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“You had it in your pocket for how long?” “You went to class with it?” “The principal told you to take it to the library?”
Steven’s house had stables out back, and a three-car garage. I hadn’t realized Steven’s family was that rich. I wondered why he went to E. O. James instead of the private school, Forest Oaks, where the kids wear blue blazers with gold buttons up the front and play field hockey instead of normal sports like basketball.
Steven was in his bedroom, which I located only with detailed directions from Darla. When I went in, he was lying on his bed. He wasn’t listening to music or anything, just lying there with a scowl on his face, still in his suit, hell, still in his shiny shoes. His right hand was bandaged.
“I’m sorry,” I burst out. “I should have taken your finger to the nurse’s office.”
“Fuck that finger,” said Steven. “I never want to see it again.”
I sat on the edge of his bed. It had a nice bedspread with matching pillows. It looked like someone other than Steven cleaned his room. There was an acceptance letter from NYU on his desk. I realized that even though he was lying down, Steven’s body was rigid, the same as if he were standing. I could feel the tension in his muscles through the mattress. A cat padded into the room, looked around disdainfully, and padded out again.
“She won’t even look at me,” said Steven.
“I know,” I said quietly. “She won’t look at me either.”
Quiet, quiet. Two rigid people on a bed. I reached over and touched the place where Steven’s finger used to be.
119
“HE’S BETTER OFF WITHOUT HER,” WIN said, shoving an armful of books into her locker. “Steven needs to kiss a few boys before he decides to nest for life with a girl like Noe. Or any girl, really. Or any boy.”
“I know,” I said. “Once he gets away from his parents, he’s going to explode with pent-up brilliance. I wish I was going to be there to see it. I don’t think he’s even going to realize how badly he was hurting until he goes to New York and experiences something different.”
“I think a lot of people are going to realize that once they leave here,” Win said.
120
LATER THAT DAY I OVERHEARD NOE conferring with Ms. Bomtrauer by the water fountains. It turned out she was going to assistant coach the E. O. James gym team next year while she was going to Gailer.
Noe stopped carrying around Foucault’s Pendulum. Now the book under her arm was a catalog of gymnastics equipment. In English she leafed through it with a highlighter, swiping in yellow the item numbers of mats and trampolines and bar equipment. Funding had come through for new leotards: at lunch, the gym birds huddled around a glossy spread of styles to choose from. Did they want a sequined starburst across the breasts, or a sporty flash up each side of the rib cage? I strained my ears to hear Noe’s voice in spite of myself, listening to the authoritative way she wielded her new vocabulary of V-necks and bias cuts and sparkle counts.
As I listened to her holding forth on pricing and sizing, a spooky thing danced on the crown of my skull. I thought of her trading air kisses with Darla at the Java Bean and putting girls through their paces at the crumbling YMCA. Buying hair gel at the Walmart, watching circus videos in her bedroom, arranging the dried flowers on her dresser.
Her voice trailed after me all the way out of the cafeteria, like a song you can’t get out of your head, a scent you’re surprised to find still lingering on your clothes.
You’d be amazed who leaves and who doesn’t, at the end of the day.
121
STEVEN WASN’T IN SCHOOL THE NEXT day, or the next. His spot next to mine in the art morgue was empty. The school had run out of art supplies, so we were down to the cheapest possible art form: that old standby, the collage.
I worked on my collage in silence, cutting pictures out of magazines and dutifully gluing them to the page. My collage looked like everyone else’s. Maybe the assignment would have worked better if we weren’t all cutting things out from the same stack of magazines. Or maybe that was the point: we were all working from the same material, even if we didn’t acknowledge it, even if we could trick ourselves into thinking we were so different from one another by holding the scissors differently or getting creative with the layout of the words and images on the page.
Win and I sat together at lunch. Dominic and Kris sat with us too. Sometimes Margot and Eliza joined us and sometimes they didn’t. Steven had succeeded in that regard: suddenly, we were our own little friend group. It was actually really nice. If I hadn’t been so sad about Steven, it would have been even nicer. I still felt something inside me shrink when I walked past Noe or one of the girls from the gym team, but now at least I had people to be with, and I wasn’t completely alone.
“Have you heard anything from Steven?” Win said.
That surprised me. I always assumed everyone was closer with everyone else than I was, but in this case Win thought I was the closer friend, and as I started to talk about Steven I realized it was true.
I am close with Steven, I thought to myself. It was a strange thought. It was strange to think of myself as being close with someone who wasn’t Noe. I didn’t know it was possible to add people to your repertoire of closeness. I don’t know why I thought that; I just did.
“Yeah,” I said, and I told Win some of what I knew.
It felt strange to be the person who knew things, instead of the person who had to find them out by asking other people. It meant that someone trusted me. Did that mean that Noe had never trusted me?
I slipped the thought into my pocket with all the others that had been collecting there that year.
122
I WENT TO SEE STEVEN AGAIN later that week. He was still lying on his bed. Still wearing his suit. Still wearing his polished shoes. I wondered if he got dressed like that every morning, or if he had never changed.
“I still have your finger,” I said. “It’s in my freezer. If you don’t ask for it soon, I’m going to get it taxidermied.”
When Steven didn’t make any sign of answering in the near future, I took out my music player and slipped an earbud into his ear. I lay down beside him on the bed and slipped the other one into my own.
We listened to The Velvet Underground, then a few chapters of Kingdom of Stones. When I got up to leave, Steven spoke suddenly.
“They all wanted me to cut off a piece of myself.”
I paused in his doorway. “Who?”
“Noe. My parents. The school. And I thought, I’d rather cut off my finger than my soul.” He looked at me with grim amusement. “I guess that’s pretty emo.”
I walked back to his bed and sat down. For some reason, my heart had begun to hammer. Normally, I would take that as a sign that I should make a hasty exit or steer the conversation toward a neutral topic, but then a fu
“Steven?” I said. “If I tell you something really personal, will you tell me something really personal?”
“A
123
I HAD THOUGHT THAT THE FIRST time I told anyone about Scott, I would break down. And maybe I would have four years ago. But it was like I’d grown stronger without noticing it, the way a seed doesn’t look like much until you turn around and see that it’s grown into a tree whose fruit you can actually eat.