The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (17 page)

Laird didn’t glance up from the notes he was making. “Yeah,” he said. “That was my uncle.”

Jory leaned quickly back. She stared at the chalkboard where Mr. DeNovia was coloring in the oceanic crust with a piece of blue chalk. “Really?” she whispered.

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t even remember him.”

“Your uncle was a
missionary
?”

Mr. DeNovia turned with the chalk still in his hand and faced the class. “Am I going to have to separate you two?”

The girl next to Jory gave a soft snort.

“When a continent runs into a piece of seafloor,” Mr. DeNovia said, knocking the point of his chalk against the chalkboard, “it’s like a Mack truck running into a Volkswagen. Not very pretty.” The end of Mr. DeNovia’s chalk broke off and fell to the floor.

A boy in the back of the class gave a brief guffaw.

Mr. DeNovia bent over and retrieved the chalk. He stood up and smiled ruefully at this lone evidence of class participation. “But at least there’s a clear winner in this wreck,” he said, wiping chalk dust down the front of his pants. “And the seafloor basalt ends up in pretty much the same position as the VW: under the truck—or continent, as the case may be. This may seem like a drag for the basalt, but remember, it isn’t all that happy on the surface anyway.”

“A drag for the basalt?”
Laird whispered the words out of the side of his mouth.

Jory smiled surreptitiously.

“This gives it the heat it needs to remelt and complete the differentiation process which was so rudely interrupted at the spreading ridge. And when it cools, guess what forms?” Mr. DeNovia glanced around the room. He picked up the attendance sheet. “Mr. Frankamp?”

A black-haired boy sitting to the left of Jory frowned. “I don’t know, man,” he said. He jabbed his pen point into the wooden tabletop and made a drilling motion with it. “But you make rocks sound like they’re people or something. Like they’re all happy and sad and shit. Whoops.”
He grinned at the boy next to him, who punched him in the arm. “I mean, sad and
stuff
. ”

“Thank you for that clarification.” Mr. DeNovia continued on as the class snickered. “The materials that make up the earth’s form may not be living in the way that we, as humans, think of as
living
, but their processes, just like ours, are ones of progression and change. They are in a state of flux, just like plants and animals and, yes, human beings.” Mr. DeNovia squinted slightly and began waving his hands. “Expansion, movement, changes in temperature and size and shape. Acting upon other elements and being acted upon. I’d call that living, wouldn’t you?” He quit waving and stood quietly at the front of the room for a moment, looking at the backs of his hands. Then he walked over to his teacher’s desk and sat down. “Why don’t you go ahead and begin reading in your textbooks. Chapter Four, I think it is. Let’s just skip over One and Two. You people obviously are already well acquainted with the earth’s crust.” He opened his desk drawer, peered inside, and promptly shut it again. “You’ve been outside. You’ve seen it.”

As Jory reached into her book bag, she felt a sudden pang. Today was the first day of PE. Just thinking about it made her feel sick. Jory glanced around the classroom at the other girls. None of them seemed like they were worrying about it. One girl behind her had even fallen asleep. Jory clenched her toes inside Grace’s boots and made a soft involuntary groaning sound.

“What’s wrong?” Laird whispered.

“Nothing,” she said. “I guess I don’t feel so good.”

“Girl stuff?”

Jory gave him a blank look.

The girl sitting to the left of Jory leaned forward. “He wants to know if you’re on the rag.” The girl was wearing a beaded choker with a tiny elephant hanging from the middle of it. “Guys always like to think you’re on the rag every minute.”

“I’m not,” whispered Jory, feeling her face turning red.

“Well, if you are,” said the girl, “go see the nurse. She’ll give you a Darvon.”

“No
way
,” said Laird.

“Yup,” said the girl, nodding. She glanced over at Mr. DeNovia, who was busily packing papers into his bag. “She has Valium too.”

“No stinking way.” Laird leaned even farther over the table. “You’re full of shit.”

The choker girl had begun digging in her suede purse. “Check it out,” she said, unwrinkling a Kleenex and pulling a tiny yellow pill out of the middle of it. She put the pill on the table for inspection.

Laird leaned past Jory and picked up the pill. “Hm,” he said, turning it over and looking at it closely. He licked the pill once and then put it in his pants pocket.

“Hey, you freak,” the girl whispered. “Give that back.” She laughed and tried to reach across the table.

“Dream on,” said Laird, leaning back and laughing.

“
All right
, table three,” Mr. DeNovia said. “That’s probably enough fun for this period.”

Jory sat silently thinking. The nurse. Why hadn’t she thought of the nurse? She could go to the nurse! Jory put her pencil between the pages of
The Earth and Its Wonders
and told herself, no, do not be stupid. If she allowed the idea about the nurse to take root much longer, she would find herself missing PE and being driven home by Mr. Mullinix. She was squinching her toes together in her boots and trying to will herself into bravery when the classroom door opened. The students all turned their heads at this exciting event.

“Who’s that?” Laird peered intently at the man standing just outside the doorway.

“It’s my father,” Jory whispered, as surprised by this as anyone else.

Jory and her father stood out in the hallway. Jory kept her arms folded tight across her chest and her eyes deliberately trained on the floor. She could hear the quiet sounds coming from inside the open door of the earth science classroom—students sighing and turning pages in their books, someone coughing and then scooting the wooden legs of their chair back. Jory listened to the large corridor clock’s muted ticking. “You can’t just come to school like this, Dad,” she whispered.

“Well, honey,” her father said in his normal tone of voice, which
seemed suddenly to Jory unbearably loud and capable of carrying all the way down the hall. “Grace called me at work and said you’d forgotten your PE clothes. I left my meeting with the admissions committee just to get them for you.” He handed her the large brown Albertsons bag that contained her sweatpants and tennis shoes. “I thought you’d be pretty glad to see me.”

Jory held the bag down by her side, as if it were full of something that smelled. “I guess you can go now,” she whispered, her chest a tight knot of bad feelings.

“Okay.” Her father brought his lips together and gazed off toward the bank of pale green lockers. “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll get back to my own school.” He took a step toward the stairs, but then stopped. He reached out and put his hand on her upper arm. “Are you doing fine? Is everyone here treating you kindly?”

Jory looked up at her father, incredulous.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Her father patted her arm. “Okay, then.”

“Dad.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Never mind.”

“What? What is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

They stood in the hall looking at each other.

“I don’t feel so good.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” Jory closed her eyes. “I don’t feel okay. Something’s wrong with me.”

“Like what?” He stepped closer and studied her face.

“Like something bad.”

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“I think I need to go home.” Jory swallowed and gripped the bag of clothes tight.

“Are you sick?”

“Um-hm.”

“Do you have a fever?” Her father tried to put a hand on her forehead, but she stepped back.

“No, it’s not like that,” she whispered. “It’s girl stuff.”

Her father blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Well, all right. Hm. Let’s see. I guess we’ll have to tell someone. The secretary or someone.”

“She’s upstairs.” Jory turned away from him. “I’ll go wait in the car.”

Her father nodded.

“I have to get my books first.”

Jory stepped toward the open classroom door. Inside, everyone looked up as she walked quickly toward her end of the table. She gathered up her papers and books and began sliding them into her book bag.

“Hey, what’s up?” Laird whispered as he watched her progress. “Where’re you going?”

“Miss Quanbeck, are you planning on leaving us?” Mr. DeNovia stood in front of her.

“I have to go home,” Jory said, not pausing in her packing. “A family emergency.”

“Oh, dear,” Mr. DeNovia said. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

All around the classroom the students lifted their heads and stopped whatever they were doing and were happily listening to this exchange. The girl with the elephant choker smiled at Jory, a strange, almost winking smile. “I have an emergency too,” she said, loudly, and stretched her arms above her head. “A boredom emergency.”

“That’s too bad, Sylvia.” Mr. DeNovia checked his watch. “Since we’ve still got a good twenty minutes of study time left.”

“Bleh.” The girl named Sylvia stuck out her tongue at Mr. DeNovia’s back. She leaned past Jory and whispered to Laird, “I could really use that thing you’ve got in your pocket.”

“That’s what they all say.” Laird grinned and then turned toward Jory. “What happened? Is somebody dead?”

Jory scooped up her pen and slung her book bag strap over her shoulder. “I wish,” she said.

It was hot in the car. Jory’s back stuck to the Buick’s vinyl seat as she and her father drove along in silence. Jory watched the farmhouses slide by. She had ridden back and forth past this terrain enough that some part of her head had already memorized the landscape. The small, neatly kept
green farmhouse and then the slightly more ostentatious redbrick one, the twinned metal grain silos overlooking the corral with the Appaloosa and the horse racing barrels, then the grayish house with its sagging, broken-toothed shutters and the rusty tractor peeking up from the weeds of the side yard. Cottonwoods, willows, elms, and then rows of cypress trees for windbreak. She could narrow her eyes and have all of it click past like so many train cars. She slumped lower in the seat. She was missing PE. The relief she felt churned bitterly in the lowest part of her stomach. She bit her inner cheek until a tiny thrill of pain forced her to stop. “I hate you,” she said under her breath. It wasn’t quite apparent who she was speaking to. Her tongue sought out the bitten spot in her cheek again. Her father drove on, his eyes on the road ahead.

Jory and her father stood outside the car. “Thanks for bringing my stuff,” Jory said quietly.

“Of course,” her father said, and gave her arm a final squeeze. “See you at home,” he said, and then almost visibly winced. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Will you be coming over on Sunday?” Jory picked up her bag of PE clothes and held it to her chest.

“Sunday?”

“For my birthday?”

Her father seemed to be thinking about this, as if it required a great deal of study. “Well, of course we will,” he said at last.

“All of you?”

“All of us.” Her father nodded firmly. “We will
all
be over,” he said. “On Sunday. For your thirteenth birthday.” He ran his hands down the front of his pant legs. “That’s a very special day.”