Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“Monday night?” I said, incredulous. “Monday night’s the-” Priscilla kicked my shin before I said anything about the May parade.

“Paige is busy until about eight,” she said. “But then we can get away.” She kissed Calvin again, hard, through the fence, so that when she pulled away she had crosses pressed into her cheeks, red as scars.

On Monday night, with my father and the neighbors watching, I was the May Queen. I wore a bride’s outfit of white lace and a white veil, and I carried white silk flowers. Before me went a stream of Catholic children, and then my attendants in their best dresses. I was last, their icon, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mother.

My father was so proud of me that he’d taken two entire thirty-six-picture rolls of film. He did not question me when I said I’d be celebrating with Priscilla’s family after the service and that I’d stay over at her house. Priscilla had told her mother she’d be with me. I moved across the cooling pavement like an angel. I thought, Hail Mary full of grace, and I repeated this to myself over and over as if that might knock sense into me.

When we got to the church, Father Draher was standing by the tall marble statue of the Blessed Mother, waiting. I took the wreath of flowers that Priscilla had been carrying, and I stepped forward to crown Mary. I expected a

Priscilla and I were picked up by Calvin in a red Chevy convertible on the corner of Clinton and Madison. In the front seat with him was another person, a boy with thick straight hair the color of chestnuts and smiling island-green eyes. He jumped out of the car and held the door open, bowing to Priscilla and to me. “Your chariot,” he said, and that might have been when I fell in love.

Dinner turned out to be Burger King, and what amazed me most was not that the guys offered to pay but that they ordered an enormous amount of food, much more than I could even think of consuming. Jake-that was the name of my date-had two chocolate shakes, three Whoppers, a chicken sandwich, large fries. Calvin had even more. We ate in the car at a drive-in theater, under a moon that seemed to rest on the top of the screen.

Priscilla and I went to the bathroom together. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her, which was the truth. Jake seemed all right, but we’d barely said more than hello.

“Just goes to show you,” Priscilla said. “That Ouija board knew a thing or two.”

“It said I’d go out with a Seth,” I pointed out.

“Jake, Seth,” Priscilla said. “They’re both four letters.”

By the time we returned to the car it had become dark. Calvin waited until Priscilla and I sat down, and then he hit the button that raised the roof of the convertible. It sealed itself with a faint sucking sound, covering us like a mouth. Calvin turned around to Jake and me in the back seat, and all I could see was the white gleam of his teeth. “Don’t you all do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said, and he settled his arm around Priscilla like a vise.

I could not tell you what the movie was that night. I clasped my hands between my knees and watched my legs tremble. I listened to the sounds of Calvin and Priscilla, skin slipping against skin in the front seat. Once I peeked and there she was, swooning and batting her lashes and whispering breathlessly just as we had practiced.

Jake kept three inches between us. “So, Paige,” he said quietly, “what do you usually do?”

“Not that,” I blurted out, which made him laugh. I pulled myself farther away, laying my cheek against the steamed glass of the window. “I shouldn’t be here,” I whispered.

Jake’s hand moved across the seat, slowly, so I could watch it. I grasped it, and that was when I realized how much I had needed the support.

We began to talk then, our voices blocking out the moans and echoes coming from the front seat. I told him I was only fourteen. That we went to parochial school and that I had been the May Queen just hours before. "›‹±urs befor“Come on, baby,” Calvin said, and I heard the tug of a zipper.

“How did you ever get together with someone like Priscilla?” Jake asked, and I told him I didn’t know. Calvin and Priscilla shifted, blocking my view of the screen. Jake inched closer to the window. “Move over here,” he said, and he offered the shelter of his arm. He kept his eyes on me as I hung back, like prey at the brink of a neatly laid trap. “It’s okay,” he said.

I rested my head against the soft pillow of his shoulder and breathed in the heavy smell of gasoline, oil, and shampoo. Priscilla and Calvin were loud; their sweating arms and legs made fart noises on the vinyl. “Jesus,” Jake said finally, crawling across me to lean into the front seat. I adjusted myself around him while he pulled the driver’s-side door handle. At the moment the door sprang free, I saw them in the flash of the moon. White spliced with black, Priscilla and Calvin were knotted at the waist. Calvin balanced himself above her on his arms, his shoulders straining. Priscilla’s breasts pointed at the night, pink and splotchy where they’d been roughened by stubble. She was looking directly at me, but she did not seem to see.

Jake pulled me out of the car and put his arm around my waist. He steered me to the front of the drive-in, before the lines of cars. We sat down on the damp grass, and I started to cry. “I’m sorry,” Jake said, although it hadn’t been his fault. “I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

“It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t.

“You shouldn’t be hanging around with a girl like Priscilla,” he said. He wiped at my cheeks with his thumb. His nails were creased with tiny black lines where motor oil had seeped in.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said, pulling back.

Jake held my wrists. “But I’d like to,” he said. He kissed my cheeks first, then my eyelids, then my temples. By the time he reached my mouth I was shaking. His lips were soft as a flower and just rubbed back and forth, quiet and slow. After all Priscilla and I had practiced, after all we had done, I had never considered this. This wasn’t even a kiss, but it made my chest and my thighs burn. I realized I had much to learn. As Jake’s lips grazed mine, I said what had been going through my mind: “No pressure?”

It was a question, and it was directed at him, but Jake didn’t take it the way I intended. He lifted his head and pulled me to his side, keeping me warm but not kissing me, not coming back to me. Over our heads, the actors were moving like dinosaurs, hollow and silent and thirty feet tall. “No pressure,” Jake said lightly, leaving me bothered and pounding, ashamed, wanting more.

Nicholas was going to harvest the heart. It had belonged to a thirty-two-year-old woman from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who had died hours before in a twenty-car pileup on Route 95. By tonight it would belong to Paul Cruz Alamonto, Fogerty’s patient, an eighteen-year-old kid who’d had the misfortune to be born with a bad heart. Nicholas looked afld myed out the window of the helicopter and pictured Paul Alamonto’s face: hooded gray eyes and thick jet hair, pulse twitching at the side of his neck. Here was a kid who had never run a mile, played quarterback, ridden a seven-alarm roller coaster. Here was a kid who-thanks to Nicholas and Fogerty and a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 95-was going to be given a renewed lease on life.

It would be Nicholas’s second heart transplant, although he was still just assisting Fogerty. The operation was complicated, and Fogerty was letting him do more than he let anyone else do, even if he thought Nicholas was still too green to be chief surgeon during the transplant. But Nicholas had been turning heads at Mass General for years now, moving swiftly under Fogerty’s tutelage from peer to near equal. He was the only cardiothoracic resident who acted as senior surgeon during routine procedures. Fogerty didn’t even stand around during his bypass operations anymore.