would just say that I was blessed with unusually low blood pressure, which should not be a problem “for anyone who actually eats and sleeps.”
“You okay?” Someone must have told Coach because it was her voice I heard, and when I lifted my head, it was the myriad surfaces of her body that came into complex focus through a mist of puckered stars. Her dimpled knees and distended belly were known to me and I was comforted by the sight of them. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with her; perhaps she was just straightforward about the inescapable fact of herself. “Need the nurse?” she asked.
The nurse would just give me a place to rest. But it’s impossible to rest when everything smells like the sweet of Band-Aids, and when the kidney pan she puts near your mouth is covered in those crazy black finger smudges, and there are depressing posters about alcohol abuse and car wrecks. You just sit and wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass before you can leave, hoping nobody you know comes in for some really gross and graphic problem. If they do, the nurse puts up a screen that you can totally see through. Before you leave, you have to thank her like she actually did something to heal you.
“Can I just stay with you?” I asked.
Coach gazed widely, blankly. She nodded once, and her oaky brown button eyes folded back into the confectionery flab of her face. “Let’s go out to the tennis courts.” She did not help me up, but she did get me a cup of cold water and a bag of salted cashews from her desk while I pulled on my shorts and sneakers. Together we crossed the deserted gymnasium, which was a queer sort of distinction.
The cyclone fence around the courts was cloaked in green tarps with cutout flaps—I sat and rested and waited for things to end, things such as the day and the tired way I felt. The sun beat against my lids, creating geometry underneath, wandering and upraised like swimming braille. The tennis balls smacked the rackets and hit the spongy ground to create a succession of hollow pops.
In the cavern of my room, after Rourke had left the night before, I was stricken with an incompetent longing, a clumsy physical loneliness. I was not clever with that lonely feeling, with its drift and wicked magnitude. I caressed my own body, seeking heat, seeking relief and restitution, seeking rewards withheld; and in the end I felt I had transgressed. It was not me I wanted but him, and that was a sorrowful offense, sorrowful because I was an animal and he was an animal, yet we lay separately in the gaping obscurity of one anonymous night on earth.
I did not change from my gym shorts or bother to go in to get my books. After the final bell rang, I just walked from the court, cutting through the side yard to the street. I was about to head home when I noticed the GTO parked in the front lot, and without even thinking I turned back to the building. I quickly navigated the crammed halls by minimizing myself—everyone else had grown so much bigger during the day that if you just stayed low and tight, you could cut through pretty easily.
In the crowded lobby, by the guidance office, Rourke was talking to Mr. McGintee. They shook hands amiably, saying “Good luck” and “Take care,” and when McGintee slipped into the auditorium where janitors were setting up for the spring concert, Rourke cut directly through the pack to meet me where I stood.
He said hi. I said hi. He seemed younger, or maybe just tired like me. There were lines beneath his eyes. “How are you?” he asked. I got the feeling he was referring to the previous night with Jack.
“I’m okay,” I said, and together we walked, him behind me. I was aware of my thighs in my shorts, the bareness of them, the way I knew he was looking.
“I have to pick up a check,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”
I sat on the entrance steps and watched everyone leave. The car, he’d said, not my car. As the last yellow bus took the bend going from the school lot to Long Lane, a set of shoes appeared on the sidewalk before me—caramel-colored loafers with tassels. It was Mr. Shepard, finishing bus duty.
“Miss Auerbach,” he said definitively, as though he’d come upon