It could have been the prayer that I put in for it, about an hour beforehand, sitting on the cold tile of her bathroom. My mother's rosary in my hand—Catholic, not Protestant—and mumblings that only I could understand. I'd sworn Him off too (him) yet the practices were still there.
There was a girl that I was acquainted with before. I remained friends with Amber during our escapade, and even though it lasted through three seasons (winter, spring, and summer) it failed in the fall. That fall, the fall I met Lucas. August. Maybe right at the beginning of November, let's give it an arbitrary date: the 5th. That could be right for all I know. She was the one that got me my puffer jacket. She was the one that got me the rosary, when, at that time, I remained in the belief that I was Christian—little Christ. Better term: Catholic. I already established that.
She engraved her name on the back of the crucifix. Was that sacreligious? I had no idea, my mother probably did.
Lucy.
Skin crawling. Yet I still keep the rosary—too expensive to throw away. And throwing it away is most definitely sacreligious. Why would I want God to be even more mad at me than he already was?
We came to know each other that winter. That isn’t exactly true, we knew each other from Italian I, for a few months, then we got to know each other during the Christmas party that Mrs. Giodarno held. Ms. Smith at the time, she got married that summer.
“I take it Christmas isn’t your favorite holiday.”
“How’d you know that?”
I had forted myself in the corner of the room, where I scribbled something on a piece of paper. No idea what it was. Could have been what the room looked like, could have been my feelings about that very moment—that wouldn’t make sense, I didn’t do that.
She was my exact height: five feet four inches. Blonde. I don’t know what I was thinking, blondes always pissed me off.
“You’re Mark, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I’m not going to try and guess your name.” Her eyes were blue. Her smile was nice, I could at least say that about her. She had a nice smile. It was different—everyone else had fake ones, it was easy to tell when you had been with the same people for so long. Real, that’s what I’d call it. I can’t remember what she was wearing, I didn’t pay much attention to that.
The girl pulled up a chair next to me, as everyone else in the room celebrated the festivities that were at hand, the two of us huddled up and shied from the crowd. She didn’t sit on it normally; she sat on it backwards, straddling the back of the chair with her legs, her arms folded on the top. “I bet people think you’re no fun.” Playful in how she said it.
“That’s two for two. What’s your next guess?” I now entertained her, taking a break from what I was doing with pencil and paper.
“You haven’t asked my name yet.”
“Am I supposed to?”
That made her laugh. That didn’t make her think I was some sort of—.
“You don’t have to, no.” She took advantage of the conversation. That’s what she always did. “Lucy,” her hand reached out. I took it—strong grip.
“How have I never noticed that you’re in this class?” I was somewhat lying, as I had seen her multiple times. One time I dropped my pencil, and since there was no one else around but her to pick it up for me, I requested.
“I’m elusive, I guess?”
That didn’t satisfy my lie. “No.”
“No? You’re the one that gets to decide things for me?”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
She looked back at everyone else. “So you're going to sit her in this spot, all by yourself?”
“That’s what I was planning on doing.”
“I’ll fuck your plans up then.”
That caught me off guard. Kind of. Barely. Not at all.
She made it her mission to interject herself into almost everything I did from then and onward. She’d sit with us at lunch—Amber liked her, Amber saw no problem with her—and she’d stop me in the parking lot, she’d invite me to do things for the first few weeks of knowing me and I always declined, until one day I decided that I might as well get it over with. One night. I’d go home afterward.
I got teased by Amber, got told that I had a girlfriend, that we were dating. We weren’t dating. Not yet.
I wasn’t the one who asked her out. I wasn’t the one that gave us titles. She was the one that did it; she introduced me to her parents as her “boyfriend”. I could have stopped her from going on from there, done something that would have clarified to her parents that that wasn’t true and that we were “just friends”. I didn’t.
Amber thought that maybe I did like her and I was incredibly awkward about it. I was limiting myself, not taking my situation “by the balls”.
So, on the night of our fifth date, a date to the movie theaters in February, Pretty in Pink, when we returned to my home—no, it was her home. It was her bed that we were sitting on. My body was pressed against hers, I embraced her with my arms wrapped around her, my hands grabbing at her shoulders as she pressed her cherry-lipstick mouth against mine. My hands gripped at the back of her head in an attempt to paw at her, yet I found it difficult to get a grip on it without it being uncomfortable. I thought to myself briefly. I repositioned myself in her hold almost a dozen times, everytime a futile attempt and everytime I still felt awkward as I held her in my arms. I thought to myself, “Maybe it would be easier if it was short hair—then I could grab at it and maybe hold it in clumps rather than ropes.” Instead, I remained uncomfortable as she pushed herself against me. Three minutes before she had taken my shorts off and I was now only in my underwear and sweatshirt with my ex-shorts tossed to the side as if they were a piece of trash that didn’t need to be worried about. Her fingers crept up my pale thighs as she continued to push herself against me and yet with each push I pulled, pulled away from her form and backwards towards the white pillow on her pink bed. I removed my hands and arms and placed them behind me as I continued to lean backward in a semi-desperate attempt to leave her.
Lucy’s right hand left my thigh and found itself entangled in my mess of brown, kind of dirty hair and then on my back as she pulled me closer to her even more. Her blonde curtains of hair now partially rested on my shoulders, and with the most discomfort I swiftly brought my face away from hers and stammered across my words, saying, “I need to use the bathroom”.
Either I was an idiot or I was a genius. If I were to bet, I would put all of my money on the former.
And, somehow, what caused the end of our “relationship” was even worse than that.
That entire summer, I refused to do anything similar to what happened after that movie. I held her hand, I rarely played with her hair that I didn’t find that much enjoyment in. She was the one that messed with my hair, she was the one that rubbed my back, she was the one that gave me all the affection—and, apparently, she wanted it back. So that November she had had enough of it all and tried to kiss me again. I don’t know why she stuck with me for so long. I pulled away, just like how I pulled away when we were sitting on her bed. That hot pink bed—I neglected to mention it was hot pink.
“Are you fucking kidding me Mark?”
We were sitting in the back of my truck, she had her legs crossed; we had planned to go to a drive-in. A drive-in in November, incredibly odd.
She gave me the crucifix a week before that.
And it could have been that the prayer worked, that the prayer is what made the car battery work when it was connected to Lucas. It could have been what caused the power-surge to jolt him back to life, to give him breath—if he breathed like we did. But why would God have done something like that, why would he bring someone back that he had already taken. And why had I confided in him if I had thrown the concept of his existence away months beforehand? Why did I think that he would have even cared in the first place?
“That’s not what I’m asking for. I’m asking for the ability to see him one more time. I don't care if it works, and I don’t care if this sort of thing is a sin. I don’t care, I just want him back.”
What an idiot I sounded like. Because it wasn’t him who brought Lucas back, he had nothing to do with it. It was all me, I was the one that brought Lucas back into the land of the living, gave him a second chance, gave him a second life, gave him a second breath. I was the one, and Amber didn’t even have anything to do with it either. She wasn’t in the garage when he stood up, she wasn’t in the garage when vomited. She could have tried her witchery, casting a spell and doing her best to ask the spirits to resurrect a dead man. But I was the one that resurrected a dead man. I was the necromancer. She wasn’t. I brought back a lover, she didn’t.
“Try me not. Rebuke me not. Hold me not. Yet, if it does come upon a moonlit clear night, where thou desire to hold I in thine arms, to feel mine body to press against thine, when thou are in thy most monumental solace, when the hour of witches creeps upon thou swiftly, and when thou have yet again started to desire what I offered thou, call upon I, and I will answer. Knock thy hand upon mine door and I will answer. Call up to mine tower, as I will lean out the window, with mine hand cupped to mine ear, and see thou down below, and I will embrace thou once again. Soon, mine love. Soon.”
My play. And cry at my grave and I will come up from the ground.
Tell me how cold my hand is when you clutch it. Tell me how my body feels against yours. See how my head crawls with insects, how I have come out of my grave to be here with you. Can you see the bite marks on my skin? Can you see the scratches, my broken leg, my withered fingers? I am here for you and you alone.
☠ ☠ ☠
I was halfway right. There was a cauldron. I don’t know if it was to be ironic, as there was no fire. It was barely even a cauldron, actually. There were the remains of a fair. It was two poles, straight up, with a rope tied between the two of them, a bucket hanging off the rope.
“Not at all what I thought it was going to be like.”
My hands were in my pockets, I thought that I could outwardly wear my necklace—they were all girls, but they weren’t what I would think of when I thought of witches. Sure, they were weird, they were awkward, they spoke in hushed tones. I assumed that one of them would cackle, howl into the night, maybe something like a werewolf. Witches don’t howl, they laugh. And they fly on brooms, too.
“We don’t fly on brooms.”
I was wrong. “Then what do you fly on?”
“We don’t fly.”
She called herself the grand witch—I thought of something that rhymes with that, but I didn’t say it.
“Mark, I swear to God, if you ruin this for me.”
“You don’t swear to God.”
One was tall, second was stout, and the third—the third was abnormally, quite possibly unnaturally, stout, and brunette. Three witches, standing like they had been waiting for me; they were waiting for Amber, this was her induction ceremony, they weren’t waiting for me. Apparently she had gotten there rather late, twelve-40. That was too late for them. But that didn’t stop them from doing the ceremony.
“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
That’s not what they actually said. That’s what I expected them to say—instead, though poetic, they said something different. How I would have laughed uncontrollably if they called for eye of newt, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.
The taller one spoke first, a flashlight in hand, cutting through the night air. If they needed wool of bat there were plenty of bats that nested in the trees above us. We were in a grove, the kind of space that one might think to find something of the likes of a fairy circle, the star-filled expanse above us broad and open. She muttered at first, her first few words slipping away from her. She interjected herself, to ask the other attendees whether or not their ceremony would work with a boy present.
“By the power of—I don’t know if this will work with Mark here,” Stacy said, her face illuminated by her flashlight. She looked something like a ghost.
The third girl, with what I thought to be a ridiculous amount of makeup plastered on her face, looked at Stacy. “The forest will tell us if it doesn’t work.” That made no sense.
“‘Ronica, I don’t think—.”
“Just go.”
The second girl remained silent.
“By the power of the north wind, the east wind, and... wait, the other winds. The west wind—the south wind, we call you. Uh, let us be witches for real, or at least get cooler, or, like, have something good happen at least.”
“That’s not how you start it!” Veronica stopped her from continuing her babbling. “By the power of the ol’ north within, the eastern wind, the wicked western wind, the deep southern wind, we call upon you, forest. Put on our heads our hats, let us be witches and follow the puppeting strings of your hands, and—.”
“Please, let the cute guy on the football team call me back—.”
“Stacy.”
The tall girl got quiet again.
“We ask the spirits to show us a sign, to reveal your presence. Maybe make the lights flicker? Or make it rain.”
Stacy had to keep talking. “But not too much because my mom will freak if we’re soaking wet.”
“You’re throwing me off, Stacy!”
I found myself glancing over at Amber; her hands were outstretched, her eyes closed. That was the position that she was told to assume by the witches.
“By fire and ice, rain and… snow?” It sounded like Stacy was asking me a question.
“This is your thing—.”
“Mark!” ‘Ronica and Amber yelled at me at the same time.
“We offer up our sister, Amber Blair, to become a part of our coven,” said the stouter one.
They weren’t given a sign. “‘Ronica, we weren’t given a sign!”
The second witch, who had yet to speak, stepped forward. She wore a black hood, one that I learned she bought not too long before from a costume shop. “Per noctem et lunam, potentiam invoco.”
Was that Latin? “Does she speak Latin?”
“No.” Veronica was the one to answer me, she didn’t let the stout one respond. Apparently, she didn’t speak Latin.
Everything seemed rather disjointed. This only led to more discreditation.
“Did it work?” Amber whispered under her breath, just barely enough for me and the three girls to hear.
“We’ll have to see, but by name you’re totally a part of the coven.” The taller one, the one with blonde hair—it was always the blondes that threw me off—walked over to Amber, placed her right hand on Amber’s left shoulder, and gave her a kiss on the forehead. That didn’t seem right. “‘Ronica, you know that I’m a medium, I’m only good for talking to ghosts. That’s why we usually do this sort of stuff in the graveyard.” It was a cemetery, not a graveyard.
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“Amber told us that that wouldn’t work for her, so we had to compromise.”
The forehead kiss was odd, yes. It confused me, perplexed me, it haunted me in my dreams when I, later that night, curled myself up against his frozen frame once again. But at that time I didn’t think about it too much. There was still more of the ceremony to complete.
“What’s the next part, again?”
“Stacy, if you don’t get your shit together you’re going to be kicked out. You do this every time, that’s why the last girl we tried to have join the coven left halfway through her induction. It’s always you who’s causing the problem.” She was pissed, that much I knew.
“It’s not my fault.” Stacy crossed her arms, trying to give herself some semblance of a defensive stance.
Veronica wasn’t having any of it. “I just pointed out how it is.”
“Mark, you have to offer something of yours.”
“I have to do what?”
“Give us something of yours.” Didn’t think so.
“Why’s that? Why would I have to do that?”
Stacy was the one pushing for this. “Don’t just say the same thing twice, only slightly differently.” Lucas had told me that that was my thing, that’s what I did, and that’s what I had always done.
“I’m not giving anything up.”
“Then I guess Amber can’t be a part of our coven.” A turn on her right foot, like she was a toddler trying to guilt trip me into doing what she wanted me to, her back facing me.
I weighed my options; it would have made Amber exceedingly happy if she was allowed membership into the coven, but then again I had nothing that I wanted to give up, or nothing that I was willing to give up.
“Wait a minute, you already said that she was a part of the coven by name.”
“That’s by name, idiot.” Veronica chimed in. The second one remained silent—I’d seen the first and third girls in the hallway before in passing, I knew their frames, I knew their faces, I somewhat knew their shrill, annoying, piercing, burning voices. But I didn’t know the second girl, the one that spoke Vulgar.
“I’d like to say that I’ve had enough of this, I’d like to say that I can leave and never come back to this. But I can’t leave right now, I can’t leave because I’m tied down with Amber. Amber, I’m going to sit over here in front of this tree, but I’m not going to give up something of mine.”
Amber had, at this point, already broken out of her incredibly odd stance. “Mark, come on.”
Veronica made her decision in about five seconds. “Well, Amber, you’re not a part of the coven.”
“Mark, you asshole.” I was the one that she was calling that? How about Veronica? Actually, the name calling did make sense in that conversation. I was stubborn, I am stubborn, I will remain stubborn.
My bottom got wet in the dew covered ground yet I refused to stand up simply on principle.
“You could give up the necklace,” Amber said, definitely expecting me to concede and comply.
“No, not at all, not one chance—that’s a definite ‘no’.”
“A necklace?” She’d sparked Stacy’s interest, her turning on her foot again now to face me in all my relaxed glory on the water-soaked ground, leaning against hard bark. “Let us sisters see the necklace.” I don’t know why she even said that in the first place, it was out in the open, hanging down from my neck and leaned against my chest.
“Not one chance, I already said that.”
She crept towards me—maybe I shouldn’t have chosen violence, but the closest thing to my right hand was a rock, and I had thrown a baseball before with surprising accuracy. A squeal came from her; I barely threw that hard. Sure, like I said, I was accurate, but I put barely any arm into it, and it only hit her in the shoulder. It was enough to send her back in the direction of the bucket-cauldron.
“You can’t be here anymore Mark, the spirits are upset with you.” Not only was she a ghost medium, but she was a tarot card reader too—Amber told me that later on. I could have never guessed.
“Did they whisper that in your ear or did they call you on your carphone?” That joke didn’t land. I should have thought it through thoroughly before I tried it.
“My what?” She could have been half deaf for all I knew. Or, more likely, confused. Utterly confused.
“Nevermind.” Now I stood up, the necklace that Stacy had desired to see even though it was very clearly on my chest now dangling, reflecting the spare light from the flashlight in its black, metallic, glossy frame. “I’ll be off now.”
“You can’t just leave after insulting my coven, assaulting a high ranking member of my coven, and then interrupting a sacred ceremony.” There was venom in the way that Veronica talked to me, it was there from the very beginning.
“‘Sacred’ is an absurd word for this kind of sacrilege. And saying that a pebble thrown at one of your ‘high ranking members’ is assault is ridiculous. Absurd, even. And I wasn’t even interrupting, I came before the ceremony even started.”
The stout one, the one that barely talked, spoke up, only to put in some of the worst two cents I have ever heard in my life. “Tu es molestus.” Definitely Latin, but I didn’t speak it. That’s why it was some of the worst two cents.
“Okay, do you guys understand what this girl is saying because I don’t and she’s freaking me out at this point.” Maybe I could distract them, turn the conversation to the fact that one of their members didn’t even speak English as far as I was aware.
“That doesn’t matter, Mark.” I failed. Stacy looked at Amber. “‘Ronica has spoken, you’re out of the coven.”
I had never seen her grovel—only three times had I seen her completely embarrass herself, two of which she did purposefully and she had complete control over. But now, now she was raking the ground and its leaves with her fingernails, she was bursting into tears at an alarming rate, she was uprooting the soil like a squirrel or a badger. “Forgive him, please, let me be a part of your group!” She wasn’t crying, crying wasn’t her thing; it wasn’t her style. Maybe her act would have been more convincing if she did cry though.
That night she wrote her own death spell. I think that she hoped she would, one day, be able to use it on me. She could try it when I was sleeping, when my guard was down. But on Maple, we split paths, me to my home and her to hers—and, thankfully, I wasn’t going to be alone a second night. I had Lucas.
She called me though, when we laid in bed, as I read to him with a flashlight in one hand and my book of Lovecraftian horrors in the other, reading out loud the Dunwich Horror. He couldn’t relate, he didn’t have an albino mother—neither did I.
“They called me.”
“Who? Where? When—.” Cut off by the voice on the other end.
“The coven, they called me and said that the forest thinks I should reconsider.”
“What’s there to reconsider, they were the ones that rejected you.”
“Sorry, I meant that the forest reconsidered me. I’m in.” It was like she was let back on the cheerleading team, it was like she made it on the football team. It was like she got the lead role in her favourite musical or play. And it was like all the things that I had done were now completely reconnected, the pages of that book were ripped out of the binding and thrown into the fire. Still, the inky stains on her hands when they were pulled out remained.
“When's the next meeting?”
“They said they would call me or tell me in person at school.”
I looked back towards Lucas—I didn’t know if he wanted me to come back, if he wanted me to keep reading the story to him. He was looking up, into the ceiling; but not where my fan was, as that dangled above the center of my room. Instead, he looked up at the white ceiling—that flat, boring, naked ceiling.
I was trying to get my amygdala burning, so that when I thought of my greatest fears I would be able to nestle myself in his still arms, and her phone call was stopping that from happening. As she continued to talk to me, as I pulled the handset away from its holder, the cord stretching almost halfway through my room, I took off my shirt. I tossed into a laundry bin that I stole from the basement—I thought that, maybe, with Lucas being around all the time I could get more organized. No longer would I have the floor of my room be a minefield of dirty clothes. Still had yet to give him a new change of clothes, he wore what he was buried in. I had him put it back on when he was done showering on the night of his awakening. None of my clothes would fit him, they were far too small. Maybe one would be fit as a belly shirt, but he wasn’t the type to wear that sort of attire—and neither was I. I’d never even entertained that idea.
She talked for half an hour. I talked for, more or less, three minutes of that entire half hour. Thirty minutes of nonsense, about how the witches were excited to have her, about how even though I had “interrupted” their escapade she was still allowed entry into their group, about how she had a specific quota for spells written that she had to meet every week, how she had to try and get others to join that had similar interests. And they, the witches (their names, come to find out, being in totality Veronica, Stacy, and Erica), actually enjoyed my company, even if they acted as though I was a nuisance. Amber was always one to give me any sort of gossip or detailed information that she learned from everyone that she talked to—she was leagues ahead of me when it came to being informed and involved in the affairs of others.
“She thought you were cute.”
“Which one?”
“Stacy.”
“Go figure.”
That could have been why she tried to be such a horrible person to me—I’d rather not call her one of the words that Amber so regularly put to use. I’ve never considered those sorts of words to be a part of my vocabulary. And Amber invited them to sit with our odd group at lunch.
“How did you get acquainted with these girls anyways?” I asked her.
“First of all, acquaintance is way too formal. These ‘girls’ are my sisters now.”
“How did you meet these women whose sisterhood you are now a part of?” I didn’t know if she recognized my attempt at poking fun. My attempt at demeaning.
“Meanwhile, old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his herd. He also cut… he cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house—a spacious, peaked-roofed affair whose rear… Whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter. For himself and his daughter.” I paused in my reading, his hand had crept—his left was still over my stomach, where I had placed it when I returned to the safety of the bed, but his right was within my hair. I hadn’t put it there. “There must have been prodigious… Prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labor…” I couldn’t continue, it was ignorant of me to even try and continue. I turned my head to the right, to look into his eyes like I had done so many times before. He didn’t smile, he didn’t need to smile; I knew that, truly, there was a sort of pleasure that was brewing in him. Even if he didn’t express it on his outside. Or maybe that pleasure was brewing in me. It was brewing in me, indeed, as well.
“We ought to go to bed.”
That didn’t stop his knotting, knitting, splitting fingers. That didn’t tell him to stop. He peered not into my eyes anymore, but instead into the nest placed above my head. And he still hadn’t yet moved his right arm, stretched about my frame. I thought that it might be better if I turned to him, if I faced him stomach to stomach, face to face, legs to legs.
“Lucas.”
The shortest, smallest grunt.
“I said that we ought to go to bed.”
I hadn’t read much of those stories, but what I had I enjoyed. And it made it all the more better that I was able to enjoy them with him.
☠ ☠ ☠
“Do you think that Satan was sad when he fell out of heaven?”
“Lucifer?”
“The devil. Who else do you think that I would be talking about?” I was sitting on a stump. The coven meeting was over, we were debating on whether or not we were going to leave. I had someone waiting on me back home, of course. Realistically he was still asleep. Realistically, I thought.
“Well I don’t know, you could be talking about anyone with the amount of things that you know. Almost every time that I talk to you you spit something new up.” In her right hand she held a stick, wacked against a tree—it was rotten, old, it exploded into spongey splinters.
“I read Paradise Lost not too long ago. Thinking about reading Regained, too.”
“Haven’t you tried to write poetry before? Isn’t that a poem?”
“You do listen when I talk to you.”
“Of course I do, your voice is shrill and grading. It’s hard not to.”
I don’t know how true that was. I’d only heard my voice once, from a tape recorder that I used a long time ago—and that was around puberty, too.
“Me miserable, which way shall I fly, infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, and in the lowest deep a lower deep, still threatening to devour me, opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” Part of me wished that she wasn’t really listening to what I was saying, that she was trying to avoid. I bet that she lost interest in my quotation halfway through.
“Did you write that?”
I wanted to lie. “No. John Milton, Paradise Lost.”
“Sounds like something that you would write.” I can’t remember the last time it was that she read something that I wrote. The majority of my manuscripts are cluttered in the drawers of my desk; I don’t even know if I want anything that I’ve written to be published.
“What was the thing about the devil?”
“‘Do you think that Satan was sad when he fell out of heaven?’”
“What does the Bible say?”
It was funny that she would ask that, that wasn’t like her; like I’ve said before I think, she doesn’t even care about the Bible anymore. If I were to throw it in front of her she would shield her face from it like she were a vampire and it was the sun, and maybe if it touched her skin she would act like it was garlic or holy water.
“It doesn’t say anything like that, I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?”
Lying, no idea.
“I would think that if he is real,” she said, picking up another stick that was also most likely rotten, “then he would miss heaven. Heaven’s supposed to be the greatest place on earth—it’s not on earth though. I think that if I was kicked out of heaven I would want to get back in and I’d miss it.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I mean, do you miss Lucy?”
I choked on air, started coughing as I tried to regain my breath. Why would she ask something like that, why would she pry me like that? That wasn’t something that she would do at all, and when I was Lucy’s boyfriend I didn’t tell Amber much about our relationship.
Probably her twentieth drag of her cigarette, I wasn’t counting—I didn’t know if I was supposed to be counting. “Tell me, how did that end?”
I’d forgotten, I’d neglected to tell her the majority of that. Thought that I had only omitted some parts, the parts that I didn’t like to talk about nor think about even, the parts that made me uncomfortable; the parts where she tried to do more than just courting.
“That’s none of your business.” She thought that it was.
“I’ve known you since third grade, Mark.” Amber had, she showed up on St. Valentine’s Day. No one knew her—Catholic school at the time, that’s where we were. In middle school we switched to public, but before that everything was private and Catholic. It was gothic, the stones for the foundation must have been set centuries beforehand. We would always hide ourselves away in one of the rooms that no one ever went into near the confession booth; if we couldn’t go there then we would hide away in a far corner-nook of the library amongst where hid the book that somehow the school had neglected to get rid of: the sex education book. There was one and only one, it shouldn’t have been in a place like that I would think. I always imagined that someone had snuck it into the building and hid it away there between a copy of Lives of the Saints and McGuffey Readers. She liked me then, and that went on for a few years. It only got stamped out in eighth grade. And they did eventually get rid of those books, all because of me—I admit it, it was my fault, I shouldn’t have gone in that corner to look at the pictures by myself. When the two of us would go one of us would stay as the watchman, making sure that we wouldn’t get caught. We didn’t care about the text, we didn’t care about what the book had to say and how it was trying to go about educating us, all we had interest in were the diagrams. She was so different, she wasn’t like how she was now—she wore skirts. She braided her hair. She smiled a lot more. She giggled too. Mother Virginia was the one who caught me; what an ironic name.
“Do you think that, if he’s real, God regrets what he did?” Amber asked.
We knew the doctrine, it was ingrained in us. Again, Catholic school.
“He has remorse, he cries.”
“He weeps.”
“Yeah. He weeps. Even Jesus did.”
“Even Jesus did.”
The air was still, the moon shone above us, I could have sworn there were fireflies that flickered about but it was October, that didn’t make sense, my mind was playing tricks on me. They were either dead or asleep—hibernating, that is. I’m not an entomologist.
A pause.
“Fuck if Jesus did.”
“What?” The only person I knew to swear that deeply was Lucy.
“What does it matter if Jesus cried?”
I’m not a priest either, not a theologian. “I’m not a theologian.”
“You’re not what?”
“I don’t study religion.”
She was now leaning against the same tree that she had smacked with the first stick.
“For so I created them free, and free they must remain,” I muttered.
“But you say shit like that.”
I didn’t quite understand her logic. “That’s still Paradise Lost. That wasn’t the Bible.”
“Sounded like it,” she said then to perform a guttural sigh.
I wanted to see him again. I didn’t understand what was wrong with that. There was nothing wrong with that, everyone else that cared about him wanted to see him again. His family did, his friends did, I did—and yeah, she did too, but I wanted to do more. And in all honesty I think that I deserved to see him again more than anyone else.
She liked him, she told me. She finally told me now that he was back in the land of the living. She finally told me, on our walk back; it was awkward, incredibly awkward, and I struggled to be able to figure out what I was supposed to say in response. I usually think that I’m good at being able to gauge how someone else feels, what they’re thinking, what they maybe want to say, and I also think that I’m skilled at being able to articulate words in a specific order to make sure that the other person knows what I mean. Now I stumbled over my words. I wasn’t flustered, I would know if I was flustered. She was smoking, almost blew it directly in my face—however, before she did, she realized that she had to give me some sort of common decency and, coughing, blew it to the left instead of the right where I stood.
I thought that I knew, I told myself that I knew the whole time. Yet I knew that I denied this, I still tried to lie to myself and say that he didn’t like her, that it wasn’t her who he wanted.
“I knew.”
“The hell you didn’t.”
I couldn’t fight back, I felt no need to. She believed what she wanted to believe and I believed what I wanted to believe; it was going to stay that way and we couldn’t really do anything about it. I almost twisted my ankle on a stick.
“Are you alright?” Amber said, halfway picking me up, doing her best to make sure that I didn’t fall flat on my face.
I scoffed at her. “What do you think? Was that a serious question?” I gripped at the sides of my puffer jacket. Maybe that wasn’t the right attire for a coven meeting. I tripped again somewhere along the walk, I don’t know what it was. It might have been a root that was hiding in the leaf litter or maybe a ball that a dog had lost somehow.