Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,33

hands. She has touched my arm three times that I can recall. I have a secret question about whether Lindsay has actually gone all the way. There are rumors about her just like there are rumors about every pretty girl at school about their sluttiness or the opposite. With Lindsay it’s the opposite. But I don’t want to know. Or I guess I should say I don’t want to know from anyone but her. I want her to confess it to me. I have a vision of her confessing it to me as a private breakable thing. I want to be the only one who knows it. I am not jealous, never have been, but I feel a pang when I think of anyone knowing Lindsay the way I do. Which is not to say I know her well, but I do know her—differently. I know her secretly.

This past weekend, at a movie, she rested her heavy head on my shoulder. I looked at her out of the side of my eye. Her hair fell across her face. She was dreamy and tired and close to me as she could be. I could not move for I was frozen. She’s the best girl I’ve ever known.

She’s walking beside me now, past the tennis courts and the green perfect fields in front of Pells High. We are walking up the cobbled pathway to the school. It’s the first time we’ve done this together. Lindsay waves happily to Cleary O’Connor who is also wearing a field hockey skirt and green knee socks.

GO GIANTS! says Cleary, a short frightening girl with thighs like support beams. Then she looks at me curiously. Hi Cleary, I say. It’s the first time I’ve ever called her by name and she softens immediately and smiles at me.

Hi! she says, and it seems as if she wants to go on—she opens and closes her mouth twice—but she can’t think of anything to say.

Lindsay is friendlier than I am. She says hello to everyone and when she stops to talk to her friend Christy I tell her I’ll see her later and slip into school, relieved in a way to be alone again.

Trevor’s waiting for me at my locker. You and Lindsay Harper, he says.

I shrug.

You and Lindsay Harpeeeeer, he says. He punches me gently in the gut. Then walks away.

• • •

My earliest memory is of my father who is also called Kel. Our last name is Keller. He gave me his name and he gave me his baseball and then when I was four he left and moved to Arizona. And I am still Kel Keller.

In my memory he is throwing me the baseball and I am catching it cleanly in my little glove. In my memory he is huge, though in pictures I have seen of him he’s smaller, not much bigger than my mother. There is one whole photo album that exists of us as a family before he left. There are thirty or fifty pictures in it and they are all of my father and mother and me. My mother has always been a picture-taker. We have albums of just the two of us, albums with ridiculous frilly covers or the word Family going across the front of it. Pictures of my birthday parties in Yonkers when I was little. Others filled with my school photos, my baseball photos, my friends. Grandma and Grandpa and me at the beach. Of all of them my favorite is the earliest, the only one with my dad in it.

I have looked through that first photo album so many times that I can see it without seeing it. I can tell you the order of the photos and who is doing what in each. On the first page my father is mustached, skinny, wearing ripped ridiculous jeans and a Black Sabbath T-shirt. Next to him is my mother who is extremely pregnant and wearing a long dress. They are standing outside a house I don’t recognize. Now that I am older I can tell how young they were. There, in the next one, is my mother, unrecognizable, her bangs one long strand that covers an eye, lying back on a hospital bed with me in her arms. She is sweaty-headed and smiling. My own face is turned in toward her. I can see the outline of my cheek. My father is next to us: black hair to his shoulders and that faint mustache, which makes him look younger