Circle of Three (17 page)

“Is it really bleeding?” I scrambled up and went to him. He half turned around to say no, but it was. All I had was my wadded-up Kleenex. I passed it over his shoulder. “I’m really, really sorry. I just, all of a sudden, you know. Remembered.”

“We could go over there,” he said nasally, pointing to some trees.

“Um, well. I guess I should get back.”

“Okay.”

“Because I’ve got that test.”

“Whatever.”

“But that was…” I went blank. I turned away and started gathering up our stuff, pretending I hadn’t said anything. How could anyone finish that sentence? Who would be stupid enough to start that sentence? “That was nice”? “That was fun”? “Thanks for feeling me up, let’s do it again sometime”? I often think my life would be a lot easier if I were a mute.

Raven’s car is an old Plymouth station wagon he spray-painted black to look like a hearse. The vanity license tag says
CDVRS RUS
, which hardly anyone gets unless they know him. The inside smells like decaying leather, old bananas, and smoke. He always drives slowly and carefully, not like every other kid I know who can drive. I kept sneaking looks at him, trying to figure out how he was feeling. I hoped he
wasn’t hurt or mad at me. I’d have apologized more, but I didn’t necessarily want him to think I wanted to start up again right away or anything—like bloodying his nose was the only thing stopping us from some hot and heavy love affair. But I didn’t really think he thought that anyway.

“Hey, you know my friend Jess? The guy I told you about, the ark guy? Jess Deeping? That’s his road—if you turn right there, that goes to his farm.” Raven nodded but didn’t slow down. “Turn! Turn, okay?” The car slowed; we turned in at the gravel drive between the gateposts. “I just—I was thinking we could say hi, is that okay? He’s probably not even there. Look, those are his cows, that’s all his land, that whole hill. Isn’t it pretty? Some of it’s on the river, too.” Raven kept his eyes on the lane and didn’t look around. “We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. We can just say hi.” We rounded the last corner and the house came into view, then the barns. Raven probably thought farms were hokey or retro or exploitive or something, but I thought Jess’s was beautiful. “That’s Mr. Green, the hired man,” I said, pointing. “Look, he’s painting. He’s painting that barn red again, and it doesn’t even need it. Isn’t this place pretty?”

The dogs were swarming the car, barking and growling, pretending they were fierce. “There’s Tracer! Hi, girl!” As soon as Raven stopped, I jumped out of the car and dropped to my knees on the gravel. The dogs backed away, still barking, but I called them by their names and gradually they sidled over, all but Tough Guy, and started sniffing my hands, my clothes. “Hey, Mouse, hey, Red. Hi, guys, did you miss me?”

I stood up when I realized Raven wasn’t getting out of the car, which was still idling. Mr. Green came over, wiping his hands on a paint-spattered cloth.

“Hey,” he said, “how you doing?” He shoved the rag in the pocket of his dirty coveralls and squinted, trying to see who was in the driver’s seat of the Plymouth. Mr. Green was an old man, maybe sixty, with a chubby, cracked brown face.
He never had much to say, but he smiled a lot, showing two gold front teeth. “Come to see Jess, eh?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling back. “Is he here?”

“Up at the house. Go on in if you want.”

“Thanks. How’ve you been?” I asked politely.

“Good, you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Mr. Green touched his temple with his finger and went back to his painting.

I leaned in the window on my side. Raven was slouched in his seat, lighting a cigarette. His hair hid the side of his face. “So, um…”

“Listen, can you get a ride back with this guy?”

I stood back. “Yeah, I guess. You don’t want to come in?”

“I’ve got some things to do.”

“Oh.” I should go with him. I should go back to school. I was going to get in trouble. Plus I was ditching Raven for no reason, plus Jess probably didn’t need company in the middle of the day. “Okay,” I said. “Well, see you.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” I didn’t move, though, so he had to look at me. He has pretty eyes, light blue with dark, curly lashes. I used my willpower to make him smile. I did—I stared into his eyes with my feminine charm and
made
him smile at me. “See you.”

“Yeah. See you.”

He waited a second and then very slowly drove away.

Well, that was okay. This day could’ve been one of the kind that make you squirm at night when you’re trying to fall asleep, I mean it could so
easily
have made it onto my Most Embarrassing Moments list, but I fixed it. There at the
end I took control somehow, I’m not sure exactly how, and I saved it. So I hope I’ve got it down in my genetic code or something now for future reference, a DNA memory, because that kind of girl power is definitely going to come in handy again.

Jess’s front door was closed but not locked. I went right in. I was about to yell “Yoo hoo” or something when I heard his voice coming from the direction of his office. I went through the living room nobody ever uses, past the kitchen, the dining room. I stuck my head in the door to his study. He was sitting behind his desk, talking on the telephone.

When he saw me, he looked amazed. And glad! He stood up, but he couldn’t get off the phone; he waved, gestured to a chair, but he had to keep talking. “So this is an IPO? Sure, I’m interested, but I’d need a prospectus. No. So there’s no revenue yet? They’re still losing money?” He laughed. “Sounds like my kind of—no, send me the prospectus, I can’t tell you until I see it. Okay. Okay. No, I agree with you. That’s what I’m saying, I want to look at the internationals. Listen, I’ll have to get back to you—” He smiled across at me apologetically. “Good, send it, that’s great. Right, and we’ll talk next week. So. Yeah. Okay, Bob. Thanks. ’Bye.”

He hung up. “Hi,” he said, coming around his desk and sitting on the edge in front of me. “Look at you. How’d you get here? Everything okay?” He had on holey jeans and an old green sweater and muddy, ancient-looking work boots, and he looked good, he looked really real. I grinned at him, very glad I’d come, even if I was interrupting his workday.

“Everything’s fine,” I said, “I just came to say hi—a friend dropped me off. Um…can you drive me to work at Krystal’s in about an hour and a half?”

He put his head back and looked at me over his nose. “This is a school holiday, is it?”

“Yeah. Teacher training day. In-service.”

He lifted one eyebrow. He folded his arms.

“Okay, I’m cutting.” I laughed, sparkling my eyes at him. “You won’t tell Mom, will you?” I knew he wouldn’t, he
was too nice. And I was too cute—I could tell I was getting to him.

“Depends. You do this often?” He wasn’t smiling back.

“No. Really, I don’t, in fact I never do. Really!” It was true, practically. “Just—today it was so nice out, and this friend said let’s have a picnic, and so we did.” Good; that could sound like a group of kids, not just me and one guy. I smiled winningly, shrugged my shoulders, spread my hands. “Didn’t you ever cut class when you were in school?”

“Irrelevant.” He shook his head, but I’d made him smile. “I ought to tell Carrie,” he said darkly. “If you do it again, I will.”

“Never again.” I put my hand on my heart.

“You want a soda?”

“Okay.”

I followed him out to the kitchen, where he got down a bag of pretzels and opened a Coke. “I’ve still got some phone calls to make,” he said. “Can you take care of yourself for a little while?”

“Sure, go ahead, don’t worry about me. You won’t even know I’m here.”

He looked amused and doubtful, but he didn’t say anything. We went back to his office, and I sat on the sofa on the other side of the room from his desk, so he couldn’t hear me crunching pretzels while he talked on the phone. He called somebody named Bill to order fish liver oil and TMR, whatever that is, and he called somebody else, I guessed the vet, to talk about some poor cow’s inflamed uterus and whether he should give it antibiotics, electrolytes, or dextrose and estrogens. He called two different places for estimates on belts and pumps and vacuum regulators for his milking machines.

I watched him while he talked, thinking how efficient he was but still nice to people. You can learn a lot about somebody by listening to their side of a phone conversation. My mom’s formal with strangers, almost too polite sometimes, to the point of sounding cold. Sometimes my dad was rude,
especially to salesmen or people asking for charitable contributions. Jess had a soothing voice, even and low; I couldn’t imagine him ever yelling at anybody. He was kind of a mystery to me, though. Even though he seemed so peaceful and easygoing, I was sure there was a lot going on inside of him. Would I want a man like him if I were older? A man who felt things a lot, didn’t just think things? Jess is quiet, but I think he would tell me anything at all, anything I wanted to know, if I just knew the right questions to ask.

I got up and walked around the room. All the bookshelves were crammed with Holstein journals, Holstein sale catalogs, record books, a million books about dairy farming. On a cork board by the door were photos of cows wearing ribbons. I didn’t want to disturb Jess, but I could see that behind his desk were the interesting pictures, ones with people in them, so I sidled around behind his chair, being as quiet as I could, and checked them out.

Wow, he looked exactly like his mother. Ora—I remembered the name. She had a big cloud of shiny light brown hair she wore up in an old-fashioned bun, but otherwise she didn’t look old-fashioned at all. She was beautiful, very tall and slender, with big dark eyes and a soft mouth. She was laughing in the picture, standing by a rose trellis in a pretty housedress, and holding out her hand—she had long white arms—as if asking somebody if she could help. Jess, probably; if he’d taken this picture, he’d have been a little boy. I could see his face in the mother’s face so clearly, the same long eyelashes and sharp-sided nose, but most of all the same expression in their eyes. Hard to describe—because they
weren’t
really sad, were they? But that’s how Ora looked, and it was how Jess looked sometimes, like he knew about something painful and heavy, it would make you cry if he told you what it was.

There was a picture of his father, too, a snapshot of him taken in this room, sitting at the same desk where Jess was sitting now. He looked much older than his wife, and
smaller; he was a little, serious-looking man with frown lines between his eyes and smile lines around his lips. He looked worried and kind.

The best was a photograph of the whole family, Jess in the middle with his arms around his parents’ waists, grinning into the camera. He was so skinny! He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and his long, streaky, rock star hair was much lighter than now. I’d have known it was him anywhere, but he looked so
different
, loose and crazy or something, reckless. I stared and stared, trying to see the man I knew in the boy’s features. His mother wasn’t laughing in this picture; she was looking at Jess, and her pretty profile was vague and wistful. They weren’t at home, they were standing in front of a modern brick building with aluminum windows. Daffodils bloomed between two bushes—maybe it was Easter. Jess’s father had on a suit that didn’t quite fit him.

Now they were both dead and Jess lived all by himself. Did he get lonely? He had Mr. Green and some other hired men, but they didn’t seem like much company. He had all his cows, which he knew by name (he said). He had friends, probably, and an ex-wife but no kids, and he was a member of the city council. Did he have girlfriends? Maybe I’d ask him.

“Going to the bathroom,” I mouthed, and he nodded and pointed and kept talking. I went out and down the hall and into the bathroom next to the kitchen.

Jess had left the toilet seat up. Well, why not? Mom used to scold Dad about that all the time, but I could never figure out why it was the man’s job any more than the woman’s. Jess lived alone, though, so the whole thing wasn’t even an issue.

After I peed, I stared at my face in the mirror, especially my lips. How many times would I be kissed in my whole life? So far, about four times, but today was by far the most serious. I’d only done it once with tongues before. Too weird. But I might get used to it. Caitlin did it all the time, or
so she claimed. In fact, Caitlin was probably sleeping with Donny Hartman, her boyfriend since ninth grade, but I didn’t know for sure. Jamie knew, but she’d sworn not to tell, and I could only get hints out of her.

I stuck out my tongue, examining the little pink bumps on it. It wasn’t disgusting because it was mine, but the thought of Raven’s tongue, that was different. Tongues. Who’d invented that? Who was the first person to put his tongue in somebody else’s mouth and decide that was a good deal? And what did the person whose mouth he’d put it in think the first time? It was like—pesto or something. Who could ever have thought grinding up
leaves
and putting them on
spaghetti
would be a good idea?

Breasts, too—what was the huge deal there? I pulled up my blouse and studied mine in my bra, a 32-A. Caitlin was a 34-A; Jamie didn’t even need a bra but she wore one anyway, she wouldn’t say what size. My breasts were coming in okay, I guessed; I wasn’t obsessed about it like some girls. Leslie Weber, for instance, who stared down at her own chest all the time. She sat across from me in English, and that’s all she did, stared at her own breasts, like they were actively growing before her eyes.

“Boys will want to touch you there,” Mom said to me once, in the most horrible, the most excruciating conversation we ever had. It wasn’t the sex talk—we’d already had that when I was about eight. This was the date talk, brought on by Brad Donnelly asking me out to the movies last summer, just the two of us, not in a group. Big deal. Just because Brad was a junior, Mom decided it was time to talk about date behavior and condoms and AIDS and syphilis and breasts and French-kissing.
Gross
. Like I didn’t already know all that. She actually used the word
fondle
. It was like an out-of-body experience, and me thinking,
Is this really happening? Is my mother really saying this?
The horrible part wasn’t that she thought what she was saying might actually apply to my life; that was kind of flattering. The horrible
part was thinking about how she knew all that stuff—she knew it because she’d done it herself. Which is obvious, but still creepy and revolting and bizarro.