“I’m not so sure this was a good idea,” you said.
“Mm-hm, mm-hm.” He pressed one faux-thoughtful finger over his mouth as he nodded. “She’s right over there.”
And it was then that the rental lighting kit, rigged into the gymnasium’s rafters, came into perfect synchronicity with your teenage heart. A parting of darkness, as if from the heavens. A single slant of brightness, eliminating the masses from the room, landing on Rebekkah, a dream of Rebekkah, the dream of Rebekkah you would carry with you, her maroon dress like a second, silken skin as she rocked gently in the seraphic light. Somewhere, a DJ pressed a button, a lightning storm of strobe effects erupted, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man” blasting forth. At the precise moment Rebekkah’s gaze landed on you, your father gave you a hard nudge from behind, like a shove into cold waters.
You turned to show him a glare. You turned, also, to receive your last view of Jed Loving in that before. “Be bold,” Pa recited his favorite Goethe quote with a goofy, bemused smirk, “and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
But you were not bold, not then, and no forces came to aid you. For a long while, it could have been fifteen minutes, you slouched against a corner, striking the posture of a boy having a meaningful conversation with the scuffed leather of his loafers. At last, when you could bear it no more, you lifted your eyes, and they seemed to know just where to find her.
Rebekkah Sterling was at the room’s far side now, walking in the direction of the snack table. You did not so much follow Rebekkah as you were pulled into the gravity of her sway. Contact, your first in days, was made at the start of an empty hallway, lit dimly by a fluorescent panel at the gymnasium’s edge.
“Rebekkah,” you said.
“Oh, Oliver! Hi.” The joy of your proximity to Rebekkah nearly threw you. But, up close, you noticed a little flaw in that disco-lit vision of beauty you’d seen from the gymnasium’s edge, her eyelids ringed with teary swelling. In the story of yourself you were trying again to contrive, you stuck to your new character, Rebekkah’s 120-pound protector.
“What did he do?” you said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been crying.”
“Oh, that? It’s nothing. Just this, uh, new makeup I was trying? Must be allergic.”
“Right, allergic.”
“It’s just that. I mean it.”
You scanned the party daddishly, as if everyone in the room bore some responsibility.
“God, Rebekkah. We’ve got to tell someone. You can’t let him hurt you any more.” Him, you said, not at all sure if you meant her father or Mr. Avalon.
Even then you doubted that you’d really find the courage to do anything, but you feinted a few steps in the general direction of—who? Someone. Shameful: what you wanted most was for Rebekkah to pull you back, for this little dramatic theater, starring yourself, to continue. For a single grateful second, you were very happy Rebekkah played her part, gripping your wrist.
“What has he done to you?” you asked again.
“What has who done?”
“Who? Mr. Avalon. How long have you—” You paused. The freckles dotting Rebekkah’s cheeks had become suddenly vivid as the color behind them drained away. But Rebekkah never answered you. Because now another boy had come jangling over, in full mariachi regalia. This boy was Ray Lopez, a kid you didn’t know, a boy who himself couldn’t know that he was walking through the last moments of his life. “What are you doing?” Roy Lopez asked Rebekkah. “We’re all waiting for you in the theater room. You have to get into costume. We start in thirty minutes!”
“I have to go,” Rebekkah told you. “I really have to go.”
“But—” But the moment passed. Before you could think of what else to say, Rebekkah turned her back to you, as if wishing you out of the room. And yet you did not leave, not just yet. You stood there, eyeing Mr. Avalon, beneath the upraised basketball hoop, waving his arms in Rebekkah’s direction as she slowly began to cross the gymnasium. And when Mr. Avalon’s gaze locked on yours, you learned that the corollary to the six-second hypothesis was also true. You did not blink for much longer than six seconds.
On a Young Astronomers Club trip to the McDonald Observatory, a docent had told you that when you view any darker spot in the sky through the great telescope, thousands of galaxies become visible in the ambient luminescence. A hidden starscape whose pattern bore the record of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year-old explosion, the secret of the Big Bang. On the night of November fifteenth, you were just starting to see that pattern, but you didn’t have the equations to make sense of it. At the time, you just watched as Mr. Avalon followed Rebekkah toward the theater classroom. You turned, set off down a different hall.
And so: it was sometime before 9 P.M. on November fifteenth, and you were wandering Bliss Township School. The hallways after hours were surreal and lovely, without the alienating crowds, a nice reminder that time went on there in those stale corridors, and you were only passing through. You ran your fingers along the tattered lines of lockers, over the poster board displays and the many hand-painted encouragements for the Bliss Township Mountain Lions football team, along the cheaply ornamented crenulations of the frame that held Pa’s cheery, wind-warped vision of your school. Distantly, the deep cardiac rhythm of dance music throbbed through the walls.
In a far wing, you could just make out the familiar chord progression of “Baby Got Back” as you drifted along—lonely as a cloud, you thought in a tragic, poetic mood, remembering a poem you’d read in ninth grade. You were as lonely as a cloud in the West Texan sky, and like condensation, you fell back into the place where that particular lonesomeness first rose up, your desk in Mrs. Schumacher’s empty classroom. The whiteboard said, THE ODYSSEY: HOW IS IT RELEVANT TODAY? You hardly even heard it, that first fractured noise.