The Rules of Inheritance (22 page)

 

My body knew Henry before I did.

I LOOK FORWARD to cross-country practice every day after school, and not just because of Henry.

 

I love running. After a day folded behind desks and dry-erase boards, sack lunches and confusing friendships, running feels like screaming.

 

I can feel my whole body open up, the muscles harden and sing with meaning. I love the feeling of sweat sliding down the new curve of my breasts, the hard pavement beneath my feet. I can't even describe what it feels like to run behind, and not just follow, Henry.

 

It is his calves that captivate me first. They are muscled and covered in a coarse bristle of hair. Running behind him, I watch as the muscles tense and resolve, swell and soften. Eventually my eyes travel up to his forearms with their smooth, pale underbellies, his Adam's apple and unruly brown hair, his limpid brown eyes and wide forehead. I want to mother him. I want to smother him.

 

I want to do things to him that I won't know how to do until I am doing them.

 

But we're not quite there yet. Right now it's still the very beginning of the thing.

 

It all begins innocently enough, but it's here where Zoe and I begin to divide. Where she is content to cast secret glances at Ethan in art class, I have seen something I want and I cannot shake the idea that I can have it.

 

I devise a plan.

 

I notice that Henry is always at school by the time I get there. His father has to drop him off early on his way in to work. So I ask my mother to drop me off early as well. On these early mornings I lean my back up against my locker, pull my knees to my chest, and cast furtive glances at Henry. If I time the thing right, there is usually no one around for at least fifteen minutes.

 

When you're in tenth grade, that's a long time.

 

By the second week I've worked up the courage to ask him a homework question, and I can tell he has inched a little closer to me—not close enough so that we are sitting together, but close enough so that we can keep our voices soft.

 

By the third week we begin to talk about our lives. His parents are divorced. He lives in a two-bedroom condo with his father on the opposite side of town. His mother lives nearby. He has two older brothers, one of whom introduced him to the Velvet Underground and neither of which lives at home anymore.

 

I tell him about the quiet triangle of my family, always isosceles, never equilateral. Not that I even understand those terms yet. I won't take geometry until the next year and even then I won't begin to comprehend the knife-sharp angles that come with equidistance.

 

Before long, Henry and I have created a secret friendship—the fragile kind we pretend doesn't exist when we pass each other in the hall between classes. At some point, later that fall, close to winter, we move our friendship to the telephone. It is safer there, our whispers encased in the snakelike black cords that wind their way through Sandy Springs, across town, and into a small two-bedroom condo in Smyrna.

 

But on the nights that I fall asleep thinking about Henry, I dream about Zoe. The dreams are black and white, her amber eyes the only color.

ZOE AND I STILL spend every weekend together. We speak every night on the phone and match our footsteps on the path to English class. We hate the same people and turn our scorn, our slitted eyes, toward them at the same moment.

 

We hate everyone really. No one can do right. Why do they wear that outfit, drive that car, stop to pick up that person's book? We sneak my father's big black Lincoln Town Car out in the middle of the night and coast up and down the darkened streets of Atlanta, knowing that there is more somewhere but not knowing which direction to turn.

 

Zoe lives in a crumbling, charming kind of house. It is messy there, the floors warped in some places, both Zoe's and her mother's hair tending to frizz in the humidity that traps itself under the eaves. We don't spend a lot of time there, always preferring the anonymity of my basement, the ease of sneaking out in the middle of the night. Sometimes we walk out to the middle of the road in my quiet neighborhood and just lie down on the still-warm asphalt, the night air cool on our bare skin.

 

Sometimes I talk to her about my parents. But as resentful as I feel about the doctors and the hospitals, about my father's age and my mother's stupid shark-cartilage capsules, my venting doesn't seem justified. Is having parents with cancer really that much worse than having parents who are divorced?

 

I tell Zoe bits and pieces about my tentative relationship with Henry, but not everything. I can feel her tense when I talk about him, can see her lips begin to close if I go too far. So I keep most of my secrets secret. Although I yearn for a girlfriend with whom I can share these things, I don't tell her that Henry has admitted that he thinks about me late at night. I don't tell her that this knowledge, this confession, thrills me, that I can feel myself opening in places I didn't know were closed.

 

Instead Zoe and I talk about ourselves, about the kind of women we think we'll be, about the places we'll live and the sound our footsteps will make one day on the hardwood floors of our studio apartments in some big, nameless city.

 

We talk about this future as though it is one single existence, not hers or mine, but just this single collective vision of the grown-up us we will become.

ONE WEEKEND I sacrifice my standing Saturday date with Zoe for one with Henry.

 

He and I go to a music store together and wander up and down the aisles, our bodies gently bumping and pushing again back off each other's.

 

At this point he is still unsure of the thing. He wants to be friends, just friends. I want him so much I can't breathe.

 

Some of the most erotic moments I'll ever experience happen in those early days, in those moments after we've swung shut the car door and realized that we are alone together in the silent, heavy air.

 

The next weekend he invites me to his house, wants me to meet his father, to see his room. I am nervous as we stand in that small space, his bed the focal point. I gently touch each of his drawings hanging on the walls, take in the soft, plaid comforter pulled boy-neat at the corners, the books stacked on the nightstand, the dresser and the blinds on the window.

 

So this is where Henry is alone, I think, and I can feel myself opening.

 

We walk out into the woods behind his house. There is a train track running through the kudzu-covered oak trees. Cicadas hum in the warm spring air and we place pennies on the railroad lines and then step over them, going deeper into the woods.

 

We find a fallen tree and sit down side by side, our breath practically the only sound. At first we just put our arms around each other, but it isn't enough. When his mouth finally finds mine, I feel the ache shift for the first time in my life. It is as though there is a warm lake inside me.

 

By the time the train roars by we are on the ground, in the leaves and damp soil, Henry above me, my fingers kneading into the warm skin of his back. It will still be another month before I lose my virginity but I can feel him come against me, his face buried in my neck, the sunlight filtering through the trees above me.

 

Babes in the woods. We are lost, all right.

IT'S HERE WHERE Zoe exits stage right. She and I still spend our days together at school, and she still spends the night on the weekends, but all I can think about is Henry.

 

At school it becomes difficult, yet thrilling, to pass Henry in the halls or to sit across from him in English class and pretend not to know what the soft curve of his abdomen feels like against my palm.

 

We see each other every weekend now and our rendezvous often take place outside.

 

Georgia in the springtime is magnificent, everything lush and green, magnolia trees and daffodils, weeping willows and thickly hanging wisteria. I feel the crush of my hips against a bed of tulips one day, and the thick thrust of sharp pain, signaling the very moment of my deflowering, my legs spread, taut under the quilt in Henry's bed one warm afternoon.

 

When I am with him, I think of nothing else. Not the look on my father's face when he returns home from another dejected job interview, not the sound of my mother retching into the toilet after chemo. I don't think about Ms. Cusak's class or the shadows that fall across Zoe's face.

 

Henry and I stand in the rain after cross-country one day, water streaming, gleaming down our pressed-together bodies. Another afternoon we wait in Ethan's yard for him to return home. We sit on the grass by a honeysuckle bush, and I show Henry how to find the honey, that careful pulling out of the stamen, that golden drop heavy and translucent on the tip of your tongue. Soon the sweet taste mingles back and forth between our mouths.

 

The spring goes on like this, each week like its own year.

 

One night I come home from a date with Henry and find my mother in the living room, white wine on her breath.

 

Sit down, she says.

 

She looks at me for a long moment, and I know that she is trying to see into me.

 

Are you having sex with Henry?

 

My first impulse is to lie.

 

No, I stutter, my cheeks burning.

 

Are you lying to me?