Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

He’d swum in a creek just like this one as a boy. He and his friends had caught tadpoles and put them in jars so they could watch them turn into frogs if they didn’t die first from lack of oxygen. But now a slick of green slime covered the rocks, making the going treacherous. He thought how, if the theory of evolution was true, man’s ancestors must have crawled out of the slime and up the banks, their gills turning instantly into lungs. Of course, there were mutations not only of physical features, but also of outlook and character. How else had people emerged from the Dark Ages, and how else had tyrants given way to more enlightened rulers? But, like anything else, enlightenment could go too far. It was a strange world, and he didn’t pretend to understand it. Strange and wonderful, he told himself, shaking his head over an image of the cute little Rainbow Girls and only belatedly adding a thought about the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen! He sat on a fallen log and peered into the water, but it was sluggish and opaque, and if there were frogs or tadpoles hiding there, the pastor didn’t see them.

7.8 Will

The team was behind by two runs, but things were finally clicking for Will. His arm was smoking. His legs were on fire.

By the time he thought to glance up at the stands, it was the fifth inning. His parents were sitting on a high tier behind third base. Tula had another engagement, so she wasn’t at the game, but they had plans to meet up after. He wished he had a car. If he had a car of his own, he could take her out when the game was over. But he didn’t, which meant he’d have to go home with his parents, and if he couldn’t persuade them to let him have the truck for the evening, he’d have to ride the bicycle or walk the two and a half miles to Ash Creek Circle on foot.

Don’t let the future interfere with the present, his coach was always saying, so Will forgot about Tula and the truck. He excised the present from everything that had come before it and everything that would come after. He was coming from and going nowhere. He said his cue word, which worked to center him. “Spider-Man,” he said. He immediately felt a contraction of his body mass, as if his mind and body were undergoing a kind of cold fusion before releasing a blast of focused heat. As he approached the plate, the coach called out, “Okay, killer. Knock it out of the park.”

Will let the bat slide through his hands and settle into place before he tightened his grip around it, stepped up to the plate, and pounded the bat against it. Then he sized up the pitcher, who was pivoting to hold Stucky Place on second. Stucky gave a nonchalant shrug and spat in the dirt. When the pitcher turned back around, he squinted into Will’s eyes and Will squinted back, both eyes together and then each eye on its own. He refocused on Stucky. Then he let Stucky go and narrowed the universe until it contained only Will and the pitcher and then only the ball and the bat. He ran his left hand and then his right hand between his ear and his cap, as if to push a lock of hair out of his eyes. He swung the bat loosely in a figure eight before locking his wrists again, this time for real. Now when he said his cue word, the power surged from his hands up through his elbows and shoulders and down through his core, where it connected with a countering surge that started at the ground and ran up through his legs and groin. The forces met in a tightening of his abdominal muscles and culminated in what the coach called the resonating moment — a snapshot of approaching time showing only the smack of the bat and the sweet spot of the ball. When the pitcher wound up and released, Will’s muscles took over, transferring the blast of pure thermonuclear energy into the ball, converting the vision into reality, and sending the baseball out of the park.

7.9 Tula

Tula and the other rising juniors had drawn lots to determine the order of their presentations. As luck would have it, Tula was to go third, after Sammi Green and a tall, composed girl named Wanda Wallace who had moved from Oklahoma City the year before. Most of the presentations were predictable — only Sammi’s plan for honoring the heroes of Red Bud and Tula’s idea of a new bow station had never been done before.

Wanda had made a PowerPoint presentation with captions that said HELP FOR WORKING FAMILIES and GIVE A KID A BREAK. Each year someone presented a version of the same idea. Tula herself had played kick ball and consumed sugary snacks at just such an after-school program while she waited for her mother to finish her shift at a local motel. “Role model” was an enduring Rainbow concept, and the older girls who staffed the program competed vigorously for the title of most energetic and most sincere. They were the reason Tula had become a Rainbow Girl, so while the idea wasn’t original, it had a proven track record of making a difference in actual lives.

Sammi’s presentation featured a series of slides showing men in uniform and other slides showing wealthy donors handing over giant checks to the previous year’s Worthy Advisor, who beamed and blushed from her chair on the stage when her picture went up on the big screen. Sammi and Wanda sported broad smiles and gleaming teeth and paused confidently when their presentations were over to have their pictures snapped shaking hands with the people on the stage.

By the time her name was called, Tula was nearly faint with excitement. She had called her proposal Project Purity and had made a rainbow-colored banner modeled on the banner that hung on the wall of the meeting room. But where the traditional banner comprised seven bright swaths of color, hers consisted of eight, with the eighth made of the purest white silk her little stash of savings could buy.

When Tula stood up and tenderly unfurled the banner, she was greeted with an intake of breath. “My project is to expand the Rainbow principles to include an eighth bow station, represented by white to symbolize Purity,” she began. “Purity is not only the highest female virtue, but it also represents cleanliness and health.” When she said the word “cleanliness,” she had an unwelcome vision of her mother swabbing out a toilet at the motel, but she shook the image off. She explained that white was not an absence of color but included all wavelengths within it, thus symbolizing the very essence of the Rainbow tradition. Then she paused to gauge how the audience was receiving her presentation. People had clapped in the middle of Sammi’s presentation, and the tall girl had made everyone laugh when she told them that of course they could donate money instead of snacks and toys for the disadvantaged children. But now, except for the tick of acorns falling on the metal roof of the meeting hall, all was silent and blurred, the audience an undifferentiated flotilla of oval faces bobbing on a sea of frothy dresses and not even Sammi beaming out encouragement from the front row.

The silence was broken when someone coughed. Another person shuffled her feet. Tula tried to think of something funny to say, but she couldn’t. Tula’s strength wasn’t humor, but passion, which she hoped would come through when she talked about saving up her money for the silk, about borrowing the motel sewing machine to stitch the panels together, about her plans for rewriting the Rainbow Handbook to include the new station. But instead of emitting sparks of passion and enthusiasm as she rushed through the second part of her speech with the banner hanging limply in front of her, she found herself stuttering and blinking back tears.

That year’s Worthy Advisor had been elected by her classmates the previous spring, and presiding over the autumn assembly was her first official act. She was wearing a long white dress for the occasion, and when she got to her feet right in the middle of Tula’s presentation, the layers of fabric sprang away from her body and shimmered with subtle iridescence. “I’m not sure we understand,” she said, the words crisp with new authority. “Please tell us exactly how this is a project for the entire junior class to work on over the course of the coming year. It seems like you plan to do it all yourself. It seems, frankly, as if it’s already done.” She held her ivory arms out like a queen addressing her subjects, who were fanned out before her and beginning to whisper behind cupped hands.