Althea and Oliver Read online

  “What are you working on now?”

  She turns back to the present. “It’s a dead frog,” she says. “It’s good, right?”

  Her illustration of an ill-fated dissection frog is only half-finished, but rendered thus far in the eerie, Victorian style of old-fashioned anatomical drawings and vintage medical textbooks. She’s even drawn the thin silver pins stuck through the webbed feet to keep the creature stretched out and firmly in place. The skin of the belly has been sliced down the middle and peeled back to reveal the internal organs, which she’s labeled with Roman numerals. He studies the illustration for a long time.

  Oliver doesn’t see it coming, and the first thrown piece of popcorn catches him in the eye. Althea instigates as always, apparently too giddy with his return to allow his attention to stray from her for a moment. Things progress quickly until the contents of the bowl have been mashed equally into the carpet and her hair. From there they progress quicker still, until Oliver is facedown on the couch with a mouthful of damp upholstery, Althea’s knee digging into his kidneys, his arm twisted and yanked up so that his hand waves like a pale flag over his head. Her weight bears down on him ruthlessly, and when he tries to move, bottle rockets of pain whistle and pop inside his shoulder. They are yelling so loudly—“Say Uncle!”—“Fuck you!”—neither hears the door open at the top of the stairs.

  “Althea, let him go,” her father says.

  Panting and reluctant, Althea stands up, picking popcorn out of her hair. She blows her bangs out of her face but says nothing, glaring in her father’s direction. Oliver knows this is one staring contest she isn’t going to win. As Garth comes down the stairs, a tumbler of scotch in his hand, he stoops to avoid cracking his head on the beams.

  Oliver’s impression of his best friend’s father was fully formed one summer night when Oliver and Althea were eight years old and Garth Carter taught them how to pitch a tent in the backyard. As they unrolled their sleeping bags, a skunk waddled out of the bushes and glanced absently in their direction. Petrified, the children collapsed to the ground, clutching each other, as if beset by a pack of feral dogs. Garth emerged from behind the tent, where he had been nailing the final stake into the ground, and restored himself to his full and considerable height. He clapped his hands together three times. The skunk turned and ran off into the night.

  “Skunks hate noise,” he had said. “You kids need to know things like that.”

  “Sorry about the yelling,” Oliver says now, peeling his cheek from the sofa.

  Garth waves his glasses, shrugging to indicate how little he actually cares. “I can hardly hear anything from my study. I just wanted to visit. Say hello to Oliver.”

  “Good to see you, sir.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “You know. Jazzed to be back on the show.”

  “Althea catching you up on everything you missed?”

  “It really wasn’t much,” she says.

  “Did you tell him about the track team?” says Garth.

  “Dad, he’s been here for, like, two minutes.”

  “What about the track team?” Oliver asks.

  “Nothing,” Althea says. “I quit.”

  “You quit?” Oliver looks at her askance.

  “She quit,” Garth confirms.

  “I wish you hadn’t said anything,” Althea tells her father.

  “I’m sure you were planning on telling him eventually.”

  “I’m sure how I might place in hurdles this year is the last thing on Oliver’s mind right now.”

  Actually, Oliver would much rather be thinking about Althea’s race times than what might be wrong with his brain, but standard best-friend-defense mode kicks into gear and he nods in agreement without meeting Garth’s eyes. “I bet it got boring anyway, running around in all those circles. Give someone else a chance to win.”

  “Exactly,” she says.

  Ignoring her, Garth lowers himself into the recliner and turns to Oliver. “I think I’ve got one you’re really going to like.”

  “I’m ready,” Oliver says. Now he’s sorry not to have the popcorn.

  Garth teaches history at UNC Wilmington. A Southern gentleman from Savannah, where all of his family still resides, Garth quietly nurses—despite his outward trappings of erudite bookishness: reading glasses, ever-present glass of good scotch, and insistence on proper grammar—a fervent love of the lowbrow, particularly mass market paperbacks and poker. He organizes a weekly poker night among his department’s faculty, and though his specialty is Latin American history, he uses these card games as an opportunity to collect a wide range of fucked-up historical anecdotes. This semester, one of Garth’s colleagues is giving a seminar on ancient China, and Oliver loves the tales about brothers poisoning each other and eunuchs ruling through puppet emperors. A mildly contrite Althea massages Oliver’s shoulder while Garth tells them the gruesome tale of an emperor from the Tang Dynasty; it begins with him falling in love with a concubine and ends with decapitated bodies lying in a ditch.

  When he’s finished with his story, Garth rattles the ice cubes in his glass with a dramatic flourish. Oliver is rapt. Althea is horrified. “Well. I’ve stunned you both into silence. It means my work here is done. I’m going out to dinner.” He leans over and kisses Althea’s forehead. She wrinkles her nose in faux protest. “You’re not fooling anyone. You’re all mush.”

  “Actually, I think I am fooling everyone. Who are you having dinner with?”

  “Whom. Just this year’s artist in residence. A writer, very distinguished. You’d like her.”

  “You say that about the artist in residence every year,” Althea reminds him.

  Popcorn shrapnel crunches under Garth’s feet. He shakes his head at his daughter. “You could have just told Oliver that you missed him. Saved yourself an hour of vacuuming.”

  “Better not keep her waiting, Dad; it’ll just give her time to think about your flaws.”

  Garth smiles wearily at Oliver. “Welcome back, Ol. She’s all yours.”

  Once he’s gone and safely out of earshot, Oliver turns to Althea. “So why did you quit track? What happened?”

  She shrugs, avoiding his eyes. “I got tired of it. I just walked off the field one day.”

  “Just like that?”

  She fiddles nervously with the pages of her sketchbook. “Just like that.”

  There’s more she isn’t saying, he’s sure of it, and while he’s sure he could coax it out of her given sufficient time, the idea is suddenly exhausting. If she wanted to tell him, she would—it’s the fact that she doesn’t that he finds unsettling.

  Later, after Althea has finished catching him up on the last three weeks with her sketchbook, after she’s made him turkey burgers and another batch of popcorn and they’ve watched a movie, Oliver stands up and announces he’s going home.

  “You could just sleep here,” Althea says.

  “I’ll be okay.” A fragment of popcorn has nestled in Althea’s collarbone. He plucks it off her and pops it into his mouth, salt dissolving onto his tongue. Briefly, he reconsiders her offer to stay over, but in the last few months a new restlessness has made it harder for them to sleep in the same bed. He hears her weighted sighs in the middle of the night when she thinks he’s asleep, feels her rolling over and over until she finally comes to rest with her nose buried in his neck, a shaky hand alighted on his hip. And he’s afraid to spoon her now, or assume any of their chaste cuddling positions, for fear she’ll brush against him and he’ll be revealed in the most basic way a teenaged boy can betray himself. So instead, he zips his sweatshirt in a gesture of finality and pulls up his hood. “See you in the morning?”

  She looks down at the spot where he touched her. “I was saving that for later,” she says.

  Back at his house, Nicky is asleep on the couch underneath one of her books, an aromath
erapy candle flickering on the coffee table beside her—chamomile and peppermint, for rejuvenation. They cost something like thirty dollars at the spa, but Nicky gets them at a discount.

  “Mom?”

  She mumbles something and rolls over, the book slipping off her chest and onto the floor. He shuts off the lamp over her head and blows out the candle.

  Nicky has changed his sheets, but still the idea of returning to bed, knowing he has spent the last three weeks there, is deeply unappealing. He sits at his desk, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling where those cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark stars form a random constellation. Althea put them there, one winter years ago. Standing on his bed, balanced on the toes of one foot in a rangy arabesque, she slapped them up one at a time, following his directions to create a haphazard version of Gemini, their star sign, before she lost patience and just pasted the rest on. He had been complaining about the weather, about how he missed camping and hiking, about how he was sick of being trapped in her basement playing board games.

  “You can sleep under these stars until spring,” she had said.

  Inspired, he grabs his telescope—an old Christmas gift from Garth—and sleeping bag and slips out the back door into the yard. He trains the lens on the clearing of sky untouched by trees and the neighbors’ satellite dish, and is reassured to see the stars are where they should be, Hydra still snaking its way across the heavens, Ursa Major and all its galaxies firmly in place. He tries to get a fix on the Owl Nebula, but it’s not dark enough.

  When they were ten, Oliver had somehow happened upon the unfortunate piece of information that in approximately five billion years the sun would run out of juice, ending life in the solar system. He’d been so pissed; it seemed so unfair. Althea assured him that by then space travel would be no big deal—everyone could just ship off to another solar system. When Oliver heard scientists claim that someday the entire universe would end, either tearing itself apart or collapsing in on itself—the theories varied—Althea had no answers, and Oliver was inconsolable. At night he lay in bed and tried to imagine it, the end of everything. Some scientist suggested it was possible that eventually, if humanity could last long enough, a wormhole could be found that would lead happily to a parallel universe that would go on after ours had come to its ignoble end. He had been casually dismissed, but Oliver found it deeply comforting, imagining people stepping through a portal in the sky as easily as boarding a plane, slipping into another dimension where soccer games and trips to the beach and arguments over whose turn it was to mow the lawn could all continue apace.

  His enthusiasm for science in general and astronomy in particular has matured since then, and he loves the concomitant math and equations underlying these grandiose ideas about the universe, but in the back of his mind that original urgency remains, that there’s more at stake than acing the SATs or getting into MIT—somewhere out there has to be a wormhole that is going to save us all.

  • • •

  Two months later, as their junior year is winding down, Oliver cajoles Althea into attending a house party thrown by someone they hardly know. When he arrives to pick her up, she is pacing around her bedroom in a short terrycloth bathrobe. The soles of her feet, pink-white like shells, are picking up dust from the floor. She is brushing her hair in long frantic strokes, anxiously trying to loosen the tangles.

  “Could you please, for one second, just pretend you’re a girl and help me pick something to wear?” she yells.

  “To do that, first I would have to pretend that you’re a girl.” Even as he says it, he’s studying the place below her neck, the dark crevice where the two sides of her robe meet.

  That shuts her up. In truth, it’s a decision that mostly comes down to which jeans and which T-shirt; her wardrobe doesn’t consist of much else. But at the last minute she digs out a plaid pleated skirt and her steel-toed boots. She sits on the edge of the bed lacing them up while Oliver watches the muscles flex in her runner’s legs. As her fingers nimbly work the frayed laces through the endless eyelets, he mentally removes the outfit she just put on while he was facing the other way.

  “What?” she says. “You’re staring.”

  He snaps back into himself. “The skirt and the boots. I don’t know. Isn’t it, like, a mixed message?”

  “You’re a fucking mixed message. You lost your vote ten minutes ago. Let’s go.”

  The party is close, so they walk. Althea crosses her arms over her chest, occasionally smoothing her hair or running her fingers over her skirt, looking quietly alarmed that the hemline ends several inches above her knees. Oliver can see that she’s already in a bad mood. If he doesn’t take action, she’s going to stand in a corner, sulk for forty-five minutes, and then demand to go home.

  Reaching up, he swipes several leaves from an overhead branch, shredding them as they walk. The sap gets in between his fingers, sticking them together. “You know what I was thinking? About tonight?” he says.

  “Mmm?”

  “Let’s play a game. Make the party into a game.”

  “Like a drinking game?” says Althea.

  “Not exactly. It’s a new game; I just made it up. Let’s try saying yes. To everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Whenever someone proposes something, asks us if we want to do something, let’s just say yes.”

  “This is your idea of a new game?” she asks skeptically.

  “Yes. We will be receptive to all that the universe has to offer. And I shall call it: the Non-Stop Party Wagon.” He tosses the leaf pieces into the air over their heads like confetti.

  The first game Althea and Oliver ever played was Candy Land. One night, ten years ago, the babysitter canceled on a panicked Nicky, who in desperation took her son down the street to the house of a college professor who she knew had a little girl Oliver’s age. Garth let them play in the basement, fed them red velvet cupcakes, and pulled out the only board game Althea owned, a gift from some relative. She won three times before Garth gently suggested they play something else. When Althea pointed out that she had no other games, her father produced a deck of cards and a pile of poker chips and explained the nuances of Texas Hold ’Em. When Nicky returned, Oliver and Althea were asleep on opposite ends of the couch in the basement, their cards pressed closely to their chests.

  They never played Candy Land again, but in winter they holed up in the basement after school, drinking hot apple cider around the space heater and honing their military strategies on the Risk board. In summer, when it was too hot to throw a Frisbee on Wrightsville Beach or float down the Cape Fear River on an inner tube, they played gin rummy and casino in the shade of Althea’s porch, a pitcher of cranberry iced tea on the table between them, slices of Key lime pie going runny in the heat.

  And then there were the games they made up themselves. Swaggering around downtown Wilmington wearing sunglasses, black clothes, and sullen expressions—that was called Playing New York. Whoever cracked a smile first lost. Sitting in the gazebo in August, complaining about the humidity, drinking limeade out of silver mint julep cups, and exaggerating their mild Southern accents—that was called Playing New Orleans. You won by keeping up your accent longest. Last spring, after catching Deliverance on cable late one night, they started passing the afternoons on the banks of the Cape Fear, stalking, chasing, and ambushing each other in the woods, although neither ever consented to squeal like a pig. That ended in a draw.

  “Non-Stop Party Wagon doesn’t sound like much of a game to me,” she says, batting at the foliage in her hair.

  “Then it will be easy to play,” Oliver says.

  “Come here.” Standing close, she brushes leaf detritus from his shoulders. Her sweatshirt smells like the beach.

  Often they are mistaken for twins, although their faces look nothing alike. Oliver doesn’t have her high cheekbones, and she doesn’t have his dimples. But they ar
e both lean and narrow, and when she is dressed in his clothes, Althea’s straight-up-and-down body doesn’t look all that different. They have the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. She brushes her bangs out of those eyes now with one chapped, nail-bitten hand so she can scowl at him more effectively. She wrinkles her nose. “Okay. I’ll play along.”

  When they arrive at the party, Oliver’s own resolve wavers. It’s as though someone rounded up every teenage misfit in New Hanover County and doused them with so much alcohol that if anyone lit a cigarette, the whole house would ignite. Taking hold of Althea’s elbow, he shoulders his way through the crowd. The air is stifling, like breathing through a whiskey-soaked rag. His friend Valerie appears, wading through from the opposite direction, a plastic funnel and tube hung around her neck like a stethoscope. Another friend, Coby, shoves past them, precariously toting at least half a dozen cans of Natural Ice—tucked under his chin, wedged between his elbows and ribs, and stuffed in his pockets.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Oliver asks.

  “To hide them,” Valerie says. “You’ve never seen him do that at a party?”

  “We don’t really go to parties,” says Althea.

  “All over the house. In the mailbox, in someone’s underwear drawer. Toilet tanks are his favorite—they actually keep the beer cold. But he’ll hide them anywhere that will guarantee him a beer later when everyone else is out.”

  “Christ,” says Oliver. “He’s like an alcoholic Easter Bunny.” It fits Coby, though, the kind of guy who reads Bukowski and is building his own apartment over his parents’ garage, presumably so he can continue to pilfer their bourbon long after he’s limped across the finish line at Cape Fear Academy with the rest of the class of 1997; the kind of guy who has sex in your little sister’s room at your house party and then steals the keg on his way out.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Valerie says. “The show’s about to start.”