Salvation City (19 page)

It took his mind off his fresh humiliation to be working on Starlyn’s gift: a charcoal portrait based on one of Tracy’s many photographs of her niece. Tracy had also helped him pick out a frame for the drawing, one with real pressed flowers under the Plexiglas, which made Cole happy every time he looked at it.

Cole was fairly satisfied with how his drawing finally came out, but when he imagined Starlyn unwrapping it in front of everyone else he felt almost sick, and so he was more relieved than disappointed that there were so many presents for her to open, she couldn’t spend time fussing over any one of them. He could tell she liked the drawing from the way her eyes lit up when she peeled the paper away. In the photo she was smiling, but Cole had drawn her with her lips closed and slightly pursed. Tracy said it made her look like she was praying, but that wasn’t what Cole had been thinking about.

Starlyn scanned the crowded living room to find him, half hiding in a corner, and blew him a kiss. It was enough.

No, it was not enough. Not if he was honest. Maybe it was all those hours he’d spent poring over her photos, making sketches, working so hard to get her features right (and the nose, he’d despaired, would never ever be right). Now, from the safety of his corner, he could not take his eyes off her. Once, he happened to catch PW watching him watch her, and there was something in his look—not disapproval, exactly, but something that made Cole feel chastened nevertheless.

Maybe it was the lacy white slip she was wearing. Not that he hadn’t seen her and plenty of other girls dressed like that before. It was one more thing Boots could get worked up about:
Gals coming to church half naked
. But Starlyn, who was thin, and whose breasts were smaller than most girls’ her age, didn’t look as exposed as some other girls—or as Tracy—did. Cole had been surprised to learn that girls and women in the Church of Salvation City didn’t have to cover up, and that they were allowed to wear makeup. He was surprised, too, that smoking wasn’t forbidden and that although heavy drinking was considered a major sin, alcohol wasn’t strictly forbidden, either.

“We ain’t the Taliban,” PW had told him, grinning. “We love music and laughter and a pretty dress, and we know that sometimes a man needs a drink and sometimes he’s just got to cuss.”

Starlyn had long arms and legs but tiny bones. She was perfectly healthy, had survived the pandemic without becoming infected, but she looked delicate.

“I always feel like a big oafess next to her,” said Tracy, who, except for her breasts, which were about the size of roast chickens, was quite small herself.

But Cole didn’t see how Starlyn could be warm enough dressed like that. The urge to cover her kept rising in him—and not with, say, the flannel shirt he was wearing over his T-shirt today, but with his whole body. And with this urge each time he grew too warm himself and dreamed of cooling his face in the marble curve of her neck.

Her cooling him, him warming her—Cole had to wonder sometimes where ideas like that came from. This one would not leave him alone. All day he would veer between guilt and excitement.

It was like having a fever again. All that great food, including meat loaf and three kinds of birthday cake, and no appetite. A houseful of people, including Mason and Clem from Bible class and a few other kids Cole was normally glad to see, but he kept ending up in some corner, alone, too listless to do more than look on. Starlyn herself kept getting swallowed up by one gaggle of guests or another—Cole seemed to be the only one lacking the nerve to go up and chat with the birthday girl. When her mother came up to tell him she thought his was the most special of all the gifts Starlyn had received, he froze with self-consciousness, unable to move his lips to say thanks.

As usual at such gatherings, PW, too, was always surrounded. There were times (and today was one of them) when Cole couldn’t help being annoyed at how people—how women, especially—demanded PW’s attention. Even Tracy had had enough, complaining that some women used the excuse that he was their pastor to ignore the fact that he was also her husband. But anyone could see that PW was enjoying himself, all smiles and big hugs—the same way he always was when he mingled with parishoners after a service.

Cole was feeling more and more restless and downcast. The memory of the radio broadcast returned to gnaw at him. He thought of slipping away, going on a long bike ride, something that always managed to soothe him, but he knew it would be rude for him to leave in the middle of the party, and his disappearance would probably only make people worry about him.

He was relieved when Clem found him collecting dirty paper plates and cups on the back porch and asked if he wanted to play a video game. It gave him something to do without having to talk much, and when the game was over they played a few more, and then Clem’s mother appeared, saying it was time to go home.

Women were putting away leftovers, men were carrying presents out to Starlyn’s mother’s car. PW had retreated to his home office in the den. Cole looked for Starlyn, and when he didn’t see her he decided to go up to his room.

The party was over, but no one had turned down the music that had played all afternoon (and had driven some of the older guests home early), and so they didn’t hear him. They didn’t see him, either, because instead of continuing down the hall to his room, Cole turned and hurried back downstairs. But if Mason’s face hadn’t been buried in her hair, his 20/10 eye could not have missed Cole.

He was standing with his back to the wall, leaning against it as she leaned into him. Her arms around his neck, his face in her hair, and his hands—looking almost black against the bright white fabric—kneading her flesh so hard that her short skirt was scrunched up, uncovering the backs of her thighs and a smile of white underpants.

“You okay, Cole?” said Tracy. “You look mad or something.”

Tracy and Starlyn’s mother, Taffy, were drinking coffee at the kitchen counter.

“Just thirsty,” said Cole. (Half true, at least.) He took a can of root beer from the fridge and slid into a chair at the table.

Taffy, who was older than Tracy and looked like an overfed, overtired version of her, swiveled in Cole’s direction. “I was just saying how much I can’t wait to get home and hang your picture.” And as the two women launched into a duet of his praises, agreeing how lucky Starlyn was to have such a great artist for a friend, Cole felt a prickly sensation behind his nose that was only partly from drinking soda.

What sounded like some kind of dance step made them all turn their heads in time to see Starlyn lollop into the room.

“There she is!” said Tracy, flinging her arms wide. But Starlyn twirled past her and across the floor to flop down at the table with Cole.

“You look like you just run a race,” Tracy said, and Starlyn began to laugh. She had a brash toot of a laugh, one thing about her that was not delicate at all.

“Oh, she’s in a race, all right,” Taffy drawled. “The race to be all grown up.” This made Starlyn laugh so hard she lost her breath, and her mother said, “Uh-oh. Looks like Birthday Girl’s had enough excitement for one day. We better hit the road.”

Cole was studying Starlyn as closely as he dared. Her mouth looked fuller than usual—awesomely close to what he’d had in mind when he was drawing it—and there were pink marks on her upper arms where the flesh had been pressed, which made him think of other marks that he couldn’t see but that he knew must be there.

Tracy said, “It’s Cole’s turn next”—causing him to slosh root beer up his nose before he realized she was talking about his own birthday coming up. “Did I say? The boys are taking a little trip.”

Just then, Cole noticed PW standing in the kitchen doorway. He was staring at Cole with the same meaningful look on his face as before. How long had he been there?

Suddenly it was too crowded for Cole. As PW crossed the room to get something from the fridge, Cole quietly got up and slipped out. Behind him he heard PW say something that made Starlyn toot again, and though he had no reason to think it had anything at all to do with him, Cole cringed.

From his bedroom window he looked down on Mason, slowly pacing the front lawn and smoking a cigarette.

Cole sat on his bed and leafed through his drawing pad, which was filled with sketches of Starlyn. They all looked different now. Not everyone would be able to tell, but he could tell. She was not the same anymore. His brand-new portrait was out of date.

At the end of that long day he lies on his stomach, seeing Mason’s dark hands on Starlyn’s white skirt and the bright smile of underpants, thinking what a wild thing it must be to have someone rubbing and squeezing your cheeks like that, fingers digging into your crack, like he owns you. He crushes a pillow between his thighs and he kneads it, kneads it, seeing the hands, being the hands, and feeling them, all at the same time.

An hour earlier, in the kitchen again but this time alone, he’d found himself standing by the chair Starlyn had been sitting on in her scrap of a dress, and almost without thinking, he’d bent down and sniffed the quilted chair pad handmade by Tracy.

He’d have thought any smell would have faded by now. But there it was. Neither as good as he’d heard nor as bad as he’d heard. Wet sand at the beach.

After the unbearable tension has been relieved, he feels soiled and vaguely mournful, he feels a little sorry for himself and a little disappointed, too—he feels the way he always feels when he masturbates. He is tired, but when he tries to sleep the teasing image of white underpants is still there, like the grin of the Cheshire cat.

PART THREE

It was their secret, and Cole respected secrets. He would not tell anyone what he had seen. Only he wanted to know more himself. For example, he wanted to know if what he had seen was the first time Mason and Starlyn had ever made out. He thought probably yes, but this was mainly because of the number of times in recent weeks he’d heard Mason mention the fact that on her birthday Starlyn would become Sweet Little Sixteen.

And now, of course, she was sixteen. But she was still a girl, and Mason was not a boy. He was seven years older than Starlyn, and Cole knew most people would say it wasn’t right for a man to touch a girl like that, even if she let him. Even if she begged him. And the idea of this particular man and girl together was somehow particularly shocking. Her perfect face, his disfigured one. Her perfect skin, his snakeheads and skulls. Her shining blond hair, his shaved scalp. Her whiteness under his grease-monkey hands.

But she must have liked that, Cole thought. The eye-patch scar, the crusty palms and black nails. You’d think a girl would be turned off by those things—

And what about her boyfriend in Louisville?

Mason didn’t have a girlfriend, as far as Cole knew, and people were always teasing him about still being single. Everyone knew that, before his conversion, he’d sown his share of wild oats and, as he confessed, had not always been respectful of ladies.

“Maybe that’s why the Lord put all that on hold for me. When the time’s right, I expect he’ll introduce me to the one meant for me. I know the next step for me is to take a wife, but I’m leaving it all in his hands.” Meanwhile he lived with his mother. Lucinda Boyle, who’d raised Mason all on her own, was still in her forties but might as well have been an old woman. She was one of those people who, a year after getting over the flu, had developed symptoms of parkinsonism. She almost never left the house.

Cole wondered what was going to happen next. Did Mason believe that, even though she was so young, Starlyn was the one God intended for him? And did that mean they’d be getting married one day? But if that was the case, he thought, they wouldn’t have to keep their love a secret. Whatever the story was, he knew he shouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about it. It was none of his business. His mother used to say when it came to people’s love lives you should always look the other way. And: Never be the kind of boy who talks about what he did with a girl. Nice boys don’t kiss and tell.

Here the taste of cherry burst on Cole’s tongue, and he remembered: passing the cough drop from mouth to mouth—like kissing and not kissing and more than kissing all at the same time. And afterward, strangely enough, they’d gone on as before. Not girlfriend and boyfriend, not even friends, just ordinary classmates again—as if the accidental collision in the closet had never occurred. But he hadn’t talked about it. He’d never told anyone what he’d done in the dark with Jade.

Jade Korsky. Whose hair was like a poodle’s if poodles had been red. Who always had to sit in the front because she was both nearsighted and incapable of holding on to a pair of glasses for more than a week. First girl he ever kissed—and he’d forgotten all about her. How sad was that?

That had been sixth grade. In seventh grade, a boy named Royce had told him about an eighth-grader named Sage, a tall girl with hair like licorice twists and a faceful of piercings. A nympho, Royce said, and when Cole asked him what that meant he’d laughed and said, “It means you don’t got to pay her or nothing, dude. You just hook up and get your rocks off.” But Cole would have been terrified of hooking up with a girl he didn’t even know. Until Royce told him, he had no idea, either, what a chicken head was. He could not see how any girl could become famous for that. Enough boys had confirmed what Royce had said about Sage for Cole to think it could be true, but he could not imagine ever finding out for himself.