We ran a lot in that time to the cemetery, up, and in, at winter.
The mornings were getting much darker.
The sun climbed onto our backs.
Once, we ran to Epsom, and Sweeney was a man of his word:
The caravan was gone, but the shack went dying on.
We smiled and Clay said, “Enyone.”
* * *
—
Then June, and seriously, I think Achilles was more intelligent than Rory, because Rory was again suspended. He edged his way closer to expulsion; his ambitions were being rewarded.
I met again with Claudia Kirkby.
This time her hair was shorter, just noticeably, and she wore a beautiful pair of earrings, formed into lightweight arrows. They were silver, slightly hanging. There were papers all strewn on her desk, and the posters remained intact.
The trouble, this time, was that a new teacher had arrived—another young woman—and Rory had made an example of her.
“Well, apparently,” explained Ms. Kirkby, “he was swiping grapes from Joe Leonello’s lunch, and lobbing them at the whiteboard. She was hit when she stopped and turned. It went down the front of her shirt.”
Already, her grasp of poetry.
I stood, I closed my eyes.
“Look, honestly,” she went on, “I think the teacher may have overreacted a little, but we just can’t keep putting up with it.”
“She had a right to be upset,” I said, but soon I started to flounder. I was lost in the cream of her shirt, and the way it had waves and ripples. “I mean, what are the odds?” Could a shirt be somehow tidal? “Turning around at that exact moment—” It jumped from my mouth and I knew it. What a mistake!
“Are you saying it was her fault?”
“No! I—”
She was giving me a hiding!
She was holding those papers now. She smiled gently, reassuringly. “Matthew, it’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it that way—”
I sat on a graffitied desk.
The usual teenage subtlety:
A deskful of Goddamn penises.
How could I possibly resist?
It was then she stopped talking and took a silent, brazen risk—and it was that that I first fell in love with.
She laid her palm down on my arm.
Her hand was warm and slim.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “so much worse happens here every day, but with Rory, it’s one more thing.” She was on our side, she was showing me. “It’s not an excuse, but he’s hurting—and he’s a boy,” and she killed me, like this, in an instant. “Am I right, or am I right?”
All she’d had to do was wink at me then, but she didn’t, for which I was grateful—for she’d quoted something word for word, and soon she’d stepped away. She sat now herself, on a desk.