last resort, a lever I could pull when my back was against the wall. But now that I had pulled it, I understood its futility. It did nothing after all.
“What happened?” Tyler said again.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
I hung up and dialed Stokes. The assistant manager answered. “You done working today?” she said brightly. I told her I quit, said I was sorry, then put down the phone. I opened my closet and there they were, where I’d left them four months before: my scrapping boots. I put them on. It felt as though I’d never taken them off.
Dad was in the forklift, scooping up a stack of corrugated tin. He would need someone to place wooden blocks on the trailer so he could offload the stack. When he saw me, he lowered the tin so I could step onto it, and I rode the stack up and onto the trailer.
* * *
—
MY MEMORIES OF THE UNIVERSITY faded quickly. The scratch of pencils on paper, the clack of a projector moving to the next slide, the peal of the bells signaling the end of class—all were drowned out by the clatter of iron and the roar of diesel engines. After a month in the junkyard, BYU seemed like a dream, something I’d conjured. Now I was awake.
My daily routine was exactly what it had been: after breakfast I sorted scrap or pulled copper from radiators. If the boys were working on-site, sometimes I’d go along to drive the loader or forklift or crane. At lunch I’d help Mother cook and do the dishes, then I’d return, either to the junkyard or to the forklift.
The only difference was Shawn. He was not what I remembered. He never said a harsh word, seemed at peace with himself. He was studying for his GED, and one night when we were driving back from a job, he told me he was going to try a semester at a community college. He wanted to study law.
There was a play that summer at the Worm Creek Opera House, and Shawn and I bought tickets. Charles was also there, a few rows ahead of us, and at intermission when Shawn moved away to chat up a girl, he shuffled over. For the first time I was not utterly tongue-tied. I thought of Shannon and how she’d talked to people at church, the friendly merriment of her, the way she laughed and smiled. Just be Shannon, I thought to myself. And for five minutes, I was.
Charles was looking at me strangely, the way I’d seen men look at Shannon. He asked if I’d like to see a movie on Saturday. The movie he suggested was vulgar, worldly, one I would never want to see, but I was being Shannon, so I said I’d love to.
I tried to be Shannon on Saturday night. The movie was terrible, worse than I’d expected, the kind of movie only a gentile would see. But it was hard for me to see Charles as a gentile. He was just Charles. I thought about telling him the movie was immoral, that he shouldn’t be seeing such things, but—still being Shannon—I said nothing, just smiled when he asked if I’d like to get ice cream.
Shawn was the only one still awake when I got home. I was smiling when I came through the door. Shawn joked that I had a boyfriend, and it was a real joke—he wanted me to laugh. He said Charles had good taste, that I was the most decent person he knew, then he went to bed.
In my room, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. The first thing I noticed was my men’s jeans and how they were nothing like the jeans other girls wore. The second thing I noticed was that my shirt was too large and made me seem more square than I was.
Charles called a few days later. I was standing in my room after a day of roofing. I smelled of paint thinner and was covered in dust the color of ash, but he didn’t know that. We talked for two hours. He called the next night, and the one after. He said we should get a burger on Friday.
* * *
—
ON THURSDAY, AFTER I’D finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts, both blue. When I put them on, I barely recognized my own body, the way it narrowed and curved.