Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [40]
Alice is stuffing her books and her notebooks and her jacket into her backpack. He needs to say something. Anything. It sounds like she’s crying. Say something, you idiot! But Henry is rooted to the floor like his socks have superglue on them and his legs are made of lead and not one single body part is responding to his urgent, desperate commands.
Alice is at the door.
“We could pretend that never happened, okay? So it doesn’t get weird and stuff.”
Too late for that! is what Henry would normally say, if Henry could find his voice, if Henry could just turn and look at her. He’s thinking this is about the loneliest he’s ever felt in his life, this not being able to look at Alice, this business of being glued to the floor when he wants to reach out and touch her hair or her hand or her sleeve even.
And then she’s gone, and Henry finds out that loneliest is right now, after she’s left the room. Suddenly his feet unfreeze and his legs start to move and he’s running down the stairs three, four at a time and throwing open the front door. But Alice is already halfway down the block, jogging steadily, her backpack bouncing on her back.
He watches until she turns in at her driveway and he can’t see her anymore. He sits down on the front steps, pops back up, starts down the walk, retreats to the steps. I need to do something; I need to go over there; I can’t possibly look her in the face; I have never felt so stupid in my life. But mixed in with the stupid feelings and the indecision and the walking up and down, there’s another feeling, a big, welling up feeling in the middle of his chest, this kernel, this diamond—okay, yes, a diamond in the rough—this fact, this incontrovertible fact: Alice kissed me. Then he remembers, right, her father. Three days. No contact. So maybe that wasn’t really a kiss. Not a kiss kiss. More like some desperate something that looked like a kiss, that almost felt like a kiss but was not, actually, a kiss.
That would make more sense. But making sense of this turns out not to be comforting in the least. Making sense of this turns out to feel like a direct blow to the solar plexus. Maybe he’s wrong, maybe he could talk to her. But what would he say, exactly? Hey, Alice, explain your motives. Hey, Alice, could we try that again? The more he thinks about it the more difficult it is to get up and walk down the block. And just as he’s finally getting so uncomfortable he can’t really do anything else but head over there, because nothing could make him feel worse, Alice’s Uncle Eddie pulls up in an old orange Dodge and blows the horn: three long blasts.
He sees Alice run out to the curb, look up the street at him, watching her. She waves and turns away before he can wave back. She slides into the seat beside Uncle Eddie and they head off. Henry walks out into the street to watch them go. He waves at her, willing her to turn around and see him, which she doesn’t do. He waves at her until the old Dodge crests the hill and disappears out of sight.
He turns back and starts trudging up his driveway, staring at the scuff marks and the incipient holes in the toes of his Chucks. Until he is stopped by the sight of the toes of his mother’s brown sensible tie shoes. Pointing directly at him.
Don’t look up, don’t look up, he tells himself! What did she see? Did she see anything? Can he never, not even