Cross, Part One
Editor’s note: This following story is copied from its original draft, scribbled illegibly in a spiral notebook way back in September of 1989. Barring egregious errors in syntax, grammar, and style, it has been represented as faithful to that original, scribbled draft as possible. A kind of prosaic “time capsule” if you will….
ortune, she was born with the name, had stopped bleeding by now and had almost cried herself to sleep when she suddenly sat up, opened her eyes and squinted at me for a few seconds. It seemed she had suddenly gotten extremely curious about some coveted secret of mine that I may have vaguely mentioned in passing to her a long time ago. Her curiosity had so consumed her that it rendered her fully awake within seconds. Wide-eyed now, she glanced at my hands, firmly fisted in my jeans pockets, then looked back at my face, my mouth. She grinned, very quickly, a grin I recognized as the grin of someone who had become suddenly proud of some newly acquired courage or will. She was about to do, say, or ask something she had never dared before, and by that point in the evening, I had become very vulnerable. She knew this. She opened her mouth and I was ready to expose my whole life to her. She blinked hard and whispered, “I really really really gotta pee!”I stood up from the desk chair for no reason and stepped unnecessarily out of her way as she wandered down the short, dim hall into the bathroom and did her business with the bathroom lights off and the bathroom door open. I walked to the bedroom window and cracked it open. Bending down towards the wind, I spoiled my face to some fresh, therapeutic November Scarsdale air. I had started to feel a little faint, mentally; you see, Fortune, for the first time since I met her two years ago at a Beta House party at Columbia, Fortune had completely thrown me off, had me off guard. She wanted something from me now, which was not like her. She wanted an answer, a reaction, a feeling, a thought from my life…. Maybe at that moment she got it without me knowing. Between the two of us, she was always the one who was less stable, although she comes off as being highly stable, as intelligent as she is. I had gotten used to being the sanity and order in her life, but now she was suddenly the one with both feet on the ground and I was the one who was free-falling.
I heard her flush and hoped at that moment that Bryanna would show up. Bryanna was a good friend of hers from earlier high school days, but wasn’t anything like a best friend. Neither Fortune nor I had best friends; I couldn’t speak for Bryanna. I had called her about an hour earlier to tell her that Fortune was depressed and had cut herself with a razor. I asked her to come over to help Fortune “feel loved” and cared for; to not have her worry about herself since obviously Fortune was in no mood to take care of herself. But now I needed Bryanna. I needed her to preoccupy Fortune from having her mental way with me, and watching Fortune walk through the hall and back into the bedroom, I felt naked and defenseless, and hoped I’d have no need for defenses.
“Are you tired?”, she slowly laid back on the bed.
“No.” I looked at her feet. Perfect as usual.
“Aren’t you tired of me?” She wriggled her toes at me. Was she starting?
“If I were tired of you, would I bother at all? Wouldn’t I just sell you away or something? Trade you in for a better model?” I snickered to keep the conversation light-hearted. She reciprocated.
“And you haven’t found a better model yet?, she rubbed the gauze pad on her stomach through her sweater.
“Nope.” I watched her to see if she would show any pain while touching her wound. She didn’t; I did.
“Not even shopping,looking around, or test driving? She could have been alluding to something in particular or not. I thought maybe not. But then then I thought of Bryanna, and I started to hope it was for no reason.
“You’ve not let me down yet,” I assured her., “…Or stranded me in the middle of nowhere!” I sat down again and grabbed her cigarettes. I didn’t smoke much at all but the picture of her actually stranding me in the middle of nowhere at that moment became my biggest fear. I kept the cigarette unlit in my mouth for a few minutes.
Fortune lay on her back now, her arms folded across her stomach. We didn’t say anything to each other at all for about three minutes and we both, finally, felt completely at ease for the first time all evening. She was wide awake but kept her eyes closed. I spent this quiet time trying to figure out if I was actually in love with her, or just happy to see her so peaceful and feeling I had something to do with that. I abandoned my earlier concerns, concluding they were all for nothing.
Tags: cross, doubt, drama, love, night, suicide, Westchester, youth
