“I have to go. We have to go to class. I’m sorry, okay? Sorry.”
And how is this for foreshadowing? It was that very day that Mrs. Schumacher began a monthlong unit on Homer’s Odyssey. “Does anyone know the secret about this gift that the Greeks gave the Trojans?” asked Mrs. Schumacher. “What was inside the horse?”
The class was silent. “It wasn’t a gift at all,” you said. “It was a trap.”
“Bingo!” Mrs. Schumacher tossed, as was her custom, a Hershey’s Kiss as a reward.
And it was then—your mouth pulverizing the stale chocolate, Rebekkah flushing under your gaze—that you saw it. Under the intense beam of your hard stare, Rebekkah shifted in her chair, a little movement like the ones that you had tracked so closely for weeks. This time, however, you noticed something strange there, just above the hemline of her skirt. A purplish mass, threaded with red. Very unlike her slight blue discolorations that you occasionally noticed, this was a severe bruise that ran halfway to her knee, its epicenter bound together by two Band-Aids, the cotton of which was stained a rusted brown.
By late third period, you were learning a new lesson about love, one that perhaps gave you a little sympathy for the mother whose worries so often agitated you. The sight of the bruise on Rebekkah’s leg shot your veins with a very pleasing brand of upset. Heartsick boy that you were, you found, in that quick glimpse beneath Rebekkah’s school desk, a merciful exit from your moody solitude. A new grim story, veering away from the ordinary dull one about your own rejection, a mystery you could pursue if you could no longer pursue her directly. Just one quick glimpse of a bad bruise, and you were conjuring monstrous abuse scenarios. Her father? You remembered her worry that night at the football game, her fear that the two of you would be seen together. Maybe her father was one of those jealous, faintly incestuous types familiar to West Texas, the kind of man who wielded his righteous morality like a bullwhip, disciplining his daughter like livestock, warning boys off what he believed belonged to him. Your dejection needed a face to clutch at, a reason, and here (or so you tried to convince yourself) was an answer for why Rebekkah would limit your company to your morning sessions, why she would steal a kiss, why she would be afraid to let it go any further. She must have been protecting you! But if her father was a hitter, why did she only ever speak of him like some obnoxious stranger in her house? Why—after all you said about your own parents—did she never tell you a thing about it?
You were silent as Pa drove you home that afternoon, silent at the dinner table as Charlie ran relays back to his backpack on an armchair to display the recent fruits of his labors, his marker-and sparkle-bedazzled report on Mount St. Helens, the A– paper on the construction of Versailles, the B+ on his math exam. You could only poke at Ma’s “famous” macaroni casserole.
“How about you?” Ma asked. “Good day?”
“Great day. Actually, I was wondering if I could borrow the car tonight?”
“What for?”
“I have a study group.”
“A study group? For what?”
“It’s, ah, for this project on The Odyssey. Something I’m doing with Rebekkah, actually.” Why did you mention her name? Perhaps just for the magic of the sound of it in your mouth.
“Rebekkah? Rebekkah Sterling? For real?” Pa asked. “Good for you. Good for her, too, of course. Lucky to have a, ah, study partner like you, huh?” Pa was grinning at you now, in his dumb-sly way.
“It’s just random. We were randomly assigned, I mean.”
“This study group, it’s at her house?” Ma asked. “Can I at least speak with her parents first?”
“Speak with them about what?” you said. “What do you think will happen?”
“It’s just a normal thing parents do, Oliver. They check to be sure there will be parental supervision.”
“Ma,” you said, loading an entire counterargument in that word. In another family, this might not have seemed such an unusual conversation, but in the history of your life as Eve Loving’s son, this tense impasse represented a new escalation of the cold war of wills you and she had been conducting those last weeks.
“Fine,” she said, waving her hands. “You do what you want.”
Just after seven that night, you went ahead with your lie. It was ridiculous, you knew it, but the outrage of your heartache, funneling into the narrow trough of your worry, roared through you, and you needed to release it. As Goliath tore through the night, a Bob Dylan cassette wailing—What drives me to you is what drives me insane—the divider lines under the bright beams looked like stars at warp speed. Just after eight, you pulled up outside the address for Rebekkah Sterling that was printed in the spiral-bound school directory open on the passenger seat.
What would you say to her? You tried to convince yourself that the right words, the real poetry, came when they were needed, and you hadn’t planned them. And yet, you wouldn’t be needing them tonight. All the windows in Rebekkah’s house, one of those new stucco McMansions metastasizing over the high plains, were lightless at 7:45 P.M. Only the foyer light was on, and just minutes after you arrived, it too went dark. Two adult bodies came from the front door, arguing over something you couldn’t make out. The man was barreling unsteadily—drunkenly; a drunkard’s son could recognize a drunk man even from fifty yards. He was a rotund, rook-shaped man, with no apparent genetic linkage to the girl you knew, but the rail-thin, birdish woman hovering behind him? You felt your heart click into higher gear, the sight of her parents like some secret your imagined, often-conjured Rebekkah was at last whispering into your ear. But where was the actual Rebekkah? You remained very still as they boarded the wine-dark Mercedes in the drive and drove away. You remained there for a long while, looking into those vacant, spotless panes of glass as you imagined Rebekkah’s presence beatifying each sterilized room. You imagined what it might feel like for her to live in a gargantuan, automated museum of a house like that.