Enrique opened his mouth, and was a little surprised by the word that came out: “Okay.”
The population that comprised junior high track-and-field couldn’t have been more perfectly assembled for Enrique’s comfort. The jocks, including Pete Randolph and his crew, had all gone out for baseball, which meant they were practicing in a nearby city park. The male members of the track team were generally the smart boys who disliked team sports but knew athletics would be an important part of their college application. There was no alternative sport for girls, except for dance team (cheerleading, but without a sport for which to cheer), so all the truly athletic girls were here. Most of them were already Enrique’s friends.
Mrs. Wheeler, the girls’ coach, was a stocky woman with a voice like a whistle. She didn’t walk, she charged, her torso and hips twisting in opposite directions back and forth like a pepper grinder. And although she and Mr. Dodd seemed to get along—their brief interactions in passing were full of elbow-jabs and muttered jokes—their coaching styles couldn’t have been more different. Mr. Dodd gently prodded his boys to raise the bar or decrease their time, but only when he wasn’t reclined in the bleachers with his ankles crossed, chatting. Mrs. Wheeler sorted out the real athletes and proceeded to ride them hard and ignore the other girls. That she never grew hoarse seemed due to the fact that she sang, rather than hollered, her refrain: “Faster, Jenny, faster! Faster! C’mon! Faster!” No sound could have been more out of place over the lovely buzz of locusts from the field and warbling birds in the sumacs by the road.
And so practice was very nearly what Mr. Dodd had promised. After Enrique changed into his sweat suit, he, Tommy, and the other long-distance boys ran for a while on the track (Mr. Dodd’s only requirement was they run farther than the day before), then he’d relax until his event was called. He’d race three other boys one lap around the track and, shockingly—maybe it was because of the energy he conserved, or maybe Mr. Dodd was right and he was a natural—he won about half the time. He spent the rest of track practice at the center of the field, where the kids laid their jackets out in a colorful patchwork on the grass. They gossiped and joked, wrote on each other’s arms with dandelion heads, shared answers for homework, and generally enjoyed each other’s company in the absence of the more grating elements of junior high—abusive jocks, squealing cheerleaders, grumbling dirtbags, and strutting cowboys. In the middle of telling a funny story one afternoon, Enrique looked around at the amused expressions and realized that he was breaking a rule he had made the previous fall, Don’t talk to groups. He went further. His laugh loosened a bit. He allowed himself to tease his new friends and be teased by them. He became an expert at undoing girls’ bra straps, quickly, through their shirts, with a quick pinch. Some of the old, giggling Enrique showed himself in the new Enrique, and it was all right.
There was also the advantage that Enrique got to spend his afternoons looking at athletic boys in sweat suits. His bedtime fantasies began to change yet again. The various scenes of intimidation and punishment gave way to one quiet, even romantic, fantasy: in the dark, Enrique was embracing a boy, feeling the boy’s hair against his cheek, his breath in his ear. Enrique couldn’t see the boy’s face—that would have made it shamefully intimate—but he did let his hands move down the boy’s back and rest on his buttocks, which felt like two volleyballs—hard, in comparison to the boy’s soft mouth, which searched Enrique’s face and found his mouth and mashed against it.
MELISSA CALLED WANDA late in the month with an offer. “I don’t know how it seemed to you,” she said in her business voice, “but to me the insemination procedure seemed pretty simple. I was thinking, if you feel comfortable with it, maybe we can do it here at home.”
“With what?” Wanda asked.
“Well, use your imagination,” Melissa said, then she paused. “These seven-hour bus rides can’t be very fun for you, Wanda, and the appointments at the clinics are pretty pricey. With the money we save by doing it at home, we could fly you here.”
“On an airplane?”
“No, on an albatross. Of course on an airplane!”
Wanda giggled. “I’ve never been on one.”
“All the more reason.”
“What do you wear?”
“Oh, Wanda.” Melissa laughed. “You’re too much.”
So, a week later, Wanda, her face pressed against the window, watched Boise drop beneath her and the Interstate become a thread and the pale brown patchwork landscape pass behind her as she moved over the treeless Owyhee Mountains, where the wrinkled-leather earth was veined with dry rivers. They passed a squiggled border, where the leather seemed to have been bleached. Snow. The stewardess came by and served Wanda a Coke, and before she could finish it, the descent began. Wanda pulled at her earlobes and yawned to ease the pain in her head, disappointed that the flight had gone so quickly.
They did it every morning for a week, in order to better their chances: Melissa timidly woke Wanda in the early morning and handed her a little plastic syringe full of milky liquid on a neatly folded towel, then left her alone. Wanda slipped off her underwear, elevated her feet on some pillows, and emptied the syringe into herself. Then she dozed off for a while with Simon at her feet. By the time she went downstairs, Melissa and Randy were gone, having left breakfast for her on the bar. Wanda spent the day watching TV and taking the dogs for walks through the woods. At night, they had conversation over dinner, like a family.
“Catherine and I went to see this band we like,” Melissa said the last night. “Catherine’s a lawyer for Legal Aid. And this big tattooed guy offered to buy me a drink . . .” The story went on; but the idea of two wealthy, successful women, still young enough to go to rock shows and attract men, one with a husband at home, so gentle and adoring that he could hear the story with a cocked head and amused smile . . . the idea had so overwhelmed Wanda that she missed the rest.
In the car the next morning, Melissa slipped a wad of bills into Wanda’s hand and kissed her cheek. “I realize you missed a lot of work this week. Keep this. It’s not an advance, it’s reimbursement.”
Wanda thanked her, then ran across the rain-glazed lot into the airport.
This time the plane passed through a bank of gray clouds on its way up. Water beaded and flew away, leaving horizontal streaks on the window. Wanda worried that the pilot would get lost and crash into a mountainside. Then they burst out into sunlight. Above the clouds the weather was fine! As soon as Wanda realized this, she wondered if it was something she had always known.
“I FIGURED OUT who my secret admirer is,” Liz told Abby over the phone.
“Really,” Abby said, allowing herself a teasing tone. Liz hadn’t mentioned to Abby anything other than the fact that he was back. “Well, who is it?”
“It’s not good.”
“Who?”
Liz whimpered, “Jay Cortez.”
“Wow.”
“I know. Wow.”
But Abby’s Wow was different from Liz’s. Her impression of Jay had been based on the day years ago when he and Winston offered her a Hershey’s Kiss and she had opened the bag to find a dead mouse among the silver-wrapped chocolates. This and a hundred other incidents had driven her and Liz gradually to change their after-school hangout from the Padgetts’ to the Halls’. Jay was Winston’s sarcastic crony with toothpick legs in basketball shorts, and Abby would have left him to his meager Idaho fate, had it not been for the afternoon she came over to see Enrique’s diorama. “Hey, Abby. Hey, little brother,” he had said. Jay was this sweet boy’s brother, and he had become very, very handsome.
In this small way, Jay had accomplished his goal that afternoon.
“Well, Liz,” Abby said, “he’s pretty cute.”
“Abby!” Liz whined. It was clearly not what she wanted to hear, but only, Abby suspected, because it was true.
“What do you want me to say?”
Liz, sitting on her bed among an array of tarot cards, which she had put out not
to read but just to be surrounded by pictures that were simple even if their meanings were mysterious—swords, cups, moons—wondered quietly, what did she want Abby to say? She wanted Abby to tell her to forget about Jay Cortez and Eula, Idaho, because they would be together at Stanford soon. And Abby would have told her this, Liz felt, if they were face-to-face, if they didn’t have to talk over the phone, if all this were done already.
If Abby’s mother were dead.
“I guess it’s not a big deal,” Liz said. “I’ll let him down easy. He’s not a bad guy.”
“You haven’t talked about it?”
“Not yet.”
AT THE JARRETTS’, Lucy began to appear regularly after Wanda put other children to bed. Apparently, Mrs. Jarrett didn’t mind if Lucy stayed up late watching TV, and Wanda liked the company.
“Have you ever ridden a plane?” Wanda asked her one night.
“Yeah. We flew to Phoenix to see my grandma.”
“I just flew to Portland.”
“For what?”
“To visit my best friend. She’s an architect.”
“Neat.”
They fell into silence for several minutes, then Lucy scooted down the long couch toward Wanda. “Look,” she said, turning her notebook to reveal what she had been drawing.
It was Wanda, rendered in colored pencil. The likeness in the face astounded her—Lucy was good!—but that’s where the accuracy ended. Wanda’s hair was a flaming yellow mass, and she rode a winged unicorn with a pink mane. Their eyes, both Wanda’s and the unicorn’s, were huge and mournful, fringed by thick lashes that licked up at the tips. Wanda was naked, and though her lower body was obscured behind the unicorn’s wing, her breasts were round as softballs and pink-nippled. A rainbow-trail marked the unicorn’s flight across a sky full of multicolored stars.
“Wow, that’s really pretty,” Wanda said. “Thanks for the boobs.”
Lucy released an embarrassed laugh, then wiped from her chin the spittle she had blown from her braces.
“Can I look at the rest?”
“If you want.”
As Wanda slowly turned the pages, she learned that this dorky girl lived in an incredible world full of sailboats, elves with pointed ears, jewels the size of houses, mountaintop castles, crashing oceans, human-headed birds, and bird-headed humans. There was no gravity; everything floated in a wreath of pastel-colored mist or flew on butterfly wings. Lucy herself appeared, not as a chubby girl but a graceful, redheaded sorceress who was always accompanied by a floating crystal ball. There were many women with orb-like breasts and buttocks, but only one man—or boy, really—a brown-skinned, sweet-faced boy, who sometimes rode behind Lucy on her steed, encircling her with lithe arms.
“Who’s this?” Wanda asked.
Lucy pulled one curtain of her bob across her face to suck on its tip. “This boy at school, Enrique. He’s a year under me.”
“What’s he like?”
Lucy heaved a great sigh. “He’s really quiet and sweet and smart. Like, supersmart, the smartest one in his grade. I see him sitting out on the curb after school sometimes, just by himself, thinking, waiting for his brother. Sometimes I think he’s kinda like me. But he’s probably got a crush on a popular girl. He doesn’t know I exist.” She took back the notebook.
“Well,” Wanda suggested, “if he is like you, then he doesn’t care about the popular girls, right?”
Lucy shook her head. “Boys are different.”
“You can say that again.”
Lucy pulled her legs up under her. “I bet you were popular in school.”
As she considered it, it seemed to Wanda that she had spent her youth spinning: exaggerating the severity of injuries just for the attention, cutting class to give the new girl a tour of the haunted house out on Amity Road, bargaining for rides after school, hopping from this clique to that all across Eula, spreading rumors and forging alliances and breaking promises—all in the hope of finding someone who would like her. “I wasn’t popular,” she said.
“But you were pretty,” Lucy said, beginning to sketch.
“Popular or pretty—that doesn’t mean people like you.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“You know what? That world you have there is worth more than boys and popularity and whatever. Sure, roll your eyes. I would have too, when I was your age. But I wish I had had that—what’s in that notebook. It would have saved me from doing a lot of things I didn’t like doing.” Wanda saw a smile stir in the corners of Lucy’s mouth. “You kind of know that, don’t you, Lucy? That what you have is worth more?”
Lucy drew for a while, then she shyly said, “That’s why I like Enrique. I feel like he knows it, too.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Wanda asked.
Lucy nodded without looking up.
“Seriously, can I tell you a secret that you can’t tell anybody?”
“Yes.”
“I’m trying to have a baby for these people—my friends in Portland. They can’t have kids, so I’m going to get pregnant for them and have their baby. Like Baby M, but I’m not gonna try to keep it. And if I have a girl, I hope she’s nice rather than popular. And if it’s a boy, I hope I can sit on the curb and just be quiet with him rather than watch him play football. It’s opposite from the way parents are supposed to think, but maybe that’s why the world’s so messed up. You only get one chance in this life, right? Well, when you have a kid, you get two.”
Lucy gave a studied nod of profound agreement, although it was doubtful that she knew what Wanda meant when Wanda hardly knew herself. They turned again to the TV. Lucy drew, and eventually Wanda nodded off. At the sound of the Jarretts’ car in the drive, she woke up and stretched.
“Here.” Lucy tore a sheet from her notebook.
Wanda—Lucy’s version, beautiful and fiery-haired—looked down between her breasts to her belly, where a baby boy, visible by a magical cross-section of the circular chamber, gazed lovingly back. The boy had brown skin, elf-ears, and little bat wings folded against his sides. His face was that of the sweet, introspective boy—Lucy’s crush.
Wanda hung the drawing in a place of honor at the head of her bed, under the mobile. She started and ended every day with it.
ON A SATURDAY afternoon Liz walked into the living room to find Winston and Jay watching TV with their feet up on the furniture. Shafts of sunlight lit the slow-moving dust in the air, and the boys had sunk so deeply into the soft sofas as to be flat on their backs. Winston, who had a faded yellow bruise on his chin, grunted a hello, while Jay let his head list casually to the side. His eyes took their time meeting hers.
She gave a caring smile—not affectionate really, but tender. He smiled too and lifted one shoulder in a little shrug. Abby was right, of course. He was cute. But to say so aloud had seemed sacrilegious. One mustn’t admit to everything. Liz listened to Bananarama, but she didn’t talk about it at school.
It made Jay tremble a little, deep in his bones, to look into Liz’s long-lashed eyes and watch them close and reopen. They were like the eyes of a deer, but one that lived around McCall, the resort town Jay used to visit with the Van Bekes. There, all the wives and children fed the deer stale bread in the mornings. Those deer didn’t run off when you came across them on a trail; they simply gazed at you with large, unthreatened eyes and let you pass.
Liz turned and climbed the stairs to her room.
From the moment she had discovered that it was Jay, Liz had forgotten all about how she was going to expose and humiliate her secret admirer. As someone who considered racial discrimination a blot on the kind face of Eula (that was how she had worded it in an opinion piece for the Eula High Gazette), Liz would never admit to herself that the reason she never had suspected Jay and the reason she now felt kind and docile toward him were the same: he was a Mexican.
A half-hour later there was a tap on Liz’s open door. She looked up from her book. “Winston fell asleep,” Jay said. His hands were stuffed in his back
pockets and his gaze remained on the floor. He had cultured his aloof attitude to mask his shyness. Why hadn’t Liz seen that before? Because she hadn’t cared to look, of course. It was horribly vain, but the singular fact that Jay admired her had made him leap in her estimation, as if it proved his taste if not his intelligence.
“How have you been?” Liz asked.
Jay shrugged. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out but a long, rasping exhale that turned to a laugh as he bowed and shook his head.
“Been sleeping okay?” Liz prodded.
“No, actually,” Jay said. Now he nodded. It seemed he needed to encourage himself to speak with these movements of his head. “Not since Monday.”
“I never once thought it was you, you know,” Liz said.
Jay swiveled side to side for a while, apparently unaware of his elbow knocking the door. “It feels kinda weird talking about it here, don’t you think? I feel like your mom’s gonna show up and tell me to get downstairs.”
Liz quoted the rule from their childhood: “Boys downstairs, girls upstairs.”
“Would you like to talk about it . . . somewhere else . . . sometime?”
“Jay,” Liz said, “I’m going away.”
“I know. Stanford. I was thinking that might be a reason to hang out, rather than a reason not to.”
“I’ve got so much to do before school’s out . . .”
She never would have suspected that Jay would so clearly recognize her first false note. But the light in his eyes went out, and she saw that she had called up the old Jay, the one that lived like a hermit in a dark-windowed house.
Jay, though, saw no change in Liz’s eyes. They were still steady as those of a McCall deer. “Catch you later,” he said as he rolled away into the hall.
MR. DODD’S “TRIAL period” was nearing its end, and Enrique had all but decided he would stay on the team and compete in meets—he had even toyed with the idea of taking on another event, the 880 or the long jump—when he made a terrible mistake.
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