Dating fat girlsHe shot upright in his seat and froze.‘Did you hear that?’ The day came, in fact, when Madame de Ch?vign? did grow weak. Marie-Th?r?se de Croisset came to tell me: The mascot— a cartoonlike Confederate soldier known affectionately on campus as Rebby the Blue — had been defiled. Unfortunately, the African American sophomore commissioned to wear the costume at the spring pep rally didn’t notice the freshly painted Hitler mustache until it was too late. Joshua Stiltfist-pumped his way onto the gymnasium floor, where he expected to be swathed in the intoxicating energy of school spirit. Instead, he was met with a wild mixture of laughter and hissing from the overwhelmingly white audience of five hundred. Afterwards, the local news sent a camera crew and a reporter to interview Joshua Stilt and the high school’s white principal about what was already being described in the Antelope Valley as the third or fourth greatest controversy of the year. “Yes. He asked me to drop by.” These ideas settled in my bed with Lana’s breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere. I spent most of my time in the Eastfjords. My mother comes from there. It’s like a foreign country in Iceland, with different weather, different people. In fact that’s where I’m going now, with my girl. That’s the way many lives end. “Tell only the men you trust from home,” Duncan warned his friends. “Devon’s killer is still among us.” He could hear steps approaching. He straightened up. A housemaid with a dressing gown over her shoulders opened the door. It made no sense that amidst the urgent, mysterious work these men were engaged in they would take time to speak of Shakespeare, to memorize passages, first fromKing Lear and now this one, fromRichard the Second. He examined the paper more closely. On the back, dimly inscribed, was the numeral 4. He extracted the slip Red Jacob had carried and turned it over to confirm his recollection. It held the numeral5. He shook his head in bewilderment, then took all of Rohrbach’s treasures, leaving only the dog-eared Bible. Fish, said Mom, pointing at the haddock. “Oh... yes, of course.” Hickey removed his elbow from the counter and stood to attention. A grey-haired man had entered through the door behind the bar and was taking stock of the premises in a proprietorial fashion. He drew up sharply when his eyes alighted on me. I should never have come here, I realised then. I should never have darkened this door. “You’re going by yourself?” The way she spoke — accusatory and bewildered all at once — made going to the rally alone seem like the most ridiculous thing in the world. And so, for the second time in as many responses, I lied. ‘Landmark,’ I corrected him. “Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.” It was Analie who answered, in a deeply solemn voice.“One night old grandmother Adanahoe showed me such a stone, after we had seen a shower of shooting stars. She told me they are seeds left by the gods when they departed, for the new world that needs to rise when the last good men have died. They represent a trust, she said, from one world to the next.” You stuck out your tongue at Gerti. I was remembering the scent of Aldo Peel as I sat on Jolie’s last bed. Aftershave and deodorant, tobacco smoke and whiskey — the feeling of my father could still steal up on me and transform, for an instant, wherever I was into the home I abandoned. “No,” he said. He had a slight accent but I couldn’t place it. “I’m going to press my cock in through your skin and under your ribs, into your body.”. |