Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn
before
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
chapter
one
matter
I don’t feel the presence of God here.
I pace along the far side of the river, my ears filled with the hum of cicadas and the roar of water flowing over the milldam. Vermont is postcard perfect. I could stand on my toes and peer over the current and the cattails and see the whole town spread before me. Green-shuttered houses. The cobblestone square. The church spire. The boarding school.
But I don’t.
I crave the illusion of solitude.
The dark-haired girl, who looks like a boy, watches me from the woods. She’s hunkered down in a birch thicket with bare legs and discerning eyes. I know what she saw and I don’t want her to talk to me, but she’ll try. I’m sure of this. She mistakes my distance for mystery, and she wants to know why I do the things I do.
My sister was the same way. She thought there was a reason for everything.
Me? I don’t think there’s a reason for anything.
Not anymore.
*
Seven years ago, I strode onto the local country club court beneath a punishing Charlottesville sun like a mini Roger Federer. I had the headband. The tennis whites. The killer instinct.
I was nine.
My opponent was Soren Nichols, a nobody compared to me, top seed in the U10 bracket. But I was off my game, got in trouble early. Soren, who had a decent serve and quick feet, easily took advantage of my unforced errors and double faults.
It didn’t take long. I didn’t know how to come from behind. I lost in straight sets in front of the home crowd. Without so much as a glance in the direction of my parents or my coach, I stalked to the net and reached across to shake Soren’s hand.
“Good game,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Thanks, Drew. You too.” He had a sheepish grin and southern drawl.
Something dark roiled in my gut. A subterranean shift.
No, that was not a good game. Not for me.
People got to their feet between matches, milling across the court, the club grounds. I trailed Soren as his mother hugged him and his father clapped his back. Then I slipped into the narrow alley that ran back toward the clubhouse and waited in the shadows beneath the grandstand.
When he passed by, I stepped onto the walkway. No one could see us.
“Hey,” I said softly.
Soren turned. I took my racket, reached behind me, and cracked it full force across the side of his face. Then I jumped back and gave a little yell of surprise. Like I didn’t know what had happened.
That’s exactly what I told everyone when I ran for help. I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know how he got hurt. I was running. Maybe I slipped. Maybe he fell. I don’t know.
I shook with shame, not regret. Soren was out cold. When he first came to, he really didn’t know. All that swelling. The blood.
An ambulance came. Then a cop car.
When pressed harder about it, I cried. A lot.
Howled, really.
*
“Why’d you let them do that?” the girl asks as she crawls from the bushes. She holds the headphones of her mp3 player carefully in one hand. Her hair’s so short, it’s practically a Caesar cut, but she still has to brush dirt and leaves out of it now that she’s standing in the open.
I edge away from her. Play dumb. Yeah, I know she’s a transfer student, and sure, we have a class together and she just joined the cross-country team, but it’s not like any of that means I want to have an actual conversation with her. Why would I? No one around here ever talks to me without reason.
None of them good.
“Do what?” I ask cautiously.
“Let them get away with pushing you while you were … you know.” She points to my leg. It’s soaked with piss—my own, courtesy of two classmates who decided to assault me on their way back to campus. And no, I didn’t fight back. I never do. That wouldn’t be fair.
Besides, there’s not a lot you can do when somebody punches you midstream.
The girl clears her throat. She’s waiting for my answer, but I step up my playing-dumb game by saying nothing.
She frowns. “So you’re just cool with being treated like that?”
Like what? I wonder, but give a careless shrug. “Kind of looks that way.”
There’s silence and squinting. Her ears aren’t even pierced and she’s wearing oversized athletic shorts that look cheap, like something you’d find in the clearance aisle at CVS. They drape past her knees and bear the silver-and-black logo of some professional sports team. Her whole look is at odds with the rest of the girls around here, who like to show off as much skin as possible, every inch of them tanned, coltish, and prep school sleek. This girl is different. This girl is forgettable.
She speaks again. “You really okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”