As Simple as Snow Page 3

  A dirt hiking path followed the river along the western side from one edge of town to the other, and we walked south along that. We could see a few fishermen packing up their gear before it turned dark.

  “Do you ever walk down here at night?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You should. It’s quiet, with just the sound of the river and the wind. It’s calming. Sometimes I come down here when I can’t sleep, and I just sit and listen. I’ve fallen asleep on the banks before, and then had to hurry home in the morning before my parents found out. You should come here sometime late at night.”

  “I’d probably fall in,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something? Something kind of personal?”

  “It depends,” I said.

  “When you came up to me earlier today, were you going to ask me out?”

  “What?”

  “Were you going to ask me to the game tonight?”

  I couldn’t even get a response out, just an open-mouthed, slack-jawed silence.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Let me try this again. Would you go to the game with me?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that’s for you to figure out,” she said. “But let me tell you something. I thought that you were going to ask me out earlier, and that’s why I acted like a jerk. I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready, and then when I realized what you were doing, it freaked me out. I’m not used to people paying attention to me, I mean like that, so I had to figure it out first. I had to buy some time.”

  “And?”

  “And I would be very happy if you would ask me to the game tonight.”

  “Would you go to the game with me, tonight?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and then she leaned over and gave me a very quick kiss on the mouth.

  I went home and ate my dinner in as few bites as humanly possible and then walked over to Anna’s. Her mom drove us to the game. Mrs. Cayne looked nothing like her daughter. While Anna had a round face with a small nose, her mother was almost gaunt, with a sharp, prominent nose. Her hair was crazy and frizzy and went everywhere before it finally collapsed below her shoulders. She looked slightly deranged or dangerous. In fact, she looked kind of like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. I half expected monkeys to fly into the car and grab me and take me to some cage somewhere.

  She was a paralegal, or a legal aide, something legal.

  We were sitting in the bleachers, near the top, in the second-to-last row, where Anna always sat. None of her friends had arrived yet. It was just the two of us. I was nervous. By Monday everyone in school would know. I felt that everyone was staring at us, but that was impossible. They were all looking at the field. No one cared, but I still felt awkward, sitting with my stupid blue and gold school jacket, and she was dressed all in black. My parents had bought me the jacket when I made the football team. “You need it so you can wear your letter,” my mother said. Only now I wasn’t going to get a letter. I just had the jacket. I wished I could be down at the bench, at least there the jacket would make sense, and people would see me with the splint on my finger. I was nervous. All of a sudden, I didn’t know what to say.

  “You haven’t said anything about my finger.” I kind of held up the splint toward her.

  “What did you want me to say, ‘Way to go, dumbass’?”

  “Most people say something,” I said.

  “Most people say the obvious.”

  She had teased me from the first time she spoke to me, and I liked it. A bright glint would appear in her eyes, a sense of enjoyment and a clue not to take her seriously. Her mouth took on a hint of a smile, and her voice was not as deadpan as she probably would have wanted. It was a game, flirtatious and fleeting, a way to pass the time and test each other’s agility.

  “I didn’t know if you knew about it.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, but I did know about it.”

  “Believe me, I’m not flattered,” I said. I asked her if she had been to any of the games before.

  “All of them,” she said. I already knew the answer. We used to talk about them on the bench, the vampires huddled together at the top of the stands. They never cheered; they just sat and watched, like menacing birds on a wire.

  “Why?”

  The glint evaporated and her eyes turned dark and hard. “What you don’t know about what you don’t know about.” She shook her head. I had been scolded. Then she started to laugh.

  “Have you ever seen the movie Strangers on a Train?”

  “No.”

  “There’s this scene where the character Bruno is at a tennis match and everyone is watching the ball go back and forth across the net, their heads moving right to left, right to left, but Bruno’s head is perfectly still, because he’s staring right at one of the players. You can see the entire stadium watching the ball, and there’s Bruno, the only one perfectly still, staring.”

  “Why’s he the only one?”

  “You’ll have to watch it to find out,” she said. “Come on, let’s go make some Brunos.” She jumped up and grabbed me by the hand, and we walked down the steps to sit in the front row. Now everyone was watching.

  “What’s it feel like to be the center of attention?” she said.

  “Let’s go back up where we were.”

  “Relax. Enjoy the game.”

  I looked back up into the stands. No one seemed to be staring, until you got to the place where we had been sitting. All of Anna’s friends were there, looking right at me.

  “They don’t look happy.”

  She laughed again. “Do they ever? Forget it. Pay some attention to me for a change. It’s a date, remember?”

  At halftime I went to get us something to drink at the concession stand behind the bleachers. “You’ll be here when I get back?” I said.

  “I won’t make any promises.”

  I waited on line and wondered how many people had noticed Anna and me together. No one said anything to me and no one appeared to be paying any more attention to me at all. It was a little disappointing. I bought a box of popcorn and a couple of large cups of soda. It was hard to carry everything with the splint on my finger, and I was sure that something was going to spill before I could make it to my seat.

  When I got to the walkway above our section, I noticed that Bryce Druitt was sitting next to Anna, in my spot. I wanted to wait and watch them. I couldn’t see his face, but Anna was looking at him with concentration and affection; it was an intimate look that made me suddenly jealous. I also became aware that the rest of the Goths were watching me as I stood in the walkway, so I moved down the steps toward my seat.

  Bryce stood up and passed me on the steps without saying a word to me, but I could hear a few of the parents in the stands speak to him. “We could use you out there, son.” “It’s a shame you’re not playing.” Things like that.

  Anna took a cup of soda from me and I sat down. “Bryce wants us to go sit with them,” she said, “but I told him to get his own date.”

  notes

  I wasn’t popular, but I didn’t think I was unpopular. I didn’t think anyone even paid that much attention to me. I was never in anyone’s thoughts or opinions, at least that’s what I had believed. Anna changed all of that. We became something of a scandal, the talk of the school.

  We both got notes in our lockers on the same day, the Tuesday after the football game. It was the same message for both of us: Stay away from each other. “What are you thinking?” That’s how my note started. It was handwritten on lined notebook paper. It was sloppy, as if written by a child, or someone using the wrong hand. “Stay away from that witch. You don’t know what trouble you are in for. What do you know about her? She will fuck you up. Take it from someone who knows.”

  “This is for your own good. Stay away from that geek. You can’t trust him. He’s a liar. He will hurt you.” That’s what her note said. It was typed on plain white paper.

  I had an idea who had written both of them, but I wanted to fi
nd out for sure.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Anna said. “I get notes all the time. Just ignore it, and it will take care of itself.”

  She didn’t wait for me after school. I was walking home when I saw her in the passenger seat of Bryce’s car.

  At school the next morning all the talk was about Bryce Druitt. He had been in a serious accident the night before, slamming his Intrigue into the side of the northern bridge. They said that the car bounced off the bridge and spun down the bank, and almost went into the river. Bryce was taken to the hospital. Luckily he had only a broken leg. I didn’t particularly care about Bryce before, but I wouldn’t have wished that on him, not then anyway.

  Anna was having a hard time maintaining her usual calm, almost trembling when I saw her.

  “What was he doing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Somebody said he’d been drinking, but I don’t know what he was doing over here. He hardly ever comes over here at night.”

  “He’s going to be all right. That’s what they say, that he’s going to be all right.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  I noticed that a bruise was visible underneath the makeup on her left cheek. “What happened there?”

  Her hand sprang up to hide the spot. “I got punched,” she said.

  “Who did that?”

  “Never mind. I took care of it. I told you I would take care of it.”

  “You said it would take care of itself. Was it Bryce?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I saw you with him after school yesterday.”

  “It wasn’t Bryce,” she said. “He gave me a ride home after. He was helping me. You won’t be getting any more of those notes.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Do they have a bruise they’re hiding this morning?”

  “I didn’t punch anyone,” she said. “But they got the message. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.” She gave me a hug and hurried off to class.

  the house of cayne

  It’s funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice the specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.

  It was that way with me and Anna. I had once thought of her only as a generic figure, one of a set of identical ghouls, but now I began to notice the smallest changes about her, the things that made her unique. I used to think that she wore the same black dress and same black pullover sweater every day. I thought that she wore the same black boots, but she really had three different pairs of Doc Martens, the six-eyelet, eight-eyelet, and ten-eyelet versions (“What’s wrong with fourteen?” I had to ask her later). She also had a pair of the three-eyelet Gibson shoe, but you almost never saw her in shoes.

  I noticed how her hair would curl just under her chin on some days, and how other times it would curl away from her face. I wondered if it did this naturally or if she woke up each morning and had to decide which way she would curl it.

  Even her eyes were constantly changing. They could be clear, bright blue and then suddenly darken and become almost gray. At times they would flicker with light, and I would swear that I could see them changing, with white clouds passing across her pupils, and the next second they would look like ice. She would stare at me or at some point far beyond me, or at nothing, with her eyes locked and still, not tick-tocking back and forth but dead calm, and the blues would darken and become as vacant and useless as empty swimming pools. I began to take note of her mood and the color and texture of her eyes to see whether there was some sort of correlation, some sort of code that I could use to better understand her. If there was a code, I didn’t have enough time to break it.

  As time went by, I began to notice things that were strange and unsettling. The first was harmless; they all might have been. She had a cut on the left side of her lower lip, and when I asked her about it she responded that she couldn’t remember how she had gotten it. “Maybe I bit myself in my sleep,” she said. A few days later I noticed bruises on the back of her neck, on both sides, as though someone had choked her. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten those either. “Maybe from a necklace I was wearing,” she said. She always shrugged them off and acted as if they weren’t anything, like the bruise she had the morning after Bryce’s accident. They matter more now, looking back.

  There were some things I did question her about, however, things she couldn’t easily shrug off. She always wore long sleeves, no matter what the weather, and the first time I saw her bare arms I noticed a number of small cuts on her left forearm. There must have been twenty or thirty, some fading and healing, others scabbed over, and some fresh, still red and swollen. “I’m trying to quit smoking,” she said. “I started cutting my arm every time I wanted a cigarette, to associate the pain with smoking.” She looked down at her arm. “Unfortunately, I think it’s worked the wrong way. I’m starting to associate the pleasure of smoking with cutting. Now instead of thinking that smoking will hurt me, I think that cutting will feel good, you know, like a cigarette should.” She laughed. “I just have to be smarter than my own mind.”

  I also discovered that she had a tattoo. At least I think she did. It wasn’t always there. This was another game, perhaps. Whatever it was, the mark was on her hip. It was a wheel, and the spokes inside the wheel turned into sharp spikes as they came out of the wheel. There was writing on each of the spokes, but I could never tell what they said. “I don’t know what they are either,” Anna said. I didn’t believe her.

  “Why did you get the tattoo, then?”

  “It’s a family thing. My parents have the same one. In the same place. It’s a tradition.” I didn’t believe that either. Not entirely.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It has something to do with the fact that we’re all witches.” She looked at me, reading my face and eyes to see if I had believed her. She started laughing.

  “Is any of that true?” I said.

  “My parents have the tattoo. I don’t really know what it means. I think it’s kind of cool, though, don’t you?”

  I did.

  The next time I saw her bare hip, the tattoo was gone, and I began to doubt everything she had told me about it. To be fair, I saw it only a couple of times in good light, so maybe it was there all the time but I didn’t notice. You’d think you’d notice a thing like the impermanence of a tattoo, though. Maybe it was a fake, and she kept removing it and applying it, hoping I would say something. I never said anything. I just waited for that little spiked wheel with the strange writing to come and go.

  A week or so after the football game, and after a few days of walking around together after school, Anna invited me to her house. Her room was nothing like I had imagined. I guess I had in my mind that she lived in a crypt or a coffin, a dungeon or a cave, something spare and black and dark. It wasn’t that at all. It was more like a guy’s room. There was stuff everywhere. There were piles of books, biographies on Ambrose Bierce and Houdini, art books of the works of Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson, fiction by Kate Chopin, David Hartwell, Robert Bloch, and a ragged copy of Gray’s Anatomy set off by itself. There were books of poetry—Shelley, Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Frank Stanford, Federico García Lorca, and Sylvia Plath—and a stack of nonfiction I didn’t even comprehend, titles like The Psychology of a Rumor, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Secret Signals, and stuff by Albert Camus. I’d seen some of these books before, in my brother’s room after he’d started college. “What kind of grades do you get?” I blurted out. She laughed. “Straight D’s.” At least I had that on her. I’d been on the honor roll every semester so far.

  I also n
oticed that there was a paperback copy of the Lovecraft book she had grabbed when we first talked in the library. It was on her bed, open with the front and back of the book exposed. “Why did you bother to take that out of the library?” I said.

  She looked at the book and blushed slightly. “I can’t keep any of this stuff straight. I need to get better organized. Do you want to start on that for me?”

  I looked around and saw that it was a hopeless case.

  There were discs everywhere, and even vinyl records. Music by Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Gram Parsons, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Robert Johnson, Mozart. (I don’t know if these were the exact objects on that first visit, but they were definitely things strewn around her room during the time we spent together.) There must have been twenty or thirty discs poorly stacked on the floor, and more than fifty records spread around like a dropped deck of cards. About the only thing I recognized was a Nirvana disc, everything else was obscure to me, country and jazz and classical. There were posters and postcards covering the walls, mostly of people I’d never heard of, like Isadora Duncan and Robert Schumann and a scarred, engaging, mysterious man named Louis Kahn, or people I’d heard of but never knew what they looked like, like Anne Sexton and Amelia Earhart, but whoever they were, they were everywhere, their dead faces plastered on the walls and their eyes calmly watching me. Houdini was bound in chains in a large picture above her computer, Natalie Wood smiled from the closet door, and James Dean stood on a frozen farm pond above the bed, looking at his reflection in the ice.