Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Sorry,” Molly said. Her mother handed her the seam ripper, and Molly began to undo the stitches, but she was imagining Peabo dancing in a suit of haphazardly swimming fish. Her mother was still staring at her when she handed back the seam ripper.

“Well?” her mother said.

“What?”

“You’re the only one who hasn’t shared yet,” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Huh?”

“What do you think about the latest addition to our family?”

Molly shrugged. “He seems nice,” she said.

“And?”

Molly shrugged again.

“And she’s too fancy to share her opinions,” said Malinda. Their mother shushed her with a wave of her hand. “Mary,” she said. “Tell your sister what sort of family she’s living in.”

“A Christian Democratic Union,” Mary said, not looking up from her work.

“And what does a Christian Democratic Union rely upon?” She looked at Malinda now, but it was the voice that Molly heard answering first: Every citizen being perfectly ugly and perfectly boring .

“The open and honest loving communication of information equally shared among all participants,” Malinda said. Molly sighed, and Malinda glared at her, but she was sighing at the voice, not at her sister.

“So,” their mother said to Molly. “Once more, with feelings!”

“Did something bad happen to him?” Molly asked.

“Bad things happen to all of us,” her mother said.

“Something especially bad,” Molly said. “Something tragic?” She hadn’t read any farther than the first page of the file on her father’s desk, and didn’t know anyway if they put that sort of thing in it, the list of his lifetime of problems: dead mother, dead father, beaten by auntie, contracted out to a sweatshop, punished with burns …

“Not everybody can be lucky like you,” said Malinda.

“Or like you ,” said their mother. “Or you or you or you or you .” She pointed to all of them, then to Malinda one more time, and then she suggested that they take this as an opportunity to express their love for each other, so Molly turned to Mary and Melissa and said it, and finally suffered Malinda’s stiff hug.

“I love you,” Malinda said, and leaned close to whisper, “Even though you totally suck.”

“I love you, too,” said Molly, and she tried hard to mean it.

Later, during the afternoon rehearsal, she kept expecting Peabo to do the dance again. But today he was copying her exactly, doing the one-two, one-two shuffle in perfect time with her, and singing in tune on the signature piece of the new album, which was the reason they were rehearsing every day, and sewing costumes, and blocking out a video. They would start a tour in two weeks.

“The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies” was the most complicated song her father had ever written. It didn’t involve any more than the usual four chords, but it was seven minutes long, and the lyrics told an actual story, which her father had borrowed from a children’s book of hippie ethics. Her father didn’t like hippies, but had sent a note to California to the author of the children’ book, thanking him for the inspiration and encouraging him to put Jesus in his heart instead of Charles Manson. The tale of the Warm Fuzzies and their battle with the Cold Pricklies unfolded in twelve verses, with half the family squaring off against the other in song. Peabo, along with Molly, was among the Pricklies.

All day, Molly had watched him as closely as she dared, given how closely she was being watched by Malinda for evidence of snootiness or lack of charity toward the boy. Her mother had told them that Jesus would help them along to a place where they couldn’t even see that he was black, that with perfect love would come perfect color blindness, but every time Molly saw him standing next to one of her brothers or sisters it was all she noticed about him, how different he looked. Black is beautiful , the voice kept saying, which made her shake her head.

He talked to her in the same way that he talked to all the girls, politely and never for very long. He joshed and roughhoused with the boys and seemed to settle immediately into companionship with them in a way that belied the remote gaze he had trained on everyone during the first rehearsal and dinner. She watched him at play with her brothers. It was as if there were two boys, who didn’t jibe with each other. There was the boy who had sneaked into her room to offer up the little dance for her interpretation, and then there was the boy who arm-wrestled with Craig and did algebra equations for fun with Colin. She could understand if there were two boys in him, since she had felt like there were two girls in her, one for the regular voice that said regular things about people and one for the other voice that spoke a language made up only of cruel insults. If she stared in the bathroom mirror long enough, she thought she could catch that other girl’s features superimposed in brief flashes upon hers: her eyes were small, and her nose turned up like a pig’s, and her mouth was a colorless gash in her face. Malinda caught her staring at herself like that once and said, “You think you’re so pretty, don’t you?”

Molly tripped up on the beat and came late to the chorus. At first, it seemed that no one had noticed that she’d messed up the rhythm — Chris was the only one who usually cared, anyway — until Peabo did the same thing, just one beat off, but didn’t look at her. He did it again: another missed beat.

She missed one back, and then threw in an extra one at the end of the next verse, and then for the rest of the song they were trading omissions and additions, having a conversation above and below and around the song that no one else, not even the snarky voice in her, could understand, and it occurred to her, just before the song ended, that they were speaking tambourine.

“Off the charts!” their father said, because they all stopped playing at exactly the same time for once, and everyone had been on key and no one had forgotten any verses; even Melissa’s flailing dance had been more graceful than usual. “He is risen! He is risen! Off the charts! ” he shouted. Peabo was nodding soberly as they all put down their instruments and began to exchange hugs, something they usually did at the end of the rehearsal, though they were only half done now. It was one of those moments that Molly would really have appreciated a couple of months before. Everyone was hugging with breathless abandon, entirely caught up in how much they loved the music, one another, this day, and Jesus, of course. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus , Molly said to herself, but the voice said Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey , which lent a new emergent sense of alarm to her effort really to feel what they were feeling, and with her eyes shut tight she tried to feel it by sheer force of will. She strained, and there was a sensation in her like a bubble popping, and clear as day she had a picture in her head all of a sudden: a lizard sunning itself on a rock, staring rapt and remote into the distance.

They went to church that evening. Molly sat there, looking around without moving her head. It was worse here, surrounded not just by her family but by the whole congregation, hairy Mrs. Louque in the row in front of her and ancient Mr. Landry behind her. The church, which was as big as a warehouse because it had once been a warehouse, was full of good, normal people who put her to shame by their example. Up on the stage, Reverend Duff was a lightning rod for the voice. There once was a reverend named Fudd , it sang, and she tried to do the mental equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing la la la .