The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “Right,” Becky sniffed. “Paris is expensive. Sex is cheap.”

  “You’re going to have sex?” Florie squawked.

  Elyse gave Florie another withering look. “Why don’t you say it louder?” Elyse snapped. “There might be people three towns away who didn’t hear you.”

  “But . . . but why? With who?”

  “None of your business,” Elyse retorted.

  “Oh, of course, you’re right.” Florie sounded contrite and also rather flustered. “I only meant, well, if you loved somebody. I mean, like, if you were with somebody. You’re not even dating anyone. Not that I think that’s a bad thing,” she added hastily. “You’re so pretty, Elyse. I’m sure you could date any guy in the school if you wanted.”

  “Especially if they heard you were looking for sex,” Becky said. “Then they’d be lining up for the chance to bang you.”

  “You’re disgusting,” said Elyse, although she didn’t sound particularly offended.

  “Doesn’t . . . I mean, won’t it hurt?” Florie asked. Becky doubted the pink blooming in Florie’s cheeks was from the heat. Florie seemed amazingly embarrassed by the whole subject, like a wilting Victorian damsel.

  “The first time, maybe,” Elyse said, “although who knows? I might have lost my virginity on my bicycle.”

  Florie looked so perplexed, Becky felt obligated to explain. “Not all virgins have intact hymens. Sometimes activities like bike riding can break them.”

  Elyse groaned. “Ask Mr. Wizard.”

  “Ms. Wizard,” Becky corrected.

  “Dr. Wizard,” Elyse said.

  “I know that,” Florie said hesitantly. “I mean, about that . . . that part of you breaking. But . . . I mean, wouldn’t you notice if it happened while you were riding a bicycle? Wouldn’t it hurt?”

  “God, you two,” Elyse groaned. “Analyzing the whole thing so technically. Maybe it does hurt if you get fucked by your bike seat. Who cares?”

  Florie seemed desperate to explain herself. “I’ve heard about that happening to girls who ride horses, and I don’t ride horses. But I do ride a bike.” She gestured toward her bicycle, lying on the grass next to Elyse’s. “Maybe I’m not a virgin.”

  “If you haven’t had sex, you’re a virgin,” Becky said in a gentle voice, hoping to ease Florie’s obvious panic. Did it really matter anymore whether a girl was a virgin or not? Well, maybe it mattered to the girl, but did anyone else care? It wasn’t like they lived in some third-world macho country where if a bride wasn’t a virgin on her wedding night, she’d be doused in kerosene and set aflame.

  It hadn’t mattered to April. Sitting in the shade of the tree, gazing up into the shifting leaves as if April’s spirit hovered just above her, filtering down to her in specks of light, Becky felt sure of this. She felt positive that as April lay on the ground, life seeping out of her, she did not think about the fact that she’d never had sex. Or never been to Paris, for that matter. Becky wasn’t sure what April had been thinking, but Becky hoped it wasn’t regret over what she hadn’t done. She hoped April was thinking, “I have friends who love me, and they will keep me alive in their hearts and in their ceremonies beneath this tree.”

  Logically, Becky knew April hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d smashed the back of her head when she’d landed, and although Becky hadn’t read the autopsy report, she assumed a brain injury was what had killed April. But the brain was not the mind. Who knew what the mind experienced? A tunnel of light? A glide into a new dimension? An orgasmic release? The hands of God reaching out and lifting her away? Not that Becky had suddenly started believing in God, but she was open-minded enough to include him in her list of options.

  What was going on in Elyse’s mind? Why was she hell-bent on doing someone? Or being done by someone? Who would do the doing? As Florie said, it wasn’t as if she was with a guy, madly in love.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with your mother, does it?” Becky asked.

  Elyse grimaced.

  “Whose mother?” Florie asked.

  Right. Florie didn’t know about the situation with Elyse’s parents. But they were all sisters now, weren’t they? They’d all done the ritual together—lighting the candle, touching the tree, chanting April, April died in May. They were all smelling the smoke from the citronella candle, all being dive-bombed by the blackflies. All grieving for April.

  “My mother is a bitch,” Elyse said succinctly, and then, to Becky, “No, Beck. This doesn’t have anything to do with my mother. This is about me and April.”

  “And dying.”

  “Me, April, dying and living. And I’m done talking about it.”

  For a minute, no one said anything. Becky listened to the leaves whispering above them as a breeze rustled through, a distant caw of a crow, the hiss and crackle of the flame singeing the melting wax in the bowl of the candle.

  And then Florie, inept Florie, bless-her-heart Florie, blurted out, “So, who are you going to have sex with?”

  And suddenly, they were all laughing. Even April. Becky was sure she could hear her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  FLORIE DIDN’T own a computer. Her parents had promised her that when she went to college, they would buy her a laptop, just as they had with Andrew, but college was two years in the future. Two years and two months, during which she was stuck using the family computer in the den. It sat on a wood-veneer computer desk against a wall paneled with knotty pine, next to a trite painting of a bowl of fruit Andrew had created a few years ago. Her parents had framed and hung it as if it were museum quality. Staring at the computer monitor, Florie could not escape the painting. The too-red apples and the too-yellow bananas teased their way into her peripheral vision, distracting her, making her want to swear off fruit forever.

  Her parents didn’t object to her participating in online social networks or receiving email, but there was a limit to how open a person could be when she was seated only a few feet from her father, who was currently riveted by the broadcast of a golf tournament on TV. Given how boring the show was, Florie had to believe her father’s gaze would stray to the computer monitor every now and then. Not that he could read her email or other posts from that distance, but still, his nearness inhibited her.

  She couldn’t possibly look up information about sex with her parents so close, her mother ensconced on the sofa next to her father, working through the crossword puzzle in the Sunday newspaper and interjecting comments often enough to remind everyone that she was present. “I thought the singing sounded particularly good in church today,” she might say, or “What’s the capital of Senegal? Five letters.”

  Florie had a reasonable theoretical knowledge of sex. At her old school in New York, she’d sat through a few giggle-inducing lectures on the subject in health class. Here in Wheatley, whoever designed the curriculum apparently believed that tenth-graders already knew everything they needed to know about the subject, because the health class focused mostly on substance abuse and suicidal behaviors.

  And even if Ms. Crockett had devoted a few classes to sex, her comments surely wouldn’t have answered Florie’s questions, questions Florie wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask. Like: why was the same male plumbing used for both sex and urination? How could a girl know a guy was not peeing into her? What if there was some residual urine lining that tube when he decided to have sex? What if the girl was performing oral sex and he peed into her mouth?

  And while female anatomy was more function-specific, why was everything located in the same general area? Why was a woman’s vagina so close to her rear end? That part of a woman’s body was so . . . dirty. Didn’t that mean sex was dirty, too? Didn’t that lump intercourse with pooping?

  Why, if sex was essential for the survival of the species, did God make it so complicated? So difficult? So unpleasant? Florie had heard this fro
m one of her classmates back in New York, who’d heard it from her older sister. Apparently, intercourse hurt terribly, and oral sex made you want to vomit. Well, of course you’d want to vomit if the guy was filling your mouth with stuff that might include some of his pee.

  She wanted to ask Elyse these questions, to figure out why Elyse was so determined to have sex. But Florie couldn’t risk antagonizing her only friends in Wheatley, or allowing them to think she was a moron.

  The announcer’s voice on the television was hushed, monotonous. More soporific than a sleeping pill, she thought, staring at the chatter-text scrolling down the computer monitor. Florie had never excelled at small talk. All that happy blather about silly things dogs did and why school sucked and glorious summer events, none of which Florie was likely to be invited to. If only April were alive, she’d make sure Florie got included in barbecues and pool parties. “I’d love to come,” she’d say—she was the kind of girl everyone invited to gatherings, even if she was not exactly cool. “Can I bring my friend Florie along?”

  Florie wasn’t sure Becky or Elyse could be counted on to include her. Definitely not Elyse. Maybe Becky.

  “Oscar role for Marlon Brando,” her mother announced.

  “Don Corleone,” her father said, his gaze never shifting from the TV, where a tricky putt was about to be attempted, according to the tremulous whisper of the announcer.

  “Doesn’t fit,” her mother said.

  “What else did he win an Oscar for?”

  “I don’t know. It ends with a Y.”

  No wonder Florie was such a mess, with parents like hers. How Andrew had escaped his genetic fate, she couldn’t say. But she certainly hadn’t escaped it.

  “What was his name in that movie where he keeps scratching his chest and shouting ‘Stella’?” her father asked. “Wasn’t it Stanley? That ends with a Y.”

  “Stanley is too short.”

  Florie Googled Marlon Brando and quickly found the answer her mother was searching for. But her parents weren’t asking for her help, and she wasn’t going to give it. If she couldn’t ask them the questions that burned inside her, they couldn’t ask her questions about Marlon Brando.

  Terry Malloy, she thought, closing the Google window. Terry Malloy. She returned to the page she’d been reading, full of conversations as bright and meaningless as her mother’s prattling about people at church. What does it mean? Florie thought. What does it matter? Who cares about crossword puzzles and risky golf putts and all this superficial gossip about school and characters on TV shows and the goofy things people’s dogs do?

  She didn’t need this. What she needed was someone she could really talk to, really trust, someone who didn’t think she was a loser and wouldn’t laugh at her if she asked just what exactly happened to a man’s penis to make it possible for him to stick it into a woman. And whether oral sex really made you vomit. And why sex was designed so men received so much more pleasure from it than women.

  She could have talked to April.

  But April was gone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ELYSE HAD thought about phoning Tommy Crawford, but she decided to broach the subject with him in person. If she didn’t have the guts to ask him to his face, then she didn’t have the guts to do it at all.

  Also, she wasn’t entirely sure about his phone skills. He’d phoned her that one time, which was good, but then he’d ended the call abruptly, which was not good. She needed to see his face when she talked to him. She needed to be able to read the nuances.

  Assuming he even had nuances. He did not seem like a particularly nuanced guy.

  As expected, she found him hanging out with Brian and Taylor in the hall near the cafeteria. He acknowledged her with a slight jerk of his chin and a faint smile.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said, shoving away from the cinder-block wall.

  Brian muttered something and Taylor snickered, but Tommy ignored them. Elyse appreciated that. Whatever goading his friends subjected him to, he had enough class not to respond.

  Tommy’s friends gawked at her as if she’d been teleported from another planet. Even after she walked down the hall, she felt their stares following her. “Actually,” she said to Tommy, “maybe we should talk some other time.” She wasn’t chickening out, but honestly, how was she supposed to have this conversation with kids swarming around them, and the aroma of stale cooking oil and burnt meat wafting from the cafeteria, and the monitor on the wall flashing reminders about the final exam schedule, and Tommy’s best friends glaring at her so intensely their eyes were like laser pointers?

  Tommy shrugged. “If you want,” he said. One thing about Tommy Crawford: he was agreeable. He was average size, not too tall, not too heavy. His flat, square face was pleasantly bland, utterly unobjectionable. He was like soothing, neutral decor, beiges and tans, his appearance comforting but nondescript. If someone more colorful stood next to him, he would disappear.

  Elyse wondered why April had been so infatuated with him. Chemistry, she supposed. Or physics—a spark, a lightning bolt, a sear of heat flaming through her whenever she’d seen him. Or maybe April had been drawn to him because he’d seemed safe and cute, like a teddy bear.

  He seemed safe to Elyse, which was good. When she was ready to fall in love, it would be with someone edgier, riskier, someone with brooding eyes and attitude, someone who made her blush and fidget, who caused a knot to swell in her throat so that just breathing in his presence was a triumph. Someone who made her dizzy and giddy and tense.

  But this wasn’t about love. This was about fulfilling for April the destiny she’d been unable to fulfill for herself.

  “So,” Tommy said, goading her out of her silence.

  “Can we meet somewhere after last block?” she asked.

  “I’ve got baseball practice,” he said. “I’ll be at the JV field.”

  Great. With a bunch of his teammates gaping at her the way Brian and Taylor were gaping at her now. Maybe Brian and Taylor were on the JV baseball team, too, and they’d get to gape at her twice in one day.

  “How about by the Snack Shack?” she suggested. The Snack Shack abutted several of the athletic fields. She and Tommy could walk to the far side of it so his teammates couldn’t see them, and stand in the shadow of its roof’s long eaves, and get this discussion over with.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll look for you. But once practice begins, I’ve got to be on the field.”

  “I’ll go there straight from class.” She sighed, feeling a sudden need for oxygen. “I’ll be waiting for you. I promise it won’t take long.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t push her, didn’t question why she was being so cryptic. He was just so fucking agreeable.

  Maybe she was crazy, choosing him. But he was perfect for what she needed: pleasant looking, decently groomed, reasonably friendly. More important, she had no emotional connection to him. She didn’t want this to be about love or passion or need, anything sloppy.

  It all made a certain sense. This was her memorial to April. If Becky could light her candles and plant her seeds and recite her rhymes, Elyse could do this. She could live the life April had died too young to live.

  She promised herself she would go to Paris, too. But first, this.

  Thinking about her impending meeting with Tommy—wondering how to phrase her request, wondering how he would react, wondering if Becky and Florie were right and Elyse was insane—distracted her throughout the rest of the day, even in her art class.

  Art was her favorite subject, but today she could barely focus on her final project, a portfolio of charcoal sketches of a human figure. Ms. Reyes had brought in a live model for the class—her niece, home from college for the summer. The girl wasn’t particularly pretty, and she could afford to lose a few pounds, but she was alive and warm, a re
al skeleton padded with real flesh.

  For last week’s class, the model had worn jeans and a shirt, and Elyse had enjoyed drawing the apparel, meticulously adding the fraying threads at the hems of the model’s pant legs, the folds of her shirt where her elbows bent. But Ms. Reyes wanted the class to learn something about anatomy, so today her niece wore only a form-fitting leotard. Her thighs dimpled slightly on the stool where she was perched, and her body creased at her waist like dough folded onto itself.

  What would Tommy think of Elyse’s body? Would he think her midsection looked like dough, soft and yeasty? Would he even have to see her naked?

  Would she have to see him naked? Did she want to?

  Did she trust him? Not so much with the act, but with the possibility that he would tell other people what she looked like? He’d practically hung up on her that evening when he’d phoned. What if he was an asshole?

  Don’t overthink it, she ordered herself, shading the curve of the model’s forearm and the softness of her hand, which rested on her bent knee. This is about doing something so you don’t die with it undone. It doesn’t matter if Tommy Crawford is an asshole. Really, it doesn’t.

  And seeing him naked, if it turned out that was how things went, would not be so awful. Once she went to college, she’d get to draw naked models, male and female. She’d undoubtedly sleep with lots of men, too. She might as well get used to looking at guys’ bodies. Tommy was a jock. He probably didn’t have any doughy areas on him.

  She survived art. She survived math—an easier survival, since she didn’t care much about what was going on in that class. She ran into Becky near the main gym after math—her locker was on the gym hall—and Elyse didn’t mention that she was going to meet with Tommy after school, which made her feel uncomfortable, since she and Becky told each other everything. Becky spotted Florie en route to her own locker but only waved and kept walking.

  The heat of the afternoon shocked Elyse when she stepped outside. The air was dry; it crackled like lit kindling. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually have a team practice in this weather. But the high school baseball season ran for another two weeks, and jocks obeyed their coaches. That was one reason she, Becky, and April had never gone out for varsity teams: they didn’t want to have to do what coaches ordered them to do. Playing tennis at the town courts, or swimming, or riding their bikes—there were plenty of sports you could pursue without joining a team.