I kept my eye on Lily that spring. On my way to school one late April morning, I saw her slide out of her dad’s pickup truck behind the baseball field. The temperature had plunged the night before, and a layer of fresh spring snow had the temporary effect of returning the road to a slurry of slush and salt. As the pickup rumbled off, I watched Lily lick her bare hand and bend over, dampen the salt-stained cuffs of her jeans with her own saliva. Her coat hung open, and her hands were bare, her head was bare, her hair was wet. As I followed her across the field to the high school, I felt I could see her long hair freeze as she walked. It swung darkly, then grew stiff. It looked like something you could crack off with your hands.
Inside, she did not go directly to class. All the bells had rung, and I followed her through the empty halls, down the dark staircase, past the closed gym door, past the trophy case with all its bronze boys pointing their nubby toes. She was quiet, but I was quieter still, setting each boot on the floor carefully—one at a time—as if walking through the woods. I made the linoleum absorb my sounds. Lily’s tennis shoes squeaked.
She bought a Coke from the vending machine and stood for a moment gulping it before wedging the half-finished can behind the radiator. She yawned so wide a second chin appeared on her neck. That was a revelation to me, Lily Holburn’s future fat. I thought by then I knew everything there was to know about her. I knew how Lily’s mom had died in a car accident when she was twelve, how her dad dropped her off at school every morning in the baseball field, how she went to a special teacher for her dyslexia during homeroom. I knew that Lars Solvin had broken up with her recently, a few days before prom, and by then I knew what she was saying Mr. Grierson had done to her. He had driven her out to Gone Lake last fall, she’d said, driven her there after school in his car and kissed her. That’s the word I kept hearing in the halls, “kiss,” and there was something all the more perverse in this, as if she couldn’t bring herself to name anything more explicit.
I don’t know why I followed Lily that day for so long, save that it was easy. As she continued down the empty hall, she ran her fingers through her hair, cutting open the thawing spokes with her fingers. Her tennis shoes left a gray streak of water on the brown linoleum. I thought maybe she was heading toward the loading dock to sneak out, cut class—but no. She went straight into the girls’ locker room, peed in one of the stalls, washed her hands, cleaned her teeth with a finger, then walked over to the lost and found in the corner.
I stayed behind a bank of open lockers and watched her. People used to say that Lily was a little deaf. People used to say she was a little touched, that she had been left outside too long in the cold as a baby, had never fully bloomed. Because she rarely said more than a few words at once, because her dad’s trailer bordered the reservation three lakes north, she was called Lily the Indian when we were kids. Poor Lily the Indian, the Brownies in their sashes used to say, bestowing on her the pudding cups from their lunches—even though everyone knew that the real Ojibwa kids had their own school up on Lake Winesaga. Still, the story persisted until her mom died, that Lily’s grandmother or great-grandmother was a member of the tribe, and it occurred to me now Lily never denied it.
I was thinking about this in the locker room that day as I watched her bend in half and rifle through the box of tangled jackets and bras. She systematically sorted through the lost and found until she discovered a pair of heeled black boots, which made her look abruptly older when she put them on. Elegantly tall, casually looming. She looked like someone who might raise her eyes to the mirror and see me standing right behind her. But she did not. She twisted her damp hair with her fists and squeezed out a last trickle of water. Then, with a sigh, she kicked off those beautiful black boots and selected something no one would ever ask her about—a big pair of puffy blue mittens that she wedged under one armpit. I watched her pull her hair back with someone else’s lost barrette and wrap her neck with someone else’s frayed pink scarf. Before tying her tennis shoes up, she pocketed a purple vial of nail polish.
May, and who needs boots anymore anyway? Lilacs were exploding early. Crabapple blossoms covered branches the way snow once did—white as that, but poofier. Petals caught in Paul’s hood as we walked. Chickadees were doing loops.