Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [71]
I sneezed and coughed for a solid week, lying limp in my bed and crying to every gospel song that came over the radio. It was as if I were mourning the loss of something I had never really had. I sang along with the music and prayed for all I was worth. Jesus’ blood and country music, there had to be something else, something more to hope for. I bit my lip and went back to reading the Book of Revelation, taking comfort in the hope of the apocalypse, God’s retribution on the wicked. I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication.
11
I recognized Shannon Pearl immediately on the first Monday of the school year. I’d seen her with her family at the revival tent. Her daddy booked singers for the circuit, and her mama managed the Christian bookstore, a religious supply store downtown south of Main Street, a place where you could get embossed Bibles, bookmarks with the 23rd Psalm in blue relief, hot plates featuring the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus and that damned lamb on everything imaginable—slipcovers, tablecloths, even plastic pants to go over baby diapers.
Shannon got on the bus two stops after Reese and me, walking stolidly past a dozen hooting boys and another dozen flushed and whispering girls. As she made her way up the aisle, I watched each boy slide to the end of his seat to block her sitting with him and every girl flinch away as if whatever Shannon had might be catching. In the seat ahead of us Danny Yarboro leaned far over into the aisle and began to make retching noises.
“Cootie train! Cootie train!” somebody yelled as the bus lurched into motion and Shannon still hadn’t found a seat.
I watched her face—impassive, self-sufficient, and stubborn; she reminded me of myself, or at least the way I had come to think of myself. Sweat was showing through her dress, but nothing showed in her face except for the eyes. There was fire in those pink eyes, a deep fire I recognized, banked and raging. Before I knew what I’d done, I was on my feet and leaning forward to catch her arm. I pulled her into our row without a word. Reese stared at me like I was crazy, but Shannon settled herself and started cleaning her bottleglass lenses as if nothing at all was happening.
I glared at Danny Yarboro’s open mouth until he turned away from us. Reese pulled a strand of her lank blond hair into her mouth and pretended she was sitting alone. Slowly, the boys sitting near us turned their heads and began to mutter to each other. There was one soft “cootie bitch” hissed in my direction, but no yelling. Nobody knew exactly why I had taken a shine to Shannon, but Reese and I were back at Greenville Elementary and everyone there knew me and my family—particularly my cousins Grey and Garvey, who would toss you against a wall if they heard you’d insulted any of us.
Shannon Pearl spent a good five minutes cleaning her glasses and then sat silent for the rest of the ride to school. I understood intuitively that she would not say anything, would in fact generously pretend to have fallen into our seat. I sat there beside her watching the pinched faces of my classmates as they kept looking back toward us. Just the way they stared made me forget all my newly made vows to behave like a good Christian; their contemptuous, angry faces made me want to start a conversation with Shannon and shock them all. I almost grinned, imagining Shannon and me discussing all the enemies we had in common while half the bus craned their necks to hear. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that, couldn’t even think what I would say to her. Not till the bus crossed the railroad tracks at the south corner of Greenville Elementary did I manage to force my mouth open enough to say my name and then Reese’s.
She nodded impartially and whispered “Shannon Pearl” before taking off her glasses to begin cleaning them all over again. With her glasses off she half-shut her eyes and hunched her shoulders. Much later, I would realize that she cleaned her glasses whenever