What I Said, and What She Said
I waited until the next Tuesday, the twenty-seventh, at the lockers, with nobody in the hall. I said, “I think I owe somebody something.”
Marvene was putting her typing book into her locker. She stopped, and I watched all the color leave her face from the forehead down, like a shade being drawn. She said, very quietly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Stan.” She looked up and down the empty hall. There was something in her eyes that I have seen once since, in the face of a lineman after a close one, the look of a person who has been caught being better than she was allowed to be. “Please don’t say anything. Please.”
That is all that was ever said. I said, “All right.” She shut the locker, and she went to Algebra, and I stood in the hall.
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I understood then, the way you understand a thing in your body before your head does. She had been forbidden the pond, and she had a reason, and she was asking a boy she barely knew for exactly one thing. So I gave it to her. I did not tell Mr. Lorentz. I did not tell my mother, who was suspicious. I did not tell the Courier. I let the town have its angel and its hunter’s boy.
And on Tuesday the tenth of February I walked up to her at that same row of lockers and asked her to the Valentine’s dance, which was that Saturday, and she looked at me for a long moment, and she said, “All right.”
We were together for a year and a half.
I want to be honest about the next part, since it is the part that does not look good on me. In all that year and a half I never thanked her.
I told myself I couldn’t, because she had asked. But I was a boy of sixteen, then seventeen, then eighteen, who had been given his life by a girl and had nowhere to put it. There is no way to say thank you for your own life that is not either too small or too large, and every time I opened my mouth I saw her face at the lockers and closed it. And all the while I was falling in love with her, as natural as the creek in March.
I knew that if I told her I knew, I would never be sure she loved me. And I knew that if I did not, I would never be sure I loved her for herself and not out of a debt.