Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,104

that sort of matched. They were made from about four hundred colors of yarn and she started wearing the hat as soon as the weather got cool. That fall when we were both seventeen, I’d get on the school bus in the morning and see that hat pointing up above the green vinyl seat and I’d go over and sit next to her. We were an item then and she expected it. She was always huddled over whatever book was assigned to her for English, reading like a madwoman. Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter—she plowed through them at light speed. The catching-up was necessary because neither of us was getting a lot of homework done. Halfway between her house and mine there was this house we biked to in the afternoons. In my part of New Hampshire there are a lot of broken-down buildings—old motels, lodges, cottages too small for more than one person and a skinny cat—along the side of the road. Abandoned, and nobody comes back to pay the taxes or fix them up, and so they just rot back into the earth. This one house between ours, it was a Victorian that still had most of its shutters and the original gingerbread along the porch, but the roof had rotted out in the back and so water had gotten into what had once been the veranda. It was essentially a ruin, but it was also a shelter, and one where nobody was going to bust in to milk the cows or watch TV. That’s a priceless thing when you’re seventeen.

Most distinctly I remember the feeling of biking there—pedaling as if the cops were chasing me, tires crackling through the leaves, the trees arching overhead and throwing sunlight at me like javelins. Most of the time her bike was already there, white but hidden beside the encroaching woods. She was still afraid to go in without me—bad men always ranged near the forest, so they said. We were done exploring the house. We knew the crumbling plaster in the bedrooms upstairs, the gutted kitchen, the fireplace all walnut splendor and filthy black ash. What we weren’t done with was each other.

Before it happened there wasn’t any real anticipation. We’d brought in a couple of old quilts during the summer, but we didn’t discuss what we did on them or what we might do later. One afternoon, fooling around, we kept getting closer and closer. The intent was to ride the edge of it, to drink down how tantalizing it was to be this close, but at a certain point a million years of evolution kicks in and starts giving really loud instructions. The thing I remember best—not just in my brain, but along my nerves when I think about it—is the feeling of unbelievable pleasure when I pushed into her, at exactly the same moment her voice in my ear shivered a long, rising scream of pain.

Not long after that, the weather got too cold to use that place anymore. We switched to the shed behind my folks’ place, because from the main house it’s pretty hard to see people coming in and out of it, and I could block the door from the inside with the circular saw. There was light and even a little space heater. For about a month we met there all the time, three or four days a week probably. I spent 97 percent of my waking hours thinking about being with her. The other 3 percent, we were in the shed.

Then Dodge got wise to it. He made eye contact when we were coming out of the shed one day. I didn’t think he’d say anything, because he was a guy, even if he was also an asshole, and I figured he’d have my back. And he didn’t say a word. Instead he took up this major project building new cabinets for his kitchen all of a sudden—the kitchen in their house that they didn’t use for anything except making cereal. Every day, all afternoon, he’d be in that shed sawing and staining wood, screwing stuff together, pulling out tools that hadn’t seen the light of day since I was in elementary school. God, did it ever piss me off.

And then came that lunch hour when Piper pulled me aside and told me she thought she was pregnant. The whole weight of how careless I’d been crashed down on me all at once. Even after the whole