through the water; the feeling of piercing a worm’s body with a fishhook, how it would squirm and then be still. “Was it weird to be a preacher’s kid?” It was hard to get the words out correctly. Her tongue felt as heavy and droopy as her arms had.
“It was different,” Harold said. “People look at you differently. They hold you to a higher standard, I’d say. Oh, and there’s no getting out of church. Ever.” He had his arm around her waist. Leaning against him felt like leaning against a very warm wall.
“You’re strong,” Bethie told him. Before Harold could respond to that, she asked, “What’s it like, knowing your Messiah’s shown up already?”
“What’s that, now?”
“Jesus,” Bethie explained. “Like, your Messiah’s already come, and now you’re waiting for him to come back, right? Is that weird? Does it feel like there was a great movie and you missed it?”
“Ah, not exactly,” Harold said.
Bethie said, “See, if you’re Jewish, you wait. Because the Messiah hasn’t come yet. Could be anyone.” She made a show of looking around at the kids walking around campus. “Could be . . .” She paused, then pointed at the least-likely person she saw, a shrimpy pale-faced red-haired boy with a sunken chest and a rabbitty overbite. “Him!”
Harold chuckled.
“Could be me!” Bethie said. She stopped in front of a wooden bench, climbed on top, and said, “I could be the Messiah!” A few kids clapped, a few more stared.
“Come on,” Harold said, and put his hands on her waist, lifting her down the way he had in the show. “Keep moving.”
The night air was cool, and it felt good against her flushed cheeks. Bethie wanted to ask him about being a Negro, if he felt different all the time, or if it was more like being Jewish, where you could go for long stretches mostly fitting in, feeling the same as everyone else, until something—a store clerk wishing you “Merry Christmas,” or a casual exclamation of “Jesus Christ,” or someone saying, “I jewed him down” when he’d gotten a good price on a used car—would remind you that you were different. She wanted to ask if he was the kind of Christian who thought that Jews were all going to hell, or if he believed in hell, or God at all, but before she could decide how to ask it, Harold had walked her through the door of Stockwell Hall, up the stairs, down the corridor, past a half-dozen open dorm-room doors from which a half-dozen different kinds of music could be heard, and into Jo’s cell-like chamber. Bethie lay back on Jo’s bed, feeling Harold fumble with the straps of her shoes. He spread a blanket over her and turned off the light, and Bethie shut her eyes, thinking that there was more to the world than she’d ever imagined. She pictured the dancing girl, arms spread wide, hair flaring out as she spun and spun, at ease with her own size, her own power, forcing people to make room for her, and how she still felt like she’d somehow left her body, like she was pure feeling now. I want to be brave like that, thought Bethie, as sleep washed over her and carried her away.
Jo
Even at a school as big as the University of Michigan, it was statistically probable that most students’ paths would cross at least a few times before graduation. The same face would appear in lecture halls, on the Diag, at the Student Union, or in the stadium for the football games. So it was that Jo Kaufman had seen Shelley Finkelbein three times, and knew exactly who she was, before they ever spoke.
The first time was in Introduction to Philosophy, her freshman year. Jo had taken a seat in the middle of the hall, and Professor Glass had started his lecture when the door banged open and a slender, dark-haired girl with luminously pale skin and light eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes came hurrying down the aisle, leaving the fresh scent of something floral trailing in her wake. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she murmured, taking a seat, easing an expensive-looking trench coat off her shoulders and tossing it negligently on the chair beside her. Her hair was stylishly arranged, teased up high around her head, hanging long and loose in the back. Professor Glass raised his bushy eyebrows. “And you are?” he inquired. A few kids laughed.
“Shelley Finkelbein,” said Shelley. Her voice was low, but confident, and if the