at my old school, this one group of guys had a bet on who could, you know, talk me out of it. The nun thing. Except not talk. You know what I mean?” William doesn’t, and it must show on his face, because she adds, “They bet on who could fuck me out of it.”
Paula has her breath back. She straightens and stands with one hip cocked, appraising Bridget. “Boom, William! You just got f-bombed.”
“I’m just quoting what those boys said.” Bridget’s cheeks have pinked.
“Pretty bold quote, for a nun,” Paula answers.
“I’m just a person,” Bridget says, clearly exasperated. “Every nun is always just a person. But no one seems to get that. So I didn’t tell anyone here, and now instead of not having friends because I’m Weirdo Nun Girl, I don’t have friends because I can’t talk about anything that matters.”
“William will be your friend,” Paula says promptly. She grins and adds, “You probably don’t even have to nail him.”
Bridget blinks, looks back and forth between them. “I still don’t get it. Why you did all this, the fireworks and the perfume, the note thing. Why do it, if . . .” She trails off.
He stays still with his hands still spread, still helpless. He doesn’t have words for it, how it was to see her in the park. She is a thing he wants to be near in his whole body, to understand with all his mind.
“No one said you could tear out those flowers. I saw you doing it, and I liked you,” he says.
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“That’s a little weird,” she says, but not mean at all. Like she is interested in figuring it out.
“A little?” Paula says. She cackles. “Sis, wake up! Weird is his go-to setting. He’s a total Aspy freak. Computer brain. Ask him to do math in his head. You’ll die. And if you’re friends with him, you get free A’s in Calculus because he doesn’t have the world’s best moral compass. Though maybe future nuns don’t cheat, I dunno. They sure do seem to cuss and lose their tempers . . .” She is saying sassy Paula things, but her voice sounds like it is being kind to Bridget. This is Paula, being his wingman. “I’ll tell you one more thing. He’s the best friend I’ve had in my whole life. Only guy who’s never shot me full of bull, and he can keep a secret. Maybe because he almost never talks. Be mad he made you fireworks if you want, Sister Potty-Quotes, but don’t be stupid. You think Space Mountain here has to work this hard to get laid? Please. Look at him. They come to him. He likes you, dumbass. He just likes you.” She grabs William’s hand and tugs him up to his feet, off the post. “You’re done here, William,” she says, and starts pulling him away.
He lets her, because most of what she has said is right. Only most, because of course he does want to have sex with Bridget. Avidly. But he doesn’t think this is a thing he should explain right now. Paula has the gist of it; it wasn’t only to fuck her. He wants to fuck her and love her and marry her, in any order she will take these things.
That Monday, at lunch, William and Paula are sitting at their small four-top right beside the long table full of the football players and their girls. Paula calls it the Annex. They don’t sit with the team because Paula has had sex with a lot of them. But they sit near, because the team is not allowed to ignore her or talk shit. They have to say hello to her and wave back if she waves. These are William’s rules.
Paula has a new rule, too, this year: William’s teammates cannot hit her up for sex. She only goes with college boys now.
Paula’s telling him some long, involved story about a party at Emory when he sees Bridget, walking toward them. The air heats and vibrates around him. Bridget is carrying her tray. Her walk is not hesitant. With purpose, she approaches. She has made a decision. She passes the smart girls’ lunch table, beelining toward them.
Watching the bright tail of hair swinging in tandem with her curvy hips, he is not sure how to be friends with a Bridget who is going to be a nun. He cannot lie down by Bridget and have her bite his shoulder the way Paula can. His body would unstoppably roll toward Bridget, and his mouth would bite her back. Paula’s nearly naked body is null to him, no longer viable, as if she is, in spite of their disparate ethnicities, his sister. He could not be remotely peaceful if Bridget were prone on a roof near him in her underpants. When Bridget says that she will be a nun, she means that she will not belong to him, and he cannot belong to her.
She says, “Hi,” and drops onto the seat beside Paula, across from him.
He can smell her. Orange blossoms, undercut with green herbs. She is wearing his catalyst.
Paula says, “Yo, Mother Superior,” and after that, they are three, William and Paula and Bridget, always together, untouching, each in their separate skins.
But he is waiting. He can wait, because she can say with her mouth that she is going to be a nun, and never love a man, never be in love with him, but chemistry is truer than anything a person says. She has sprayed the thing he made onto her skin. She has marked herself with his scent.
He never stopped making it for her, and she never stopped wearing it. His waiting body stayed blank, done with being the best ride in the park. He was waiting for the contact that he knew was coming. Orange blossoms, and green herbs; that was the smell of Bridget, always, then and now. Exactly now.
He is not seventeen, and Paula is not here. He is in the hospital, floating slowly down from the morphine; pain is closer, more relevant, but only by a little. Pain and Bridget’s scent, both faint, have come into the room together. The smell makes the air heavier than when Twyla was a thousand pounds pressed into his side.
He opens his eyes. Dawn has come. So has his wife. She floats and wavers. Sunlight pushes in the window behind her, turning her hair into a halo of molten copper-blond around her face. She is wearing a long pale dress, and the sunlight comes through that, too, lighting up the outline of her body.
It is Bridget, and she still believes in miracles. She believes that if he puts his hand out, his arm could span time, reach backward, past the whole bleak silence of the last year, into the before, before they put her in the ambulance, before she did the unforgivable. If only he believed it, too, he could pull her to him now, put his mouth on hers, and have her, bullet holes and trucks and gravity and God and space and time be damned. The look on her face—he knows this look, though it is tempered now by sorrow. It is permission.
He breathes in the air and the air is full of her smell. Her scent chokes him.
“Are you here to pray for me?” William asks. “Don’t pray for me.” His throat is parched, and his voice comes out of it in a raspy, burned-up whisper. His words are slurred. His blood is thick with drugs. He will not reach. Her body bends and ripples in the rising sun, and her hair is made of light. “I’m going to close my eyes now,” he says. “When they open, you won’t be here anymore.”
He blinks, a long, black blink that could be twenty seconds or an hour. Morphine has stolen all his sense of time. In the dark of it, her scent begins to fade. He rolls onto his unshot side to face the wall, dragging the box with the button with him, pressing and pressing. He keeps flooding his blood with the drug, so everything stays distant. He’s willing to accept the spine shudders, the woozy unreality of the room, and the clenched jaw, if these things come with unconsciousness. Better darkness than seeing Bridget, at any age. He has worked so hard, for months now, to blank out any memory that might have her in it. To push it away, unexamined. He cannot keep remembering his wife tearing up a garden at sixteen, must stop watching her take on his scent at seventeen. He can’t have the grown-up version wafting into his hospital room, looking so holy, so forgiving. He has not, will not, cannot forgive her.
He wakes up facing the flat green wall, still rolled onto his unshot side. He sucks in a great, heaving breath through his nose. The air is still and quiet and smells only like cheap cleaning fluid.
“Are you awake, Bubba?” Paula’s voice, speaking quietly in case he’s not.
He rolls cautiously onto his back.
The room is full of silent people, looking at him. His jaw aches. He feels woozy and nauseous and all the people in the room are undulating inside their skins. The only one he recognizes is Paula, who is sitting on the other bed in a black skirt and a white blouse, her expensive jacket in a crumple beside her.
She smiles when she sees his eyes and says, “What did I tell you about getting shot? What did I tell you?”
“Nothing,” William says. “Though in retrospect, you meant to tell me not to?” His voice comes out hoarse and overloud.
“I see the bullet missed your smart-ass gland,” Paula says. Her head wavers back and forth on her wobbling neck, and he weaves his own head back and forth, trying to match the movement to hers. “Bubba? Did you get shot in the brain? Or do they have you on the good drugs?” He holds up the box with the button, and she smiles. “Yummy. Okay, but don’t be shot again. Ever.”
“Check,” William says.
The tall, skinny boy standing to her left shuffles impatiently. William doesn’t know him. He’s college-aged, wearing long shorts and flip-flops. His face looks like he is eating something sour.
Closer to his bed, in the room’s only visitor’s chair, sits a familiar dark-haired girl with a little boy in her lap. The boy is holding a tattered, grimy origami bird.
“Hello, Natty,” William says. He picks up the bed remote and presses the button that raises him to sit.
&n
bsp; “Hello, William,” the little boy says. “Mommy said you wasn’t killed.”
“How are you feeling?” the girl says, shyly, and the name comes back as he hears that familiar accent. Shandi.
“Yes, William, how are you feeling?” says Paula, raising her eyebrows at him. She waggles them significantly. “I see you’ve made new friends. Pretty ones. With . . .” Behind Shandi’s back, Paula hovers her hands over her own small breasts, honking large imaginary ones.
Shandi says, “Natty’s been really worried.”
“Psssh,” says William, looking at Natty now. He waves one hand expansively, which causes a long, shuddering pain to radiate from his side, but the morphine makes this only mildly interesting. “I’m hardly even scratched.”
A lie, but it is oftentimes expedient and kind to lie to children. The last two months that Twyla was alive, he nightly had to shoo away the Hommy-Hom who lived in her closet. It was an idea he resisted at first. Instead he explained the natural world to Twyla, the nonexistence of monsters in general and Hommy-Homs in the specific. Twyla listened and nodded, and at the end he said to her, “So monsters don’t exist, do they?”
She answered, very serious, “No, Daddy. ’Cept dis Hommy-Hom.” And pointed at the closet.
“My bird has blood on it,” the little boy tells him, mournful. “I’m not allowed to keep it.”
He holds it out, showing William the rusty streak on the tail.
“I’ll make you another,” William says.
Paula, sounding very much like herself now, says, “By the way, I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Me, too,” William says. It is expedient and kind to lie to adults sometimes, as well. “Why aren’t you in court?”
“I need to be. I had to get a continuance, and now my bitch client has decided we should renegotiate and go after that second summer home. All because you couldn’t wait to get shot until tomorrow.”