I did my schoolwork well, still seeing college as salvation. My teachers paid close attention to me, and I didn’t realize how depressed I was until the guidance counselor asked me into his office and said that several of my teachers were worried about me. They knew why I’d come to the school, why I lived with my aunt and uncle; I was one of the few new students in a fifty-two-person class that had been together since kindergarten. “I’m fine,” I insisted, ashamed that my unhappiness was so evident. “Really. But thanks.”
Still, I agreed to be paired with one of a handful of teachers who had offered to listen, informally, to students’ troubles. I got the youngest one, a good-looking guy who must have just gotten out of college. But I couldn’t tell him anything. The problem was that I’d noticed, while he was writing on the board during Humanities, how much his hands looked like Mom’s—freckled, with long fingers, strong palms, and large knuckles. I was scared of those hands, of their unnatural persistence in the world, but I also wanted them on me. When we met after school to talk, all I could do was look at those beautiful hands of his, folded on his desk. I could have leaned over and softly kissed his full mouth. I could have burst into tears. I sat there, carefully not moving, unsure which impulse was more likely to seize me.
* * *
That first winter back rose to greet me like a dog that had been chained and waiting, lean and cold and beautiful and full of teeth. The snow came down relentlessly, and as I waited for the bus in the morning, the air was so dry and harsh that I could feel it rushing down my throat and into my body with each breath. But I had retained my thick northern blood: each morning I woke in the dark and showered, and I would stand out by the road in a canvas jacket over a T-shirt, the long ropes of my hair freezing around me.
In January, the night before we were to return to school from winter break, a light drizzle of freezing rain began, sparkling in the spotlight mounted on the garage and pinging against the windows. The next morning I awoke to the pure silence of lost power, the absence of refrigerator hum and furnace kick. Even my uncle’s police scanner was silent. My alarm had not sounded, and I had no idea if I was late or early. I walked downstairs in a disoriented haze, and when I looked outside I saw that two inches of ice had covered everything in the night; the glassy layer on the porch railing was so flawless that I could see right through it. The rain was still coming down fast, a solid silver sheet. The ice on the porch grew to three inches, four. Carol’s rosebush, towering out of the snow, held slabs of ice on every twig.
The ice came down for two full days. We were out of school for two weeks, out of power at our house for three. I read every book on that semester’s English class list, from dawn through candlelight. I drank cups of hot chocolate and wrote in my journal and looked out at the bright whites and soft shadows of snow polished under the glare. We had heat for a few hours a day, when Carroll ran the generator. I’d step out onto the porch now and then, just to listen to the gunshot crackle of trees breaking under the weight of the ice. Many of them died under that weight, but others held strong, sending forth green leaves when spring finally came.
The melting of ice works by acceleration: slow at first, then faster and faster. As the warmth returned, I thawed out, too; I felt purified, lighter. I was grateful for Carol’s simple meals, served every evening at six o’clock precisely, and for the neatly folded laundry she left on the stairs for me to take up to my room. My purple parakeet, Moonshadow, had stayed at Carol and Carroll’s while I was in Texas, and every few nights Carroll would take him out of his cage and give him a bath in the kitchen sink, the two of them saying “Good little bird!” back and forth to each other, Moonshadow boxing with Carroll’s thumb.
Things kept improving, gradually, life nudging me along. I got recruited to the math team and started practicing with the tiny, misfit marching band. I even joined the tennis team, although I could barely play. I applied for and was accepted to a summer program for students who would be the first in their families to attend college. I wasn’t a runner, but I let my friend Jen talk me into joining the cross-country team so the girls would have six members and thus be eligible for state rankings for the first time in years.
I felt the same pull toward Jen that I had toward Anne. I tried not to think about it, to deny it, but of course volunteering to run miles through the steep, rocky woods every day after school was just the sort of stupid thing a person does to win a girl’s affection. But I knew our friendship could go only so far; my uncle hated “queers.” More and more celebrities were coming out in the late nineties, and related news coverage never failed to spark a vicious rant from him about how “all those pedophiles should be locked up; we should just shoot ’em.” I wanted to think that none of this applied to me, but could not ignore my body’s panicked reaction each time I heard him say these things. In addition to my worry that I’d be thrown out, I didn’t want to lose his love; I didn’t want him to hate me. I did not want more loss.
Conveniently, I liked boys, too, and I soon fell for one—Jen’s best friend, Jason—so I dated him. It was easier and safer to be like everyone else, or seem to be, just as it had been easier and safer to hide my past in the time of the O.J. trial. I became skilled at ignoring my own desires, focusing less on what I wanted to do and more on what I was supposed to, on what was expected of a smart, college-bound girl. I could not take risks, and it seemed foolish to make myself more vulnerable than I already was.