Cecily Von Ziegesar (19 page)

It was almost eleven. The barn door stood open. Heavy white snowflakes fell from the sky like a chorus of paper angels. A few minutes ago the Gatzes' house, only one hundred yards away, was fully visible. Now it was obliterated by the whiteout.

“Guess we're going to be stuck here for a while,” Geoff observed, waggling his bottle of ether in his skeletal hands.

“Time for a short break!” Wills flung down his guitar and knotted up his long yellow skirt as if he were preparing for a boxing match or a good game of tug-o'-war. Geoff poured some ether
on the end of the knot, and Wills squatted down on his haunches to sniff it. Grover held out one of the straps of his overalls and Geoff daubed it with ether too.

“What is that stuff anyway?” Tragedy asked, swaying tipsily.

“You don't want to know.” Sea Bass winked at her. “Stick with beer.”

“Nothing worse than coming down from an ether high,” Damascus observed. “Besides, it stinks.”

“Ether is not cool,” Sea Bass said definitively.

Tragedy didn't enjoy being told what was cool and what was not. She preferred to decide for herself. Horseshoes, for example.

She'd learned all about drugs in school. Home was so boring, everyone did them. Not her though. Her parents had done drugs to such excess back in college they were basically brain damaged. Drugs had always seemed pretty dumb. But ether was different. It wasn't a pill or a powder or some gross weed.

“Can I try some?” she asked Geoff.

Geoff appraised Tragedy's beautiful face, her lush dark hair, her curvy body encased in an inappropriately skimpy white sundress and furry raccoon coat. He appraised her black rubber farm boots and brown bony knees. “You look like a model,” he said.

She held out her hand for the bottle of ether. “Come on. Just tell me what I have to do.”

Geoff let her have the bottle. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a rag. “Just pour some on, hold it up against your nose, and inhale.”

Tragedy did as she was told. Adam was going to freak when he came back to find her all fucked up. He was supposed to be babysitting, he was supposed to be in charge! She doused the rag in the clear, toxic liquid and held it up to her nose. Closing
her eyes, she inhaled again and again, allowing the heady pulse of it to consume her.

The Grannies took up their instruments.

“It's a fucking blizzard!” Wills yelled before banging out the first few bars of a very up-tempo song that may or may not have been by the Grateful Dead.

Tragedy closed her eyes, falling into a blissed-out sort of trance. Every hair on her body vibrated intensely. Or maybe it was the raccoon coat, coming back to life.

“Are you okay?” Sea Bass asked.

“We told you ether was nasty,” Damascus chimed in.

“You don't know what it feels like,” Tragedy gushed, her eyes still closed. She could hear the kittens scratching away on the other side of the barn wall. She could hear the sheep milling around by the fence. She tipped the bottle back onto the rag and held it against her nose once more, loving the sharp clinical rush as it tore away at her nasal passages.
Scratch, scratch. Baa, baa. Scratch, scratch. Baa, baa.

She opened her eyes. Outside, the landscape was a bright, fuzzy white like a white angora sweater. All those hours she'd spent poring over travel guides, imagining what it would be like to climb mountains in Nepal or dogsled in Alaska, and now her own backyard was completely spectacular and foreign. Geoff's face loomed in front of her, his hollow eyes gaping out of their sunken, hungry sockets. He stuck up his bony thumb in silent solidarity. Or maybe he said something that Tragedy couldn't hear.

Mesmerized by the whiteout, she stumbled out of the barn. White snowflakes drifted down from the sky and nested on her eyelashes. The sheep stamped and stared at her through the fence. They should have been brought in hours ago.

She held out her hands. The snowflakes screamed as they fell out of the sky and melted on her bare skin. The yard was al
ready blanketed in snow. The house was a ghostly blur. Everything was white, white, white.

“I'm going out there!” she cried, making a run for it. She dashed across the yard, behind the house, and into the woods beyond. It was colder than she realized, and darker in the woods. Whorls of ice pelted her bare skin and skittered over the thick fur of her coat. All around her the tall trees swayed and shivered, leafless and unfamiliar. She'd roamed these pathless woods almost every day of her life, but tonight she couldn't see a thing. What a joke it would be if she got lost.

T
he average freshman course load at a liberal arts college such as Dexter looks something like this: Geology 101, The Romantics, English 100, Creative Writing: Poetry, Music Appreciation. An English midterm examination would involve two essays and four questions to be answered in a brief paragraph, such as, “Who wrote the lines ‘When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,/Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,/And think that I may never live to trace/Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance,' and what did he or she mean by them?” There would be an additional grammar section with witty, impossible questions, as in, “Write an ironic hortatory sentence in iambic pentameter using a gerund, a phoneme, and a conjunction. Please use proper punctuation.” The Geology exam was all memorization, including the lab portion, which would require the identification of fourteen species of rock. Studying for Music Appreciation was almost pleasant. An entire night of Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven concertos played at low
volume while you slept and you were bound to be able to distinguish them in the morning.

Shipley sat at her desk in her dorm room, listening to Chopin's nocturnes and watching the snow fall with her Romantics anthology opened to John Keats's “When I Have Fears.” It was almost midnight and the snow was falling hard. She was probably the only one studying on campus. Everyone else was at Adam's party, which had probably turned into a giant sleepover since no one would want to drive back in the snow. Chances were, Adam had already fallen into the arms of some pushy, overachieving drunk girl who'd started studying for exams back in October. Of course Shipley could have borrowed Tom's Jeep and gone to check up on Adam herself. The Jeep would be better in the snow than the Mercedes anyway. But Tom was not to be disturbed.

Through the aching strains of music she detected the inharmonious sound of someone knocking on her door.

“Hello?” she called, sitting up very straight.

The door opened a crack. “Shipley? Are you in there?”

For a moment Shipley thought she might be having one of her daydreams—the pornographic ones she used to have before she'd come to college. A tall, handsome stranger would walk into her dorm room, mistaking it for his own, while she lay half-asleep in her bed. He'd strip down to his boxer shorts and perform some ritualistic football team stretching routine involving karate chops and grunts and taut muscle flexes, completely oblivious to her watching from beneath the covers. Then he'd slip into bed, and, pleasantly surprised to find the bed occupied by none other than Shipley herself, would proceed to make passionate love to her, from behind. In the morning she'd wake up to find him stroking her hair and gazing adoringly into her face. “What's your name?” he'd say.

“It's Adam.”

Shipley turned toward the door. “Adam?”

“I waited for you,” he said, coming into the room. The shoulders of his blue parka were dusted with snow. “Finally I just decided to come look for you.”

The truth was that Adam had been driving in circles around Dexter's campus for almost two hours, daring himself. The visibility got so bad he finally pulled over. Now he was here. And—miraculously—she was here too.

“It's snowing so hard,” she said, closing her book. Chopin trilled away on the piano. Nocturne in G Major, Opus 37, Andantino. Or had the tape switched over to Beethoven?

Adam unzipped his jacket halfway. Taking it off all the way felt too presumptuous. “I was going to offer to drive you back to the party, but it's pretty bad out there….”

“No, please. Come in. Sit down,” Shipley said.

Adam took off his jacket and hung it on the doorknob. He sat down on the end of her bed. “Maybe in the morning we can ski,” he said stupidly. He didn't even know how to ski, except cross-country, which didn't count.

“My father just bought a house in Hawaii,” Shipley said. “Did you know they can ski there?”

“Skiing in Hawaii?” Adam exclaimed loudly. “I thought it was all volcanoes and beaches.”

It was the most inane conversation either of them had ever had.

“You were great in the play.” Shipley walked over to the bed and sat down next to Adam. His jeans were damp. His legs were very long. “But I—”

She wanted to tell him that she'd made a mistake. That she hadn't meant to kiss him that time, in Professor Rosen's kitchen. She wanted to tell him that she'd had a rough evening, what with
Tom being such a mess and throwing up everywhere, and Tom's mother seeing those pictures of her naked. Instead she found herself wanting to knock Adam down on the bed and kiss him again. The tape flipped over and new music came on. Violins and a cello. It was a Mozart sonata, or a Bach concerto.
Dolce ma non troppo
or
dulce de leche.
Oh, hadn't she learned anything?

“I don't want you to think I came here to—” Adam began and then stopped. It was pretty obvious why he'd come.

Shipley smiled. “I was beginning to feel like such a loser, studying on a Saturday. Everyone's at your party.”

Adam wasn't sure if he was imagining things, but she seemed to be coming closer and closer. She smelled like fish and chips and cigarette smoke.

“Have you been to the Lobster Shack recently?” he asked, laughing. He'd been to the restaurant with his family on three occasions: Tragedy's thirteenth birthday, after his high school graduation last June, and once when Uncle Laurie came up to visit. They always came back smelling like a fish fry.

Shipley blushed. “I'm sorry. Do I stink?” The dorm was so quiet she hadn't felt comfortable taking a shower. It was too spooky.

“Kind of,” he admitted. “But don't worry, it's not too terrible.”

“I'm sorry.” She moved away from him on the bed.

“No.” He closed up the space between them. “It's really not bad.”

Shipley allowed herself to look at him again. His face was only inches away. She could see his freckles now. “Someone stole my car,” she told him. “Again.”

“You have to be more careful,” Adam murmured hoarsely. He couldn't stop smiling. They were breathing all over each other.

This was better than any daydream. Shipley didn't care what
she smelled like, she couldn't stand it anymore. She bowled Adam over on the bed and straddled his hips.

“I really wanted to go to your party,” she confessed.

Adam kissed his way up to her lips. “It's better here.”

Shipley slipped out of her shirt and unbuttoned her jeans. The sonata's final notes resounded from her boom box. Adam kissed her bare hip and slipped her jeans down over her thighs.

She fell back on the bed with an indulgent sigh. “I really need to learn the name of that song.”

 

P
atrick was glad he'd stayed in Maine for the winter. Winter there was so extreme. Sometimes there were warm days like earlier today—a balmy pre-Christmas offering, or a reminder of August. Then the snow came, piling up on the sides of roads and on the roofs of houses, whitening everything and making summer unfeasible.

Back when he was living at home, they'd spent Christmas in the Caribbean. Their parents liked undiscovered beaches on islands where they were the only white people. He'd played dominoes with the local boys on Salt Key. “Patrick, Patrick! Dominoes, Patrick, dominoes!” the boys shouted up at his window in the simple guesthouse where they'd stayed. None of the boys wore shoes, and the palms of their hands were pink like the inside of a fish. The local women made little sundresses for his sister. They went to a parade in the village, and she looked like a doll in her bright yellow dress, her blond hair braided with red beads. His dad took him spear fishing and he caught a barracuda.

The Mercedes skidded on the unplowed road. Up ahead was a nice-looking white farmhouse. Cars were parked willy-nilly all over the yard, and a small herd of sheep was clustered expectantly behind the barn, as if someone had forgotten to feed
them. The kitchen lights were on inside the house, but the party was clearly in the barn. He could hear the thrum of guitar music even before he stepped out of the car.

“Bill Clinton is so freaking
hot
!” A girl's voice rang out through the chilly air as he trudged through the snow to the house. He mounted the porch steps and peeked through the smudged kitchen window. The house was still and quiet, as if it had been lulled to sleep by the snow. The door was unlocked.

Inside, the kitchen was messy. Patrick opened the fridge, which was covered with paper reminders—
Call vet for wormer
.
Sell manure. Cheese!!
—and all manner of crap. The contents of the fridge were even messier. Half-eaten brown apples. Moldy cheese. Hard bread. He was craving something sweet, but he could do a lot better at the Dumpster. A pint of yogurt looked promising, but when he pulled the top off the container, he saw it was filled with coffee beans. He went for a round Saran Wrapped ball of soft cheese that looked fresh and a bunch of green grapes in a plastic bag still tied in a knot from the store. He stuffed the whole ball of cheese into his mouth and then ran the cold tap to wash it down.

Eating the grapes three at a time, he pushed open the kitchen door and stepped out onto the porch. It was snowing even harder now. He could barely even see the barn. When he finally reached it, he slid open the big wooden door and poked his head inside.

Dexter students, looking so wasted their faces were sliding off their skulls, danced around a metal feed trough containing three kegs while the band played their way through their repertoire of Grateful Dead songs for the third time. Damascus and Sea Bass were playing horseshoes, calling out fouls and howling like it was the Super Bowl. Geoff lay on the ground, a skeleton on the barn floor, with his eyes closed and the funnel in his mouth. In
the corner of the barn Nick and Eliza were slow-dancing, one body propping up the other. Eliza wore Nick's hat.

“I love you,” she whispered into Nick's hair.

“Me too,” Nick whispered back. “Actually.”

Patrick thought he heard a mewing sound. He peeked through the dusty wooden boards of a nearby box stall. On the floor of the stall was a cardboard box housing a gray cat and her kittens. The cats stared up at him with accusing yellow eyes.
Have you been drinking?
they seemed to say. The kittens were shivering. Patrick opened the door to the stall and picked up the box. He carried it out of the barn and through the snow to the house, cradling the top of the box against his chest to keep out the snow. The mother cat was big. She must have weighed nearly twenty pounds.

He put the box under the kitchen table, filled up a bowl full of sheep's milk from the fridge, and placed the bowl next to the box. His parents had never allowed him a pet. It felt nice, providing for these little creatures.

“There,” he told the wary mother cat. “See? I'm not so bad.”

The gray cat continued to stare at him while he finished off the grapes. A minute or two went by. Then the cat stood up and stretched and hopped out of the box to lap up the milk. Patrick lunged for the box and scooped up a soft black kitten, carefully stashing it in his parka pocket. He headed outside to the car, ignoring the mother cat's accusing glare.

 

T
ragedy buried her chin beneath the collar of the thick raccoon coat. The fur was warm as hell. Falling almost down to her ankles, it completely insulated every part of her body except her head, which was frozen raw. Pretty soon she'd be able to peel her head off her shoulders, like a wart that had been frozen off.

She liked to walk. No matter the weather, she'd always liked to walk. The woods around Dexter were connected by a trail that looped around itself like a giant pretzel, with the town of Home in the middle of one loop, and the college, up on its hill, in the middle of the other. She thought she knew the trail blindfolded—rain, shine, in sunlight, or in total darkness. One of her usual routes led from the top of the hill behind her house all the way to the field house at Dexter, on the other side of the Pond. This was the path she was on now. At least, she thought she was. Walking in a blizzard in the dark was like solving a Rubik's cube with only white squares.

The melody of the Bee Gees song she'd been named after moseyed through her mind like Muzak in a grocery store.
It's hard to see. With all this snow and no pants on, you're going nowhere…

Her parents hoped that naming their beautiful baby girl Tragedy might provide some relief from all the ugly tragedies in the world. The personal is political. Make love not war. Think globally act locally. Those were their mottos. And she liked the way people repeated it when she said her name, rolling it around in their mouths and testing it out. “Pretty,” they'd say, looking her up and down.

Where was the fucking field house? She'd been walking for hours, and there was not a building or a light in sight. The path she was on ended in a clump of uprooted trees. It looked like a car wreck. She must have gotten turned around somewhere. Maybe she'd walked over the state line into Canada, which might actually be all right. Her mom and dad would miss her, but she could write to them tomorrow and let them know she was okay.

“Fuck!” she exclaimed, remembering the sheep. She was supposed to put them in the back stalls and throw them some hay.

“Double fuck!” she shouted, remembering the kittens. It was
cold now and Storm, the mother cat, would be hungry. They should have been put in the house.

“Mom is going to kill me,” she muttered, retracing her steps.

Adam would probably get home first anyway. He'd bring the sheep in. And if Storm was hungry enough she'd yowl her head off till he heard her. Tragedy could pay him back tomorrow by making his favorite peanut butter and jam yule log. But first she had to find a path out of the woods.