“Well, I know I am totally psyched!” This was Matthew. Predictably, the boys in the youth group were considerably more enthusiastic about the paintball outing than the girls. Lightly, but certainly not gently, he thumped Schuyler, the other boy on the committee, on the shoulder and added, “Wear a ton of sweatshirts, bro. Those paintballs hurt!”
Schuyler took a massive slurp of his hot chocolate and nodded, expelling an immense sigh that suggested orgasmic satisfaction. He had already finished a chocolate chip muffin the size of a grapefruit.
“Where have you heard that?” Talia asked Matthew. No one had told her that paintballs might hurt. She thought they were little marbles about the consistency of a gelatinous bath bead-the sort of thing that would more or less melt in your fingers if you held it too long.
“Heard that? I’ve felt ’em!” said Matthew. “I played once, last year, and I was, like, completely humbled. I walked like an old dude for days.”
This was news to Talia-and, clearly, to the two girls at the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see they both looked a little sheepish.
“Oh, come on, how painful could it really be?” she said. “Middle-aged executives play it all the time as a team-building exercise. They get a dozen employees-all white-collar geeks, most of whom are in serious need of defibrillation when they’re done-”
“Defibri-what?” asked Randy.
“Electric shock. It gets the heart beating…after it stops.”
“Is it that hard?”
“Paintball? No! All I meant is that it can’t be all that difficult or all that painful if a lot of out-of-shape, middle-aged-”
She stopped when she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around instantly. It was David. Laurel ’s boyfriend. Laurel ’s middle-aged boyfriend. The latest in her roommate’s string of middle-aged boyfriends. The three of them had had dinner together a couple of times, but he had never spent the night at Laurel ’s and her apartment. Why would he when he had a place of his own that looked out on the lake, and he and Laurel could make all the noise they wanted when they were there? Consequently, she didn’t know him especially well. She certainly didn’t know him well enough that she thought he might see the humor in her dissing out-of-shape, hypochondriac, middle-aged, white-collar…geeks.
And, she realized with embarrassment, she had used that very word.
“Do I really seem that old and infirm, Talia?” he asked, his voice playful and bemused. He had at least a decade on everyone else in the café. He was wearing a gray tweed blazer and his eyeglasses had retro tortoiseshell frames. At least Talia hoped they were meant to be retro. It was possible he really had owned them for decades. Middle-aged people weren’t nearly as bad as senior citizens when it came to wearing dowdy old frames, but they sure as hell didn’t update them often enough.
“I was generalizing,” she said and started to rise, but with a gentle downward pressure of his fingers he suggested she needn’t stand on his account. Then he pulled back his hand and waved-more of a salute, really-at the students crowded around the table beside her.
“How are you?” Talia asked him, surprised at how small her voice sounded. Was she really that mortified by what she had said?
“Still a few years shy of a respirator, I hope.”
“I was just kidding. I-”
“And I’m just kidding, too. I wasn’t offended, honest.”
“So, what are you doing here?”
He rolled his eyes from side to side conspiratorially, as if he wanted to make sure no one was listening. Then in a stage whisper he said, “They sell coffee here. You can buy it and”-again the eyes darting from one wall to the other-“bring it back to your office.”
She nodded. The newspaper building was right around the corner.
“Yo, you ever play paintball-like as a team-building exercise or something?” asked Matthew. Everyone at the table, even the girls, started to laugh.
“Can’t say that I have. Are you all about to?”
“Saturday, man!” the burly teen announced. “And I am pumped!”
“Well, then, I am pumped for you,” he said patiently to the boy before turning back to Talia. “Have you heard from Laurel since she went to Long Island?”
“An e-mail or two. Nothing major.”
“She back yet? I know she was planning to drive home today.”
“She might be. I haven’t been home since breakfast.”
“Well, I’m seeing her tomorrow night. Say hi to her for me,” he said, and then he retreated to the rear of the café where three young adults with significant parts of their faces pierced danced like dervishes behind a counter to grind and brew and steam a lengthy menu of coffee and espresso drinks.
“That dude”-the word stretched out into two lengthy syllables-“is dating Laurel?” Vanessa asked, unable to hide the incredulity in her voice. Vanessa was Talia’s young biblical scholar, and she looked up at the youth pastor now with wise eyes and straight hennaed hair-hair so straight that it fell like curtains down the sides of her face.
“Indeed he is.”
“Isn’t he, like, old enough to be her dad?”
“It’s close. But I think he may only be old enough to be her uncle.”
She made a mental note that when she saw Laurel next she should tell her that she might get some grief from the youth group about the age of her boyfriend. And, she realized, she had better warn her that paintball might be more painful than she had let on-than, in all fairness, she had known. Well, maybe not warn her-at least not use that particular word. She knew that occasionally she treated Laurel with more delicacy than was really necessary, but something about the violence of the game had her questioning now whether it might have been her very best idea to insist that Laurel join them in the woods that coming Saturday: Yes, it had been years since her roommate had been attacked, and they hardly ever discussed it. But her friend was far more damaged than she ever let on. The girl still made a point of being out of state on the mere anniversary of the attack.
Sometimes Talia wondered if she really knew all that had occurred that Sunday night up in Underhill. Sometimes she wondered if anyone did.
Quickly, she caught herself. This was paintball. A game. And, the truth was, Laurel didn’t get out a whole lot. She saw David a couple of nights a week, swam with her boss, but otherwise spent most of her time with the homeless who just wanted in from the cold. Talia was practically her only serious friend. Which, of course, led to another inscrutable element in Laurel ’s personal history: Why had her roommate allowed her to remain a part of her life when she had consciously exiled herself from the rest of the herd? Laurel had been a part of one once. They both had been in one, traveling through school in a pack: a group of young women who dressed alike and talked alike and through sheer force of numbers could help each other endure even the most awkward or intimidating social situations. But Laurel had banished herself from the rest of her coterie ever since that nightmare at the start of her sophomore year of college.
“Remind me,” Vanessa was asking Talia now, her voice an up-and-down wave of adolescent uninterest and boredom that brought the youth minister back into the conversation. “Just why are we doing this paintball thing?”
She leaned in toward the younger girl, her elbows on the knees of her second-skin jeans, and smiled as broadly as she could. “Because-and you will have to trust me on this one,” she answered, “it will be absolutely, positively massive amounts of fun. Okay?”
She thought to herself that she would have to tell Laurel this, too-and to say it in precisely this fashion-when she saw her next.
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