by Jodi Picoult
Minutes after we had settled ourselves in the closet, Steven came into his room with a girl. She was not someone from Pope Pius but probably a public-school girl from downtown. She had short brown hair and wore pink nail polish, and her white jeans rode low on her hips. Steven pulled her onto his bed with a groan and began to unbutton her shirt. She kicked off her shoes and wiggled off her pants, and before I knew what had happened they were both naked. I could not see much of Steven, which was good, because how would I ever have faced him? But there were the smooth circles of his bottom and the pink heels of his feet, and tangled across his back were the legs of this girl. Steven squeezed the breast of the girl with one hand, revealing a nipple like a strawberry, while he rummaged in his nightstand drawer for a condom. And then he began to move on her, rocking her back and forth like those playground animals on thick wiry springs. Her legs climbed higher, her toes crossed on Steven's shoulders, and they both started to moan. The sound rose around them like yellow steam, punctuated by the scrape of the bed on the hardwood floor. I was not sure what I was seeing, sliced as it was by the closet into strips, but it seemed a machine, or a mythical beast that shrieked as it fed on itself.
Priscilla's crazy aunt from Boise sent her a Ouija board for her fifteenth birthday, and the first question we asked it was who would be the May Queen. May was Mary's month, or so we'd been told at Our Lady, and every year there was a parade on the first Monday night in May. The students would march in a procession from the school to Saint Christopher's, preceded by the discord and oompahs of the school band. At the end of the parade came the May Queen, chosen by Father Draher himself, and her court of attendants. The prettiest girl in the eighth grade was always the May Queen, and everyone assumed that this year it would be Priscilla, so when we asked the Ouija board I gave a subtle push toward P, knowing it would have gone that way no matter what.
"P what?" Priscilla said, impatiently tapping her fingers on the cursor.
"Don't tap," I warned her. "It won't work. It's got to feel the heat."
Priscilla rubbed her nose with her shoulder and said that the board didn't want to answer that question, although I wondered if it was because she was afraid the next letter might not be R. "I know," she said. "Let's ask it who you're going to go out with."
Since spying on Steven, Priscilla had been dating a steady stream of boys. She had let them kiss her and touch her breasts, and she told me that the next time she might even go to third base. I had listened to her describe the way Joe Salvatore jammed his tongue in her mouth, and I wondered why she would keep going back for more. First base, second base, third base--it reminded me of the Stations of the Cross, the special services during Lent where you said a prayer for each of the twelve steps leading up to the Crucifixion. I'd been doing it for years every Friday during Lent, and it was the same hour-long ordeal week after week. First Station, Second Station, Third . . . I would flip ahead in the prayer book to see how much longer I'd have to suffer. It seemed to me that in a different way, Priscilla was doing the same thing.
"S-E-T-H," Priscilla pronounced. "You're going to go out with Seth." She took her fingers off the Ouija cursor and frowned. "Who the hell is Seth?" she said.
There was no Seth in our school, no Seth related to Priscilla or to me, no Seth anywhere in the world that we knew of. "Who cares," I said, and I meant it.
The next day in school Father Draher announced that the May Queen that year would be Paige O'Toole, and I almost died. I turned bright red and wondered what on earth had made them pick me, when Priscilla was clearly more beautiful. In fact, I could feel her eyes searing into my neck from the desk behind me and the cruel jab of her pencil in my shoulder blade. I also wondered why, for a rite honoring the mother of God, they'd pick someone who had no mother at all.
Priscilla was one of the May Queen's attendants, which meant she got off easy. I had to spend every day after school being fitted for the white lace gown I would wear during the procession. I spent hours listening to Sister Felicite and Sister Anata Falla as they pinned up the hem and adjusted the bustline from last year's queen. As I watched the setting sun run into the gutters of the wet streets, I wondered if Priscilla had found another friend.
But Priscilla did not hold the May Queen appointment against me. She cut her trig class two days later and stood outside the door of my English class until I noticed her waving and smiling. I took the bathroom pass and met her in the hall. "Paige," she said, "how do you feel about getting violently ill?"
We planned a way for me to get away from May Queen practice that day: I would start shaking during lunch and then get severe abdominal cramps, and although I would be able to troupe it out till the end of the day, I would tell Sister Felicite that it was that time of the month, something the sisters seemed to be overly accommodating about. Then I'd meet Priscilla behind the bleachers and we'd take the bus uptown. Priscilla said there was something she had to show me, and it was a surprise.
It was nearly four o'clock when we arrived at the old car lot, a blacktop area enclosed with high mesh fencing that someone had rigged with two netless basketball hoops. A shock of multicolored, sweating men were running up and down the makeshift court, passing a dirty ball back and forth. Their muscles flexed, outlined and taut. They grunted and gasped and whistled, hoarding the air like gold. Of course I had seen basketball before, but never like this. It was primal, angry, and wholehearted, played as if the players' souls were at stake.
"Look at him, Paige," Priscilla whispered. Her fingers gripped the chain links so tightly that the joints paled. "He's so beautiful." She pointed to one of the men. He was tall and lean and could jump with the grace of a mountain lion. His hands seemed to cover the basketball. He was black.
"Priscilla," I said, "your mother will kill you."
Priscilla didn't even look at me. "Only if some Goody Two-shoes virgin May Queen rats on me," she said.
The game ended, and Priscilla called him over. His name was Calvin. From the inside of the fence, he pressed his hands against hers and pushed his lips through one of the little open diamonds to kiss her. He was not as old as I'd originally thought; probably eighteen or so, a public high school kid. He smiled at me. "So we goin' out or what?" he said, talking so fast that I had to blink.
Priscilla turned to me. "Calvin here wants to double-date," she said. I stared at her as if she was crazy. We were in the eighth grade. We couldn't go out in guys' cars; we had weekend curfews. "Just for dinner," Priscilla said, reading my mind. "Monday night."
"Monday night?" I said, incredulous. "Monday night's the--" Priscilla kicked my shin before I said anything about the May parade.
"Paige is busy until about eight," she said. "But then we can get away." She kissed Calvin again, hard, through the fence, so that when she pulled away she had crosses pressed into her cheeks, red as scars.
On Monday night, with my father and the neighbors watching, I was the May Queen. I wore a bride's outfit of white lace and a white veil, and I carried white silk flowers. Before me went a stream of Catholic children, and then my attendants in their best dresses. I was last, their icon, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mother
My father was so proud of me that he'd taken two entire thirty-six-picture rolls of film. He did not question me when I said I'd be celebrating with Priscilla's family after the service and that I'd stay over at her house. Priscilla had told her mother she'd be with me. I moved across the cooling pavement like an angel. I thought, Hail Mary full of grace, and I repeated this to myself over and over as if that might knock sense into me.
When we got to the church, Father Draher was standing by the tall marble statue of the Blessed Mother, waiting. I took the wreath of flowers that Priscilla had been carrying, and I stepped forward to crown Mary. I expected a miracle, and I watched the statue's face the entire time, hoping to see the features of my own mother. But my fingers slipped over Mary as I offered the wreath, and her pale-blue cheek stayed as cold and forbidding as hate.
Pris
cilla and I were picked up by Calvin in a red Chevy convertible on the corner of Clinton and Madison. In the front seat with him was another person, a boy with thick straight hair the color of chestnuts and smiling island-green eyes. He jumped out of the car and held the door open, bowing to Priscilla and to me. "Your chariot," he said, and that might have been when I fell in love.
Dinner turned out to be Burger King, and what amazed me most was not that the guys offered to pay but that they ordered an enormous amount of food, much more than I could even think of consuming. Jake--that was the name of my date--had two chocolate shakes, three Whoppers, a chicken sandwich, large fries. Calvin had even more. We ate in the car at a drive-in theater, under a moon that seemed to rest on the top of the screen.
Priscilla and I went to the bathroom together. "What do you think?" she asked.
"I don't know," I told her, which was the truth. Jake seemed all right, but we'd barely said more than hello.
"Just goes to show you," Priscilla said. "That Ouija board knew a thing or two."
"It said I'd go out with a Seth," I pointed out.
"Jake, Seth," Priscilla said. "They're both four letters."
By the time we returned to the car it had become dark. Calvin waited until Priscilla and I sat down, and then he hit the button that raised the roof of the convertible. It sealed itself with a faint sucking sound, covering us like a mouth. Calvin turned around to Jake and me in the back seat, and all I could see was the white gleam of his teeth. "Don't you all do anything I wouldn't do," he said, and he settled his arm around Priscilla like a vise.
I could not tell you what the movie was that night. I clasped my hands between my knees and watched my legs tremble. I listened to the sounds of Calvin and Priscilla, skin slipping against skin in the front seat. Once I peeked and there she was, swooning and batting her lashes and whispering breathlessly just as we had practiced.
Jake kept three inches between us. "So, Paige," he said quietly, "what do you usually do?"
"Not that," I blurted out, which made him laugh. I pulled myself farther away, laying my cheek against the steamed glass of the window. "I shouldn't be here," I whispered.
Jake's hand moved across the seat, slowly, so I could watch it. I grasped it, and that was when I realized how much I had needed the support.
We began to talk then, our voices blocking out the moans and echoes coming from the front seat. I told him I was only fourteen. That we went to parochial school and that I had been the May Queen just hours before. "Come on, baby," Calvin said, and I heard the tug of a zipper.
"How did you ever get together with someone like Priscilla?" Jake asked, and I told him I didn't know. Calvin and Priscilla shifted, blocking my view of the screen. Jake inched closer to the window. "Move over here," he said, and he offered the shelter of his arm. He kept his eyes on me as I hung back, like prey at the brink of a neatly laid trap. "It's okay," he said.
I rested my head against the soft pillow of his shoulder and breathed in the heavy smell of gasoline, oil, and shampoo. Priscilla and Calvin were loud; their sweating arms and legs made fart noises on the vinyl. "Jesus," Jake said finally, crawling across me to lean into the front seat. I adjusted myself around him while he pulled the driver's-side door handle. At the moment the door sprang free, I saw them in the flash of the moon. White spliced with black, Priscilla and Calvin were knotted at the waist. Calvin balanced himself above her on his arms, his shoulders straining. Priscilla's breasts pointed at the night, pink and splotchy where they'd been roughened by stubble. She was looking directly at me, but she did not seem to see.
Jake pulled me out of the car and put his arm around my waist.
He steered me to the front of the drive-in, before the lines of cars. We sat down on the damp grass, and I started to cry. "I'm sorry," Jake said, although it hadn't been his fault. "I wish you hadn't seen that."
"It's okay," I said, even though it wasn't.
"You shouldn't be hanging around with a girl like Priscilla," he said. He wiped at my cheeks with his thumb. His nails were creased with tiny black lines where motor oil had seeped in.
"You don't know anything about me," I said, pulling back.
Jake held my wrists. "But I'd like to," he said. He kissed my cheeks first, then my eyelids, then my temples. By the time he reached my mouth I was shaking. His lips were soft as a flower and just rubbed back and forth, quiet and slow. After all Priscilla and I had practiced, after all we had done, I had never considered this. This wasn't even a kiss, but it made my chest and my thighs burn. I realized I had much to learn. As Jake's lips grazed mine, I said what had been going through my mind: "No pressure?"
It was a question, and it was directed at him, but Jake didn't take it the way I intended. He lifted his head and pulled me to his side, keeping me warm but not kissing me, not coming back to me. Over our heads, the actors were moving like dinosaurs, hollow and silent and thirty feet tall. "No pressure," Jake said lightly, leaving me bothered and pounding, ashamed, wanting more.
chapter 9
Nicholas
Nicholas was going to harvest the heart. It had belonged to a thirty-two-year-old woman from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who had died hours before in a twenty-car pileup on Route 95. By tonight it would belong to Paul Cruz Alamonto, Fogerty's patient, an eighteen-year-old kid who'd had the misfortune to be born with a bad heart. Nicholas looked out the window of the helicopter and pictured Paul Alamonto's face: hooded gray eyes and thick jet hair, pulse twitching at the side of his neck. Here was a kid who had never run a mile, played quarterback, ridden a seven-alarm roller coaster. Here was a kid who--thanks to Nicholas and Fogerty and a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 95--was going to be given a renewed lease on life.
It would be Nicholas's second heart transplant, although he was still just assisting Fogerty. The operation was complicated, and Fogerty was letting him do more than he let anyone else do, even if he
thought Nicholas was still too green to be chief surgeon during the transplant. But Nicholas had been turning heads at Mass General for years now, moving swiftly under Fogerty's tutelage from peer to near equal. He was the only cardiothoracic resident who acted as senior surgeon during routine procedures. Fogerty didn't even stand around during his bypass operations anymore.
Other resident fellows passed Nicholas in the scrubbed white halls of the hospital and turned the other way, unwilling to be reminded of what they hadn't yet achieved. Nicholas did not have many friends his age. He socialized with the directors of other departments at Mass General, men twenty years his senior, whose wives ran the Junior League. At thirty-six, he was for all practical purposes the associate director of cardiothoracic surgery at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. To have no friends, Nicholas reasoned, was a small sacrifice.
As the helicopter hovered over the tarmac on the roof of Saint Cecilia's, Nicholas reached for the Playmate cooler. "Let's go," he said brusquely, turning to the two residents he'd brought with him. He stepped from the helicopter, checking his watch out of nervous habit. Shrugging into his leather bomber jacket, he shielded his face from the rain and ran into the hospital, where a nurse was waiting. "Hi," he said, smiling. "I hear you have a heart for me."
It took Nicholas and the assisting residents less than an hour to retrieve the organ. Nicholas set the Playmate between his ankles when the helicopter lifted into the muddy sky. He laid his head against the damp seat, listening to the residents sitting behind him. They were good surgeons, but their rotation in cardiothoracic wasn't their favorite. If Nicholas recalled correctly, one of the doctors was leaning toward orthopedic surgery, the other toward general surgery. "Your call," one said, shuffling a deck of playing cards.
"I don't give a shit," the other resident said, "just so long as we don't play hearts."
Nicholas clenched his fists instinctively. He turned his head to see out the window but found that the helicopter was wrapped in a thick gray cloud. "Goddamn," he said, for no reason at all. He closed his e
yes, hoping he'd dream of Paige.
He was seven, and his parents were thinking of divorce. That was the way they had put it when they sat Nicholas down in the library. Nothing to be alarmed about, they had said. But Nicholas knew of at least one kid in his school whose parents were divorced. His name was Eric, and he lived with his mother, and at Christmas, when the class had made papier-mache" giraffe ornaments, Eric had had to make two, for two different trees. Nicholas remembered that well, especially the way Eric stayed late at the arts and crafts table when everyone else had gone to the gym to play kickball. Nicholas had been the last one leaving the room, but when he saw Eric's eyes turned up to the door, he got permission to stay. Eric and Nicholas had painted both giraffes the same shade of blue and had talked about everything but Christmas.
"Then where," Nicholas said, "will Daddy be for Christmas?"
The Prescotts looked at each other. It was July. Finally, Nicholas's father spoke. "It's just something we're considering," he said. "And no one said that I will be the one to leave. In fact," Robert Prescott said, "no one may be leaving at all."
Nicholas's mother made a strange sound through her clamped lips and left the room. His father crouched down in front of him. "If we're going to catch the opening pitch," he said, "we'd better get going."
Nicholas's father had season tickets to the Red Sox--three seats --but the boy was rarely invited along. Usually his father took colleagues, from time to time even a long-standing patient. For years Nicholas had watched the games on Channel 38, waiting for the camera to span the crowd behind third base, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father. But so far that had never happened.
Nicholas was allowed to go to one or two games each season, and it was always the high point of his summer. He kept the dates marked on the calendar in his bedroom, and he'd cross off each day leading up to the game. The night before, he'd take out the wool Sox cap he'd been given two birthdays ago, and he'd tuck it neatly into his Little League glove. He was up at dawn, and although they wouldn't leave until noon, Nicholas was ready.