City of Boys (16 page)

—Lizzie, he says again. —Don’t you think he will? I do.

—That’s bad luck, I say. —Don’t even think about it.

He turns his eyes on me. Through the thick glass they are the color of the ink that runs out of my fountain pen, faint blue and brilliant both somehow.

—It’s true, he says. —Look how hard he works.

I pretend he has not said this, and suddenly his hand darts out and closes around the delicate wings of a butterfly. It is his only talent, catching butterflies, snatching them right out of the air, or from where they rest on the grass around him. He catches them and brings them to me, opening his hand to show a butterfly sitting there, like magic, until it flies shakily off, or drops feebly from his hand.

It grows late as I wait here. A few lights go out in buildings. Girls lie in the darkness, just a few feet away from the strangers who are their roommates. They sleep and try to grow accustomed to the strange patterns of breath, the strange noises, the strange rustlings of people they don’t know lying in beds only a few feet away. Somewhere the boy I will soon love tries to sleep. He pulls the covers up to his chin and dreams of touching my pale skin.

What I remember: the sun stretching across my bed, the crows quarreling in the trees, the quiet whisper of Puff’s tail against the floor as Glennie opens the door.

—Lizzie, he whispers in my ear, —time to get up. Lizzie,
he breathes. —Owl eyes, and I keep my eyes closed until I feel the pressure of his forehead against mine, his nose on my nose.

—One, two, three, he says, and I open my eyes to see his, spread like a shining mask over his face, half an inch from my own. I close my eyes again and wonder at the tiny fine bones of his face.

This is what I remember. This is all I remember and this is how I remember it.

—Lizzie, he calls. —Come. Look.

It is a late summer evening and all the children have gone home from our game of hide-and-seek. As they move away from this safe ground, under the streetlight that serves as home, I imagine they turn into monsters. Glennie is crouched under our parents’ window, and when I join him, I see Mother’s body and over her Father, arched backward, straining like a bone about to snap.

—Owlcake, Glennie whispers, and he lets go a high-pitched giggle. He smiles. —I watch them all the time, he says.

—Look at Father. He’s going to have a heart attack.

They hear our voices and turn toward the window, ghostfaced, wondering what is there, but we back away, making noises that could be nothing more than the rustling of small animals in the bushes.

In my own bed, I cannot sleep. When I turn out the light, all I can see are their round ghost faces, glowing in the dark room.

The boy I will fall in love with wakes and walks to the mirror. He looks at himself and rubs his hand across the new stubble on his cheeks. He imagines what it must be like to touch my face.

* * *

At school Glennie is what they call difficult, behaving in ways that confuse teachers and administrators: he talks too loud, will not sing in his music class, breaks whatever he makes in art. Our teachers are always surprised to find we are related, and I can tell they see me differently then, watching me with sideways speculative looks. My parents shake their heads over the notes on his report cards, and put them down, fully intending to do something about it all, but time drifts away from them, and they sign them and send them back, settled by the sense that if the card has been signed, something must have been done.

Glennie is only two years younger than I. In the hallways and on the playground I watch the other children move uneasily away from him; they are deceived at first by how much he looks like them, his cheerful happy face, his neat little shoes and shirts and shorts.

In first grade he sits at the edge of the concrete playground, holding a stick; as the other children climb over the jungle gym, he whacks the stick against the ground, humming a little song and gazing intently at their arms and legs as they move like spiders over the bars.

In third grade he always wanders away from his class at recess, and I spot him, a little dark hump in the corner of the schoolyard, digging holes with his hands. He removes his shirt in the heat and his back glows, the brightest spot in the whole gray day, as he puts things in the holes, then covers them up.

I should do something, I think, there is something I should do, but I am only in the fifth grade. I am only in the fifth grade, I tell myself, and I turn to watch the children my own age, then go to join them.

* * *

Glennie’s fourth-grade class is keeping a rabbit, to teach them about responsibility, and soon, the teacher has told them, they will experience the miracle of birth. Each child is given a week with the rabbit at home, but somehow Glennie’s week never comes, even though he has made a bed for the rabbit in the corner of his room, and dug a little hole in the yard for it to rest in. He is already planning to bring home one of the baby rabbits as a pet, and when he tells my parents this, they nod absently in his direction. We’ll see, we’ll see, they murmur, and his face glows as he plans the fun he will have with his new pet.

When the children come in one morning, the rabbits have been born, five new rabbits, and one tiny dead one. The teacher picks the students who will get to keep a baby, and of course none of them is Glennie, but somehow in all the excitement and confusion he gets hold of the little dead one. A while passes before they notice the blood on his bright shirt, where he has hidden the rabbit against his chest, and when they take it away from him, he runs from the room. They find him later in the bathroom, gazing down into the toilet as he flushes it over and over.

Because my mother is shopping or at the beauty parlor or having lunch with her friends, I must walk Glennie home to change his shirt, and as I approach the office where he waits, I see him before he sees me. I stand in the hallway just out of his sight; he is bent over his knees, looking down at his feet, but even so, I can see the stain creeping across his shirt, and I run to the bathroom, where I don’t have to believe this is happening.

I look at myself in the mirror. —I am in the sixth grade, I say out loud. —I am in the sixth grade, and I don’t care, but the face that stares back at me does not resemble my own. For the first time I realize that he is going to get in my way. When I come back to the office for him, he smiles when he
sees me. —Lizzie, he says. —Let’s stop for candy on the way home. His shirt clings to his chest in dark, wet patches, but as we walk down the hall together, he takes my hand and smiles at the empty walls; behind the walls, children stare at figures on a dark board.

In the bathroom, the girl next to me, whom I would like to be my friend, says, —Your brother tried to steal that dead rabbit.

She pulls a tiny lipstick from her purse. —Didn’t he?

I look at myself in the mirror. —No, I say.

She brings her face close to the glass. —He had blood all over his shirt, she says.

I watch her smear lipstick across her pink lips.

—He was bleeding, I finally say. —He has a disease that makes his chest bleed.

She looks over at the girl on her other side. Their eyes meet in the mirror and they trade their miniature cosmetics. The girl next to me draws large red circles on her cheeks and I smile at her.

I want these girls as my friends. I walk down the hall just a step behind them and grow older with each moment.

—Lizzie, Glennie calls from the water fountain where he stands alone, but I do not hear him as I walk down the hall with these girls. Our skirts rustle in the cold air.

What happens after this is what happens, and cannot be changed. Over the years only cruelties pass between us, and I do not remember them except as little flare-ups in a long glowing stretch of mirror. His cruelties are small, but dazzling in their sincerity. He calls me desperate names to get my attention, but I hear them only distantly; they are like the faint buzz of a fly caught between a window and a screen.

* * *

Glennie looks at me slyly over his cereal at the breakfast table, where I sit unwillingly, eating little, waiting to be released to school.

—Lizzie, he says, his voice rising and falling in a little song.

—I saw that boy you like.

I look down at my bowl, soggy lumps of cereal floating in yellow milk. My parents do not look up from their papers, but they tilt their heads to listen, and after a moment their eyes meet.

—He was smoking pot, Glennie says, and laughs. —Right on the street corner.

My parents’ heads swivel slowly toward me like heavy flowers waving on thin stalks. They gaze blindly at me, waiting for an explanation, while Glennie smiles and drowns the lumps of cereal in his bowl, pretending they are bugs clinging to crumbling boats.

When I walk by him later, he is standing in the open door, shirtless in the heat, trying to decide whether to stay in or go out. He has already forgotten the betrayal at breakfast, but I have not, and as I walk by him I am unable to stop myself. I watch my arm swing out, as though it belongs to someone else, and slap him hard on his back; it makes a horrible satisfying smack in the quiet afternoon and he turns to me with tears in his eyes. —Lizzie, he says, in horror and disbelief, touching his hand to his soft cheek. —You made me cry.

His cruel little deeds are forgotten in a moment, swallowed up in his strange days, but mine will never fade, each a testimony to the frailty of my love. This slap will resound through the years; it will draw for me all the boundaries of my past and my future, his face turning to me in slack-jawed
stunned innocence, the afternoon sun shining brightly behind him, his cheeks glittering with unaccustomed tears.

These years of closed doors—I can hardly believe they happen. I barely remember each moment even as it ends. —Lizzie, he whispers at my door. —Let me in. I have to talk to you. I look out the window and watch the owls gathering in the trees. If he is gone before I sleep, I do not know. I imagine him curling up outside my room, and I can hear his slow breath through the thin door, his tiny heart beating against the floor. I lock the door and leave him to his life. He will get in my way and I will be left behind, mired in whatever it is I feel for him. I have no other choice: I lock my door and do not hear the faint scratch of his nails against the hollow wood.

These are years that never happen. At school I look in the mirror and meet the eyes of the other girls. We exchange our lipsticks, and admire each other for the boys whose eyes we will catch, the boys who will watch us in the mirrors of their cars. Hardly a moment goes by for us that does not pass under the gaze of those boys, and I work hard to let them see how much I want them. They are so sleek, with their smooth hairless chests, and I am only happy when I find myself with one or another of them in the back seat of his car, the moon rising all around us, the engine hissing, our breath rising against the windows. I forget each boy’s name as we kiss, his face as he touches me, and when he lays his body over mine, inert and inattentive, I smile with a secret pleasure, but whenever I am careless enough to look over some boy’s shaggy head, I see Glennie there, his eyes like little black cavities in the moon;
Owlcake
, he winks, and turns to let a spray of butterflies into the milky sky. I
close my eyes and concentrate on the smell of a strange boy’s skin, his quick breath in my ear, the unfamiliar welcome heart beating against my breast.

In the hall mirror at home, I practice looking up at boys from under my eyelashes; I practice three or four dazzling smiles before I notice a little blot at the edge of the mirror, and turn to see Glennie hunched in a corner, staring at me. Every day at school he creeps along the hallways behind me. When I turn to smile at a boy, he is there, watching us from some doorway, or half hidden by his locker. I freeze my smile and fix my eyes on the face of the boy in front of me, so he won’t turn and see Glennie watching us.

As I wait here by the campus, the boy I will love closes his eyes and finally sleeps, finally dreams. His roommate raises himself up on one bony elbow and watches the boy I love sleep and dream of me.

When I am finally let free to go to college, my suitcases sit in a heap by the door. My mother becomes sentimental and adds to the pile a stuffed panda from my closet. I return it, but later it is replaced by a tiger whose face has been rubbed smooth. Glennie says nothing while all of this goes on. He hates school, and he is getting fat, swelling out of his shirts, rocking in the hot desert of the August sun.

—Glennie, I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, I say. —Okay?

—Okay, he says, not looking at me. He drags a stick through the ground, disrupting an anthill, and my mother and father listen to us from behind their closed door.

Here at school I have tried not to expect anything. I go to classes and do not think of home at all. When I arrived, my
new roommate suggested that we get identical bedspreads, and curtains to match. I could not think of what to say and only stared at her, fingering the rough chenille of the bedspread that covered my bed at home for so many years. She has a boyfriend who leaves when I come in, not looking at me.

—Elizabeth, my mother says on the telephone. —You’ll have to come home. Your father and I need to talk to you. I have been here only a month. My roommate files her nails and looks at herself in the mirror.

—What about? I ask.

—Your brother, she says. Her voice is higher-pitched than usual, and it is clear she will say no more on the phone. My roommate looks at me without interest, and bites at the corner of one of her nails.

At the airport my mother stands nervously in the entrance-way, so that I have only a moment to compose a face to meet her. She kisses me quickly on the cheek.

—Let’s go, she says. —I’m double-parked. She turns and I notice that she has somehow acquired a tan while I’ve been gone, even though it is bleak fall in Ohio.

Before she starts the car, she pulls the sun visor down to check her makeup in the mirror, using her little finger to rub away the faint smears of lipstick in the corners of her mouth. As we pull out of the airport onto the highway, she drums her long fingernails on the hard plastic of the steering wheel, and her eyes go back and forth between the rearview mirror and the road ahead, though there is almost no traffic.