As Simple as Snow Page 6

  “I don’t think she likes me,” I told Carl on Monday.

  “That’s not what her brother says.”

  “Even after Friday?”

  “He says she had a good time.”

  “Maybe he’s just jerking me around.”

  “It’s true,” Carl said. “Everyone’s out to get you.”

  I found Adam after school. “Carl says that your sister still likes me.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?”

  “I’m not so sure things went all that well,” I said.

  “She’s just shy. You didn’t tell her that I talked to Carl, did you?”

  “No.”

  “I mean talked to him at all.”

  “No,” I said.

  “All right. Give Melissa another call. If you want to, I mean.”

  I don’t know whether Adam talked to his sister or not, but she was a lot different the second time we went out. She even spoke. We started going out after that, hanging out after school and on the weekends. She would call me every night, and it was all right at first. Then I got bored, I guess. I don’t really know what happened; I just knew that I didn’t really like spending time with her anymore, no matter how much we kissed. I didn’t feel a connection with her; nothing drew me toward her. Something about her made me want to be away from her whenever we were together. I take that back—there wasn’t anything wrong with Melissa Laughner. There was something about me that made me want to be away from her. We would sit at my house and watch TV, and the time would barely move forward to when she would leave. I didn’t know what to say around her, and the fact that she was quiet made me uncomfortable or uninterested, or both. It was easier to be alone, I thought. At that time I wanted to be alone, I guess. And then I was. More than I wanted.

  I hardly knew how to get into a relationship, and I had no idea how to get out of one. I wanted to break up with Melissa, but I didn’t know what to say or what to do. Everything dragged on for a few more months, and when the freshman spring dance was coming up, Carl and I devised a plan.

  Melissa and I were supposed to go to the dance together, of course, but I called her at the last minute on the night of the dance and told her that I was sick and couldn’t make it. She said that she wasn’t going to go either then, but I persuaded her to go. She could hang out with her friends and have a good time without me. She had to go to the dance. That was critical. Because when Carl saw her sitting at a table by herself he went over to her and said, “I’m sorry you guys broke up,” then acted all surprised when she acted surprised. “I didn’t know he was sick,” Carl then lied. “He told me he was going to break up with you before the dance, so I figured . . .”

  Melissa immediately went home and called me. “Carl said that you were going to break up with me before the dance tonight.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Melissa. I was going to, but then I got sick and I didn’t want to do it over the phone.” To tell the truth, that’s exactly how I had wanted to do it. Carl had no problem breaking up for me. In fact, I think he enjoyed it. It was simply another transaction for him. I was a coward, I admit it. And I’d like to say that I felt bad, but the next day Carl and I were laughing about it.

  “You should have seen her face,” he said. “It was like I’d hit her in the head with a shovel. How often do you get to do that?”

  Melissa didn’t talk to me again for a long time. She went around and told people some shit about me, and a few more people in the world stopped talking to me. I didn’t have that many friends to begin with, and now Melissa was subtracting a few more. She left notes in my locker telling me how terrible I was and how much she hated me. I ignored them. I don’t know why I was all in a hurry to get away from her; it wasn’t like I was suddenly doing something more exciting after we broke up. I would wander around town by myself, try to avoid going home to my mother, and watch Carl conduct his business. I couldn’t go with him—that was bad for business, he said—so I would follow him around, spying from a safe distance. That’s what I did now that I wasn’t with Melissa—I spied on my best friend. It was always interesting to see who was buying what from Carl. It wasn’t just the burnouts and the jocks, there were people who everybody thought were squeaky clean, good students. There were preachers’ kids and teachers’ kids, even adults, who would meet Carl behind some building or at some out-of-the-way spot, and he would hand them a small bag of something and take their money. When I got bored watching Carl, I would pretend to run into him and then walk around with him for a while. He was good, though he never talked business. He was business.

  Melissa and I had a few classes together and we would pass each other in the halls almost every day at school, but she had stopped talking to me. We ignored each other to the point that I had almost forgotten about her. But when Anna and I found those notes in our lockers after the football game, I was certain that it was Melissa who had left them.

  halloween

  It had snowed the night before. I looked out my bedroom window and saw a good five inches on the ground, covering everything. The plows hadn’t come by yet, and no one had driven on the street. A perfect blanket of white stretched as far as I could see. I wished that it would stay like that, but no sooner did I wish it than I heard the sound of a shovel scraping against concrete. My father was out in the driveway. He would need help. I pulled on my clothes and a pair of coveralls, laced up my boots, put on a cap and a pair of gloves, and went out to ruin the spotless snow.

  “It’s a lot of snow,” I said. “Have you ever seen so much snow so early?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” my father said. “There’s school.”

  It was costume day. Everybody was supposed to wear one. Carl went as an executive. He wore a suit and tie and carried a briefcase. His visor was tucked away in his locker and his hair was combed and neat. During classes, he pretended to be on his cell phone the whole time.

  Anna came dressed in a private school uniform: black shoes, white stockings, plaid skirt, white blouse, and a blue blazer with a crest on it. She didn’t wear anything black (except her shoes), not even eyeliner. Everyone was shocked. I thought she was beautiful, but by then I thought she was beautiful all the time. On the crest, in tiny gold script, were the words “Satan’s School for Girls.” Only a few people paid attention to the details.

  At first I didn’t want to wear a costume, but in the end I went as a box of Velveeta. I should have gone as a pirate. I could have put on some junky clothes and a bandanna, and had a hook cover the splint on my finger. Instead, I got a big cardboard box and attached a pair of my father’s old suspenders, so it would rest on my shoulders. I painted the box bright yellow, and had my mother help me with the logo. She made a stencil so I could paint the letters red. “Why do you want to go as a box of cheese?” she said. “It seemed like something easy,” I told her. “And who else is going to wear anything like it?”

  Billy Godley, a freshman, also came as a Velveeta box. And his costume looked a lot better than mine. I had made mine too big, and it got bent when I tried to fit it into the backseat of the car. It was snowing again when I got to school, and the heavy wet flakes spotted the paint and made some of the red run. The worst thing was that I couldn’t sit down in class. The cardboard went from my shoulders to my ankles, and I had to either keep standing or take off the costume, and what was the point of that? Billy Godley had hinges in his costume, at the knees and waist, so at least he could sit on a chair, even if he couldn’t fit into a desk.

  Before last period I stopped by Mr. Devon’s classroom to throw the thing in the trash.

  “I like it,” he said. “It’s a statement.”

  “Billy Godley’s got a better one,” I said.

  “Well, how many pirates did you see today?”

  “About twenty.”

  “And what was their statement?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what mine was.”

  Mr. Devon motioned me to follow him into his office, where
he pulled a book from one of his shelves. “Look at these,” he said. “Brillo pads and soup cans. Not so different from cheese boxes, are they? And these are in museums and books.”

  “Maybe I should get that out of the trash, then,” I said.

  Mr. Devon laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  A book on his desk caught my attention. Arshile Gorky. It was the same one I’d seen at Anna’s. “Did Anna borrow that from you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Anna. That’s your friend, right?”

  “Yeah. She had the same book.”

  “Oh, really? Maybe we should all get together and talk about art sometime.”

  “She’d probably like that,” I said.

  The book was a coincidence, I guess, and later Anna made it clear that she didn’t want to have any conversation with Mr. Devon, let alone one about art. At least that’s what she told me.

  When the final bell rang and I went to my locker, I realized that I hadn’t worn a coat. It was because of that stupid costume I’d had on in the morning. You would think that someone would have reminded me, been looking out for me. Isn’t that what mothers are for? And of course she wasn’t picking me up after school. Which meant that I had to walk home with no coat, no hat, and no gloves. I started out of school and walked slowly past parents parked in their cars, waiting for their sons and daughters, in hopes that someone would see my plight and offer some help.

  “Hey, cheese loaf,” I heard someone yell at me. I turned around. It was Anna. She was hurrying out the door. “Where’s your pretty yellow wrapper?”

  “Billy Godley is wearing it.”

  “Come on, you were a lot more believable as a box of cheese than he was.”

  “I’m sure I was.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Home, I guess.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “I forgot it this morning.”

  “Do you want to wear mine?” It was a man’s coat. An old black overcoat from the 1940s or 1950s. It probably would have fit me.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “You could wear my blazer,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t want to misrepresent Satan’s School.”

  “My mom’s supposed to pick me up. Do you want us to give you a ride home?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Who knows, maybe we can convince her to take you home after a while. Instead of right away, I mean.”

  “That would be even better.”

  Mrs. Cayne pulled into the circular drive in front of the school, and Anna went and spoke with her and then motioned me to the car. “Get in front,” Anna said, “so you can be closer to the heat.”

  It was the first time that I had seen Anna’s mother up close in the daytime. She looked crazier than ever. Her hair was particularly wild that day, and seemed magnetically drawn to the roof of the car. There was a pencil sticking out of the back of her hair, as if someone had jabbed it into her skull.

  “So where’s your costume?” Mrs. Cayne asked.

  “I took it off late in the day,” I said.

  “Anna said you went as a block of cheese.”

  “Velveeta.” I didn’t want to correct her.

  “That’s interesting. Seems like a good idea for a costume.”

  “It seemed that way, but it wasn’t really.”

  “Not very practical?”

  “Exactly. Cheese doesn’t offer a lot of range of motion.”

  Mrs. Cayne laughed. It has to be a good thing when you make your girlfriend’s mom laugh. Especially when she’s thinking that you’re an idiot for (1) going to school dressed as a box of cheese and (2) forgetting your coat right after a snowstorm.

  When we got to the Caynes’, Mrs. Cayne offered me some candy. She had bowls of chocolates and M&M’s and nuts all over the place. “I can’t eat any of this stuff,” she said. She always said that. You might think that she had so many bowls of stuff around the house because it was Halloween, but they were there every time I was at their house. And I always saw her eating it. She would never take more than one piece of candy out of a bowl, but when you have twenty bowls of stuff lying around, that adds up. And Mrs. Cayne always said the same thing: “I can’t eat any of it. Help yourself.”

  I left Mrs. Cayne and her candy and went with Anna to her room. She closed the door and cleared a space on the floor for us to sit, pushing books and discs and papers into a heap under her desk. She dug around in a pile of discs and pulled out one with a dark cover, and white lines forming jagged mountains on the black. It looked like a cross between an X ray and a topographic map. “This was my dad’s favorite band, when he was in college,” she said, and put the CD in the player. She turned on her computer and showed me some fan sites. “The lead singer killed himself two days before they were starting their U.S. tour.”

  “It sounds like it,” I said.

  She gave me a disapproving look and moved on, jumping from site to site, subject to subject. We moved from the band to the city of Manchester to a site about London. “Have you ever been?” she asked.

  “No. I haven’t been anywhere.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with here.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. This is fine by me. You might want to try and see the world someday, though.”

  “And where have you been?”

  “I’ve been lurking around in the dark,” she said, “waiting for you.”

  She ejected the disc and fished around for another. The cover was a black-and-white photograph of an antenna and wires. “My dad just played this for me yesterday,” she said.

  It wasn’t music. People were reciting numbers in foreign languages, over and over, often barely discernible behind the static. A horn or a buzzer went off every few seconds. There were four discs of the stuff, recordings of radio broadcasts.

  “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “It’s been going on a long time, for more than twenty years. Some people think that they’re coded messages, used by spies, the CIA, KGB, stuff like that.”

  There was a knock on the door. I quickly got off the bed. It was her father.

  “Please keep the door open,” he said. He looked at the stereo. “What do you think of this?”

  “It’s weird,” I told him.

  “Have you ever heard anything like it?”

  “No.”

  “Are you staying for dinner?”

  I looked at Anna and she nodded at me to accept. I did. “I just need to call my mom,” I said.

  “Well, after dinner, let’s go listen to some more of this,” he said. “But on the radio.”

  Mrs. Cayne was dressed in a princess costume when we came to sit at the table. She had her hair pulled back so that she could fit her funnel-shaped hat on her head, and I noticed for the only time a resemblance between her and her daughter.

  “What does your mother do for Halloween?” Mrs. Cayne asked me.

  “She likes to bake.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. My mother bought the cookie dough that comes in a tube, and all you do is crack it open, separate the pieces, and put them on a cookie sheet and then into the oven. She would take the fresh-baked cookies and go sit in the dark. When I used to dress up and go trick-or-treating, my mother would have a spread of candy. Actually, it was a well-ordered regiment. She would arrange the candy in neat, precise rows, and then re-sort and rearrange the rows as she handed out the candy. It was maddening to watch this compulsion, which demonstrated an organization and ardor she failed to exhibit anywhere else. This woman who couldn’t file or answer a phone properly could arrange candy in rows on the hall table, alphabetically or by size or according to who knows what exact system, and then dispense the candy in a logic and method known only to her, but in an obviously even way, updating the rows so that they kept their structural integrity. How was that possible?

  Once I had stopped dressing up in a costume and bringing home candy, my pa
rents stopped handing it out. It must have had something to do with reciprocity. I could imagine my father running the numbers in his head, seeing the debits, the red numbers piling up with every knock. He always hated kids’ coming to the door anyway. “Are there any worse sounds than doorbells?” he grumbled. So now my parents retreated to their usual spots in the house—my father to his den of solitude, and my mother to eat cookies in the dark, so that no one would think they were home.

  As we headed down to the Caynes’ basement after dinner, a group of trick-or-treaters came to the door. “Where’s the witch?” they kept saying.

  “No witches,” Mrs. Cayne answered calmly. “Only princesses live in this house.”

  I looked at Anna, but she didn’t even acknowledge that anyone had said anything.

  the basement

  A door off the kitchen led to the basement at the Caynes’. There wasn’t much down there, but it was away from the rest of the house, and you could hear anyone coming. No one could sneak up on you or surprise you.

  The stairs led to a large room, maybe forty feet by forty feet, almost perfectly square, with a small utility room right by the stairs, that housed the furnace and hot-water heater and all that junk. Behind the stairs was an old bumper pool table, and a beat-up brown sofa against one wall. At the other end of the basement was another sofa, positioned near a wood-burning stove that heated the place. While most of the basement was underground, there was a door that led outside. You only had to walk up a few steps and you were underneath a wooden deck at the back of the house that overlooked the yard sloping toward the street.

  Mr. Cayne led us past a stack of boxes left over from their move and past an ancient TV set. It was the only TV in the house. “Is that color?” I joked.