So Shelly (14 page)

Gordon made his way through the parting sea of onlookers directly to where Shelly was standing. A collective gasp sounded when he extended his hand to … Hogg, who, suddenly oblivious to Shelly’s presence, followed him to the floor, accompanied by a slow song. Soon the mismatched pair were melded into the sea of dancers, rocking back and forth, left and right, from foot to foot, and then I completely lost sight of them for the remainder of the evening.

I did, however, spot Shelly—although I wish I hadn’t. After her snubbing, she marched directly up to Brandon Sullivan and cut in on his partner. Before the dance ended, her tongue was tonsil-deep in Brandon’s mouth.

Maybe that was the beginning of the end, a sign of her tendency to respond irrationally and dangerously to Gordon’s
rejection. In any case, in that moment, if she couldn’t have Gordon, she’d
be
Gordon.

Both Hogg and Shelly went too far that night—Shelly spitefully, in the back of Brandon’s father’s Dodge Ram, and Hogg because what choice did she have, on the floor of Trinity’s chapel, after being plied with a bottle of Communion wine that Gordon had pilfered from the tabernacle?

The outcomes of the evening were not revealed to me by Shelly or Gordon. Regarding Shelly, gentlemen may never kiss and tell, but Brandon Sullivan sure as hell was no gentleman. As for Hogg, on Monday, when the missing wine was discovered, so too were the black string tie from Hogg’s costume and an empty condom wrapper. The tie was easily traced to Hogg through a large number of schadenfreude-inspired witnesses. Hogg was summarily expelled when, for the sake of what she was convinced was love, she refused to narc on Gordon, which could have reduced her punishment to a six-day suspension. Hearsay evidence led Principal Smith to Gordon, who, after a terse denial, escaped unpunished. He was, however, informally assigned to Father Fulop for counseling.

I’m convinced that Gordon unconsciously left the evidence behind on purpose. I think he perceived Hogg as a threat. You see, there’s no doubt that Gordon loved Shelly, but not in some easily classifiable way.

“Romantically?” you ask.

No.

“Like a sister?”

Not really.

“A best friend?”

That’s not it either.

It was some twisted form of love that required her to be forever inferior to, and emotionally dependent on, him. With Hogg, he couldn’t stand the idea of Shelly’s attention being diverted from him, so he found a way to remove her. It’s just a theory, but one that grew stronger. And, if the theory is correct, Gordon’s possessiveness played just as big a role in Shelly’s death as her own obsessions.

In the weeks that followed, Shelly grew distant and sullen. While Gordon dove into the start of swim season and made only infrequent visits to the
Beacon
’s office, Shelly stayed long hours, worked weekends, and threw herself headlong into making the final edits and preparing the magazine for December’s publication date. She had also assumed Hogg’s responsibilities and was already lining up advertisers for next semester’s edition. I figured that her mood was the result of Gordon’s and Hogg’s absences, and that she was working so hard as a way of dealing with her sadness by not dealing with it at all. Concerned for her well-being and selfishly missing her attention, I followed her into the media center darkroom one day when we, the Gordonettes, and Mr. Robbins were all working after school. She had gone to retrieve a ream of paper for the printer.

“Hey,” I said, as, with her back to me, she reached for the papers stacked high on an overhead shelf.

Startled, she gasped, half-turned toward me with widened eyes, and formed a shield across her breasts with her arms.

When she recognized me in the strawberry syrup light, she let her guard down. “Oh, it’s just you.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, playing hurt.

“You know what I mean. You scared me.”

“Following you in here was the only way to corner you long enough to talk to you.”

“What do you want?” she asked tersely with her lashes fluttering incessantly over eyes that refused to alight for more than a second on anything, including me.

“I want to know what’s wrong. You haven’t been so … so … so Shelly lately. Did I do something?” I asked, in the egocentric way all guys believe the world and everything in it is somehow connected to ourselves.

“Maybe, John, you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” she snipped in a tone I’d never heard her use before. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s my period,” she said, expecting the topic of menstruation to send me reeling like Dracula from a cross, as is typical of most males. Ironic simile, I know.

What Shelly didn’t know was that since I’d been a little boy, my mother had sent me on “tampon runs.” Literally, I’d run—because my father was at work or, in the last years of his life, unable to drive, and she was too drowning in self-pity to do much of anything. She’d tell me that if I didn’t hurry, she’d bleed to death. I know now that she was exaggerating, but I didn’t know that then. Because of the dearth of drugstores in our neighborhood, my runs weren’t short ones. I like to think that if I had had the inclination, I could have been a fair cross-country runner.

The first time, I was maybe nine years old. I tore into the drugstore and ran right into a white-coated man, who was trying to exit. “Mister, I need help!” I said with tears welling. “My mother is bleeding to death!”

I handed him a slip of scrap paper wrapped in a ten-dollar
bill on which my mother had scribbled, “One box of store-brand tampons.”

The pharmacist smiled, then calmly walked me to the feminine products section. On one knee, he explained that my mother was not going to bleed to death (“desanguination” is the term for the type of massive blood loss that may lead to death), and he proceeded to provide a clinical explanation of the female reproductive system. I certainly didn’t understand much of the anatomy lecture, but I was relieved to know that my mother was going to live. When I think of that pharmacist today, I imagine him as the type of father who, in what he believes is a loving and rational manner, teaches his children that there is no Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, or even Santa Claus.

Anyway, Shelly’s attempt at avoidance didn’t work. I stood my ground, blocking the narrow darkroom passage.

In the next instant, she was pressed against me, head resting on my left shoulder, arms still draped at her sides and tears drenching my neck and polo.

Unsure of my role, I slowly raised my arms so that I held her loosely and was running my hand down the back of her head and shoulders over her long, silky black hair from where it spilled out from beneath her toboggan. She sobbed convulsively and confessed strings of mostly unintelligible sorrows—some of which I have already shared with you—until, eventually, she regained her composure. She wiped her eyes, her nose, and my shoulder, with tissues removed from the pockets of the black cardigan that she wore over her uniform blouse. The disintegrated tissue left white dandruff-like flakes on my shirtfront.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a half-laugh, half-cry.

“It’s okay.”

“Thank you so much, John,” she added.

“For what?” I asked, sincerely unsure of what good I’d done and certainly no wiser for having listened to the causes of her sadness.

“For asking,” Shelly said. Then she deftly slid between the sink baths and me and was gone.

A week later, on a Friday afternoon early in December, a day when the first Alberta clipper of the winter had come barreling down from Canada, surfing the current of the fast-flowing jet stream and dumping the season’s first measurable snowfall on northern Ohio, I asked Shelly to join me at Gordon’s swim meet after school.

She whispered that she couldn’t because she was working that afternoon at Planned Parenthood.

So I went to the meet by myself, knowing full well that it was a total violation of the code of teenage cool to go anywhere alone. It’s penultimate only to being seen riding a school bus to or from school, which is the irrefutable sign of being completely friendless and lame.

The humidity inside the natatorium was stifling, like a tropical rain forest. I was seated in the first row of the aluminum bleachers, and I half-expected Gordon to swing in on a vine. His entrance was, however, less conspicuous but not much less impressive.

The girls’ and then the boys’ teams filed out of their respective locker rooms, and Gordon was the last swimmer in
line, and the only topless one. The others were all wrapped in red calf-length swim parkas with hoods over their heads; they looked like a line of monks marching to evening prayers. Gordon wore only a pair of black wind pants that rested well below his waistline, to expose the top of the red bikini Speedo beneath. The pants effectively concealed his misshapen foot and calf, as his bared torso drew the crowd’s collective stare of appreciation for his Adonis-like build and beauty.

When Gordon’s events were called, he’d wait until after introductions, and at the very last second drop his pants, assume his position on the platform or in the pool, and train his eyes on the water in order to avoid catching a glimpse of any untoward stares at his deformity.

As on the deck, in the water he was without peer regardless of the stroke: butterfly, breaststroke, backstroke, or freestyle. What had been pure, brutish athleticism during his sophomore year, Coach Mancini had transformed into a graceful liquidity of motion by his junior season. Gordon’s form cut with surgical precision through the water, more dolphinlike than human.

“He’s an Aquarius, you know,” a woman’s voice said from behind me as Gordon dominated his final race of the afternoon.

When I turned in acknowledgment, however, her eyes were glued on the pool as if she had been speaking to no one, or anyone, or, perhaps, everyone.

Then she said, “Aquarians are stubborn, contrary, perverse, unpredictable, unemotional, and detached. Look it up. It’s not my fault. It’s in his stars.”

After Gordon touched the timing pad, having easily won his race, the strange woman rose and exited the natatorium without another word.

As the swim parents seated on the bleacher behind me repositioned themselves into the vacuum created by the strange woman’s departure, I heard a father say, “That Byron woman is one queer duck.”

When I left the swim meet, the weather couldn’t have been more opposite to the sauna-like natatorium, but it being a Friday and there being no one waiting enthusiastically for my return at home, I decided to lean into the wind, brave the face-stinging snowflakes, and visit Shelly at Planned Parenthood. I thought it might make her happy to hear of the Olympian feats Gordon had performed, and I wanted to share with her that I’d met, sort of, Gordon’s mother. Okay, yeah, I
really
didn’t want to go home.

Planned Parenthood is located on the fringe of what used to be a downtown Ogontz replete with department stores and specialty shops and restaurants but is now nearly full of empty buildings. As I approached, I was relieved to see that there were no picketers outside the clinic. An ecumenical group of pro-life advocates, sponsored by a coalition of Ogontz’s Christian churches (the only kind in town), occasionally set up human barricades to frighten away and harass would-be patients, and to express their scorn for a sexually informed citizenry. These advocates were usually armed with poster-sized photographs of aborted fetuses and with cameras, which they sometimes used to take pictures of clients as they
exited the building beneath the Planned Parenthood sign. Then they would post the photographs on their website. Apparently, the rain, sleet, snow, and gloom of night did stay these people’s puritanical resolve, unlike that of the intrepid U.S. mail carriers.

A tone sounded in the back of the building when I pulled open the single glass door. I felt my testicles shrivel the second I entered the waiting room and a multitude of shades of pinks attacked my senses. I had hoped to find Shelly behind the receptionist’s counter, but it was unattended. A vertical rack, full of pamphlets related to sexual health, hung to the right of the counter. I was reading, without actually touching, one on genital warts when a large African American woman asked, “Can I help you?” in one of those tones that conveys the exact opposite meaning of one’s actual words.

If not for the counterbalancing pull of her double-wide hips, the woman’s boulder-sized breasts, spilling from the front of her scoop-necked red chiffon dress, would have successfully teamed with gravity to topple her to the ground. I immediately understood her agitation with having to rise from wherever she had been parked in the rear to wait on a skinny white boy, who, she presumed, had been unable to keep his puny peashooter holstered and was now suffering the consequences. She made note of my reading selection and, despite her best attempt at professionalism, was unable to mask her disgust.

Her badge read “Sha’niqua.”

“Oh. No. I don’t need help,” I said, responding to her revulsion.

“It’s okay, honey; you’d be surprised at the folks who come here. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said, although it sounded more like “Sure you don’t, asshole.”

“No. You don’t understand. I’m here for Shelly.”

Her brow furrowed and her frown deepened; her contempt for me actually increased at my mention of Shelly’s name.

“I see,” she said. “Did she know you was coming?”

I paused to consider whether the pun was a Planned Parenthood joke and whether I should acknowledge the attempt at humor with a smile or chuckle. An additional nonthreatening glance into Sha’niqua’s eyes, however, made it clear that levity was not standard procedure at Planned Parenthood. “Yes.”

She hesitated, sized me up, clearly found me lacking in whatever it was she was measuring, and said, “Come with me.”

Sha’niqua waddled, accompanied by the
squish-squish
of the fabric from her sleeves rubbing a bossa nova beat against the material on her sides, making the metallic rattlesnake sound of a cabasa. I followed her, conga style, past the receptionist’s work area, the director’s office, a pair of conference rooms, and a kitchenette, until she stopped and opened the door to an examining room in which Shelly sat with her bare legs hanging over the side of one of those cold vinyl-covered, height-adjustable examining tables with the ass-wide paper strip down the middle. Her face was turned to the wall; she wore a thin hospital robe. A Trinity girl’s uniform made a pile on a chair in the corner. My guide shut the door
and left without a word, but not before shooting me a look of utter loathing.