The Snow (3 page)

Christina stalked away. How could she ever have found Jonah pleasant company? How could she ever have thought he would understand anything?

Jonah ran to catch up. “It was probably just Anya up in the kitchen, being crazy,” Jonah offered. “Giggling to herself.” Jonah was growing at such a great rate that his blue jeans, new in November, were too short for him in January. Even his hair grew more quickly, and it was bunched up in his collar. His huge feet thumped in the school hallway. He didn’t have much control over them. He was always running into something. Beside Jonah Christina always felt graceful. It was a nice feeling, and sometimes she was quite grateful to Jonah for being clunky.

But not today.

“Don’t be mad, Chrissie,” Jonah said.

She wanted to sock him.

“It was dark down there, and you were scared. You’re just being silly, is all.”

Christina socked him.

Jonah knew her pretty well. He stepped out of range. Holding up his palms like a warrior’s shields, he said, “The Shevvingtons are rotten, I agree with that much. But nobody is living in the cellar, Christina.”

She stared at those hands. A man’s hands on a boy. The feet and the hands were finished growing; the legs and arms were rushing to catch up.

Slowly, as if unsure that his arm would obey his brain’s order, Jonah extended his arm and put it around her shoulder.

What comfort! The weight and the warmth were like a signed contract:
I’m your friend.

On the island there had been few boys: Dolly’s brothers, a couple of little kids in first and second grade, one or two older boys already lobstering for a living. Here in school there were hundreds.

Christina’s mind filled and swirled with boys, like a plastic paperweight you shook in your hand to make it snow. In her paperweight were all the seventh-grade boys and of course Blake … but in her heart they vanished, as if covered by snow. There was only Jonah. Her eyes and ears filled up with him. She forgot school, its hum of talk, the beginning of classes.

“We’ll be late for English,” Jonah whispered, as if it were a secret. They took each other’s hands, and his hand was very hot in hers. It was like holding a fever.

Mrs. Shevvington stood in front of the blackboard. She held a sheaf of corrected papers in her hand. In her class the seventh-graders, even the boys, were subdued. Nobody had a set of dueling pistols that shot heavy-duty rubber bands into the girls’ rear ends. Nobody had forged love letters to pass around the room.

Yet again Mrs. Shevvington made them write an essay in class. Her voice cut like the wind at ten below zero. “A brief essay,” she said to her silent thirteen-year-olds, “on January daydreams. One or two paragraphs. Good adjectives. Nothing dull. What you daydream about on the longest, darkest days of winter.”

They wrote. The usual kids tried to get sent to the nurse, and Mrs. Shevvington as usual replied that they were welcome to throw up in the wastebasket if necessary, but she expected a finished essay first. The timer on her deck ticked mercilessly. Christina scribbled. She broke her pencil point, and Jonah silently handed her a new pencil. I love you, she thought, but he had looked back at his own paper before their eyes met.

“Time,” said Mrs. Shevvington triumphantly. As always, Gretchen and Vicki collected the essays, their mean little faces smirking down on the pages, knowing trouble was out there for somebody — but not them. Never them. Mrs. Shevvington leafed slowly through the sheaf of essays. Nobody breathed. They were all praying not to be ordered to read theirs aloud. Mrs. Shevvington tapped the papers rhythmically against her palm, as if spanking herself.

“Christina?” said Mrs. Shevvington. “Read, please. We will all be so interested in what you have to say.”

The class sagged in relief. Christina could handle anything. It was better for her to be Mrs. Shevvington’s victim than any of them.

Gretch and Vicki stroked their silken hair in identical motions and leaned back in their chairs, the better to laugh at Christina.

Christina walked to the front of the class. She knew her essay was good, even funny. So why was she picked? What torment awaited her? Mrs. Shevvington handed her the paper. For once there was an expression on the teacher’s flat face, but Christina could not fathom it. It was power, that much she knew. Whatever was going to happen, Mrs. Shevvington had planned it.

The panic from the cellar rose up in Christina. All things dark and slimy trembled in her brain. She tried to control her voice, but couldn’t. It quivered. Even her chin shook. In her hand the essay trembled.

Gretch exploded in a silvery giggle.

Christina looked at Jonah for support. His smile gave her courage. She began reading out loud. “ ‘My January Dream. By Christina Romney. I have cabin fever. The snow, the cold, the ice, and the early dark are like demons. I am going winter mad. The sweater I put on so eagerly when the first cold wind came up in September had the prettiest pattern. It was cozy on my shoulders. Now the same sweater is an instrument of torture. My January dream is of burning all my winter clothes. I have worn the same heavy sweaters and the same thick flannel shirts week after week after week. In my January dream I light a huge bonfire in the middle of a field of snow. We all throw our old boring winter clothes into the fire. Then we feel a thousand times better, and we can laugh all the way through February.’ ”

Christina finished. How clever the essay sounded. Surely the others felt the same way about their winter wardrobes. She half thought her classmates would applaud, and she got ready to smile back.

But instead, Vicki screamed with laughter. “Then you’d be naked all through February, Christina.”

Gretchen said pityingly, “The rest of us have tons of clothes. Why, I’ve hardly even started to show off my sweater collection. I have thirty-four sweaters. How many do you have, Christina?”

Vicki said to Mrs. Shevvington, “Maybe we could get up a collection for Christina. So she’d have something decent to wear.”

Mrs. Shevvington said that island girls had too much pride to accept charity, but it was very, very thoughtful of Vicki to think of such a thing. Fine people like Vicki, she told the class, were always putting others first.

Christina found her way to her seat. She could feel Jonah’s pity. She hated pity. She didn’t love him anymore, if that’s what that minute of heat and touch had been.

Vicki touched Christina’s sweater sleeve and said, “It really is ratty, Chrissie. Maybe you should just wash your wardrobe once this winter and that would make you feel better.” Vicki and Gretch laughed together, like music boxes, all tinkly. Christina yearned to throw the silver laughter against the wall and smash it.

Mrs. Shevvington delivered a strange little lecture as she walked up and down the rows of desks. “January daydreams,” she repeated. “Daydreams are dangerous things, children. You must be very sure you want what you daydream of.” She was right in front of Christina’s desk, and her heavy-lidded eyes in the oatmeal of her face stared at Christina. “Sometimes when things come true,” said Mrs. Shevvington softly, her voice crawling into Christina’s ears like mice in the night, “you are sorry.”

Class, like all tortures, ended eventually.

The rest of school was a summer breeze compared to English. At lunch Christina looked for Jonah. Ahead of her in the hall she saw Mr. Shevvington. In his hand he held a large, swollen briefcase. Christina had never seen it before. It was old but cherished. The leather was supple, kept soft and shiny with polish.

He loves that briefcase, Christina thought.

She stood quietly among the teenagers going to and from the most important thirty minutes of the day — lunch. Mr. Shevvington entered his office. A few minutes later he came out again — without the briefcase.

Christina slipped into the girls’ bathroom to avoid notice.

While she was there a thought crossed her mind.

She took a paper towel from the shiny box on the wall. She folded it several times. She waited while girls entered and left the stalls, brushed their hair, played with lip gloss. When she was alone Christina unlocked a window, opened it a quarter inch, and wedged the paper in the crack so that the window would not lock.

A
FTER SCHOOL CHRISTINA STOOD
near the playing fields waiting for Dolly.

The wintry days were so short! Class was hardly over when the sky began getting dark. January closed in like a fat dictionary on a pressed flower. Christina felt squashed between the pages of January days.

She swung her ice skates in a circle.

The village fire department had ruled that nobody could skate on the pond this year. It never froze hard enough because of the brook flowing beneath it. Instead, the parking lot behind the old hardware store was flooded. The curbs held a few inches of water, which froze smooth and black, and there the children skated safely.

Christina was just an ordinary skater, but when she laced up her skates, she felt like an Olympic star, and in her head she heard nations applauding.

Dolly came running down the street from elementary school, her book bag, skates, and scarf flying behind her like separate people.

You could never mistake Dolly for anyone else. Her thick red hair was still in two braids, because she was only in sixth grade and had not started to care yet about hair. Her skinny little legs and long thin arms flung about her as if they were barely stapled to her body and might come off if you jerked too hard. Dolly never cared if any of her clothing matched. Today she wore a neon-pink ski jacket and killer-whale-blue pants with a screaming yellow scarf.

Dolly always had so much to say; she began talking long before she was close enough to be heard, so Christina came into the middle of Dolly’s conversation. “… because of people watching. I fall down too much. I’d rather read about skating than actually skate. So we won’t go to the parking lot ice. People would laugh at me. We’ll go to the pond.” She took Christina’s hand. Dolly was a great hand-holder. She held hands with teachers and boys, crossing guards, and cafeteria aides.

“We can’t skate on the pond,” objected Christina. “There are rules now.”

“I hate rules,” Dolly said. Dolly believed the entire world should revolve around her, and it often did. Dolly had been born on Thanksgiving Day and her mother let them use Dolly for Baby Jesus in that year’s Christmas pageant. She was only four weeks old and a ten-year-old Mary had dropped Dolly headfirst into the manager. There wasn’t any brain damage, the doctor who had flown in told them. (Her older brothers always said there was plenty.) Dolly wanted to be Baby Jesus every year. She thought it was boring to have Jesus always either in diapers or dying on a cross, and they should have a nice six-year-old Jesus (Dolly) or a really decent nine-year-old Jesus (Dolly).

Nobody could pout quite as well as Dolly if things did not go her way.

But everything was going her way right now. While Christina felt farther away from Burning Fog Isle than Siberia, Dolly had not been homesick once. Christina could get so homesick she’d open a window and let the wind carry her tears back to the island, but Dolly simply adopted the Shevvingtons as parents. And no matter how many warnings Christina issued, Dolly never listened.

Dolly said, “You don’t really want to skate, do you? Let’s go home and be cozy and read.” Dolly’s life was stacked with books. Books to underline, to read under the covers, to read out loud to Christina.

Christina could not imagine wasting a daylight hour on the written word. “Please, Dolly? I love to skate.” Christina wrapped her scarf around her throat. She loved the soft woolen caress under her chin. “Look at that field. Untouched snow!” cried Christina. “Let’s make a chain of angels.”

They lay down in the snow, swinging their legs and arms outward to make robes and wings, then stepping carefully across the fresh snow to make the next angel. Christina yearned for some of the toughest seventh-grade boys, so she could have a snowball fight. Christina believed in serious fights.

“I’m too thin for this,” Dolly said. “I don’t get enough blood to my extremities. I’ll die of exposure and it’ll be your fault.”

“No,” Christina said. “Playing in the snow makes you stronger. It’s reading all those books that weakens you.”

They made an angel chain all the way to the snow fence. “Come on,” Christina said. “Let’s go to the parking lot after all. They won’t laugh at you. I’ll hold your hand. We’ll skate partners. Then you won’t fall.”

Dolly shook her head. Christina felt that Dolly was just not interested in her anymore. They were no longer friends, just two people with a history, who were now living in the same building. The Shevvingtons had eaten their way into Dolly’s heart like witches through a gingerbread house. Dolly gave them her art projects and dedicated her social studies papers to them.

If the Shevvingtons keep eating at her, Christina thought, Dolly will have no heart left. She will be empty.

The winter shadows were long and blue. The sky drowned the snow in darkness. Emptiness was everywhere: her lungs, the fields, the wide sky. Today it begins again, Christina Romney thought. I can feel it coming. The Shevvingtons are ready to attack.

“Look at the pond,” Dolly said, pointing. “It’s waist deep in snow. The fire department is just too mean and lazy to clear it.” Dolly pouted.

Christina took Dolly’s hand again, relieved. Now they’d have to skate on the parking lot. “You didn’t want to skate anyway.”

From the pond came a deep groan. Like a grizzly bear. A huge grinding roar like a chewing monster.

The girls stood still as statues in Stone Tag. Their bright jackets were targets in the white snow.

The groan came again. As deep as a cave.

Or a cellar.

“Something’s under the ice,” Dolly whispered. “It’s going to get us!”

The third groan was stronger, as if the ice were attacking.

The girls turned and ran. Across the fields, past the trees. Dolly’s braids flew in Christina’s face like soft branches. Her yellow scarf flew off, and Christina caught it like an escaped canary. Through the deep snow they staggered. Over the snow fence, up to their chain of angels.