Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

But she must have liked that, Cole thought. The eye-patch scar, the crusty palms and black nails. You’d think a girl would be turned off by those things—

And what about her boyfriend in Louisville?

Mason didn’t have a girlfriend, as far as Cole knew, and people were always teasing him about still being single. Everyone knew that, before his conversion, he’d sown his share of wild oats and, as he confessed, had not always been respectful of ladies.

“Maybe that’s why the Lord put all that on hold for me. When the time’s right, I expect he’ll introduce me to the one meant for me. I know the next step for me is to take a wife, but I’m leaving it all in his hands.” Meanwhile he lived with his mother. Lucinda Boyle, who’d raised Mason all on her own, was still in her forties but might as well have been an old woman. She was one of those people who, a year after getting over the flu, had developed symptoms of parkinsonism. She almost never left the house.

Cole wondered what was going to happen next. Did Mason believe that, even though she was so young, Starlyn was the one God intended for him? And did that mean they’d be getting married one day? But if that was the case, he thought, they wouldn’t have to keep their love a secret. Whatever the story was, he knew he shouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about it. It was none of his business. His mother used to say when it came to people’s love lives you should always look the other way. And: Never be the kind of boy who talks about what he did with a girl. Nice boys don’t kiss and tell.

Here the taste of cherry burst on Cole’s tongue, and he remembered: passing the cough drop from mouth to mouth—like kissing and not kissing and more than kissing all at the same time. And afterward, strangely enough, they’d gone on as before. Not girlfriend and boyfriend, not even friends, just ordinary classmates again—as if the accidental collision in the closet had never occurred. But he hadn’t talked about it. He’d never told anyone what he’d done in the dark with Jade.

Jade Korsky. Whose hair was like a poodle’s if poodles had been red. Who always had to sit in the front because she was both nearsighted and incapable of holding on to a pair of glasses for more than a week. First girl he ever kissed—and he’d forgotten all about her. How sad was that?

That had been sixth grade. In seventh grade, a boy named Royce had told him about an eighth-grader named Sage, a tall girl with hair like licorice twists and a faceful of piercings. A nympho, Royce said, and when Cole asked him what that meant he’d laughed and said, “It means you don’t got to pay her or nothing, dude. You just hook up and get your rocks off.” But Cole would have been terrified of hooking up with a girl he didn’t even know. Until Royce told him, he had no idea, either, what a chicken head was. He could not see how any girl could become famous for that. Enough boys had confirmed what Royce had said about Sage for Cole to think it could be true, but he could not imagine ever finding out for himself.

And now he could not imagine himself in Mason’s place. He could not imagine himself touching Starlyn the way he’d seen Mason touching her—like he owned her. But lately all that—kissing, touching, having sex (whatever that was really like)—had begun to take up more and more space in Cole’s head. It was another one of his “ideas” (he didn’t know what else to call them): you could never grow up, let alone be a hero, without the help of a girl. And say it didn’t happen. Say you couldn’t find a girl who would help you. Well, then, you’d be hopeless. Whatever else you might do in your life would be meaningless; there’d be no point in growing up at all.

He remembered how, in the period right after he got over the flu, it was as if he’d aged backward. Night terrors. Bed-wetting. Fear of the dark, fear of being kidnapped or lost—all his little-boy horrors had come back to him. He was smaller then, too, he’d lost so much weight, and it seemed to him his voice was higher—maybe the flu could do that, too. Later, studying himself in the mirror, he was dismayed at the scrawniness of his arms and legs, the thinness of his waist, and his sharply protruding ribs and shoulder blades. His butt looked like a baby’s. He had skin like a girl’s: too pink and too pale. Even at its biggest the Yearning Worm did not reach the six inches he knew was the absolute minimum requirement. And who would ever want to kiss a mouth ringed with acne?

But he had gained back all the weight he’d lost plus a few new pounds, and he was a good two inches taller. His voice wasn’t exactly deep, but it had a certain resonance now, a huskiness at times, like when he had sinusitis. And he was shaving every other day. He knew he could barely be called a teen, let alone a man—even a man as young as Mason was obviously way different from him. But you couldn’t call him a child anymore. He was not a child. He had caught up. He had moved on. And now that he was almost there, fourteen felt even older than he’d thought it would feel.

It was all set. Early on the morning of Cole’s birthday, he and PW were going on a three-day camping trip. Not to the Bible camp some kids from Salvation City went to every summer and where Cole, too, would probably go later that year, but to a site in the Kentucky hills where PW used to go when he was a boy.

Ever since he’d been promised this trip, Cole had been looking forward to it. There’d been days when he could think of little else. He was still looking forward to it, but he wasn’t jumping up and down inside like a little kid anymore. In fact, he was embarrassed to remember how overexcited he’d been. He couldn’t say exactly why things had changed, but it saddened him to have to admit that the trip had lost some of its magic. He was afraid PW might figure this out and be saddened, too.

If it ever came out that he’d seen Starlyn and Mason making out and kept quiet about it, Cole was sure PW would understand. What he wasn’t so sure about was the way he’d caught PW looking at him the day of the party. It mortified him to think PW could have read his thoughts then. How many times had PW already told him, “If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything to do with girls, any feelings or urges or questions you might have, you just let me know. I believe you’ll always find me open to that kind of chat.” But Cole had always shied away from that kind of chat. He didn’t want PW to know how he felt about Starlyn. He wanted him to look the other way. Now he worried that sometime while they were away PW himself might bring up the subject.

Sex had been a topic in Bible class (“Good Sex Is Clean, Not Seen, and Never Mean”), and Mason had explained that, in this particular case, Jesus’ example was not meant to be followed. A man cleaving to a wife and the two of them creating a family—that’s what the Lord wanted to see. (“Cleaving,” though he knew what it meant, bewildered Cole and gave him a physically uncomfortable feeling.)

Cole was thankful sex was not one of the subjects he had to tackle with Tracy—though, since the day of the radio show, his feelings toward Tracy had changed. Whenever Cole thought back to that awful day, the most awful part was remembering what he’d done to her. A knee to the chest had to be a very hard thing for a woman to forgive, he thought. He’d been told that, for a woman, being hit in the chest was like a guy being hit in the balls. Not that he’d meant to hit her there—he hadn’t meant to hit her anywhere! On the other hand, he had been trying to push her away, so you couldn’t say it was purely accidental, either. Like the time his father threw his phone at the living room wall. He hadn’t meant to break the phone, or to mess up the wall. But, like Cole’s mother said: “It doesn’t matter what you fucking meant, it’s what you fucking did.”