In Zanesville (14 page)

“So, do they look stupid?” she asks, glancing over at me. Her hair is freshly washed and tied back with a ribbon, like clean,
baled straw. Cheeks pink, eyes watery and magnified.

“Nobody notices glasses except the person who’s wearing them,” I remind her.

Single file along the path, which is covered with leaves. Just
before we join the crowd stuffing itself through the gates, she unties her ribbon and shakes the straw loose. Suddenly I feel
flushed and uncertain, coat open, hair sticking to my neck.

Mr. Prentiss is in there, somewhere in the vicinity of section C.

“I-I-I c-c-c-c…,” I say.

“You have to,” she replies smoothly, slipping her glasses into her pocket and blindly grabbing my sleeve. As the crowd surges
around us, I pull her along, trying to lead and follow at the same time.

We meet up with everyone—Dunk, Maroni, Yawn, Luekenfelter, a tall, brown-haired girl who is Yawn’s best friend, and Luekenfelter’s
cousin Jane—at the snack hut located at one end of the bleachers. Inside the hut, two very wide men try to work around each
other, passing popcorn and hot dogs over the counter to grown-ups. It’s considered weird for kids to eat this food, although
Maroni is holding a raspberry Sno-Kone in a gloved hand. I love raspberry.

“Don’t even ask,” she warns me. “You’ve got the flu.”

“Please?”

“Okay,” she says.

The bite is blue and icy, so refreshing that I suddenly like everything: the night, the weather, the crowd, my girlfriends.
I like Luekenfelter’s cousin, a pretty girl who is sent to stay with Luek on the weekends because of a sick mother.

“How’s your mother?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “Sick but not too sick—she sits up during the days. They’re thinking about doing one other surgery, which we hope
they will. It all depends on certain things, but we
think they’ll go ahead. If she continues to sit up on her own… that’s what will tell.”

Silence. Maroni chews ice; everyone else nods thoughtfully.

The cousin clears her throat. “I could have stayed back there this weekend but I heard you guys were meeting up with boys.”

“These are the two who are,” Luek explains, pointing to me and then Felicia, who puts on her glasses so we can see her.

Suddenly a wave of Kevin Prentiss washes over me. Detention hallway, his hand, warm and golden looking, with a pencil wart
on one finger, hanging there next to my hand.

“I-I-I,” I say.

“It’s just sitting with a guy, it’s not marrying him,” Felicia says nervously.

“Who are you—Maroni?” I ask her.

Maroni laughs.

The only way to get to section C is to walk the narrow gauntlet down in front, between the first row of packed, people-watching
bleachers and the cinder track where the cheerleaders perform. We’ll have to enter at G, walk along the chain link past F,
E, and D, then head up into the stands at C, climbing until we get to the empty seats. At which point we can finally sit and
survey the situation without the situation surveying us.

“I can’t do it unless I’m holding on to her,” Felicia says, taking off her glasses and gripping my sleeve.

I can’t have anyone holding on to me; I’m too tense.

“You’re not the only one!” Felicia hisses. “I’m supposed to
be meeting up with what’s his name.” She looks around blindly. “What’s his name?”

“Jeff Nelson,” Dunk says patiently.

“You’re
Flea,
” Maroni adds.

Duncan leads, with Felicia attached to her sleeve, then Yawn, then me, then Maroni, then Luek, then Luek’s cousin.

When walking in front of fifteen hundred spectators, it’s best not to do it in one’s normal hunching and scuttling style,
but instead to think of the shoulders as a coat hanger and the body as a chiffon dress hanging from it. Unfortunately, the
gauntlet is narrow and people in the front row aren’t good about retracting their feet, so right out of the gate we have a
stumble and a pileup. I get a mouthful of Yawn’s platinum hair, and Maroni walks up my ankle.

People are really getting on my nerves.

Single file, past sections F, E, and D, then up into the stands at C. It’s hard to be chiffon climbing bleachers, but I do
all right until Maroni yanks at the hem of my jacket, holding me fast. Foot groping for the next bleacher, I see him, amid
the undulating ocean of faces and Windbreakers. Out here in the great, dark night, Mr. Prentiss looks more like a hoodlum
than he ever has before, dark bangs falling across his eyes, coat open, no gloves. He raises one hand and cups it against
his mouth and yells something at someone behind me, people’s knees turn sideways like pinball flippers, and I’m shoved down
the row of seats toward him.

I’m the person he was yelling at behind me.

“I saw you down there,” he says by way of greeting, nodding at the gauntlet below. At the bottom of the sloping bank of bleachers,
a steady current of kids moves past, like a river. There are spots where if you step into the Mississippi it will
pull you away from the bank before your feet even touch. You have to think of yourself as a bottle, inanimate and buoyant,
and simply bob on the current. Don’t open your mouth or water will get in and the bottle will sink.

“Mm-hmm,” I murmur.

Below, the two teams move across the field a yard at a time, arranging and rearranging themselves kaleidoscopically. Who knows
what they’re doing down there—it seems remarkable that they can do anything at all, given the circumstances up here in the
stands. Eventually, a lone Central Valley Vole breaks loose from the pack and runs, his white jersey and helmet bobbing above
the churning orange of his legs. The crowd roars to its feet. Mr. Prentiss squints at the running Vole and then swears self-consciously.
I squint too and sit back down when everyone else does. On the cinder track, a teetering hive of Zanesville cheerleaders forms—
Hey, hey, that’s okay, we’re gonna beat ’em anyway—
and then collapses. One girl takes a running start and does a series of increasingly sagging backflips, spelling out Z-e-p-h-y-r-s.
By the end she is nearly landing on her head.

“Ha, that’s sick,” Mr. Prentiss says to the field.

The side of his face is soft and faintly fuzzed. Not like one of the man-boys with their strange sad sproutings of facial
hair, and not like one of the maiden-boys with the opposite problem, but somewhere in between. Broad shouldered and mysterious,
wearing desert boots instead of his bandaged sneakers; they look new, but his jeans are very old, with a series of overlapping
patches on one knee and a fringed rip on the other, through which I can see long underwear.

Right while I’m looking, the ripped knee moves about an inch in the direction of my knee but then shifts back to where it
was. He was just stretching.

I shiver involuntarily.

He glances over at me and then back at the game. “Your lips are sort of blue,” he says.

What?

“Oh,” I say. “Sno-Kone.”

“Yeah?” he says lightly, leaning forward to look back over his shoulder at me, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear the
way he does when hassling the detention monitor. His eyes at close range are brown green hazel, and not all that narrow. “You
like
blue
Sno-Kones?”

The sly, teasing grin, the shaking of the hair back over the ears, and the clear-eyed gaze, all directed at me—it’s as disconcerting
as having my name suddenly announced over the loudspeaker. A guy who isn’t one of my uncles is teasing me, and it calls for
something other than sidling out of the room backward—it calls for a teasing answer.
You like blue Sno-Kones?

“They’re raspberry,” I say eventually.

Silence. We watch the field, where nothing is happening.

Raspberry. Raspberry. Razz-beery. A word designed to make you feel like an idiot. His leg is closer to mine now, and his hand
rests on his knee, just above where the fringed rip and the slice of long underwear are.

A blast of wind hits the bleachers, and people put their mittens to their faces.

My teeth make a chattering noise.

“I was boiling,” I explain. “That’s why I’m only wearing this coat.”

“I’m always boiling,” he says. “Here.” And he takes off his green army jacket and puts it over my shoulders. It’s heavy, heavier
than a girl’s coat, and it has a frayed, body-heated
aspect to it that makes me feel relaxed and sleepy. When I was very little, I used to curl up on the coat bed at family gatherings,
wind someone’s satin lining around my thumb, and suck on it until I fell asleep. Something about the strange, borrowed fabric
enhancing my old familiar thumb, and about burrowing into the lumpy mound of coats, knowing that my parents couldn’t get out
of there without running across me—that’s the feeling I have now, resting against Mr. Prentiss’s arm, which is behind me.

A Vole takes off running, darting in and out of confused Zephyrs, and the crowd rises to its feet again. We don’t move, but
continue staring ahead, into the matching Windbreakers of the couple in front of us. When they sit back down, it looks like
the green board has been tipped and all the players have slid down to one end.

“Ha,” Mr. Prentiss says. “They’re smoking us.”

“Yep,” I say.

His hand is on my waist now, resting lightly against the fabric of my shirt. It’s the same hand, the left one, that I always
stared at in detention, the nervous-energy one that drummed his hip, felt around on his head, pulled the leather string out
of his shirt, and then dropped it back in. That hand.

“Yep,” I say again, sitting up straighter.

The girl cousins I played with at those long-ago family gatherings all turned out boy crazy, and I see now why, leaning against
this kid while he slowly bunches my shirt up, an eighth of an inch at a time. There’s something delirious and drowsy about
the whole endeavor—the term
sleeping together
is starting to make more sense, because that’s what I feel like doing. Just curling up on the coat bed and taking a nap.

My father would never make me wake up and walk, but
would carry me to the car for the ride home. Borne aloft by my tall dad through whoever’s house it was, aunts reaching out
to shake my foot as they said their good-byes, the night feeling of the family in the car on the highway. It’s night right
now, vast and beautiful, and the boy I nearly traded for my father’s life has his fingers hooked in my belt loop while the
thumb moves back and forth along a shoreline of skin.

Dear God, I give up Kevin Prentiss.

Back and forth.

Forth and back.

I don’t believe, even if there is a God, that he could have saved someone retroactively; and yet what if there is one, and
he did? This is what’s so confusing about religion—it’s all based on trying to make you believe in ghosts. If you accept that
idea, then anything is possible.

My father, rising from the coal cellar to walk into Tuck’s five minutes before.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I shrug off the coat and the hand, standing up.

“I have to go,” I say.

On my way out, I get momentarily hung up on the gauntlet while the junior all-city marching band passes through on its way
to the halftime show, a plumed and confused caterpillar running into itself. The flute is a tall, slouching girl who is fingering
the keys with her head angled so her flute points to the ground, the way I used to do it.

Come on, come on.

Then they’re gone and the current surges forward again, carrying me along until I cut behind the hot dog hut and pass
through the side gates, where a man sits on a stool with a hole puncher and a transistor radio.

“You don’t want to watch them lose, do you?” he says to me.

“Nope,” I answer.

“He better wake ’em up when they’re in that locker room!” he calls.

“Yep,” I call back, over my shoulder.

I’m warm again, and my head is throbbing. The gravel path is still washed with stadium light, but now the inky shadows are
as scary as they are beautiful, like a black-and-white movie where somebody is going to get killed. At the end of the path,
I take the dark way, over the Knoll.

Once, I watched a movie on TV after everyone else had gone to bed, an old western where a group of men are discovered by another
group of men, and the second group decides to hang the first group, unless they can talk their way out of it. I was falling
asleep the whole time but couldn’t go to bed without seeing how the first group, who were innocent, talked their way out of
getting hanged.

Running footsteps. Coming up behind me. My heart begins galloping around in circles. I have no idea what to do. There’s nothing
up here but trees.

Help.

“God!” Felicia says, panting. “I was yelling, ‘Wait up,’ and you just kept going.”

Anyway, the movie has a surprise ending: they hang them.

“We were watching you from the top, with that kid’s arm around you,” she says, falling into step, “and then all of a sudden
you got up and left. I thought you might be going to the bathroom, so I decided to go to the bathroom too, and then when you
didn’t, I just kept following you.”

“Where was yours?”

“Sitting four rows down and about ten seats over with some blond-headed girl. I had a perfect view of him.”

We drop down and circle behind the Fertilizer Home, where we can see into a rec room of sorts, lighted but empty, with folding
chairs set in a circle. That old cotton-haired woman who once came to our door is probably dead by now; if she isn’t, I don’t
want to think about it. Years now, that she would have been in there, thinking they’re trying to kill her.

“Did you ever see that movie,
The Something-Something Incident,
where they thought those guys had stolen the horses?”

“I saw it with
you,
and we fell asleep,” she says.

“I woke up just when they were hanging them,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

I’ve got my coat unbuttoned and my hands in the pockets, fanning myself. There’s going to be a certain amount of yelling when
I get home, but it’s dark and quiet out here, under the winter stars. The air feels metallic.