As Simple as Snow (2 page)

It was a long walk to the Caynes’, if you stayed on the streets, but you could save some time if you cut through Mrs. Owens’s yard and then across the vacant lot where the Boothe house had burned down two years before. Then, when you got to Talus Road, you cut through the Bordens’. You could get there in about fifteen minutes. I would do it lots of times.

All of this would become important.

 

 

 

Her given name was Anna, but she insisted on being called Anastasia. We had that in common. I wanted everyone to use my full first name. It wasn’t out of vanity; I was named after my mother’s brother, who had died young—just thirteen—and I had always been called by the full name because he had been. I never liked my name much, it never really seemed mine, a sort of hand-me-down from someone who never got enough use out of it, but what can you do? Only famous people have had their names changed, or else somebody has to give you a nickname, and no one was going to do that for me. Or you have to be someone like Anna, and just take the name for yourself.

“I love your name,” Anna said. “It’s almost a perfect double dactyl.”

“A what?”

“Higgledy-piggledy. That’s a perfect double dactyl. Two three-syllable words with the stresses on the first syllables. Your first name and your last name have the same number of syllables and almost the same sounds—they mirror each other, or are parallel or parallax or something.”

“Okay.” I was ready to be done with it. If she hadn’t said “higgledy-piggledy,” I might have told her about my dead uncle and how he had died under strange circumstances and maybe she was on to something, maybe there was a connection between the two of us. Maybe he was the parallel, although we shared only the same first name. We could have gone into all of that, but I didn’t really want to continue with any conversation where “higgledy-piggledy” was used, and especially when I was being compared with it.

“You should pay attention to things like that. It’s your name—you’ll always have that. It means something. The mirror thing is worth thinking about. Or is it repetition? It’s a double nature, anyway. The first and then the next being similar. Maybe you had a twin you don’t know about. Maybe there’s a ghost following you around. Or maybe it has something to do with parallel lines. You know, they meet at infinity. That’s interesting. But maybe it has nothing to do with you. I don’t know you well enough to figure it out yet.”

“Okay. How about your name? What does it mean?”

“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”

 

 

 

She was always spooky. Her friends were worse. They strolled silently through the school in their funeral clothes and black lipstick and eyeliner and gun-black hair. There were seven Marilyn Manson types in school (“One for every day of the week,” Carl had said, “as if one wasn’t enough”), three of them in our sophomore class. There were two seniors and two juniors and no freshmen. We hoped they were a species headed for extinction.

They stuck out like badly bruised thumbs and we thought they were pretentious and full of shit. They were rarely alone, a traveling convention of mourners, except for her. I would see her sitting off by herself in class, eating alone in the cafeteria, or just standing on her own in the hallway between classes. It’s what I disliked most about her at first, I thought she was even more pretentious and bolder than her friends, and then it became one of the things I liked most about her. Sometimes it works out that way, I guess, and sometimes the other way.

Our school, good old Hamilton High, was three stories tall, a long rectangle situated east-west on top of a low hill, with an entrance on each of the shorter sides. There is some debate about whom the school was named after. Almost everyone assumed it was after the adulterous Alexander Hamilton (as Anna liked to call him), who was shot dead by Aaron Burr in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River, for spreading lies and rumors about Burr. There had been Hamiltons around town years ago, but no one had ever found anything they had done to be noteworthy or exceptional enough to name a building after any of them, but there were people who still believed the school was named after some of these other Hamiltons. My mother was one of those people, she contended that the town would never name a building, especially a school, after such an immoral man. “He’s on the ten-dollar bill, Mom,” I said.

“What the federal government decides is suitable has nothing to do with us,” she said. It was the most political statement I ever heard my mother make.

Everybody stood around in the hallways before class, and every group had its own spot. The bandoids were always in the basement, the arty types hung around Mr. Devon’s classroom, the jocks were on the first floor by the west entrance, down the hall from the 4-H’ers, the geeks hung out at the eastern end of the second floor, the speech and debate team was on the western end (“I don’t do a lot of business on the second floor,” Carl always said). Carl traveled from floor to floor, and it never mattered where I was. Anna and the rest of the ghouls were always on the third floor, a dark cloud hanging there. Sometimes walking to school I would look up and see them, crow-black and still, perched high in the morning sky. And after school they walked together into the nearby woods. They were said to do all sorts of things there: They took drugs and had sex and performed rituals involving animal sacrifices. They cast spells there, placing curses on people in town, and plotted whom to torment and inflict pain and suffering on. Some people in school avoided the woods, but I never had a problem. Carl and I had come across trees with strange markings cut into them, and a circle of upside-down crosses, but we never knew whether these things had been left by the Goths themselves or by somebody else trying to add to their reputation. It all seemed so silly—but what was more idiotic, a group of high schoolers standing around chanting a bunch of mumbo jumbo, or the rest of the school thinking this type of stuff actually happened, and that it might really work?

There were tons of rumors about them. They were burnouts and vegans. They had pierced their bodies in strange places and had tattoos of runes and symbols and foreign languages all over. They were Satan worshippers, witches. They performed strange occult rituals involving decapitating animals and drinking blood. There were rumors that the guys in the group had taken the girls as their wives, and that they all shared them with one another. They engaged in bondage and torture and self-mutilation. They had sex with corpses. They were all gay. If you believed everything, they were tattooed Satan-worshipping Goth Mormon homosexual S&M piercing necrophiliac drug-using vegetarians. It was a small school, and they must have known what was being said about them all the time behind their black backs, but they never responded. They were mysterious and odd and no one liked them.

 

 

 

I would have gone on ignoring Anna Cayne forever, except for the fact that she spoke to me first. If I had known that she was coming my way, I would have done everything in my power to avoid her. She wasn’t the person you wanted to be seen with. She wasn’t someone you thought would talk to you first either. She sneaked up on me. It was the end of September and I was in the library stacks, wasting the rest of my lunch hour, trying out a new theory, a suggestion one of my teachers had given me. I had taken
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac from the shelf and turned around, and there she was, standing quietly a few feet away, calmly staring at me.

“Burroughs is better,” she said.

“I don’t know about that.” I looked at the book in my hand and then looked past her. It should have indicated to her that I wanted to get by to check out the Kerouac. She didn’t pay any attention. She stood her ground and gave me a slight smile. She had more to tell me.

“He shot his wife, you know.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know whether she was talking about Burroughs or Kerouac. I was just hoping that she would stop talking and let me get away from her as quickly as possible.

“They were playing William Tell. They were drinking at a friend’s apartment, and Burroughs pulls out a gun and turns to his wife and says, ‘It’s time for the old William Tell act,’ and she puts a glass on her head, and then he shoots her.”

“Really?” I said. Then she told me the whole story about William Burroughs and how he was the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and how he was friends with Kerouac and is in
On the Road
as “Old Bull Lee” and his wife is “Jane” and how even killing his wife didn’t do anything to curb his fascination with guns and that he used to make paintings with cans of paint and a shotgun. The words streamed out of her; she could have been making it all up, for all I knew, but I actually wanted to hear more.

“Did he go to prison?”

“It happened in Mexico,” she said, as if that was all the explanation I needed.

There was an awkward pause; I wanted her to continue, but she had finished. I panicked and said, “I suppose you’re looking for Stephen King,” and moved to let her go around me and deeper into the stacks. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. I could feel an embarrassed blush fill my face and I was afraid that she might turn and leave. A couple of minutes before, I had wanted desperately to get away from her, and now I was hoping that she would stay and pay more attention to me.

She stayed. “He’s only written two books worth reading,” she said.

There wasn’t a pause, but a full stop, and I stood waiting for her to speak. If I hadn’t asked her to name the books, she never would have divulged her opinion. She had an intriguing way of speaking. Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her.

“
Carrie
and
The Shining
,” she finally said.

“I’ve read
The Shining
,” I said, happy to have something in common.

“One to go,” she said. “And then you can be done with Mr. King.”

She was looking for H. P. Lovecraft, whom I had never heard of. He wrote horror stories, she said, in the early 1900s. She read anything, but she especially liked books (fiction and nonfiction) about the supernatural. She continued to move through the stacks, and I followed her. She was done talking, so I watched her scan the rows and rows of books, selecting authors and titles I would probably have never heard of, like Yukio Mishima, James Baldwin, and
All the Little Live Things
, until she had an armful. I went to the front desk and checked out both the King and the Kerouac while she simply walked out with hers and waited for me by the door. “I’ll return them when I’m finished,” she said. I had the feeling that she did that sort of thing all the time. The rules didn’t apply. I had to get to class, but I wanted to keep following her, I wanted her to talk to me more. By the time I had thought of saying something else to her she was disappearing down the hall.

i don’t want to bore you, but . . .

This is what you should know about me: I’m bland. I’m milk. Worse, I’m water. Worse yet, I’m a water glass—at least water can change shape or become some other form, like ice or vapor. Instead, I’m bland and rigid and everyone can look right through me and see that there’s nothing. I’ve got nothing. I’m walking wallpaper. I almost wish I had a broken nose, or a cauliflower ear, or a scar across my face, something that you would remember. If there were something on the outside to grab some girl’s attention, she might see that I was a good person, a quality person. Most girls just look once and don’t see me, and move on.

When I was a freshman I tried imitating the cool guys in class. I went out and bought the same clothes that they wore and tried to wear them the way they did, but I ended up looking like an idiot. Something was missing. The clothes were cool, but I wasn’t. There was nothing to be done; I was stuck with who I was. Everyone seemed to have something on me. The geeks had their own look, same with the Goths, the jocks. They all had some way that connected them with someone else. Even the retarded kids had better style than I did.

“Wear what makes you feel comfortable,” Carl told me. “If you’re comfortable, people will be comfortable around you.” It was easy for him; he knew what he was doing. But I took his advice and started wearing jeans or khakis and a plain shirt and sweater. Anna called it the “harmboy” look, somewhere between hip and farmboy, she said. I liked Abercrombie & Fitch clothes, but I hated the fact that their name was on everything. They put it on the pockets and sleeves and tails of their shirts, and the backs of the pants. I didn’t want to go around advertising some company, so I took off the labels on the shirts and pants and sweaters my mother bought for me. Most of them came off all right, you just took a small pair of scissors and cut the thread in the back, and the thing unraveled and the label pulled right off (if my mom bought me anything with the name printed on it, I would either wear it underneath something or not wear it all), but removing some labels left holes in the sleeves or at the bottom of the shirt. That was my only defining characteristic: a few holes here and there. I wore some Carhartts once in a while, which no one else wore except the shit-kicking farm kids. “Bussers,” we called them. Bryce Druitt had been a bus rider, and he was also a Goth. He was the only Goth on the bus, which might explain why he was such an ass. He had a chip on his shoulder about something, although he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t really a farm kid, though; he lived over near Hydesville, about fifteen minutes away. That was the only other town where they rode the bus to our school. The rest of them were farm kids. Bryce was a senior, which meant that he no longer rode the bus. He drove.

Bryce Druitt had started as a jock. He played football and ran cross-country, and was one of the best basketball players in the school. He started on the varsity team when he was a freshman (that was the only team the school had; we didn’t have enough players for another squad), and helped lead them to the second round of the state championship. The funny thing about that was that the old court in the high school, built in the 1940s, no longer met the minimum state requirements and so our team had to play every game of the season on the road. A new gymnasium was built at the end of the season. It was a big ugly metal building plopped down between the school and the football field. It had a cramped, dingy weight room, and a small balcony that was never used for anything. But it had a great basketball court, and bleachers that folded up into the walls so you could fit almost the whole town in the metal box for meetings and dances and whatever else people could think of, but they never thought of anything, so the place was always empty, except for games. Everyone was looking forward to the next season. Everyone was looking forward to seeing Bryce, a year older, a year better. He was a strong, tall blond athlete who had secured himself in the school’s elite and who had everyone’s admiration.