I don’t have to peek around the door to know Einstein now says something ostentatious in Woods’s impeccable handwriting. Or to know that everyone in that room follows him to a new topic the way they’d follow him through the gates of hell.
13
Action heroes have at least three ways of being shot. Hero One: takes a single bullet to the wrong location and goes down fast with no last words. Hero Two: takes an uncountable amount of lead to vital organs, stays upright long enough to save someone, falls bravely. Hero Three: takes an entire .45 clip to the brain, stumbles off camera, and everyone knows she’ll be back.
I am Hero Three.
And Hero Three is currently sitting on the freezer in her garage pulling lead out of her brain and figuring out how to build a better couch. The Daily Sit is uncooperative, which is in keeping with its ornery personality. Despite this, I love the Daily Sit fiercely. I need the distraction.
Last night Janie Lee and I walked to the Fork and Spoon after the failed Hexagon meeting. She cried into her milk shake (and then mine), and I made her go home and play her violin to me over the phone until she calmed down. She felt terrible about the whole not-standing-up-for-my-vagina thing, and I felt terrible for suggesting she silence her desires for Woods.
We’ll recover. The only real fights we’ve ever had—ones in which we didn’t speak for multiple hours—were over Green Day being sellouts, and Star Wars episodes I to III. This wasn’t a fight. But it is something that will weasel its way into future arguments.
How could you be so selfish? future Janie Lee might ask.
You know, I was thinking the same thing when you let Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon board, future Billie might respond.
You’re the one who held me back from Woods. You’re the reason we aren’t together, future Janie Lee would yell back.
Yeah, well, maybe you’re not supposed to be with him. Maybe you’re supposed to be with me. I wouldn’t have yelled that part, but I would have thought it.
Friendship relies on history—on history being positive even when it’s painful. I have to find a way to erase last night the way Woods erases Einstein. I am not sure how. So while the Hexagon is at school, I’m taking a mental health day. Neither Mom nor Dad questioned my “migraine.” The moment Dad left for visitation ministry, Mom retreated to her studio, and I parked myself in the garage to think about the fact that I had two meet-ups last night. The one with Janie Lee. The one after Janie Lee fell asleep on the phone.
I arrived at the elementary school before Woods.
Rusted playground equipment rose out of the scattered pea gravel like a metal graveyard. I squinted at the run-down ball field, where we will hold the KickFall tournament. The grass in the outfield was the shin height of a giant.
I shimmied up a triangular-shaped antenna fastened to the school building with some luck and eroded hinges. The rungs were familiar with my weight and didn’t complain in the least. When I stepped out onto the roof, heat from the day, trapped in the tar-like substance, pressed into the rubber of my tennis shoes. I was sweaty from biking over, but the extra heat was pleasant against the chill.
While waiting for Woods, I stared at the tiny metropolis of Otters Holt: the token caution light, miles and miles of electrical transmission towers pulling power from Kentucky Dam, and the massive dark caverns of the limestone quarry. Power and darkness were everywhere. The evening was quiet except for a barking dog and the Vilmers’ bleating goats. Otters Holt by night was all ghost, no town. The elementary school beneath me needed every ounce of love we planned to show it now that youth group community service was slowing down.
Woods was stepping off the antenna—a fact I was ignoring–not ignoring. He loped toward me, jacket draped over his arm. “Thought you might be cold,” he said. The silky fabric of his favorite windbreaker landed on my shoulders. He hugged me from behind, leaving his arms in a knot around my chest. Leaving my heart in a knot.
“You think Hattie is feeding those goats?” he asked.
“Do you really have to feed goats?” I asked.
We lifted our shoulders in unison. He was a full head taller than me and always had been. When we stood this way, I was eight years old again, with a spray of freckles, bowl-cut hair, and pockets filled with fossils and special rocks. Back then, Woods wrote sloppy lists on his Dad’s yellow legal pads. They said FOUR THINGS BETTER THAN COTTON CANDY and IF SANTA WERE PRESIDENT OF OUR CLASS and POP ROCKS PLUS VINEGAR AND STUFF.
“Van Gogh would be inspired by this view,” he said, his lips nearly against my ear. “Paint me something that looks like this for when we’re old.”
Seventeen-year-old me returned.
Woods Carrington always smelled either like he needed a shower or he’d just toweled off. Oatmeal and honey oozed from his pores. He must have “forgotten” again to tell his mother to get his manly-man shampoo at BI-LO, and he’d showered in her bathroom. I wanted to eat him. Instead, I bumped my head against his chin, told him he was right about Van Gogh, and mentioned the shower. He confessed that he might just be a honey and oatmeal guy. We rocked, left, right, left, sharing balance, neither of us eager to break apart.
“And you are a”—he smelled my hair—“hayfield and epoxy girl.”
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: a hayfield and epoxy girl.
“Let’s play Beggar,” I said.
We claimed a corner of the roof where the old gym slopes to meet the lower cafeteria wall. It was a cave cut from brick and glass, sitting well beyond the range of Mrs. John’s security light across the street. We opened a ragtag deck of cards, and Woods’s fingers moved nimbly over them, the cards singing as they slapped against the old cooler we keep on the roof for a table.
The wind lifted his cowlick, teasing hair that was usually contained by a baseball cap. His hair was the one disorderly thing about him. Everything else could be described as neat-as-a-pin, an item on a list, well-ordered. I was glad he hadn’t worn the cap. He looked boyish in it, and I needed to remember we were not eight.
“Let’s build a house up here and never move,” he said after the cards were dealt.
“Only if you buy us a dragon,” I said.
He grinned as if he knew a guy with dragon eggs, and I’d better want what I’d asked for. That was where I’d gotten into trouble with him. Woods and I had never had many things in common. He was music, and I was sports. He was peppermint tea, and I was an energy drink. He was class president, and I was named an “Art Alien” by an underground school blog. But we lived life on the same frequency, leading and striving and wanting. Inside both of us lurked someone young and someone ancient.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
I answered, “Love,” and he scrunched his nose appropriately.
“What’d you wanna go and do that for?” he asked.
I said, “I needed a word for my favorite card game.”
I thought, Because of your damn whiteboard, Hexagon bullshit.