by Alan Cumyn
“It’s not as if I haven’t seen you.” Sheldon’s hair was a sat-upon loaf of bread.
“I need to get out of here.” Her voice a feeble scratch. Had she really spent most of the night screaming her head off?
Had she really just gone to bed with Sheldon?
She felt stretched and raw . . . down there. Was it . . .
No. Sheldon would never drug her. She couldn’t believe it. It was something else. Pyke. The head-banging churn of Autumn Whirl.
The mother of all crashes.
“Should I go out the back . . . or the front?”
She was dressed now. Sort of. Nothing fit anymore. It felt like she’d walked into the Salvation Army and randomly pulled things off the shelves.
“You should comb your hair and wash your face and walk proudly with me into the kitchen and say good morning to Eugene and Nancy. They already love you, you know that. They have been asking me, in their way, if we have slept together yet. They aren’t against it.”
Shiels looked at him dubiously.
“They aren’t!” he said, so loud that she shushed him.
Dear, stupid, deluded, dense-brained boy. He looked like he was going to be hurt.
“This isn’t the way I want to do it,” she said. The kitchen was in the rear of the house. The stairs led straight down to the front door. That would be best. One of the advantages of living in a shoe box.
“How do you want to do it?” He was trying so hard to keep the hurt out of his voice. To just be Sheldon—never angry. Never surprised. Rolling with everything.
She kissed him, to get him to shut up, to not be so . . .
To get her one step closer to out the door.
“You might want to wash up,” she said to him, and she touched his purple-ridged nose. That look! My God. “I’m not face-raking you,” she said.
So furry in the mouth. They both were.
“You keep saying that to me.” Dangerous voice. He was looking at her with weird eyes. “You’re embarrassed,” he said. “To be with me. To be . . . with me.”
“No. No. Sheldon . . .”
“It never has been about me, has it?”
“Sheldon—”
“It’s about you. And now it’s about you and Pyke.”
Where was all this coming from? How did she ever end up here, in this freaking moment?
From the kitchen—the house was so small, they could just yell—Sheldon’s mother called out, “Breakfast is ready, dear!”
A strangulated, broken silence.
“Just trust me, please,” Shiels said. “I’m not face-raking you.”
• • •
Outside now. For once a plan had unfolded properly. She had just walked out the front door, hopefully unseen and unheard. Wearing the yellow shoes, it was almost as if she had to run, or at least try. What time was it? She was too tired to check her phone. But her parents never slept in. They would be in their cozy twin flannel dressing gowns staring dreamily into their locally crafted pottery mugs of fair trade organic coffee with the Times burning brightly on their respective screens: New York for her mother, London for her father. The sun would be flooding in from the east window.
Had they checked her room? Probably not.
Her legs creaked like they were made of wood.
(Had she really just ruined things with Sheldon? Because she couldn’t face his parents at breakfast?)
Maybe if she slipped through the front door at home . . .
Jolt, jolt, jolt went her feet.
(It would be all right. Of course it would be. After all this had blown over.)
She didn’t have her key. Probably the door was still locked.
(So why was she shaking? Why did her insides feel coated with ice?)
She walked. Too much to think about. Last night . . . last night was one of her weird dreams of late, but come to life. She remembered the shrieking, remembered wrapping herself around Sheldon, being carried around.
She remembered it as one endless kiss.
They must’ve done it. At Sheldon’s house. In his bed. They’d been too molten not to have done it. Sheldon was a prince but he was not superhuman. He would have done it.
She would’ve throttled him if he hadn’t.
So he had done it. They had done it.
Finally.
And it had been late, and they had been drunk—drunk on something. She couldn’t even remember it.
She’d done it blacked out.
She’d missed her own party.
God, God, God, God.
What did God have to do with it?
And God said: Thou shalt use a condom, because if not, you’ll become rotund with child and become a teenage mother, bottom wiper, and human milk dispenser.
And the Lord God said: Teenagers who do it while unconscious do not deserve to be student-body chair, much less be considered for a personal interview with Lorraine Miens who said, “A woman who treats her body like a highway deserves to be paved.” And who also said, “A man who treats a woman’s body like a highway deserves every crash coming to him.”
Jolt, jolt, jolt. She was walking as fast as she could. But she felt like roadkill, or not quite—like she’d been winged by a passing truck so was lurching along, almost a hop-hop-hop.
Had it been that bizarre last night? Everyone in black, hopping and lurching? Everyone shrieking?
It hadn’t been bizarre from the inside. From inside it had been . . .
Molten.
Her ears were still aching.
And she felt . . . raspy down there. She’d done it with Sheldon, obviously she had. She must’ve felt something.
Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe that was why the morning sky was purple and the grass gray and all her joints felt gritted with sand, including her jaw.
Her jaw?
What did her jaw have to complain about?
She imagined herself waddling in front of Lorraine Miens. The famous black-rimmed glasses would get pulled down for closer inspection.
“You’re pregnant, Ms. Krane.”
“Actually, it’s a thyroid condition. I’ll go on a grapefruit diet during the semester.”
Those dark-pooled eyes that had seen everything forty times already.
“I want to work on . . . the cultural implications of interspecies hyper-communications.”
“The what?”
“I’m the student-body chair of Vista View. You might not believe this, but our high school—”
“I think as little about high school as I possibly can. And I certainly couldn’t contemplate taking on a student who is going to give birth. Our program is highly—”
“We have a pterodactyl-student. I’m the chair through the whole thing. And what we’ve found . . . as I’m studying the various reactions to his—”
“Ms. Krane—you’re pregnant!”
“I don’t know if you’d call it charisma. I think that’s too lame a word. He . . . gets inside us in amazing ways. So I’m calling it ‘interspecies hyper-communications.’ ”
“Did he get you pregnant?”
“I’m not pregnant. I just—”
“Did the pterodactyl get you pregnant? Is this what you mean by ‘hyper-communications’?”
Shiels was outside her own house, shaking, when her phone rang. The earth was solid and unchanging before her—there were the elm trees, shedding their leaves; there was the water tower in the distance, as green and bulging as ever; and inside her, glaciers were melting and canyon cliffs falling into surging rivers.
It was her father.
Her father was calling her ten seconds before she would have been able to slip through the front door and possibly fool them.
Three rings. Four. One more, and Shiels’s confident answering service voice would pick up. But she hit the button.
“Hello? Hi, Dad. Hi.” She was trying to find the right tone.
“Good morning, Shiels. It’s your father speaking.” His phony formal voice. Shiels scanned the
front windows to see if he was standing there, on the phone, watching her arrive. After being out all night. After spending the night with Sheldon, and doing it, and probably getting pregnant.
Maybe.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. A flex of her little girl muscles.
He wasn’t standing at any of the front windows.
“Your mother is worried that perhaps you didn’t get your entire eight hours of restful sleep last night.” He was trying to keep a light tone. Shiels could hear her mother breathing over his shoulder.
“It was a long night,” Shiels said. “Amazing, though. Huge turnout. We were doing the cleanup, of course.” Breathe, breathe. Dark purple sky. Gray grass.
Yellow shoes.
“So you’re just getting out now?”
Yellow shoes. The store. She remembered now. She’d said she’d clean up there. An excuse! A good reason to not go home right away.
“I’m okay. I’ll sleep this afternoon. It was really a great, great event.” She could hear her mother wringing her hands. “Love you, Daddy,” Shiels said.
• • •
“What has happened to you?” the old man said, at the door of the running-shoe shop.
“Nothing. I’m quite fine,” Shiels asserted. “I’m here to fulfill my pledge.” When the old man failed to respond, but just kept standing there, blocking the door, she said, “Cleaning up the storeroom. I said I would do it this morning.”
“Why is your nose all purple?” he said.
“It isn’t,” she said, but her hand went up to her nose anyway. It felt perfectly normal. She thought of Sheldon looking at her in bed, that weirdness in his eyes.
“Looks purple to me,” the man said.
Shiels pushed her way through. There was an employee washroom at the back, an odd, old-fashioned cement chamber with a showerhead, a sink, a toilet, a mirror, a garbage can, and a drain in the middle of the floor.
She examined herself in the mirror. Her nose looked like it had been coated in purple shoe polish. Sheldon! She bent to wet her face. Where was the soap? She spotted a hulking yellow bar resting on a piece of wood on the floor behind the toilet. It smelled like it might dissolve metal. Was that the soap?
Cautiously she wet the bar and rubbed, rubbed. The purple wasn’t oily at all. It wasn’t thick. It felt . . . like her skin.
Like the skin of her nose had simply turned purple.
The pigment wasn’t coming off. She closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth, waited for this stupid nightmare to pass.
Blink. Blink.
Purple.
“Sheldon!” She screamed his name into the phone, but he wasn’t picking up. He was probably still having breakfast with his sunny-morning parents. He was probably punishing her.
She longed to face-rake him that instant. She wanted to . . .
“Is everything all right, miss?” the man called from outside the door.
“No!” she yelled. “My nose has turned purple!”
He didn’t seem to have an answer to that. He waited forever, and then he said, “Just take your time.”
She stared at her face. She looked fierce, somehow, her purple nose beak-like. Dipped in ink. The pores on her nose were larger than those on her pale cheeks. She scrubbed and scrubbed, with her hands, with a rough cloth she found by the moldy garbage pail, then with a brush that she demanded the old man bring to her. The harder she worked, the more tender the skin became, until fresh-rubbed blood oozed like cherry sauce on sick chocolate.
“Is it coming off?” the old man asked through the door.
She had to hold herself against the crusty sink to keep from falling over.
“How did it get all purple anyway?” the old man asked.
“Go away. I’m sorry. Just . . . go away.” She could still hear him breathing outside the door. “It’s all right. I’m not going to kill myself.” There must be a solution, she thought. Don’t people get tattoos removed?
Maybe she could get her nose removed.
And replaced, of course. A nose replacement . . . Her parents would know the right specialist. They knew all the right—
“It’s just . . . this is the only bathroom,” the old man said finally.
• • •
In a crisis Shiels had learned, through her years in leadership, to turn to the closest thing at hand. Do that task. Focus, focus. Give your brain time to unglue.
She tackled the mess in the storeroom. Quietly, efficiently, with all the concentration she could summon. Did it make sense to sort the boxes by style and make or by size? Size made sense. Style and make might change regularly, but size is eternal, maybe. Size is orderly and predictable. Small at the bottom. Largest on top. But broken into manageable clumps so that the shelves were used to full advantage. And midsizes, presumably the ones most often in demand, would be at chest to eye level. Easy. Predictable. A touch of organization.
She was an organized person. An energetic and intelligent and disciplined person who dismantled the entire storeroom’s structure—if near chaos could be called a structure—and rebuilt it along reasonable and practical and even scientific lines.
She swept and dusted, threw out more than twenty empty boxes that had been taking up space, pretending to hold shoes. She found three single shoes without mates. There were no more yellow ones—she was wearing the last pair.
She kept the door shut and did not look out. The old man came in twice, looking for a particular size and brand, and both times Shiels was able to retrieve the box within seconds and send him on his way.
She could organize a storeroom. If she didn’t get an interview with Lorraine Miens, she thought, if her nose stayed purple and she lost all hope and couldn’t even get into medical school, she could always organize storerooms.
Who knew how long she stayed in there? Her phone was off. She began to feel vaguely hungry, but that could be ignored until every last box was checked and stacked in its appropriate place in the universe.
In the end, when she could delay no longer, she had to open the door. The old man stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes large. Others were there too—customers who looked like they might be runners, and who (perhaps) had come to gaze at the miracle of organization.
“It’s beautiful,” the old man said, evidently for everyone.
Shiels buried her nose in her arm so it could not be seen.
XIII
Step and step, all the way home, no one answering her calls, not Sheldon, not . . . Sheldon. She was the student-body chair of Vista View High. That changes a person. The office had seeped into her posture, into how she thought of herself. Yet . . . she was hungry now, and cold, and terribly tired, and the whole of her world was a different place since yesterday, beginning with her foolish run, leading to other things. To the dance. To spending the night with her boyfriend, who now had fallen off the face of the earth.
It had led her to an unexplainable but apparently permanent purple nose.
Step and step. She would not bow her head. She would not walk around anymore with her hand in front of her face. She was student-body chair. She would not look away as the eyes of the others on the sidewalk, across the street, in the windows of the shops and restaurants she passed, registered their surprise.
A permanently purple nose.
(If she were pregnant, by her apparently disappeared boyfriend, would Babyface emerge with a purple nose too? Had the pigment seeped into her skin? Was the change encoded in her DNA?)
Step and step. Heading home to double-physician parents who would press her to recount every detail of the last twenty-four hours.
Maybe, she thought, she could just keep going. Grab a bus to somewhere large and anonymous where a purple-nosed girl would blend in with all the others who congregated there, waiting for their surgeries.
As if there were such surgeries.
She slipped into the house quietly, as she had learned to do. All still. Sunday afternoon. Her father would be in one of the dens, watch
ing the game, whatever game it was. His hour of relaxation in the frantic week. Her mother would be reviewing her case files for tomorrow, because she never relaxed.
She could relax after she was dead.
“Shiels, is that you?” her mother called. Shiels had been soundless. But her mother could still feel Sheils’s footfalls in her womb.
“Yes, I’m home.” If she pushed herself upstairs, she could barricade herself in her room, postpone the inevitable for an hour or two. But she was starving and would have to face inspection sometime.
Sure steps of doom headed toward her. Shiels waited. Her mother emerged from the western dining room carrying her tablet. Her reading glasses were still on. “I can’t imagine you’ve made a dent in your assignments this weekend,” she said. “Don’t you have that biology lab to do? And what about your—”
She was going to say “college applications,” Shiels knew it, but she stopped in the hall while her tidy chin kept working for another beat or two. It was rare to see her mother lost for words. “Have you taken a look at yourself lately, dear?” she asked finally.
Shiels’s phone then. Sheldon. She turned it off.
The boy had slept with her when she hadn’t been in her right mind.
He had let her leave the house without telling her that her nose had turned into night.
Probably he was the one who had inked it purple.
“Yes, Mother, I have seen.”
A standoff in the doorway.
“Is this some . . . fad or other? I think it’s in terrible taste. Why don’t you clean it off?”
“I will,” Shiels heard herself say. And then she was hurrying up the stairs—her feet seemed to have made the decision for her—and very quickly she was in her room. Door locked. She took out her phone and called her brother.
“What?” Jonathan said. He was just in the next bedroom.
“I want you to go downstairs and fix me a plate of mixed green salad with slices of tomato lightly sprinkled with olive oil and feta cheese, and I’d like some of those biscuits in the cupboard, the special ones in the russet package.”