Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,20

in one hand, and in the other hand I had the card.”

He left for boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, later that day without a fight. He took the card with him, and in the Flemings’ driveway, where we said goodbye, he vowed to me privately, but before God and whomever the fuck else, to take it with him everywhere he went for the rest of his sorry fucking life, as a mystic but tangible reminder that no matter how far apart he and I might grow, at the core we were one, that we were meant to be one, that things would work out as nature intended, and that no one could prevent destiny’s unfolding, not even us, because we were connected—spiritually. “Understand?” he said, as his sister, Elizabeth, leaned on the horn of the family’s New Yorker.

“I understand,” I said, because truly I did, and to seal the vow we kissed. He popped the passenger door. Before getting in, he gave a final wave of the middle finger to his parents, who were largely concealed behind the living room drapes. Then he left, and he stayed away at Kent until he dropped out at Thanksgiving. He was gone just three months, though it had felt more like a thousand years.

Jack was emptying his knapsack from summer. It smelled like heath and wax and mold, and it was covered in President Carter campaign buttons from 1976: JERSEY LOVES CARTER-MONDALE, UAW FOR CARTER-MONDALE, END THE NIXON LEGACY—VOTE JIMMY CARTER, and Jack’s particular favorite, CARTER É BRAVISSIMO. The smell was probably from camping in the mountains, but with Jack you never knew. He pulled the card from deep inside his bag and laid it on the desktop. I touched it, the inside part with my name, for luck, then I sat on the bed. Jack’s bed was built into the room, wedged square and high into the corner. When you sat, your feet did not touch ground. Attached to the long wall above it was a shelf for shells, fossils, field guides, and bottled things such as butterflies, and also bones and books. A World of Fungi, The Stranger, Demian. In Demian, Jack had found Abraxas.

“Like on the Santana album—Abraxas. There’s a quote from Hermann Hesse on the cover,” he’d said. “How cool is it that Santana reads Hesse?”

Across from the bed, his Technics stereo system was set carefully on milk crates from Schwenk’s, the local dairy farm, twelve of them stacked four wide, three tall, and all filled with albums—some rock, some punk, but mostly jazz and blues. Above that were five guitars, including a 1968 Martin D-28 with a Brazilian rosewood bridge, and a Gibson Les Paul Standard with sunburst finish and humbucking pickups. Near his pillow was a stuffed mouse I’d made in seventh-grade home economics, the only thing I’d ever sewn.

“I can’t believe you still have this mouse,” I said. I was terrible at sewing. “Do you really like it, or do you just feel sorry for me?”

“I really like it. Though I also happen to feel sorry for you.” He kissed my eyelids and lowered himself on top of me.

“Jack,” I whispered uncomfortably, pushing him. “Let’s get out of here.”

We stopped to see the trees on Main Street. The giant elms in East Hampton were dying from Dutch elm disease and many had been marked for removal.

“I went straight to your house,” Jack explained. “I didn’t get a chance to check the trees.”

Jack lay in the grass across from the Hunnting Inn, his head hanging off the curb into the gutter. I watched the car tires whizzing past his extended neck, wondering if he would be decapitated. His untucked Jethro Tull T-shirt crept up his chest, and his jeans slid to reveal the waistband of a pair of boxer shorts. The design on them was of red go-go dancers. The shorts were mine, anyway my father’s, from the fifties. Jack’s apricot belly was marked by a V of muscle low in the center and a narrow ladder of hair that mounted the middle. I crawled through the grass and got next to him, facing up also. “This one’s awesome,” he said. “The branch over Main Street is like an arm bent at the elbow. Pretty soon it will be gone.”

The streets of the village were full of fog. Along the way to the pizza place, I kept putting up my hands as if to part curtains. Jack was saying how in Wyoming juniper trees have round blue