So Shelly (12 page)

“Where’s yours?” I asked, meaning a life preserver.

For the second time that evening, Gordon looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world.

I undid the lines and tossed them into the boat while he started the engines.

When I joined Gordon beneath a hard plastic canopy behind the steering console, where he half-sat, half-stood in the captain’s chair near the dead center of the hull, we paused, perhaps each waiting for the other to change his mind. A moment passed before Gordon said, “Let’s go, then,” and he reversed the boat out into the bay.

After reorienting the bow, he set the GPS headings for North Bass Island and slowly pressed forward the dual throttles until they reached a three-quarter speed position. The Corsair gently skimmed the surface of the bay on a due north course toward the shipping channel that runs past Johnson’s Island and Marblehead Point on the left and the tip of the Strand peninsula on the right.

The open waters of Lake Erie proved to be only slightly less accommodating than those of the protected Ogontz Bay had been. One-to-two-footers rolled in the South Passage that separates the Ohio mainland from the smattering of islands that lie in Erie’s western basin. Unimpressive wave heights for a regular Laker, but I hadn’t been on the water since that fishing charter with my dad and brother that had left me green and vomiting. As Gordon navigated through the west-to-east-running rollers, I felt the nausea beginning to percolate and rise.

“Stare into the horizon; it’ll help,” Gordon advised, sensing my discomfort. “And eat these.” He reached beneath the stainless steel steering wheel into a bin and pulled out a bag of pretzels and a warm can of Sprite.

Holding fast to Shelly, pressed between my left arm and side, I nibbled on the pretzel rods with my right hand and tried to maintain my balance on my landlubber’s legs. Beyond the bobbing red bow light, I watched the last vestiges of the day surrender to a translucent night. In the middle of the lake, the canopy of stars shone in a number and with a brilliance I had never before seen from land. Remembering Gordon’s lecture of several years past, I wondered which stars were already dead and which were still pulsating, and into
what already-plotted future I was currently heading. Gordon steered the Corsair according to the path on the blue-lit screen of the GPS, but the moon hanging over us from the stern graciously projected its reflected light before us and illuminated a path that ran straight to the Bass Islands.

B
YRON! HOW SWEETLY SAD THY MELODY!
A
TTUNING STILL THE SOUL TO TENDERNESS,
A
S IF SOFT PITY, WITH UNUSUAL STRESS,
H
AD TOUCH’D HER PLAINTIVE LUTE, AND THOU, BEING BY,
H
ADST CAUGHT THE TONES, NOR SUFFER’D THEM TO DIE.
O’
ERSHADOWING SORROW DOTH NOT MAKE THEE LESS
D
ELIGHTFUL: THOU THY GRIEFS DOST DRESS
W
ITH A BRIGHT HALO, SHINING BEAMILY,
A
S WHEN A CLOUD THE GOLDEN MOON DOTH VEIL,
I
TS SIDES ARE TING’D WITH A RESPLENDENT GLOW,
T
HROUGH THE DARK ROBE OFT AMBER RAYS PREVAIL,
A
ND LIKE FAIR VEINS IN SABLE MARBLE FLOW;
S
TILL WARBLE, DYING SWAN! STILL TELL THE TALE,
T
HE ENCHANTING TALE, THE TALE OF PLEASING WOE.
—J
OHN
K
EATS
, “T
O
B
YRON
”

Looking back at the first half of Shelly and Gordon’s junior—my sophomore—year, it’s easy to pinpoint the signs of Shelly’s unraveling, which at that time, absorbed in the aftermath of my father’s death, I missed.

By then, a full year into their time together at Trinity, Shelly and Gordon’s relationship had been mostly relegated to his hot and cold involvement with the
Beacon
. No amount of her less-than-subtle worship was capable of causing him to reimagine her as anything more than a childhood friend. No matter how much more she wanted, Gordon would always be Gordon. He was a lot of things, but a white knight was not one of them. Without friends her own age or boyfriends, Shelly felt freer to devote herself to her causes (thus, the red paint protest) and the
Beacon
.

Then, as the universe continually proves itself ironic, Shelly made the first non-Byron friend of her entire life other than me.

“Hey, Shelly,” I said, as she entered the media center. “You’re late again.

“One more week of detentions to go,” she explained.

In addition to the one-week in-school suspension Shelly had earned and already served for her little act of cafeteria civil disobedience, she’d been assigned two weeks of after-school detentions and ten service hours working with the maintenance crew.

“I missed you at Mass today,” I said slyly.

“Oh, yeah? I was there,” she answered, but I knew she wasn’t. Shelly may have been the worst liar in history.

That year, for extra credit in sophomore theology, I had volunteered to film the daily Masses, from the rear balcony of All Saints. The Masses were replayed for the kids who were serving in-school suspensions. (I’m pretty sure that is some form of double jeopardy or, at least, cruel and unusual punishment.) I didn’t need the extra points, but it saved me the humiliation of, morning after morning, having to find a pew where I would be welcomed. Skipping a grade had left me a man without a class.

The camera was stationary. Once I pressed the record button, there was little actual “filming” required, so I’d spend most of my time voyeuristically watching Trinity’s mortals below. You’d be surprised by the unholy goings-on that I regularly witnessed, such as surreptitious gaming on all sorts of handheld devices, constant text messaging, and even the occasional hand job or “stinky pinky” beneath a varsity jacket placed across a lap.

To pass the time, I’d play “Where’s Shelly?” Since, like me, she didn’t belong to any of Trinity’s cliques, she lacked
their vital membership privileges—one of which was the communally understood and enforced provision that members of said cliques were not only guaranteed but also expected to sit with fellow group members at all school gatherings, such as assemblies, pep rallies, lunch, athletic events, and school Masses. During any given Mass, I’d eventually locate Shelly anywhere from parked among the freshmen, to mixed in with the faculty, to sitting unwelcome and alone among the upperclassmen—usually with the width of a full body free on either side of her. Once, I even caught her sneaking in to hide inside a confessional. But I always found her. That day, I hadn’t.

“Okay,” Shelly finally admitted under my accusing stare and the prolonged silence. “I ditched. But I made a friend.”

“Who might that be?” I asked.

“Hogg.”

The unfortunately but aptly named Tammy Jo Hogg was a fellow outcast and survivor. She possessed the cruel combination of a beautiful face and, let’s just say, “full” figure. Everyone at Trinity called her Hogg. (According to the National Institutes of Health, an estimated three hundred thousand deaths a year in the United States are the result of obesity.)

The contrasts in the two misfits couldn’t have been more pronounced. Shelly was slim and her hair long, black, and unruly; her face was not beautiful, but she was far from unattractive. Hogg was, obviously, overweight, blond, and had a ruddy skin tone. Shelly was deep-thinking and artsy, whereas Hogg’s next profound thought would be her first. Shelly’s fashion sense, like her retro taste in music and movies,
veered toward vintage consignment shop pieces, and she loved bright colors and stripes at any and all angles. Hogg chose classic cuts, patterns, and colors that complemented rather than advertised. Shelly grew up bereft of family and largely ignored by her disinterested father, who thought her at first odd and then, later, crazy. He actually threatened to make her see a shrink after the red paint stunt in the cafeteria. Hogg, in contrast to the constant cruelty she endured from the fitness Nazis at Trinity, had a family of similarly oversized parents and siblings who loved every inch and pound of her. She was never happier than when at home in her neighborhood of modest, mostly ranch-style homes on Ogontz’s west side, watching movies, playing board games, and eating junk and fried foods at a suicidal pace.

As Shelly explained it to me, their friendship began in the girls’ lavatory.

Separately, they had each decided to skip the mandatory Thursday-morning Mass and were sitting—each unbeknownst to the other—on toilets in adjoining stalls, with their feet scrunched up on their respective seats—not an easy piece of contortion for a girl of nearly two hundred and fifty pounds. A female faculty member, typically Sister Margaret, the last remaining nun at Trinity, would perform a pre-Mass sweep of the girls’ restrooms and locker room, taking a quick peek under the stall walls, looking for ditchers before moving on to nearby All Saints Church. The girls had both figured out how to outmaneuver her long ago.

No sooner had Sister Margaret completed her casing of the restroom and closed the door than Shelly heard the
unmistakable sound of a lighter being torched, followed by the smell of a cigarette burning.

Shelly delicately slid the latch to the door, lightly placed her feet on the ground, and snuck out of the stall. Turning past the bank of stalls toward the exit, she nearly fainted when she spotted Hogg leaning heavily against a sink—cigarette to her mouth and eyes squinting hard through the rising smoke. (According to current trends, 6.4 percent of teen smokers will die from a smoking-related disease.)

“Hi, Hogg,” Shelly said.

Ignoring Shelly’s greeting, Hogg said, “Psycho Shelly,” while doing that trying-to-talk-and-inhale-simultaneously thing that smokers do so that their words, like firefighters in a burning high-rise, have to ascend the esophageal stairwell through clouds of toxic smoke, only to emerge spent and nearly unrecognizable in the fresh air. Hogg exhaled and offered Shelly a cigarette. Although she’d never smoked one before, Shelly took it. The cigarette felt uncomfortable in her hand, like a sixth finger, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it in her mouth, but she definitely liked the way she looked in the mirrors while holding it and placing it between her lips. She felt bad, and bad felt good.

Shelly looked up and caught sight of the smoke detector, then looked back at Hogg.

“Relax,” Hogg said, reading her mind and recalling Shelly’s infamous red-paint-induced probation. Between her thumb and forefinger, Hogg showed Shelly the nine-volt battery she’d removed from the smoke detector. (In approximately 60 percent of all home fire deaths in the United
States, there is either no smoke detector in the home or a malfunctioning one.)

Shelly’s eyes ran another quick relay from Hogg to the top-of-the-wall location of the smoke detector and back.

“I know,” Hogg said, “pretty impressive for a fat girl.”

“You’re not so fat, Hogg,” Shelly lied.

“And you’re not so psycho, Shelly.” Shelly wasn’t sure whether that was a lie or not.

“Why aren’t you at Mass?” Shelly asked.

“Don’t feel like it, and I had a serious craving for one of these.”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“You didn’t know anything about me until a couple of minutes ago. And now, besides my being fat, the fact that I smoke is the only thing you know.” She hesitated, smiled, and then looked with kindness into Shelly’s eyes. “But it’s a start.” Hogg stuck out her arm—it reminded Shelly of a baby’s—and said, “I’m Tammy Jo, but you can call me Hogg. Everyone does.”

With something less than enthusiasm, Shelly took Hogg’s amply padded palm and shook it lightly. “Shelly,” she said.

“Why aren’t
you
at church?” Hogg asked.

Shelly vacillated, unsure if she should risk going nuclear on what might be a budding friendship, but, being Shelly and relatively lacking in tact or subtlety, she said, “I’m an atheist.”

Without responding, Hogg took a final drag of her cigarette, waddled toward the stalls, dropped the butt into the toilet, and flushed. Shelly imagined the short-lived cigarette
and Hogg’s mime show to be symbolic of their own brief friendship. Feeling claustrophobic, she awkwardly imitated Hogg’s process of evidence removal and began once more to make her way to the door.

“What does that mean? Atheist? You don’t believe in God or something?”

“Or
nothing,
actually,” Shelly said.

“What?”

Shelly’s attempt at humor had cleared Hogg’s head by a good foot.

“It was a joke. Anyway, atheism for me means I don’t believe in
believing
in a god.” She could almost smell the wires crossing and burning behind Hogg’s gray eyes beneath her knitted brow, so she attempted to expound on her anti-credo. “What I mean is I don’t believe in some grandfatherly man sitting on a cloud somewhere beyond outer space making ridiculous laws and passing arbitrary judgments but not caring how we treat one another or the planet as long as we do our weekly Catholic calisthenics. You know.” Shelly broke into a mock fitness routine as she performed the actions accompanied by the voice of an aerobics instructor. “Genuflect! Cross yourself! Sit down! Stand up! Kneel! And again. Genuflect.…” She paused to catch her breath. “If there is a god, I can’t believe she cares what you call yourself: Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Muslim, Jew, or atheist. It’s the churches that cause the divisions and the hatred and the wars. It’s the belief
system
I don’t believe in.”