Girl Parts (2 page)

The west-bankers had long ago bought the land on the east bank, so they’d have no ugly houses to mar their view.
The only lot they couldn’t buy belonged to a botanist and his wife — Charlie’s parents. The land had been in the family for years, and they refused to give it up at any price. The Nuvolas kept an old map of Westtown on their den wall. Charlie had once calculated that if he folded the map in half, Egg Lake in the south and Olive Lake in the north would lie one on top the other, and he liked the natural symmetry. If he folded the map the other way, Charlie’s and David’s houses would come together like button and clasp.

David and Charlie attended the same all-boys Catholic school on the other side of Route 290. Saint Sebastian’s ran from sixth grade through twelfth. Charlie was one of the odd ones who transferred in freshman year, breaking up a homeroom that had been constant three years running. Saint Seb’s lauded alternative teaching methods. Rather than moving from room to room throughout the day, students stayed at one desk, taking Web-based classes on personal computers, progressing at their own pace. It was all part of the headmaster’s directive to “prepare young men for the modern virtual workplace.”

The school was named for Saint Sebastian, who survived a thousand arrows. Sometimes Charlie could relate.

“Here comes Charlie Freak.”

“Hey, it’s Mr. Magoo! Hey, Magoo!”

“Gnarly Charlie. You get those glasses off an old lady or what?”

Charlie Nuvola was weird. He looked weird; he acted weird; he was interested in weird things. Worst of all, he didn’t seem to know or care that everyone else thought he was weird.

Charlie was an early bloomer. The summer after eighth grade, his upper lip was dotted with stiff, greasy hairs, and by freshman year, he towered over his classmates. From his mother, Charlie inherited a frilly mass of dark hair that loomed like a storm cloud when he leaned in to describe — in his low, rumbling voice — a
fascinating
strain of artichoke just discovered in Guam.

At lunch, Charlie sat alone, reading the latest issue of
Botanica
or one of his dog-eared Danny Houston novels (a series from the sixties about a dashing boy who solves crimes from a helicopter). Boys at the nearest table competed to land the most French fries in Charlie’s hair before he absently swept them away. David Sun was the reigning champion.

The only person who encouraged Charlie was Coach Brackage, who presided over the school’s miserable basketball team. Charlie was recruited for one season, and though he was tall, his shots were wild and halfhearted. “Focus, boy!” Coach yelled. “Keep your eyes up! And don’t run like you’re wearing flippers, for God’s sake!”

When basketball season ended, Charlie was glad to have his afternoons back. He liked to follow the brambled path behind the school, away from the bright parking lot where David Sun and his friends lolled half out of their
cars, music booming through their walleyed speakers. The path lead into the woods. This was where Charlie fit. His big feet stepped easily between the rocks and knuckled tree roots, and the branches started just high enough for him to pass under without stooping. The clumsy bee making the lily dip, the lazy blink of a sunny patch when a cloud rolled across it, the distant mutter of dragonfly wings. Every branch, bug, and pebble was connected in a grand plan. This was Charlie’s utopia — a world without people.

David Sun fit in by instinct. He had two best friends, John Pigeon (called Clay) and Artie Stubb. Clay, Artie, and David had sat together since sixth grade. Their row shifted from term to term, but the Pigeon-Stubb-Sun phalanx was never broken. The freshman-year arrival of Charlie Nuvola and another boy, Paul Lampwick, threatened to strand Clay in the back of the second row, but a last-minute transfer restored the natural order. Even so, the trio still resented Nuvola and Lampwick, who weren’t lifers like them and who were both at Saint Seb’s on pity scholarships. David, whose father’s monitors topped every desk in the building, especially despised scholarship kids.

Girls liked David. He’d had a girlfriend — a beautiful blonde a year older than he, the star of every school play — until she dumped him on Labor Day. He’d cheated on her. It happened on Nantucket, which to David’s mind was out of bounds and therefore fair game. It hadn’t been satisfying. The girls on Nantucket were wild dancers, but tight
as clams when he got them alone. Two were steamed open with weed he bought from the local hippie, but he still came home a virgin. They wouldn’t even let him past third base. Later, he bragged to Clay and Artie, only to discover the base system varied from region to region, and in western Massachusetts, David had barely rounded second.

“Ah, don’t sweat it, Little Dog,” Clay said, putting an arm around David’s shoulder. Clay, despite being overweight, somehow always had a girlfriend and liked to dispense advice. “See, you’ve got to make her want it. You’ve got to run your hand up and down her side, see, and then you kind of graze your thumb . . .”

“Jesus, Clay,” Artie said, grinding out his cigarette. “You want to make me sick?”

“I’m trying to tell our boy how to get some boob. . . .”

“Some boob?” Artie held his hands as if cupping a bowl. “Boob is not a substance you can have
some
of. You can’t quantify boob.”

David laughed, but Clay just shook his head. “So what? You have
fewer
boobs?”

“Right,” said Artie, laughing too. “You have
fewer
boobs, and
less
ass.”

That killed all three of them, and they actually rolled on the sidewalk outside the Pavilion like a bunch of bums. It was a good night.

Then came the afternoon in September, two weeks before the power outage. Charlie biked home from school, leaned
his rusty ten-speed next to his father’s, and pulled open the whining screen door.

Charlie lived alone with his father, Thaddeus, who was a professor at Clark University on a sabbatical of undetermined duration. Thaddeus’s passion was New England flora, and he spent hours in the backyard, pondering plants. Like Charlie, Thaddeus was tall. He had a long beard and bushy eyebrows that reminded people of the kitschy wax candles carved to look like tree-spirits. Absentminded by nature, he would crouch in a patch of poison ivy for hours with his field book, then come inside, muttering to himself, “Where did I put the Dr. Burt’s?”

Charlie dropped his bag by the door. There were coffee dregs in the sink and pencil shavings on the table. Charlie deduced his father was home and had probably been doing the crossword. He put his hand to his chin (just like Danny Houston) and pondered what called him away.

The flushing toilet solved the mystery.

“Hey, pal, what’s new?” Thaddeus said, emerging from the bathroom with the paper under his arm.

“Nothing.”

Charlie downed his afternoon glass of milk in three swallows, then settled into the sofa. Drowsiness enveloped him like the musty cushions. No matter how alert he was at last bell, the comfort of home was like ether, usually knocking him out until suppertime. If the woods were his natural habitat, the Nuvola house, with its wood paneling
and clutter of paperbacks and magazines, was his den. Nothing could touch him here, off the grid.

“This one’s got me stumped,” Thaddeus said, meaning the crossword. “What about a nine-letter word for
truest pal
? Begins with a
c
?”

Charlie mumbled a response. He couldn’t do word games.

Through his thickening doze, Charlie sensed his father watching him. He opened his eyes. Thaddeus was in the La-Z-Boy, leaning forward, hands folded. Charlie had seen his father stare this way at unclassified blossoms. Charlie felt uneasy.

“So, I had my meeting with your school counselor today.”

“Oh?”

“The test results came in.”

The first day of school, Saint Seb’s administered “personality adjustment profiles.” Ten pages of questions like, “If you were a spoon, what sort of handle would you have?”

“The counselor, Dr. Lightly, she told me your results suggested maladjustment.” Thaddeus rubbed his hands together, his voice casual, as if they were discussing the latest article in
Botanica.
“They think you’re depressed.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean?”

“She mentioned Fixol.” Thaddeus scratched at the bare patch of skin under his right eye. Fixol was a popular antidepressant.

Depressed.
The word closed like a lid on his brain. And the way his dad smuggled it home, into their den, and dropped it with no more than mild scientific curiosity. He felt sick. Thaddeus placed a hand on Charlie’s knee. His pinky was smudged with newsprint and graphite.

“That . . . can’t be right.” Charlie swallowed. It felt like a walnut was caught in his throat.

“Do you feel depressed?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

Thaddeus exhaled, his mustache poofing outward. “Well, think about it. OK, pal?” He patted Charlie’s knee and rose from the armchair.

Charlie’s mother had always said, “Normal follows the path of least resistance.” Charlie thought he chose — on some level — to be different, but what if he was wrong? Wasn’t he happy? At least sometimes? In the woods? By himself? A test couldn’t determine that, could it?

Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Darkness crowded him, filling his nose and ears. It was like drowning. He turned over and puked on the floor.

“Are you OK?” Thaddeus rushed to his side. Charlie’s face was green. “Sorry, buddy. I should have thrown that milk out a week ago.”

That night, Charlie tossed and turned until three. He went to his desk, turned on the light, and made a list of
times during the day when he was happy. Then he made a list of the times he was sad. The columns were even but showed an obvious trend: Charlie was happy alone. He was miserable with others.

Then he rated, from one to ten, how he felt on average. He remembered when he was a kid, going swimming with his parents at Olive Lake, his dad hoisting him up on his shoulders, his mom laughing and taking a picture. That day was a ten.

He looked at the number he’d written. Three.

Charlie put his head in his hands and thought. He woke later, still at his desk, an oval puddle of drool on the blotter, his Afro dented on one side. He turned off the light and climbed into bed. He lay awake in the darkness for a few minutes, then whispered,
“OK.”
In a moment he was asleep.

What Charlie found attractive in women were brains and personality — beauty optional, popularity an absolute no. On reconsidering, he decided he could stomach someone popular if he had to. His options were limited. Saint Seb’s was separated from its sister school by a shallow ravine, a border Saint Mary’s girls rarely crossed other than to the track behind the old gym — and track girls were tall, somber, and reportedly stuck-up.

Charlie decided on a theater girl. Twice a year the two schools staged a joint play, and by early September the cast was staying late for rehearsals in the Saint Seb’s auditorium. Rebecca Lampwick was Mrs. Higgins in this year’s production of
My Fair Lady.
She had big boobs, which she referred to as “the twins,” and a laugh that started high
and avalanched into her lower register. Charlie first saw her last year when, after basketball practice, he had crossed the auditorium to use the Coke machines. Then she’d been Mrs. Lovett in
Sweeney Todd,
and her big laugh and black eyes seemed to follow him from up onstage.

After two days of reconnaissance, he made his move. Rehearsal started at four, and from three fifteen to three thirty the cast lounged in folding chairs in front of the stage. Charlie entered through the fire door and crossed to the back. They were loud and carefree, ignoring him until he veered toward their loose circle. The chatter stopped. Charlie stood like a Sequoia in a thicket of elms. He cleared his throat. Rebecca, who’d been saying something to Eliza Doolittle in a goofy baritone, turned to the newcomer and smiled.

“What’s up, buttercup?” (This in her normal tenor’s register.)

“Hi.” Three heavily edited flash cards were tucked reassuringly in Charlie’s pocket. He focused and recited. “I was wondering if . . . you would like to come . . . with me on Friday night . . . to get some Chinese food.”

“Iambic tetrameter?” Pickering asked. Higgins snickered.

That day Rebecca was wearing a billowy pirate’s blouse and gypsy earrings, an outfit Charlie thought silly. But up close she was lovely, with skin as white and flawless as windblown snowbanks. The others waited in silent anticipation. They were an incestuous group and wary of outsiders,
especially ones like Charlie, who in some circles was considered a jock, despite his dork status. Charlie swallowed and studied the scuff marks on the floor, only looking up when Rebecca spoke.

There was a lot Charlie didn’t know about Rebecca. Her confidence was showy. She felt fat and repulsive because boys her age never talked to her. Only grown men seemed to like her. They shouted at her from their cars, which made her feel like a freak. Last year her history teacher grabbed her chest while driving her home from Model UN, a secret that constricted like a noose around her throat whenever she thought about it.