IF YOU LIVED IN BLACK CREEK AND YOU WERE a good girl, like me, you put on your best skirt and blouse and went to church on Sunday mornings, and sometimes on Wednesday evenings, too. Daddy didn't come, and neither did my brother-so much for Christian being a Christian-but they weren't girls, so they could get away with it.
Last Sunday, Aunt Tildy let me stay home because I was such a wreck after hearing about Patrick. But this Sunday, I rode my bike from Patrick's house to the Holiness Church of God in time for the "moment of silence," which kicked off every service. That and the singing were the parts I liked best.
I'd always liked singing, and in the days of hanging out with Patrick and Mama Sweetie, the three of us would belt out songs for no reason. Mama Sweetie said you didn't need a reason to sing. She said if everyone started off the day singing, just think how happy they'd be. We'd sing hymns from church and songs we'd learned at Vacation Bible School and silly songs Mama Sweetie knew from teaching preschoolers, including a goofy one about a wee-wee tot sitting on his wee-wee pot. Another of our favorites was "This Little Light of Mine," because of how catchy it was. Often, even after biking home from Patrick's, I'd find myself singing it under my breath, until Christian would grab my shoulders and say, "Could you please stop singing that dang song! I'm begging you!"
Now I just sang in church. After today's service, I filed into the fellowship hall with Aunt Tildy. Then we went our separate ways. She had a Bible study to attend, while I planned on doing some good old-fashioned eavesdropping.
I went to the refreshment table and got myself a doughnut. I even took a nibble or two, so that anyone looking would think, Oh, there's Cat, eating a doughnut and keeping to herself like always. Hopefully, no one would try to talk to me, as I had nothing to say. I just hovered on the fringes and listened. In Black Creek, church was as much about gossip as worship, and Patrick's attack was the juiciest thing going.
"I heard from Eunice that he's bound to have brain damage, bless his heart," a church lady named Tammy said to her friend. "Eunice's cousin's a nurse in the pediatric wing, you know."
"They put him in the pediatric unit?" the friend said. "Ain't he too old to be with those kids?" She lowered her voice. "What if he… you know?"
The flame inside me wanted to burn her up. What if he turned those kids into faggots? That was what she meant. Forget that he was in a coma. Forget that his body was beaten to a pulp. Forget that he might have brain damage, if Eunice's nurse cousin had access to the truth.
"Naw, they didn't stick him with them sick kids," Tammy said. "He's got a room all to hisself. Got all kinds of tubes and wires and machines sticking out of him."
Machines sticking out of him? I thought. Really, Tammy? Tammy worked at the paper mill until it was bought by some Japanese crook who shut it down and sold it for parts. But before that happened, Tammy got full-out scalped when she leaned over too close to the paper rollers. She didn't have her hair pinned up like she was supposed to. To everyone's surprise, her hair had grown back, and now it was just as sparse and stringy as ever, not that she let that stop her from teasing it high and shellacking it till it was as hard as a beetle's shell. I reckoned she was the one with brain damage, bless her heart.
I moved on from Tammy and her friend. By the choir room, the choir members were taking off their white robes and hanging them up. I caught the words wickedness and ungodly, and I turned right around, already knowing where that conversation was going.
I paused in the hallway, my interest piqued by the sight of a timid young woman named Hannah speaking with a plump woman everyone called Zippy. Hannah was new to the church, having lived most of her life in a high-up mountain town called Coonesville. That was where she met her husband, who moved there for a job. But her husband's mama lived in Black Creek, and now she was ailing, so they'd come to be with her.
Hannah had a cute baby I'd taken care of in the church nursery a couple of times. Hannah herself seemed nice enough, and-a big point in her favor-she wasn't from these parts.
I edged closer and fiddled with my shoe, which was, in truth, giving me grief. Dress shoes were expensive, and I'd had these for over a year. They were black with tiny heels, and my toes were wedged in like Vienna sausages.
"… was a nice boy," Hannah was saying. Her tone was troubled, as if she was looking for reassurance.
"He was," Zippy said. "Is, I should say. Ain't dead yet, after all." She barked out an uncomfortable laugh.
"But if he's nice and all, why are folks talking the way they are?" Hannah asked. "It's as if they think he asked for what happened to him. I just don't understand it, not one bit."
Zippy eyed her. "Oh, I think you do. I ain't sayin' it's right, mind you. But I've been to Coonesville. I reckon it's not that different from Black Creek now, is it?"
"I couldn't say," Hannah murmured. I snuck a sideways glance at her and saw that she was frowning. "There was one gal I knew-a single gal-and I can't stop thinking about her. Can't stop wondering what she would say about this mess."
"She go to your church?"
"No. She didn't go to church."
Zippy tugged at her skirt to adjust it within her rolls of fat. Her expression was disapproving as she waited for Hannah to continue.
"She had herself a lady revolver, and she made sure everyone knew it," Hannah said.
"That so," Zippy said, less a question than a bland acknowledgment.
"I asked her once-her name's Julia, and she's real pretty, not at all what you'd expect-and one day I asked if she was scared of panthers or bears, if that's why she kept a gun. She told me she could handle a panther just fine. What scared her was the thought of a truckful of rednecks paying her a visit."
Hannah kept her wide, anxious eyes on Zippy, which was lucky for me, as a girl could fool with her shoes for only so long. I straightened up and pretended to admire a quilt hanging on the wall.
"She have a man in her life?" Zippy asked, meaning Julia-who-had-a-lady-revolver.
A flush worked its way up Hannah's face. "She was a single gal, like I said. Only… not exactly."
"Not exactly a gal?" Zippy said. "Or not exactly single?"
"She was real nice," Hannah said helplessly. "She was a good friend to me."
Zippy snorted. "Oh, I'm sure she was."
I didn't stick around for more. I'd been a fool to think I'd gain anything from church gossip, and I was ready to head home. Unfortunately, I was waylaid by Verleen Cox, who played the church organ and was the worst gossip of all.
"Oh, Cat," she said, ambushing me with a hug. She pulled back and regarded me sorrowfully. Her makeup was caked in her many wrinkles, and her wiry gray hair was held back in a ponytail. "I am torn to bits about Patrick. Just torn to bits, and I know you must be, too."
"Yes, ma'am," I said uncomfortably. Verleen had talked to The Pulse. She said that Patrick was sexually broken.
"I know how close you two are," she continued. "I always did hope he'd take a shine to you, if you know what I mean. Pretty girl like you could turn any boy's head."
I said nothing.
Verleen clutched my arm. "The gas fumes should have killed him, that's what they're saying." Her color was high with the thrill of talking about it. "They're saying he may never wake up."
"He will," I said. I listened to her yap some more about how upset she was. She just liked tragedy, that's what I thought.
When she swooshed off to find another ear to bend, I went and sat at a tucked-away window nook overlooking the parking lot.
I didn't want to run into another soul on the way to my bicycle, not before I'd had time to collect myself.
When Patrick and I were kids, we didn't have sexuality, not that we knew of. We were just kids, running around and catching crawdads and breaking ivy for Aunt Tildy and Mama Sweetie. They used the ivy to make wreaths, which they sold to fancy ladies in Toomsboro. In the winter, Mama Sweetie added holly berries to hers, as well as those pointy holly leaves. Then they were Christmas wreaths.
Patrick and me preferred to use the holly leaves as pretend needles. We'd play doctor, but not like you think. We didn't take our clothes off. We said, "Time for your shot. Be brave so you can get your lollipop." Our lollipops were pretend, too.
Once, in early April, we were out collecting ivy and we got lost in a laurel thicket. Laurel branches grew twisty and gnarled, and if you got stuck in a patch, the overgrowth was so thick you couldn't see the sky. We knew we'd blunder out eventually, but for then, all we could see were laurel branches behind us and in front of us and above us. It was like we'd been spirited into a fairyland-the elf kind of fairies, not the other.
We sat for a bit. There were so many shades of green, it made my head spin. Even without direct sunlight, the green shone down on us and filled us with the promise of spring. I felt as if we were part of the forest, as if the real world no longer existed. Or, if it did still exist, that it no longer mattered.
Maybe Patrick felt the same way. Maybe that's what gave him the courage to open up to me.
We were in the seventh grade. I had a chigger bite on my ankle, and while Patrick talked, I dug at my flesh with dirty fingernails.
He told me he'd been at Tommy Lawson's house the other weekend with some other guys. No girls, just guys. Tommy's daddy was at work, and they'd snuck into his home office, where the computer was.
"Check this out," Tommy said, smirking. Patrick didn't say Tommy had smirked, but I was sure he did.
Tommy sat at his dad's desk, tapped at the keyboard, and pulled up a porn site that showed people doing nasty things without their clothes on.
When Patrick got to that part, my jaw dropped open, and I probably laid off my obsessive scratching. Nudie pictures? Tommy? Tommy was a ninth grader like my brother, and he was the handsomest boy I'd ever seen. He had blue eyes and sun-streaked blond hair, a shade my aunt called towheaded. He wore nice clothes. He smelled good, a novelty among the boys I knew. He smiled easily and with confidence, and though he made mean jokes sometimes, I didn't realize they were mean. Like, he'd say I was fat and pinch the spot above my hip that on all girls is pinchable, unless they're anorexic.
"Shut up, I'm not fat," I'd say, flustered by his touch.
"I'm just messing with you," he'd say. He'd tickle me again to make me squirm. "Just means there's more of you to love, that's all."
In the laurel thicket, where no one could see or hear us, I widened my eyes and whispered, "Omigosh, Patrick. Did you look? Were the girls pretty? Did they have big-you knows?"
Aunt Tildy called them bubbies. My brother, Christian, called them a word that rhymed with "bits." I didn't call them anything, not boobs or breasts or bosoms or hooters. Patrick didn't call them anything, either.
"There were guys, too," he said. "In the pictures."
"Gross," I said, delighted. "Could you see their… ?" This time I didn't say "you knows." I just lifted my eyebrows.
The skin of Patrick's neck grew red, and then all the way up his face and out to the tips of his ears. I assumed he didn't like talking about boy parts any more than I liked talking about girl parts. Although actually, I did like talking about them, just not labeling them. And actually, Patrick did, too.
I didn't yet realize that Patrick was as handsome as Tommy, just in a different way. I didn't see it because Patrick wasn't a boy. He was my best friend.
Plus, Tommy and Patrick were totally different. Tommy was cocksure of himself, while Patrick was shy, with a habit of ducking his head and looking up slantwise as if he wasn't sure he was supposed to be there. Where Tommy's eyes were blue, Patrick's were green. Not the swampy green of the swimming hole, but a startling bottle-glass green, like a 7UP bottle shot through with light.
"If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?" he asked me in the laurel thicket.
"Sure," I said. It was delicious telling secrets in the hushed privacy of the forest, where not even the sunlight could cut a path to the leaf-covered ground.
"Really promise," he pressed. "You can't tell Gwennie or Bailee-Ann or anyone."
I nodded. Did seeing all those pretty girls do something to Patrick? Was he going to confess a secret crush? Or maybe one of the other guys had confessed which girl he had a crush on. What if Patrick was going to tell me something about Tommy?
Patrick swallowed. "Seeing those naked pictures…"
I waited. Above us a bluebird whistled tur-a-lee, tur-a-lee.
"I didn't like looking at the girls," he said in a rush.
"Oh," I said. That wasn't what I had expected, but… oh. "Well, that's fine. In fact that's nice of you, Patrick. That means you weren't being sinful."
"No, I was."
"Nuh-uh, 'cause you didn't pull up the dirty pictures," I argued. Patrick was always hard on himself. He cared about God, and he cared about Mama Sweetie, and he worried about disappointing them. It was my job to assure him he didn't.
"Tommy brought y'all in and showed you, so if anyone was sinful, it's him," I said. "And like you said, you didn't even like looking."
"Except I did," Patrick mumbled.
"What's that?"
He tucked his chin to his chest. "I did like looking. Just… not at the girls."
"Oh." This time the processing took longer, but not by much.
Later, when I mulled it over, I realized I'd already known. I just hadn't known I'd known.
I told myself it wasn't a big deal. Patrick liking boys was part of who he was, but it was hardly the whole picture.
