LemonLye's Lit

Cancellation notice

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:22:01 GMT

Given that: a) I got busy revising a *different* novel, and b) my revision ideas for Heaven or California were becoming more and more complex, I've decided to pull the plug on posting the rough draft here. There is a lot of work to be done, and I look forward to it and thank all of YOU for inspiring the great ideas! But it will be a time before it is "finished."

I did puzzle over why Relatively Honest seemed so much more the crowd-pleaser, in terms of comments generated, when I could have sworn that Heaven or California was a better novel. But Les Miserables is probably a better novel than Bridget Jones' Diary, and nonetheless I can predict which one would play better on LiveJournal. ;) Daniel Revelstoke, as a narrator, reads a lot more like LJ than the Amoryville crew does--he speaks in first person, and is snarky, self-absorbed, sex-obsessed, and living in more or less the real world. And that is what people are likelier to want out of their LJ posts. I doubt it means anything about which story would sell better as a book, however. I do know that revisions are in order, and I thank you once again for participating! See you on my other journals.

HEAVEN OR CALIFORNIA, Ch. 1-2

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:14:43 GMT

If you're going to critique only one post of this novel, please critique this one. If the beginning isn't strong enough to keep people reading, it doesn't matter how good the rest is. :) With that, away we go...

HEAVEN OR CALIFORNIA
(all rights reserved, etc. etc.)

Chapter 1

Aug. 1, '05

Oh, God. I'm writing this at work--Leo Santos just came in and told me Tristan Cole's brother died in a car crash this morning! I thought it couldn't be true, but Leo heard it from his cousin, the paramedic, who was actually on the scene. And when I rode my bike here earlier I remember seeing Lost Gold Road blocked off with cones and police tape. The Coles live up there.

I feel all sick and freaked out. I didn't really know David, but poor Tristan! He seems so quiet and sensitive; I don't know how he's going to deal with this. Should I go to the funeral? If I don't, I might not see him till school starts. What should I say? It's not like I can go up and hug him, but I ought to do SOMETHING.

Argh!! I want to be a child psychiatrist when I grow up, and I can't even figure out what to say to a guy who lost his brother. Maybe Leo got it wrong and it's not true. Please let it not be true.

In other news, Leo's trying to grow a mustache. Which is really sad, 'cause dude, you're a sophomore and you're 5'1".

* * *

Ian Sornak walked yawning into the kitchen at nearly noon. His mother, dipping tortilla chips into a tub of salsa, froze with a chip half-dipped when she saw him. She reminded him of a scared rabbit.

"Don't stare at me," he said. He got down a bowl for cereal.

"I'm sorry. There's been terrible news. You know the Coles?"

The frosted corn flakes fell more slowly as Ian paused to listen. Hope bloomed in his heart. "Yes?"

"David--the older son--was killed in a car crash this morning."

The hope gave way to amazement, triumph, and a tiny prick of fear. He rolled shut the plastic bag inside the cereal box. "They say how?"

"Missed the curve on Lost Gold Road, I guess. Went through the guardrail into the ravine."

So people probably thought it was an accident. Good. But the police would still investigate; Ian knew he mustn't get optimistic yet. He poured milk onto his cereal. "What a tragedy."

"Did you know him?"

"From around. He was younger than me."

"Those poor people. His poor mother."

"I'll check with the paper. See if they want me to put the news online." Ian took the cereal back to his room.

He closed his door and sat down on his carpet between stacks of newspapers, balancing the bowl in his cupped hands. He stared at David's photo on last week's front page. His legs felt shaky with elation--could he really have done it?

A week ago his world had looked bleak. He was twenty years old and still living with his mom, stuck in a boring part-time job and unable to get a better one because nobody would give him a good reference--"unfriendly," they called him; "antisocial" sometimes; "scary," even. And when he had phoned his father in San Francisco for money so he could move to a new city and start fresh, he had received no help at all.

"It's not money you need, Ian; you need to lighten up with people," his father had said. "Show respect. Show some responsibility. You're so hard to understand and sometimes you--well, sometimes you do scare people."

"Responsibility? That's funny from someone who left his wife and son for another man," Ian had said.

"Okay. Fine. Your point's valid. But your attitude isn't going to make me help you."

Ian had hung up on his father, hauled out a box of photos and old toys that he associated with him, and burned them in the backyard while his mother was at work. Money would have done it, he told himself now, chewing cereal. He didn't require his father's love, his mother's shelter, or anyone in this idiotic town; he only required independence, and he needed money for that. Money meant power. And power had seemed infuriatingly out of Ian's reach.

He had logged in to his favorite chat room and sought solace in tearing apart every remark made by everyone else, but he felt no better. He typed "I think I'm going to kill whoever's on tomorrow's front page," but then deleted it before hitting "enter." Still, typing it had improved his mood a little, the way it had done when he used to work at Robinson Auto, and would leave the brake cable unconnected, or the brake fluid almost drained, fantasizing about the death of whoever came to pick up their car. But he had always undone his mischief at the last moment. Too easy to be traced--no fun if you couldn't get away with it.

When the chat room had failed to soothe him, he had called up the Amoryville Herald's website and logged in as webmaster to do his piece of inadequately-paid work. He had paused to glare at the front-page article, where David Cole, the popular and handsome eighteen-year-old athlete, was getting his butt kissed by the paper for being accepted at Stanford. Rage had boiled up inside Ian.

Seven years ago (just before his dad had left), in the Amoryville Middle School library, when Ian had been an eighth-grader, he had been sitting with his nose buried in a horror novel and his finger buried halfway up his nose. The library air had always been so dry; and he hadn't been thinking. Ian had heard a snicker, looked up, and seen David Cole, the sixth-grade brat, watching him with fascinated revulsion from across the room. David had turned to one of the friends who surrounded him like satellites, and whispered something, and soon the whole group of sixth-graders was staring, snickering, and chirping insults. The nicknames from that incident had spread through the school and stuck to Ian for the rest of the year.

He had a whole litany of such events. David and his friends and his brother Tristan roamed the town like feral cats and seemed always to pop up at the worst moments. They'd brought a camcorder to Pioneer Park once to film each other skateboarding, but swung it around to capture Ian walking by. When he had turned his head to glare at them, and tripped over a garbage can and fallen on his face, the little punks had caught it all on film, and nearly died laughing.

And once in Ian's senior year of high school, while he was harboring a tender and obsessive love for Yolanda Santos, also a senior, he had walked into the hallway to find her making out with David Cole against his--Ian's--locker.

"You know this moron's a sophomore," Ian had told her.

"At least he's not a freak," she had said, and kissed David again.

David had winked at Ian, whispered something to Yolanda--Ian could have sworn it contained the words "dad" and "fairy"--and strolled away with her.

To be fair, Ian thought, drinking the milk from his cereal bowl, David was only one of many kids in this town who had made life hell for him over the years. But he was the one unlucky enough to be on the front page this week. So he was the one Ian had chosen.

And now he was dead. Ian chuckled and admired the newspaper once more. He had never felt more powerful in his life, and he loved it.

* * *

The black sky in Heaven shimmered with countless stars, nebulae, galaxies, and the occasional planet, but lately its beauty had been no consolation to Gabriel. The Cole family's situation was unendurable, so unendurable in fact that he was taking his complaint to Salilus for the first time in his life. Salilus, his Celestial Official, was 150 years older than Gabriel, and made him feel like an immature, impatient, well-meaning but ignorant fool. And aren't I all of that? Gabriel asked himself, as Salilus folded his dragonfly-like wings and unfolded his patronizing smile.

"It's natural you're unhappy," Salilus said. "This is the worst your charge has ever been through; and, since you're young and have done nothing yet except be his Guardian, it's the worst you've ever been through too."

Gabriel held back his own wings, though they wanted to stir in rebellion. Done nothing yet--what a condescending way to put it. But it was true. He was nobody in particular. He wasn't the Angel Gabriel; he was just one of a million angels named Gabriel, the most popular angel name of the last three thousand years. Being called Gabriel in Heaven was about as remarkable as being called Mohammed in Egypt. And he was only twenty, which in Heaven was, as Salilus had put it, "nothing."

"Let me guess," Salilus went on; "you're not merely worried about Tristan. You're concerned about the 'justice' of the thing."

"Of course. Captain, his brother was murdered. They're treating it like an accident, and it isn't!"

"But I have no orders to share that information with anyone on Earth."

Gabriel shut his mouth. He felt awkward and naïve, a mere Guardian in green, no match for the serene blue wisdom glowing from Salilus. Orders were orders. Gabriel had heard it a thousand times. Even Salilus didn't know why the orders were the way they were; the Being in Charge was inscrutable. But he tried one more time.

"Can't anyone down there show them the truth, Captain? An anonymous tip to the police, maybe?"

Salilus shook his head. "It isn't in my orders."

Gabriel looked at his window upon Earth, where he could see Tristan sitting with a blank sketchpad on his lap, under the pine tree in the backyard, staring ahead at nothing. "I just wish I could help him."

"All in the divine plan, Gabriel. We must trust."

"Yes, Captain."

A pinecone landed on Tristan's sketchpad. An inch closer and it would have bounced off his nose, but Tristan didn't flinch. He drew its outline on the page as if tracing chalk around a corpse.

"I'll check up with Michaela next," Salilus said. "Thank you for sharing your concerns, Gabriel. Just be patient. Humans are obsessed with time, but we don't have to be."

Gabriel bowed.

Salilus yanked at the pliable fabric of Heaven, stepped into the fold, and disappeared. The ripple in the starry sky smoothed out.

Gabriel made his own fold in the sky, and muttered a phrase in Heaven Universal. He emerged beside Michaela. She glanced at him and returned to watching Deirdre Cole, her charge, Tristan and David's mother. The tiny halo-lights seemed to gleam less brightly in Michaela's dark hair lately, and her luna-moth wings had lost some of their luster. But she was still beautiful, and the sight of her soothed him.

"How did it go?" she asked.

"Like you said. He won't do anything."

"Of course."

"He said he'd talk to you next. I thought, maybe, if you tried..."

"Why would he do anything for me?"

"Because." Gabriel focused on Tristan. "You were..."

"Married to him?"

"Yeah."

"That ended a hundred years ago."

"But only because of death. If I had been your husband, I'd do anything you asked for eternity." He had gotten bold with that last sentence, and imagined that in human form he might have blushed in saying it. Not that he would know.

"And if we were on Earth, I might test you on that."

Gabriel smiled, recognizing the flirtation he used to receive from her more often, before the tragedy.

"But here..." She reached out for his hand.

He reached for hers too, and they watched their fingers glide through each other like two crossed flashlight beams. Gabriel felt nothing at all; not physically, anyway. He turned his gaze back to Tristan, who was surely feeling more, physically and emotionally, than Gabriel could fathom.

"I wish we could visit Earth," said Gabriel. "Together. I would be able to help them, and I--well, I would actually feel something when you touched my hand."

"I wish we could, too. But until Deirdre and Tristan are in mortal danger at the same time..."

"Yeah. And I don't wish that."

Tristan placed the pinecone on the grass and went back to staring straight ahead. Gabriel glanced at Michaela's window to see Deirdre, in her studio in the daylight basement, painting a design for a fall festival brochure. The canvas was bright with gold squash, red apples, and brown wagon wheels, and said "Gold Country Harvest Days!" in rollicking Old-West lettering. But Deirdre's face was like a robot's; it showed no joy or interest. Her hair, coppery-brown like Tristan's, hung in a neglected ponytail. Only her arm moved as she painted.

Why couldn't the angels do anything? What was the use of Guardians?, Gabriel wondered for the thousandth time, even though he knew the stock answer: So that nobody is ever truly alone. A lot of good it did them, when they didn't know they had angels at all, and wouldn't find out until they died.

Michaela waved open another window and murmured, "Ian Sornak." Gabriel looked over too. Ian, gangly and unshaven, sprawled on his bedroom floor before a flashing TV, stabbing at video-game buttons with his thumbs. Piles of newspapers, the weekly Amoryville Herald from the past year or more, slumped around him.

"What he did may have been in the divine plan," Michaela said, "but that plan better include punishing him too."

As a Guardian, Gabriel tried to love all of humankind, but couldn't help loving his charge best of all, and got angry with those who hurt him. Gabriel felt something like hatred now at the mere sight of Ian. "I'd pull the trigger myself," he said.

* * *

I am an only child. Tristan tried to get the impossible sentence through his head. David, his older brother by a mere sixteen months, had always been there, knocking him into the wall when they passed in the hallway, teaching him how to drive, doing hilarious and sometimes exasperating impressions of everyone at Amoryville High, giving Tristan a mature handshake and then a vicious noogie when Tristan topped David's SAT scores on the math section. David's photo had even been on the front page of the local newspaper last week; they had run a story about the Amoryville graduating class and where they were all headed. David, their star example, had been accepted at Stanford. Half his stuff was already packed into boxes, either to go with him or to go into storage in the attic.

Now nothing of David's was going to Stanford, and he would be on the front page again one last time. The paper wasn't out yet, but Tristan knew they would make it the top story: David Cole, dead at eighteen. Brakes failed, unpredictably, on a bend in Lost Gold Road, half a mile from home, at six-thirty a.m. on a bright summer morning, on his way to the school track to run some laps.

Tristan curled up tighter on his side. His blankets were too hot underneath him, the way everything was too hot in August around here, but he didn't move. He was busy not counting the hours. It did not, could not, matter that it was twenty-nine hours since David and the old white Dodge had smashed through the wooden guardrail, bounced against oak trees and boulders, and somersaulted to a stop, upside-down, fifty feet below in the dry ravine of Lost Gold Creek. It did not matter that it was twenty-nine hours (and fourteen minutes) since Tristan had become an only child.

Sweat collected in the crook of his knees, and trickled down his calf. Tristan stared sideways at his wall, which was covered with posters, a calendar, his latest artistic creations, and a clock. Everything on the wall was pinned exactly where it had been twenty-nine hours ago. How could that be? Nothing was the same now. Didn't his wall know?

His parents, right now, were at the funeral home with Pastor Mackie, deciding on a coffin and flowers and a tombstone, and whatever else people decided at a funeral home. Tristan had not wanted to come along. He knew it was awful for his parents, probably worse than it was for himself. But all the same, he could not go to the funeral home. He wasn't even sure he would be able to face the funeral.

On the front porch, in the shade, sat old Mrs. Beauchamp from next door, rocking in the creaky bench swing, "just there" in case he needed anything. Seventeen years old and he was being babysat. "Babysitted"?

"Yeah, maybe that's why you didn't beat my verbal score on the S.A.T.'s," David might have answered.

Tristan could still hear his voice, clearer than he could hear the squeak of the porch swing. He compressed himself into a tighter ball. No closing his eyes. No crying, either. That hadn't helped during the night and it wouldn't help today.

He knew denial was one of the earliest and most common phases of grief, but he still concluded that this whole situation was impossible. It was impossible that he, Tristan Cole, was an only child. It was impossible that the body in the closed coffin would belong to a Stanford-bound scholar and track star, and that Tristan would have to sit through a funeral and condolences from their neighbors, and that David would never speak or breathe again even though he had been talking and breathing just the other day.

Just twenty-nine hours and sixteen minutes ago.

Tristan ground his palms into his scalp, tangling his hair. Stop counting. Numbers go to infinity; it will never end; stop counting, stop, stop, stop.

Chapter 2

Ian walked up Sunset Lane's steep hill in the dark, taking his time. Two weeks had passed since David's death--David's murder, rather--and nobody had so much as blinked in Ian's direction. He was waltzing about town quite scot-free. The warm night wind swept dust off the dry mountains and scattered it across Ian's face and arms, but he didn't mind. His amazing deed portended nothing but good for his future; he knew it as if it were an established fact.

At the top of the hill, in Pioneer Park's otherwise empty parking lot, the faint lights from town gleamed off the back fender of a long car. As Ian walked closer he recognized it as the beat-up station wagon lately acquired by young Vera Brandt. That caused him a twinge of annoyance--sixteen-year-old girls with snippy tongues and drunk mothers were getting cars, and he wasn't. He approached on quiet feet, thinking he might at least ruin her evening by catching her half-dressed in the back seat with some idiot.

But she wasn't in the back seat, and she wasn't with anyone. She sat on the hood of her car with a two-liter soda bottle, kicking her leg against the headlight and staring out at the view of the town below.

"What's in the bottle, Miss Brandt?"

Vera spun and almost fell off the hood. "Who the hell is that?"

He walked up to her, smiling.

She recognized him. "Oh. What do you want?"

He sat down beside her on the hood. "Just out for a walk. Thought you looked ever so lonesome. What's in the bottle?"

"Coke; what's it look like?"

He took it from her, sniffed at it, and took a swig. "Hmm. With a goodly dash of cheap vodka, is my guess. How classy."

She snatched it back. "Yeah, not all of us are old enough to buy our own."

"I'm not old enough either. Just very knowledgeable."

"Whatever." She looked out at the town and drank another swallow.

"So what brings you out here this fine night?"

"My parents, being losers. And there being nothing to do and no one to hang out with in this crappy town."

He settled back on the hood, feeling uncommonly generous. "Then hang out with me. Tell me your troubles."

She snorted. "Why should I? I hardly know you."

"Could be more exciting than you think."

"Uh-huh. Right." Vera leaned back and stared at the stars.

Ian waited. He had nothing else planned tonight; and anyway, you never knew when allies could come in handy.

"So my dad, he left us a year ago, right?" she began.

* * *

Aug. 18, '05

Well, I did go to the funeral. I haven't felt like writing here, though. Plus I've taken on extra shifts to get overtime, and I am SO SICK of ringing up people's pills and vacation photos and condoms. And everyone from school who comes in says, "Hey, did ya hear about David Cole?" Like I WOULDN'T hear. We only have two thousand people in town; hello! I don't mind when they seem sad about it and want someone to talk to, but half of them treat it like the juicy gossip of the month. Real nice.

Yesterday Vera Brandt came in with Ian Sornak. I haven't heard if they're dating or what. It didn't really seem like it. Anyway, they didn't mention David but they were still annoying. Vera must have turned sixteen over the summer, because she was blabbing about DRIVING here and DRIVING there, and practically waving her car keys in my face. I hate it when people get their license and spend the next month jingling their car keys at everyone.

As for Ian, he's creepy, and obviously a loser since he's, what, twenty?, and still lives at home, and has nothing better to do than hang around with greasy-haired high school bitches. Anyway, I was distracted because I was still thinking about the funeral, and of course being around Ian makes me uncomfortable, and I gave Vera the wrong change, and she was all, "Ex-CUSE me. I gave you a ten." And even though I apologized and fixed it, she looked at me like I was the world's hugest retard. Then when they were leaving, Ian looked back at me and winked, and did a full-on checking-me-out thing, which was incredibly gross. If that had anything to do with our dads, I swear I'm going to kill him.

Anyway, the funeral was the saddest thing ever. I haven't been to one since Grandma's, and that was sad of course, but this was somehow about a hundred times worse. I guess it's because someone who's eighteen shouldn't die, especially someone in good health. Not to mention cute--I mean, Tristan's cute in my opinion, but David was a FOX and everyone thought so. I know that doesn't matter, but it probably helped make him popular, so there were all these girls crying. They got me started before long, even though I HATE crying in front of people.

The whole school must have been there, including all the teachers, and most of the parents. The church was packed. I was way in the back and couldn't see Tristan, up front, but at the end when they let the family leave first, I saw him for a minute. It didn't look like he'd been crying, but he still looked more miserable than I've ever seen him. Not "miserable," that's the wrong word..."haunted," that's it. His mom and dad looked the same.

Pastor Mackie's eulogy was of course annoying, but I suppose he means well.

So in a couple weeks we go back to school, and Tristan will be a senior and I'll be a junior, and I was originally thinking that since Amanda moved away I might actually try to hang out with him. He's not exactly a replacement for a best female friend, but I like him better than any females at our school. I signed up for a locker next to his at registration yesterday, out of habit I guess, because my locker was near his last year and he was always nice to me. But now everything's changed, and maybe it'll just be weird.

I don't want it to be weird. I want to help him. Jeez, I almost think I'm getting a crush on him, because isn't this a typical "woman" thing? Wanting to "save" a guy? But of course I put "woman" in quotes, 'cause fifteen isn't that old, and I'm clueless about a lot of things.

And I hate how greasy my skin gets in this hot weather. Between the sun and the mountain roads, California sometimes bites.

* * *

Amoryville, one of a hundred equally picturesque towns nestled in the western foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, had exactly two churches. People either went to the non-denominational Sierra Christian Assembly ("the Sierra church," to locals), or to St. Brigid ("the Catholic church"). If you were exotic enough to require any other kind of religious architecture, you went out of town for it; but Amoryville only had a handful who bothered doing that.

The Cole family attended the Sierra church. To the angels it was all the same, but Gabriel did sometimes wish Tristan had been Catholic, and a regular confessor, so that Gabriel might have gained better insight into Tristan's mind. Or maybe Tristan could have taken to writing in a journal, the way that girl Abbott Abe did. Instead Gabriel had to interpret Tristan's moods and motives by outer clues.

From such clues Gabriel would have thought, on this day three weeks after his brother's death, that Tristan was not yet interested in speaking to anyone. Tristan's parents, partly to replace the ruined Dodge and partly out of a desperate need to do something for their remaining child, had bought him a used Ford sedan, but Tristan hadn't driven it anywhere yet except to the grocery store. After David died, Tristan had stopped going to his summer job at the plant nursery, and stayed home most of the time. He drew landscapes of vast uninhabited places; no well-tended gardens or unique buildings like he used to sketch. And this morning he read webpages about the solitary vision quests some Native American boys traditionally went on as a rite of passage--even though there was practically no Native American ancestry in Tristan's blood.

So it surprised Gabriel when Tristan checked the clock, said to his folks, "Youth group's at ten-thirty; I better go," hopped into the white Ford, and drove off to the Sierra church. It surprised his parents Deirdre and Peter too, to judge from the look they exchanged.

"Guess that might help," Peter said.

"At least it's something," Deirdre said.

"I thought he wasn't planning to go to youth group this year," said Michaela.

"He wasn't, last I heard. But I guess he changed his mind..." Gabriel shrugged, as baffled as anyone else.

* * *

Abbott was so surprised to see Tristan walk into the meeting hall at the Sierra church, she inadvertently snapped a blue ponytail band across the room. She didn't even wear the things; her hair was too short. She had found the band on the carpet and started weaving it between her fingers in figure-eight pattern in the hopes of avoiding Pastor Mackie's questions about how her summer had gone. The other eleven people in the circle--ten teenagers and the pastor--didn't notice the flying elastic. Like Abbott, they had gone quiet at Tristan's entrance. Pastor Mackie's round face was red and shiny in the heat, and his curly hair matted from the baseball cap he usually wore. Now he opened his meaty arms toward Tristan, who hovered in the door frame.

"Tristan." The pastor's voice oozed compassion. "What a blessing to see you. Come. Sit down."

Save him!, screamed Abbott's mind, addressing neither the pastor nor Our Lord Jesus, but rather herself. While the rest of the students lowered their eyes, uneasily or maybe respectfully, Abbott lifted her chin and met Tristan's gaze. She smiled and scooted over on the carpet to make room for him. Without a word, Tristan walked toward her. One of his dark green sneakers, which he wore without socks, squeaked with each step. He put his car keys in the pocket of his shorts, and sat down next to her.

"Hi," Abbott said.

Tristan's large eyes, haunted as ever, flicked her direction. "Hey." He looked at the carpet, and pushed his hair out of his eye.

Pastor Mackie folded his hands, elbows resting on his hairy knees, and regarded the group tenderly. His T-shirt, alien-green and proclaiming "Catch GOD fever!", made Abbott's eyes hurt. She cringed and took off her glasses to polish them with the hem of her shirt.

"Well," said Pastor Mackie. "A sad summer it has turned out for our group. I had hoped to gather all our familiar young ones here, after their vacations, with joy and welcome; but instead we're missing a longtime friend."

Oh, God, do not go there, Abbott begged silently.

He did anyway. "Tristan, it's so good to see you. I hope we can be a comfort to you."

Abbott kept scrubbing at her glasses. Tristan's knee shifted beside hers. He said nothing--might have nodded; she couldn't bear to look.

"I'm sure it's on everyone's mind," the pastor went on, "and when it comes to grief, sometimes the most soothing thing is to talk about it. Sometimes that's the only way we can come to accept why the Lord lets us suffer. He intends for us to comfort one another, especially here in His house."

Abbott cringed again, and covered the grimace by tugging at her eyelashes, as if one had gotten lodged in her eye. Please, make him change the subject. I know he means well, but God, SHUT HIM UP.

"So let's talk. Tristan, it's only fair to start with you, if there's anything you have to say."

Abbott could feel the horror gripping the entire circle in the silence that followed. She slipped on her glasses, and stared at the carpet in front of her. Tristan swallowed, a click of his throat in the quiet room, and shook his head. She saw it in the corner of her eye.

"No?" Pastor Mackie went on. "How about others? I know it would comfort Tristan to know how much this event has shaken us; how much we're keeping his family in our thoughts and prayers."

Silence. Someone cleared their throat but didn't say anything. Abbott stared at the carpet until bright colors bloomed around the edges of her vision.

"Sara?" Pastor Mackie said. "You look like you have something to say."

Sara Wideman turned pink as everyone looked at her. She chewed on a hangnail. "Um. I was, like, I could hardly believe it. I mean, he was...I don't know." She shot a glance at Tristan and shut up.

"Yes," Pastor Mackie uttered, as if she had said something profound. "It is always hard, at first, to understand that God could allow such a thing to happen. And perhaps, in this lifetime, we will never know why. We can't expect to settle, right here, the question of why God took David Cole from us. But--I'm sorry, Tristan, should we go on?"

Tristan had stirred at his brother's name, and was getting up. He backed away. "I've got to get going."

"Please, don't feel--"

"No, I've...got to..." Tristan was already around the circle and crossing the room.

"Tristan..."

Out the door. He was gone.

Before she knew what she was doing, Abbott leaped to her feet and grabbed her backpack from the floor.

"Yes, Abbott," said Pastor Mackie, "if you could bring him back, let him know he's welcome--"

Abbott reeled around to stare at him. "How could you bring it up in front of him like that? He's still in shock!" Then she felt her face go hot. She had never shouted at her pastor before. It seemed the kind of thing that would cause the earth to rumble and crack open beneath your feet.

The pastor lifted one hand toward her, like someone in a medieval religious painting. "Abbott, please wait."

She let out a gust of breath, spun around, and ran out of the meeting hall.

* * *

He wasn't going to start crying. That was order of the day Number One. He was in public, and everyone in town knew him, so there was no being anonymous about it. But, having lost a brother to a car accident, he also was not about to get behind the wheel while rattled like this. So Tristan leaned against the hood of the Ford, in the shade of a pine in the Sierra church parking lot, taking deep breaths and gripping the warm metal behind his back with both hands. He fixed his gaze on the top of the pine, and concentrated on how it looked against the sky.

Footsteps approached and stopped somewhere off to his right. When he heard a feminine-sounding cough, he ventured a glance. There stood Abbott Abe--pronounced Ah-bay, his mind always chanted. ("It's Japanese," she had explained, in bright and thoroughly American tones, years ago when he had first met her in youth group. "Though actually I'm half Philippino.")

He touched his dry lips with his tongue. "Abbott Abe," he said, since it was the only thing he could think to say.

"Hey." She fidgeted with her backpack. Her spiky black hair matched the shape of the pine needles above. "I didn't come here to bring you back."

Tristan nodded.

"I'm not going back," she went on. "I think he was totally rude. Everyone thought so. Even though he didn't mean to be." She rolled her eyes.

Under his shoe Tristan rotated a pinecone the size of a raccoon. Cars got dents around here from pinecones this big. Cars also got dents from tumbling down slopes into Lost Gold Creek. He squeezed the hood harder behind his back. "You going home now?" he asked.

"I don't know. I guess."

"Don't have to work today? You work at the drugstore, right?"

"Yeah. But the job's over for the summer. I wanted some time off before school started." Abbott scuffed her feet in the fallen pine needles. "Though it's not like I'm going to get out of town and do anything cool."

Tristan took out his keys. "Want to? Get out of town, I mean."

Abbott blinked. "Like where?"

"I don't know." He opened the passenger-side door. "Anywhere." He had no idea what he was doing, except that getting out of town sounded fairly appealing.

She opened and closed her mouth, looked over her shoulder, then dove into the car. She grinned at him.

He swung her door shut, and got in on his side. "So what do you think? Over the mountains?"

"Whatever." She laughed nervously. She clicked her seatbelt on, and chucked her pack into the backseat.

He started up the engine. "How about Death Valley?"

blows dust off this LJ

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:34:46 GMT

Announcement: I will be using this LJ for a new novel-in-progress. Similar deal to before: please stick around if you want to help critique! I only ask that you not be quite so nice--you have to try to find things that need improvement. If you were only here for RELATIVELY HONEST and aren't interested in getting the new novel chapters, it's completely okay to defriend. No one owes me anything! You were all extremely wonderful.

Anyone new and not yet "friended" on this LJ may simply comment to be added.

The new story is called HEAVEN OR CALIFORNIA, and is an 81,000-word modern fantasy.

Snappy book jacket synopsis: A young angel defies orders by trying to catch a killer, and finds himself stranded on Earth in the process. Passing as a high school student, he takes refuge with the murder victim's family in a small California town. But his identity as an angel, his growing love for certain humans, and his pursuit of the killer leave him in a conflicted tangle that he must resolve before anyone else gets killed (or fails to find a date to Homecoming).

First few sample chapters will be posted soon. Questions..?

(Cross-posting here and there.)

RELATIVELY HONEST, Chapter One, a rewrite

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 02:27:32 GMT

Not to revive this journal from the dead or anything, but, um, hello. You all were so helpful last summer, I thought this might be worth a shot. I have been messing with the beginning of Relatively Honest, on the grounds that the beginning pages are the most important thing in the galaxy as far as getting an agent to look at it is concerned. If anyone would be so kind, a possible different first chapter is below the cut. Re-read the older version here, compare, contrast, share thoughts; or, at your discretion, skip this whole thing entirely. You've paid your dues already. Ta! (Oh yeah, Britpicking is still welcome!)

Chapter 1: Leaving England

My family was hurtling into the unknown, probably toward our doom, and it was all my fault.

"We've had an offer to manage a ski resort in Oregon," my parents had said, seven months ago. "It would start in autumn. We would actually have to sell the house and move there. We thought we might go, since you would be at university; but only if you wouldn't find it strange, us being so far away."

And what did I say? Five whole seconds of thought, and what did I say? "How about I go with you? Go to uni over there?"

Wow, Daniel! Brilliant plan!

Now, standing in Heathrow Airport with my carry-on bag looped around my ankle and my eyes darting from one London-tourism advertisement to another, getting all sentimental about how I would never see them again--now, as other people moved into our house--only now did I realise the magnitude of what I had done.

"Oh, Daniel," Miriam wailed. Her face made my collar wet. "I'm going to miss you so much."

Then there was her. For fuck's sake. As if I didn't have enough on my mind.

I petted her hair, and gazed at a pound sign on an advert. Soon I'd be seeing nothing but dollar signs. "It's all right," I said, my voice on auto-pilot.

"It isn't all right. These past three weeks have been some of the best in my life. Even though I knew you had to leave."

"I know." I'm not sure what that meant; "I know." I didn't know much of anything at the moment, except that Oregon had earthquakes, volcanoes, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and cougars. I had looked it up. Bloody hell. Cougars. What kind of first-world country has cougars running loose?

Miriam sniffled, so loud and wet I could almost estimate the volume of mucus drenching her throat. Her arms tightened round me. "It's not fair we have to be separated so soon."

I patted her back. "I know," I echoed. A voice on the loudspeakers announced a flight, and my eyes cut to my parents, who kept their distance and pretended they weren't watching us. At the announcement, Dad looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and scrunched his mouth into a regretful line. I nodded.

Miriam lifted her face; her eyes were red, making the grey irises look bluer than usual. Her mascara was smeared. Why did girls even bother wearing mascara when they knew very well they would be sobbing on you at an airport? More to the point, why did they have to sob on you at the airport?

"Was that your flight?" she sniffled.

"Yeah." I squinted and made a smile of regret similar to my father's. I touched the sparkly moth-shaped clip in her hair. She was always wearing silly girlish clips in the shape of bugs. It irritated me, even now; mostly because there were lots of things I was sad to be leaving behind, but she, the only thing currently in my reach, wasn't one of them. She had been a distraction to keep me from noticing I was leaving home. It wasn't her fault I had chosen her as a distraction, but I still resented her. "I better go," I said.

She nodded, and gulped down more mucus. I looked away and tried to remember if you were supposed to play dead or fight back when a cougar attacked you. Have to think of these things when you're moving to Mountain Goat Arse, Nowhere, U.S.A.

"Daniel..."

"Hm?"

She took a shuddering breath. "I love you."

All my muscles seized up. I stared at her for a second as if she had turned into a rattlesnake before my eyes. Retreat! Retreat!, my mind screamed.

I stooped to grab my carry-on, and took two steps backward. "Listen, babe, it's been so much fun."

She twisted her jumper sleeve in her hands. "You don't have to answer. I know it's not your usual thing with girls. Love, I mean; any serious attachment. I just, I wanted to say it." She looked down at her shoes.

I cast a glance around in desperation. My parents held my gaze this time; Mum tipped her head toward the gate in a Let's go signal. "Look, I...I can't talk about this right now. Our flight, it's boarding."

"I know." She took her Underground ticket from her jeans pocket, and made like she was very interested in reading it. She wiped her eyes. "Suppose I should catch my train back."

I'm no idiot when it comes to reading girls. I knew she was hoping I would sweep her into my embrace, give her a long movie-style goodbye kiss, and tell her I would never forget a single moment of my time with her. But that would be a lie. And while ordinarily I didn't mind lying to help spread the rumor that I was charming, today my mind was short-circuiting. My house, I thought like a blubbering child. Someone else was going to live in my house. Even if I came back to London I couldn't actually go home, ever again. It was over; it was done; and all because I had said, "Yeah, brilliant, let's go to America!" Why? Why had I said it?

In a way, the answer was the same as the problem standing in front of me: girls. If I had a weakness for girls, I had a special weakness for American ones. There are some weird reasons behind that, which I won't go into right now; but honestly, that had been the main thought sustaining me these past months: immigrate and conquer! And too bad for the English females I was leaving behind.

Bloody idiot, is what I was. Hating everyone, most of all myself, I hoisted my luggage onto my shoulder, and advanced the two steps necessary to peck Miriam on the cheek. "Goodbye. Don't be sad, all right?" With that bit of wisdom passed on to her, I turned and walked away.

My parents and I hustled through the gates and tunnels, and down the ramp onto the plane; shoved our luggage into the overhead compartments, and dropped into our seats. Mum and Dad remarked in their usual start-of-holiday voices, "Well, this is it!" and "Here we go!" and so on. But this was not another holiday, as they well knew. I looked out the window and didn't answer. A lorry trundled by with "British Airways" painted across its side, touching off another twinge of early homesickness in me. Christ, how pathetic.

The plane rolled forward, making a whining sound similar to Miriam's. She would be sniffling alone on the tube by now. I'm not entirely horrible; I did sense I had messed up that goodbye, and felt bad about it. But what did she expect, freaking me out with the "I love you" business? Three weeks, we had known each other. Honestly.

I watched Heathrow speed by faster and faster. We lifted and began to soar. City buildings and railways shrank to thin lines, and gave way to green countryside and grey villages. Blue summer sky filled more of my window, with an edge of brown London haze.

I touched the glass with my fingertips, and tried to name the villages. I mostly knew them as stops on the railway. We had traveled a lot, my parents and I, in and out of the UK, but always we had gone back to our same house in London. How could they have sold it? I had never lived anywhere except that house. Now my bedroom was someone else's. It might belong to a teenage bloke like me, or a girl, or an old woman and her cats; but whoever it was, they would turn it into something I wouldn't recognize.

A packet of snack mix landed in my lap, doled out by the flight attendant and handed over by my dad. I looked at it and thought I might throw up. Too depressed to even move it off my knee, I looked at the window again and hurried my brain along to somewhere else.

I was leaving friends behind besides Miriam, but they were nothing special. The ones I liked best had already scattered to colleges or universities, and thrust bits of paper at me with their new email addresses scrawled upon them. "Write to me from America," they had said, as if I was already gone. I wouldn't miss them, exactly. But leaving everything I had lived among for the past eighteen years--that was turning out a good bit more disturbing than I had expected.

"Suppose you'll miss that girl," my father commented.

Irritated to be forced to think about Miriam again, I muttered, "Not really."

"'Not really'?"

I didn't answer.

He turned in his seat to face my mother. "Did you hear that, Jenny?"

"I heard him, darling."

Dad sifted through the magazine collection stuffed in the pocket of the seat before him. "Just another girl cursing the day she met you, eh?" He wasn't criticising me; he was congratulating me. Dad, I suspected, had been quite the ladies' man in his youth. Girls were always telling me how handsome he was.

Dry sarcasm, one of my defence mechanisms, answered for me. "No girl has ever regretted meeting me."

Mum uttered a gentle snort--"Oh, God"--and rolled her eyes.

Dad winked at me. "That's the spirit. Whole new continent of 'em, right?"

Too close to truth. I produced a fake smile and looked away. Then, as my parents began chatting to one another about whether they'd eat the nibbles now or wait till drinks were brought round, I closed my eyes, and went hunting for optimistic thoughts about the future. The United States. The University of Oregon.

Yes, the Uni, where I would have to live on dormitory food, endure a roommate I had never spoken to in my life, go to classes, study, write essays, pass exams, and generally survive in America a hundred miles from my parents, when all I had ever done was live in England with them.

Panic spiraled into my stomach again. I fought it back with the best weapon I had: The girls, think of the girls; American girls, girls drooling over your accent, girls you can bring back to your dorm room...

But though I had recited that mantra to myself for months, and though it had generally worked, I only felt unhappy now. I wished, like a total loser, that I had applied to a university in London and that my parents had never sold their house nor accepted the Oregon job.

Right; anyone got a bloody time machine?

* * *

Spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains; you name it, I saw it all as we soared from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Portland, Oregon. Trapped in the endless afternoon of an east-to-west flight, unable to sleep, I stared out the window at the country I would have to start calling "home." Oregon's mountains loomed larger as our plane descended. Even in late August, snow capped the highest peaks, as if we were in Switzerland.

My mother, leaning over me to look at the landscape, murmured, "So big. So easy to lose someone in all that."

I glanced at her, and felt bad for subjecting her to this. Had I thought even once of how my own parents might feel about moving to a new country and breaking off their old ties? Likely not. They were polite, reserved people, and even I believed most of the time that they had no deep emotions. I suppose such a belief is common among teenagers, boys especially. I leaned aside so my shoulder pressed hers, and she smiled and squeezed my wrist. Good; perhaps she didn't blame me.

In Portland we caught another flight, a small special one my parents had arranged, which took us southeast to the mountain town of Sunriver. Mum and Dad worked in tourism, and thus had the connections to do things like book crop-duster-sized planes for us. They probably could have transferred anywhere; their employer was a resort company with holiday condos all over the world. I remember they had an offer once to move to Australia, and had asked me what I thought. I had been about thirteen, and had said--more wisely that time--"I don't know; seems a bit far away." (Not to mention crawling with deadly reptiles.) So we had stayed. But dangle American girls in front of me, and look out.

My bitter regret, in combination with my jet lag, almost made me wish our tiny plane would crash into a mountain. But no such luck.

At the Sunriver airfield a rental car awaited us. A stout grinning man with a broad American accent held the keys, and made sure before allowing us to have them that my father had driven on the right side of a road before. Dad, who had zoomed us all over the Alps in a rented Citroen, and up and down tiny Swedish streets in a Volvo, promised the fellow we would be all right. We packed our luggage into the Ford sedan, and set off for the new house.

Sunriver. I had loved the sound of it. From the name alone you could practically see the sunlight flashing off the mountain streams. (Girls, my mind helpfully added, skinny-dipping in the river and sunbathing nude on the rocks.) It had seemed a new and sparkling name, full of promise, not like the stodgy old British place-names I lived among.

In reality, of course, it was not what I had pictured. The scenery, mind you, was everything the brochures promised. The mountains, which I examined from the back seat with my head sticking out the window, were stunning; the air clean, the sunlight glittering, the pine trees tall and majestic. On the other hand, it was too bloody hot, which was why I had the window down in the first place. Most of the ski slopes were dry and rocky, as it was August; but the chairlifts still operated, carrying sightseeing tourists to the tops of mountains and down again. The buildings we passed were wooden structures slapped together within the last 50 years, which looked as if the trees and hills were about to swallow them up.

For, you see, Sunriver is not quite a proper town. It is a tourist trap--precisely why my parents were there, but still it was strange to imagine living in it. It was all gift shops, golf courses, and ski resorts. At least I would be living down in the valley at the University, in Eugene--a dull place compared to London, but at least a real city.

Dad drove us past a gigantic new wood-frame building, its trim painted green and white, with a car park larger than some London neighborhoods. "There it is," he announced. "Whitecrest. Looks good, doesn't it?"

I grunted politely in answer. To me it looked like a log cabin had mutated and grown out of control due to an alien virus.

Mum peered at it. "The flowers look nice. I'm glad they've got the window-boxes done."

We drove on. Our new house stood nestled among pines on a quiet and curving street a mile or so from Whitecrest. It, too, looked like an overgrown log cabin, but when we went inside I found it was brand new and quite clean, and pleasantly cool after the sun outdoors. With my carry-on luggage over my shoulder, I wandered up the carpeted staircase, and calculated that it was 1:00 a.m. London time. The fatigue of the journey weighed me down.

"That can be your room," Mum called, seeing me pause at a doorway at the top of the stairs. "For when you're home, that is. You grown-up university man, you."

I let the luggage slump to the floor, went forward to the bed, and crashed face-down on the bare mattress.

* intermission *

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:00:07 GMT

Just dropping in to say: Hi, all!, and: Thank you for adding this journal! I expected it to be me, my husband, and maybe one or two bored people. Instead it seems I've gained at least a dozen bored people. The Britpicking and other feedback has been most helpful so far, and I'm applying what I learn as I go along. (e.g., I mentioned "Baudelaire prints" on Sinter's walls. Woops; Baudelaire didn't do drawings. I meant Beardsley. But while Sinter, I'm sure, would know the names of both Baudelaire and Beardsley, I don't think Daniel would, so they've been changed to "spooky black-and-white art prints.")

Anyway, I reckon I'll post installments every four days, in groups of 2-4 chapters; whatever equals 5000-7000 words (as chapter length varies). Four days is a long enough interval to allow you to catch up, but short enough that you won't forget what was happening. Next installment will thus be posted Thursday.

Lastly, this whole thing is kind of an experiment in reader reaction. The story resembles the Jerry Springer show more and more as it goes along, so I'll be curious to hear if you find it amusing, or off-putting, or like a fascinating train wreck, or what exactly. Apologies ahead of time for any squicks I unleash. ;)

Relatively Honest - chapters 1-4

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:16:15 GMT

What is this journal? Read the explanation here.

Without further ado, the first four chapters of Relatively Honest, rough draft. Later chapters will be friends-locked, so comment if you want to be added. Thanks for dropping by.

RELATIVELY HONEST

Chapter One: Leaving England

"Oh, Daniel, you're leaving so soon!" said Miriam, throwing her arms around me. "I can't survive without you!"

Damned mawkish schoolgirl. I embraced her and tried to sound sympathetic. "Don't be upset. In a few weeks you won't even remember my name."

"It isn't true. I'll never forget you." She fell to sobbing against my coat lapels. People were looking at us. Stop! I thought. I've only known you for three bloody weeks! What's wrong with you?

"Miriam, please don't cry. I won't have you in this state when I get on the plane."

"What else do you expect me to feel? I've only just found you, and now you're flying off to--to--thingum--that state--"

"Oregon." For the thirteenth time. I could only pray she wouldn't remember my new address. "Look..." I stroked her hair awkwardly. "The flight's been announced. I can't very well board an airplane with you dangling from my jacket."

She turned away, her hands covering her face. "You make it sound like I'm a nuisance to you. And at a time like this--how could you?"

You knew all along I'd have to leave; why pretend I'm such a bastard all of a sudden? I took a deep breath and amended, "It was a joke; I wanted to cheer you up. I hate to see you this way."

"Oh, Daniel, I'm sorry." She threw herself at me once more. "I just can't bear it--I'll never see you again!"

"Never say never. But really--I have to go. They're announcing my flight. You wouldn't want us to miss our connection to Bend, would you?"

"I thought it was Oregon."

"The city; the city is Bend, the state is Oregon. I'll explain it later, in a letter or something. Now, really..." I extricated myself and backed away before she could fly at me again. "Have a good summer, Miriam."

"Oh, Daniel!"

"Look after yourself." I backed farther away.

"Daniel?"

"Yes?"

A trembling breath, then: "I love you."

I felt every muscle in my body seize up. No, not that, don't say that. God, why do they have to say that? One thing was certain: I was leaving the room--the country--and I was leaving now. "Well," I said, "I'm sorry, but I can't stay."

"You don't love me, do you."

I took another step backward. "There's just no way I can stay. Come on, you're lovely; you'll find someone else."

"Daniel..." Her eyes filled with tears, again.

I was convinced my flight was going to leave any moment, whether I was on it or not. "Listen, I'll write to you," I said.

"Fine." She looked down, miserably twisting her jumper sleeve in her hands.

"I will. Honest." I hesitated. Should I collect every reserve of kindness and sympathy in this final moment with her? Or be exceedingly brief and make it quicker for us both? Without much dithering, I opted for the latter.

"Goodbye, Miriam," I said, and picked up my luggage and walked away: Daniel Revelstoke, bastard.

She said nothing at first; there was silence behind me. I felt a twinge of sorrow for her. But then she started calling after me like a bad actress.

"Goodbye, Daniel! Don't forget me! Write to me!"

I was certain she was waving a handkerchief and that everyone in the airport was staring at us. I did not turn around to check.

I jogged to catch up with my parents, who hustled me impatiently through the turnstiles and tunnels and gates. We handed over our tickets to be stamped and torn, trudged down the ramp to the plane, shoved our luggage into the overhead compartments, and finally dropped into our seats. All the while I thought of those frightening, absurd words--"I love you"??--and felt every inch that increased the distance between Miriam and me like extra breathing space, fresh air after being cooped up indoors for three weeks. Callous bastard? Possibly. But I couldn't handle it, I just couldn't.

The plane began to roll forward, making a whining sound similar to Miriam's. I watched London speed by faster and faster. We lifted and began to soar. I scanned the city for all the landmarks I had always known, watched the Thames unwind and the spires of cathedrals thin to narrow points as we ascended.

I touched the window glass with my fingertips, and mouthed, "Goodbye, Britain." My native island rolled away beneath me, and I wondered when I would see it again. I pictured scads of girls down there sobbing as they watched my plane fly off. I smiled.

"Suppose you'll miss that girl," my father commented.

"No, Dad, I won't."

"You won't?" I didn't answer. He turned in his seat to face my mother. "Did you hear that, Jenny? He says he won't."

"I heard him, love."

"Must say, that sounds a little cruel, Daniel."

"Not really. She knew I had to leave."

Dad sifted through the magazine collection stuffed in the pocket of the seat before him. "Just another girl cursing the day she ever met you, eh?" He wasn't criticizing me. He was congratulating me. Dad, I suspected, had been quite the ladies' man in his youth. Girls were always telling me how handsome he was.

"Really, Dad," I chided. "No girl has ever regretted meeting me."

Mum uttered a gentle snort--"Oh, God"--and rolled her eyes.

Dad winked at me. "That's the spirit, lad. Whole new continent of 'em, right?"

I winked back in answer. Then, as my parents began nattering to one another about whether they'd have the biscuits now or wait till drinks were brought round, I closed my eyes and nestled into my seat.

I'm not an entirely horrible bloke. I did feel slightly bad about Miriam, who had been hoping for a steady boyfriend, true love, passion, devotion, rose petals, et cetera et cetera. I hadn't been out to hurt her or anything. It's just she was pretty, and we had a good chat at the party where I met her, and I wanted someone to snog during my last month in London. Preparing to move house is such a bore, and it's best if you can spice it up with a little flirtation.

Anyway, Miriam should have known better, shouldn't she? Got what she deserved, if we wanted to be truthful. Awfully stupid to get attached to someone who was moving to another country in three weeks--especially someone like me, who any of her friends could have warned her about.

Well, there would be no one to warn the American girls. I was getting a clean slate with this move. I was eighteen, about to start at university, and could introduce myself as a man, an exciting grown-up stranger, at last. It was finally going to happen.

Yes, and when it did happen, I would also have to live on my own, trust to dormitory food to sustain me, endure a roommate I had never met or spoken to in my life, go to classes, study, write papers, pass exams, and generally survive in the United States without my parents, when all I had ever done was live in England with them. Panic spiraled into my stomach. I fought it back with the best weapon I had: The girls, think of the girls; American girls, university girls, girls you can bring back to your dorm room...

I pictured resting my head in a young woman's lap and exaggerating my own accent for dramatic effect: "I miss London ever so much. Perhaps I don't look it, but I'm dreadfully lonely, you know. The reading room at the British Museum--why, it's like heaven. You can't imagine." (Utter rubbish. I've never spent above ten minutes in the reading room of the British Museum.) To which, of course, the young collegiate would coo, "Oh, you poor thing!," and start giving me a massage. That would be my ticket, for I'm very good at turning massages into something more.

I rehearsed this scene in my head over and over until it took the effect of counting sheep, and I drifted off and forgot where I was.

* * *

Spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains, and fruited plains; I saw snatches of it all between drifting clouds as we soared from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Portland, Oregon. The mountains loomed larger as our plane descended toward Portland. Even in late August those mountains had snow on top, as if we were in Switzerland.

My mother, leaning over me to look at the state of Oregon, murmured, "So big. So easy to lose someone in all that."

I glanced at her, and felt bad for not thinking even once of how my own parents might be feeling about moving to a new country and breaking off their old ties. They were your stereotypical prim, polite, button-up-your-feelings English people, and even I bought the act most of the time. Now I leaned aside so my shoulder pressed hers, and she smiled and gave my wrist a squeeze. I am a good boy. Mother loves me.

In Portland we had to catch another flight, taking us back eastward again and to the south, to the Bend/Redmond airport, which was the nearest major airfield to the resort town of Sunriver, where my parents would be living and working from now on. At the Bend airport we had a rental car waiting for us. The man at the counter, with a broad Western American accent, made sure before allowing us to have the keys that my father had driven on the right side of a road before. Dad, who had zoomed us all over the Alps in a rented Citroen, and up and down tiny Swedish streets in a Volvo, promised the fellow we'd be all right. We packed our luggage into the Ford sedan they brought us, and set off for Sunriver.

Sunriver. I had loved the sound of it. From the name alone you could practically see the sunlight flashing off the mountain streams. (Girls, my mind helpfully added, skinny-dipping in the river and sunbathing nude on the rocks.) It was a new and sparkling name, full of promise, not like the stodgy old British place-names I was leaving behind.

In reality, of course, it was not what I expected. It was both more and less impressive. The mountains, which I examined from the backseat with my head sticking out the window, were stunning; the air clean, the sunlight glittering, the pine trees tall and majestic. On the other hand, it was too bloody hot, which was why I had the window down in the first place. Also, the buildings were nothing special: wooden structures slapped together within the last 50 years, for the most part, which looked as if the trees and hills were about to swallow them up.

Sunriver was pleasant enough. There were hotels, golf courses, and ski resorts--precisely why my parents were there. In this blazing warm season, the ski slopes were dry and rocky, but the chairlifts still operated, carrying sightseeing tourists to the tops of mountains and back down again.

Dad drove us past a gigantic new wood-frame building, its trim painted green and white, with a car park larger than some London neighborhoods. "There it is," he announced. "Whitecrest. Looks good, doesn't it?"

I grunted politely in answer. To me it looked like a log cabin had mutated and grown out of control due to an alien virus.

Mum peered at it and observed, "The flowers look nice. I'm glad they've got the window-boxes done."

We drove on. Our new house stood nestled among pines on a quiet and curving street a mile or so from Whitecrest. It, too, looked somewhat like an overgrown log cabin, but when we went inside I found it was brand new and quite clean, and pleasantly cool after the sun outdoors. With my carry-on luggage over my shoulder, I wandered up the carpeted staircase, and calculated that it was 1:00 a.m. London time now. The fatigue of the journey was crashing down upon me.

"That can be your room," Mum called, seeing me pause at the doorway of a room at the top of the stairs. "For when you're home, that is. You grown-up university man, you."

I let the luggage slump to the floor, went forward to the bed, and crashed face-down upon the bare mattress.

Chapter Two: Someone Else's Girlfriend

It took me a few days to adjust my internal clock eight hours backward, away from Greenwich Mean Time and onto Pacific Standard. I kept waking up at odd hours, and feeling tired in the middle of the day. But I adapted, and the excitement of being in a new place helped me focus. I had the luxury of being able to sleep in, go out, wander around, and generally do nothing for the next two weeks except prepare for university.

My parents did not have that luxury. They reported immediately to Whitecrest, and took up their posts as acting managers of the new resort. They spent all day there, getting to know the employees, planning the upcoming ski season, inspecting rooms and facilities, and suggesting improvements. Their 20 years in the tourist business had given them lots of experience, and they had received several offers to move to exotic spots and help manage some resort or another. Not until now had they taken such an offer--probably because I was about to leave their roof for uni, and they would no longer be uprooting me from my school friends. They had given me the choice to stay in England and pursue my studies there, but the Western States had sounded so exciting, I had opted to go with them and use their new house as a base camp for my American adventures.

My American adventures, however, hadn't been much so far. They had consisted mostly of a lot of unpacking and loafing. On our third day in Oregon I hooked up my laptop computer and sent an email to Miriam, telling her we had arrived safely. Two hours later she sent me back a rambling response, all one incredibly long paragraph, telling me how much she missed me and what she had done each hour since I left, and something or other about her sister's romantic problems (I stopped paying attention around there). It felt like it would be an essay assignment to answer that in full, so I put it off a day, and then finally typed:

Hallo Miriam,

Can't write much at the moment, as I'm dreadfully busy with unpacking and then repacking for university, but thanks much for your sweet letter. Hope all is well with you, pretty girl.

-Daniel

If you must let them down, let them down with charm, I say.

After a lazy breakfast by myself at 11:00 a.m. on our fifth day in Oregon, I walked down the winding road to Whitecrest and went in to have a look at the place. My parents' connection to resorts usually meant I could get free postcards, and I thought it would be nice to send one to Miriam. Besides, I had overheard my parents discussing the problem of the chambermaids flirting with guests on work time, and naturally I needed to have a look at that.

Behind the reception counter sat a fellow wearing a white polo shirt with the Whitecrest logo on it. The logo had a skier and a tree that looked to be on an imminent collision course with one another. According to my mother, when I had pointed this out weeks ago, the skier was supposed to be dodging the tree, but I could never see it that way. It made me smile every time. The fellow wearing this logo now, who looked to be about my age, glanced at me from the sports magazine he was leafing through, and said in a bored tone, "Hi, can I help you?"

I leaned on the counter and said, "Hi. I'm Daniel Revelstoke. I'm looking for my parents."

Naturally this bloke--Patrick, said his blue plastic nametag--knew the name of the two English people who had arrived and taken over management. Patrick improved his posture a bit. "They're out," he said. "Schmoozing some Japanese guys. Driving them up the mountain, showing them the sights, trying to convince them to hold their company retreat here."

"Ah." I pulled back. "Just thought I'd stop in and say hello. Thank you, all the same."

Before I could leave, he set down the magazine and said, "So you grew up in England?"

Duh, one was tempted to say. "Yes," I answered. "London."

"Cool." He was watching me as if measuring whether I was worth his time. He was clean-cut, and seemed intelligent, though with an arrogant glint in his eye. "So, did you move here with your folks, or are you just visiting?"

"I moved here." Deciding to give him a chance at being a friend, I smiled and added, "First time in America, except for a short trip to visit colleges. Funny, considering my parents work in tourism."

"Well, I'll tell you one thing. You'll get plenty of dates, with that accent."

"That's good news," I said, though it was far from being news to me. By this point in my life I had already met plenty of American, Australian, Canadian, and other English-speaking girls who had told me how much they loved my accent. "I imagine my girlfriend wouldn't think it was good news," I added, as an afterthought.

"She live back home?"

I nodded. "Ex-girlfriend, really. We agreed it wasn't going to work out, over all that distance."

Patrick arched his eyebrows and picked up a Whitecrest ballpoint pen, which he started clicking. "My girlfriend and I are going to work it out," he said. "Even when she's in Oregon and I'm in Boston."

"Mm," I answered. I considered apologising for the distance comment, but stayed quiet.

"I'm going to Boston U.," he continued, and glanced at me, as if expecting me to ask for his autograph now.

"Good school?" I ventured.

He snorted. "It's a great school! Way better than anything out here on the west coast, I'll tell you that. I'm working on Julie to convince her, too."

"Your girlfriend," I guessed.

"Yeah. Oh, by the way, I'm Patrick." He stopped clicking the pen and reached out to shake my hand.

"I know," I said, giving him my cool professional handshake (not the warm clasp I used for ladies). "I can read."

He looked at his own nametag and grinned. "Yeah, good point. Well, anyhow--Julie's going to University of Oregon this fall, but she'll see what a craphole that is. I'm betting she transfers to Boston within the year. She's smart enough; she totally could."

"In that case," I said dryly, "perhaps I'll be transferring with her. I'm going to craphole--er, Oregon--as well."

He had picked up the pen again, and was now flipping it into the air and catching it. "Are you? Well, then, you'll see. I mean, what kind of college has a duck for a mascot?"

"I did wonder about that," I admitted.

"You could do better. You probably could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge or something if you'd stayed in England, right?"

"Well," I hedged, "I considered York..."

"School in England. That'd be awesome." He kept flipping the damned pen. "I should do a year abroad."

"Yes, that's always pleasant," I said. He was welcome to get on the plane right now, as far as I was concerned. My interest in befriending him had died already. I started looking around for chambermaids.

"I'm actually going to Eugene with her, for the first week," Patrick went on.

I suppressed a sigh, waiting for his monologue to end. "Really?"

"Yeah, since I don't have to be in Boston till later, figured I might as well hang out with her for as long as I can."

"Indeed." I took a step away from the desk, preparing to leave.

"You could hitch a ride with us," he suggested. "If you need a way to get there."

"Oh, I'm sure I can manage..." I started to say, but just then Patrick stopped listening to me.

He had caught sight of someone behind me. He dropped the pen, and jumped to his feet, grinning. "Heeeere she is," he said. "Hey babe!"

I turned, and forgot all about chambermaids.

She had a cloud of strawberry-blonde hair, drifting in carefree summery waves down to the level of her chin. Long bare legs carried her at a brisk stroll across the lobby toward us, to the snapping sound of flip-flop sandals. Her blue-painted toenails matched the sky-coloured flowers in her swimsuit. She had a faded beach towel draped around her shoulders. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair as she reached us. "Hey," she said to Patrick, smiling. She sent me a casual glance, perhaps thinking me a hotel guest waiting for the rest of my party. Her eyes were a light green-brown. I've always appreciated a well-done makeup job on girls, but this girl appeared to be clean of anything except a sheen of lip balm for the August sun, and looked adorable and perfect exactly as she was.

She leaned across the counter on tiptoe to kiss Patrick on the lips. "Came to swim in the pool," she told him.

"Oh, and here I thought you came to see me," he said, pretending to pout. Then he glanced at me, and told the girl, "So, you know the new English bosses I was telling you about? This is their son."

"Daniel Revelstoke," I said, and gave her the warm hand-clasp I hadn't given Patrick. "Pleasure to meet you."

"Hi," she said. "I'm--"

"Julie French, my girlfriend," Patrick cut in.

Oh, no no no, my dear boy, I chuckled, in my mind. I'm afraid this one is for me.

Julie's eyes turned to him, narrowing in amusement. "Thank you, Pat. I can say my own name."

"I was just telling him how you should give him a ride to U. of O.," Patrick said. "He's starting there in the fall, same as you."

"Oh!" She looked at me, eyes lighting up. "Are you? I assumed you were just visiting."

I shook my head. "I'll be right there in Eugene, with the rest of the ducks."

"Well, we were planning on leaving a week from Monday. If that works for you, and you need a ride..." She lifted her fine eyebrows, in invitation.

I didn't even look again at Patrick. "I would love a ride," I said.

Chapter Three: The Mysteries of Mum

The next day I was tempted to go back down to Whitecrest and hang about the swimming pool, in case Julie French returned for a dip. ("Patrick" being his name, I joked to myself.) However, it was unwise to be too obviously interested in someone else's girlfriend, so I held off, and went for a walk in the forest instead. Before long, Julie and I would be together in Eugene for months on end, while Patrick was away in Boston. There would be plenty of time to work on her.

I had a rule of never actually cheating with anyone else's girlfriends (I drew the line at kissing and anything heavier), nor did I cheat on any girlfriend of my own. Cheating was more trouble than it was worth. My preferred method was to devote myself entirely to one girl, but break things off when it started getting tiresome or I started becoming attracted to a new person. That was only fair. And there had been quite a few girls who had broken up with their boyfriends in order to be with me, once I started paying special attention to them. I counted in my head, as I batted at tree branches along the forest path: six, no, seven of my twelve girlfriends in the past had been attained that way. Shall we go for eight of thirteen, Julie?

When I got home, I was damp with sweat, and went straight to the kitchen for a glass of water. The windows were open, and the warm breeze swirled through the house. It brought me snippets of my mother's voice from the deck overlooking the backyard. I could only hear a word here and there. I went to the sliding glass door, which was also open, and peered out. She was standing at the railing, listening to someone on the cordless phone. Her back was turned to me. She had changed out of her work clothes and into shorts and sandals and a loose blue linen shirt. Her straight, tidy hair moved in the wind. I had inherited its colour--a black-coffee brown--but not its texture. There I had inherited my father's, wavy and unruly.

I glanced around for Dad, but didn't see or hear him. The new car hadn't been in the driveway, either, so it was possible he had gone out to fetch supper.

"I know," Mum said, to whoever was on the phone. "I would like to come see you, now that I'm here. Then perhaps this all wouldn't feel so clandestine. Though I suppose it must, until I talk to my family."

I only stared. I hoped I had completely misinterpreted what she had just said. She didn't sound affectionate, just honest and somewhat regretful, but then even if grown women were talking to lovers they tended not to giggle like teenaged girls...dear God, did my mother have a lover?

She turned sideways, caught sight of me, and looked startled. I put a smile on, looked out at the mountains, and sipped at my water, pretending to be unconcerned, pretending I'd heard nothing.

"Well, I must get going," she told the person, sounding a bit more businesslike now. "Awfully busy, you know. We'll talk later. Thank you. Goodbye." She switched off the phone, threw me a distant smile, and bustled past me into the house. "Didn't hear you come in! You rather startled me."

"Phoning Robert Redford, Mum?" I said dryly. "Letting him know you're in America now, in case he needs anything?"

"You're very funny, aren't you," she snapped, putting the phone down in its charger. "Just someone about the resort." She collected a handful of papers and envelopes from the dining room table, and went off down the corridor.

I walked out onto the deck, rested my water glass on the wooden railing, and stared out at the Cascade Mountains for quite some time. But I was no longer daydreaming of luring girls away from their boyfriends, and I was no longer smiling.

* * *

By the end of supper, an even more dreadful possibility had occurred to me. It scared me enough that I decided I needed to ask Dad about it. I followed him outside at twilight, when he was going out to the driveway to affix the new registration stickers to the car. As he knelt by the rear bumper and rubbed a spot clean on the license plate, I asked, "Dad...is Mum ill?"

"Ill?" He sounded a bit surprised. "No, I don't think so. Why?"

"Honestly, is she? Don't hide it from me if she is."

He applied the sticker with his thumb, and smoothed its corners. "To my knowledge, no, she isn't. Once again: why do you ask?"

"I...I heard her talking to someone on the phone, and I thought it might be a doctor. She was saying something about...feeling that she had to keep secrets from her family; needing to talk to us. At least I assume she meant us, by her 'family.'"

"Oh, well, that could have been a number of things," Dad said, but now he sounded a bit more puzzled. He was done with the sticker, but still knelt on the pavement, staring in abstraction at the bumper.

Yes, I thought, like maybe she's cheating on you. But that was something I definitely did not want to suggest. "She was just acting sort of strange," I said.

He rose slowly, and swiped his knuckles across his five-o'-clock shadow. That was a feature I hadn't yet shown signs of inheriting. My shaving shadows still took a full two days to appear. "Well, you know," he said, "women of her age do go through certain changes. If she was talking to a doctor, there's always that."

The idea of talking to Dad about menopause was too horrifying to withstand. I took a step backward and starting speaking quickly. "True, suppose there's that. Well--no worries, then. Thanks, Dad."

I went back inside and immersed myself in flipping through the University of Oregon course catalog. Uncomfortable though it made me, Dad's suggestion did seem possible, and I felt a little better. Still, whatever Mum had been talking about today, she clearly hadn't told him. And that kept me worried.

You have other things to worry about, I told myself sternly. For example, what classes are you going to take this term, Daniel? Why not think about that? Concentrate! Decide!

I focused on the course descriptions in front of me, and picked up a pencil to start marking ones that looked interesting.

* * *

The day before I was to leave for university, Mum drove me into Bend to do some shopping for clothes and supplies. The bigger and more practical shops were all there; not in touristy Sunriver.

"I have someone to meet about Whitecrest," she told me, as we parked near a department store in the middle of town. "I'll walk down and see them, while you do your shopping. Shall we meet back here in two hours? Will that give you enough time?"

"More than enough. I'm not a girl," I reminded her.

She scrunched up her nose at me--for I had followed her around in exhaustion while she did endless shopping, on more than one occasion--and then we went our separate ways.

An hour and a half later, I was back at the car with my bags of bed-linens and medicines and socks and ramen noodles. She was still not there. I had a spare key to the car, so I unlocked it and stashed my stuff, and then went to sit in the shade on a bench near the shop. I watched passers-by for a while, hoping to get lucky and run into Julie French. In my brief conversation with her and Patrick, I had learned they both lived in Bend, and went to Sunriver for skiing or hiking, or for a summer job in Patrick's case.

But I recognised no one until Mum returned, walking down the street in a hurry. Before she saw me, she stopped in the middle of the pavement, seemed to remember something, and turned round and rushed off again. All of a sudden it occurred to me that her "meeting about Whitecrest" might not actually be a meeting about Whitecrest at all. I jumped to my feet and, I hate to admit, stalked my mother through the streets.

Within about three blocks she went into an office building. It was a rather cheap one, I saw as I reached it: it looked like it had once been a shop of some sort, with display windows on the ground floor and what might have been apartments on the floor above. We also did not seem to be in the finest street in Bend. Litter peppered the gutters, and all the windows needed washing. I stepped up and read the lettering on the glass door: Bill Manning, Private Investigative Services.

Puzzled, I ventured forward and looked in. I could see my mother's back, through one of the storefront windows. She was picking up her purse from where she had evidently left it and forgot it, on a chair in front of a man's desk. He was standing, grinning at her while she explained. He was thin and middle-aged, with greasy-looking grey-brown hair; but then one never knew what women would find attractive. They stayed and chatted for half a minute or so, then shook hands. The man clasped her shoulder in a friendly-looking sort of way. This was not some stranger who had just now happened to find her purse; I felt sure of it.

But, seeing that my mother was about to leave the office, I scurried away, and jogged back to the car before she could come out. While I sat there catching my breath, I wondered in bewilderment, Has my mother hired an investigator? Or is my mother seeing an investigator? Neither option seemed appealing. I hoped I was getting it all wrong.

In a few minutes she reappeared, waved to me, and unlocked the car. "Get everything you need?" she asked.

"Yes." I climbed in, and we both rolled down the windows as she started the car. The August heat made me dizzy. "Who was it you had to meet?" I asked, keeping my eyes on the road ahead.

"Just someone interested in booking rooms, for the resort."

"Didn't know you'd make house calls for that."

"Well, they're considering quite a lot of rooms. For the ski season, you know. A special party."

It could have been true, I thought. It was possible. But reading the lines between the things women said had become a study of mine, and I fancied I had got pretty good at it over the last few years. And--I hated to think it of my own mother, but--she seemed to be lying.

That evening I found myself alone with Dad on the deck, tending to steaks on the gas grill. "If someone wanted to book a whole suite of rooms at Whitecrest," I said to him, "would you need to go meet with them specially to arrange it?"

"Don't see why," Dad said. He prodded a steak with a fork. "They could call reception for a reservation."

"For a large event, even? Would they have to talk to you or Mum personally?"

"For a large event I suppose they'd have to meet with someone, but most likely it wouldn't be us. It would be Christa, our events coordinator." He leaned back to avoid a sizzle of steam, and shot me a frown. "Why? Did someone call here with a request?"

"Oh--no. I was just thinking about it. For my classes." I was going to be majoring in Leisure Studies, the program for the hotel managers and golf-course-owners of the future, so as to follow in my parents' footsteps and use their connections toward an easy career. Dad seemed to buy my excuse, and returned his attention to the steaks. But I was more troubled than ever. Mum was up to something behind Dad's back, not to mention my back, and it did not seem to be anything good. She had seemed withdrawn and thoughtful now for weeks, now that I thought back upon it. And tomorrow I was leaving, to live in a city a hundred miles away, and could not keep an eye on whatever was developing in my normally reliable little family.

I'm so worried, I imagined saying to Julie French, with my head resting in her lap. My mother might be ill, or dying, or about to divorce my father, and here I have to cope with it on top of surviving my first year at university... And I don't even have a girlfriend to talk to...

But my scenario didn't work in helping me fall asleep this time. Trouble seemed too real, and Julie seemed too indistinct. I had only met her the once. I could barely even remember her face.

Chapter Four: Away to University

The next day my parents were posing me in front of the house for a photo, making me hold up my University of Oregon course catalog, when a blue two-door Toyota from the early '90s drove up and stopped at the curb. I tried to fling the catalog away onto my luggage, but Mum barked at me to keep holding it and keep smiling for just one second. So, posing like an absolute git, I let her take the picture while Julie and Patrick got out of the car and stood there grinning at me.

Though last night I had barely slept, today I was itching to get away and start my adventure. I still worried about Mum's behaviour, but had come to the conclusion, as I tossed and turned, that the best thing I could do was to go to college, work hard, give her the space she obviously wanted, and come back after the first term as a young man she could be proud of. Maybe by then she would be willing to tell us her troubles--or, better yet, perhaps her troubles would all have worked themselves out by that point and gone away. (Denial, as you know, being not just a river in Egypt.)

My parents greeted Patrick, whom they already knew from Whitecrest; and shook hands and exchanged first names with Julie, who looked as pretty as I remembered. Her hair was held back with a wide yellow scarf today, and glinted red in the sun where it escaped. She wore a forest-green tank top and denim shorts, and blue canvas shoes with no socks. My dad, as I put my boxes and bags into the boot of the car, winked at me with a quick and meaningful glance in her direction. I only smiled.

My parents asked me for the hundredth time whether I had everything.

"Mobile?" Mother checked.

I took the flip phone from my pocket and held it up.

"Little black book?" Dad said, and gave my elbow a nudge, chuckling.

"Dad, that is so '70s," I complained.

"His little black book would be too heavy to carry anyway," Dad informed Julie and Patrick, and I wanted to slap duct tape over his mouth. Did he think he was doing me a favour?

All the same, I hugged him goodbye, and said low in his ear, "Look after Mum."

"Of course," he said, sounding jovial, if a little confused.

I hugged Mum, who was sniffling and dabbing tears away from under her elegant sunglasses. "Don't worry," I told her. "I'll only be three hours away. You'll still be able to hear my music."

This made her laugh, amidst the torrent of words she was producing about how her baby was going off to college, and between one phrase and another I made my escape. The whole scene was starting to remind me a little too much of Miriam. (Never did send her that postcard, did I? Oh well; she could do with one from the University. If I remembered.)

"Revelstoke," Julie said, as she drove us away from my house. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

I had turned to wave out the back window at my parents, and now settled myself forward again. "Well," I began, but Patrick beat me to an answer.

"Because of Tarzan," he said. "Of Greystoke." Then he laughed, a loud nasal bark I was to grow all too familiar with in the next three hours.

"It's also a town," I said coolly. "In British Columbia. Just a small one. I looked it up in the index of an atlas, once."

She snapped her fingers. "That's it! We must have gone through it on our way to Whistler. Remember, Pat?"

Pat reached over and squeezed her thigh. "That was a great trip."

The backseat of Julie's car didn't seem like such a glorious place to be anymore. I grimaced and turned my attention to the scenery. One week, I reminded myself. That's all you get, Patrick, then it's my turn.

By the time we reached the city limits of Eugene, two and a half hours later, I had begun to think this afternoon would never end. Patrick talked on and on and on. When he did ask me questions about England, he was patronizing. ("Do you guys even have peanut butter?" he asked, pausing while handing me one of the peanut butter sandwiches Julie's mother had packed for us. "Yes," I said. "Television and microwaves, too.") My only reward was that Julie, on some of my smart-arse rejoinders, had caught my eye in the rearview mirror and given me a smile.

On the rare occasions Patrick stopped talking, she asked me about Britain too, but in an intelligent fashion, listing not only famous places but somewhat obscure locations by name.

"Are you sure you haven't been there?" I asked her when she rattled off some architectural details of Salisbury Cathedral.

"I'm sure," she laughed. "I'm just interested in history. Buildings and artwork especially."

"Ah."

"Plus, I'm part English, so it's in my blood."

"Everyone's part English in this country," Patrick smirked, through a bite of sandwich.

I ignored him and asked Julie, "Will you be majoring in History, then?"

She nodded. "With probably an Art minor. I'd love to work in historic preservation."

"She's going to be, like, the curator of the Smithsonian," Patrick interjected, his mouth still full. "Or the person in charge of renovating all of Boston's cathedrals or something. Right, hon?" He groped her thigh again, probably smearing her with peanut butter.

I rolled my eyes and went back to watching the outskirts of Eugene crawl into view. I had been here before, for one whirlwind afternoon, on a trip in June with Dad. We had looked at this university as well as four others in and around Oregon. But I couldn't say I was familiar with the town, or remembered much about my first visit except a few campus buildings where we had stood still long enough to form an impression. I now saw it was in most ways a typical university town, with perhaps a higher than average number of bead shops and tattoo parlors. As we drew nearer to campus and stopped at a red light, the scent of incense and the sound of a steel-drum band floated in through Patrick's open window.

"This place has never gotten over the '60s," he said. He glanced over at Julie. "If I come back to visit, and you have a nose ring and smell like patchouli, I'm going to kidnap you and take you to Boston by force."

"Relax," she said lightly.

I had to admit, grudgingly, that I didn't fancy the idea of Julie in a nose ring and smelling like patchouli either. For all Patrick's other faults, he had good taste in women--obviously.

"What dorm are you in, Dan?" Julie asked, lifting her face to me in the rearview mirror.

"Thornfeld," I answered.

"Really? So am I!"

"Are you?" I brightened up. "That's fantastic."

"Small world," muttered Patrick. His displeasure only made me happier.

When we got to the dorm, however, it was time to split up and move into our separate rooms. Julie was on the second floor, an all-women's floor; and I was on third, which was all-men's. We checked in with the Resident Assistant, a grad student named Mary Jo. She found our respective keys, and Patrick and Julie trudged up to second to get Julie settled into her new room.

Mary Jo picked up one of my boxes and walked me upstairs to the room that would become my home for the next nine months. She thumped down the box in front of a door, and knocked on it. "Your roommate checked in," she explained. "Sinter." I knew his name was Sinter Blackwell, from the information the university had mailed me, but the way she said it, drawling the syllables with a flat look at me, seemed ominous. There was no answer to her knock, so she unlocked the door and opened it.

I took one step, and froze in place. My roommate was not evidently present, but he had certainly left behind an impression. Over his bed he had suspended a black sheet, like a canopy, rigged up with what looked to be fishing line and thumbtacks. The smell of clove cigarettes and leather boots lingered in the air. His blankets were a dark tartan; there was a huge Union Jack hanging in the corner over his desk, blocking out the light from the window; and in the spaces of ceiling and wall left to him, he had begun to stick up posters of Goth music groups and spooky black-and-white art prints. A scattering of rolled-up paper on his desk suggested he was going to fill in the rest of the wall space later, but had left it for the time being. Probably doesn't come out during the strongest hours of sunlight, I found myself thinking, my mind racing in uneasiness. Must be lying in a coffin under the bed.

Mary Jo read the expression on my face. "Yeah," she said. "If it gets too weird, come talk to me. We'll see about moving you to another room. Well--" She put the keys into my hand. "Good luck." She glanced once more at the bat-cave Sinter Blackwell had made of his bed, then shook her head and left.

I swallowed, and tried to focus on getting my own stuff put away into my side of the room. All right, so my roommate's a nutter, I thought, as I unpacked my clothes into my closet. Needn't be a problem. It will give me interesting stories to tell Julie--and excuses to spend time in her room. Unfortunately, though, Patrick would be commandeering her time for the next week, so I had to get through at least seven days of the nutter on my own.

I had left the door to the hallway open, as it felt less claustrophobic that way. Therefore, when I was on my knees under my desk, plugging in my computer cables, I didn't realise anyone had entered until he spoke.

"Are you Daniel?"

He sounded hesitant and fairly ordinary, but I was so startled I smacked my elbow against the corner of the desk--and when I looked at him I was even more startled. "Yes," I said carefully, rising to my feet and rubbing my bruised arm. "Hello. And you're...Sinter?"

He nodded, examining me without a smile. He looked, if anything, even more alarming than you would expect him to look from his interior décor. He was probably six feet tall, a bit taller than me; and seemed thin, but it was hard to tell, the way he had shrouded himself in clothing. Though it was a hot September day, he wore black from head to toe: black jeans, black chunky Doc Martens boots, and an oversized black shirt with long sleeves. His hair was black too--most likely a dye job--and might have touched his shoulders if it hadn't been so spiked up. It lent him another four or five inches of height; and against it his skin was quite pale. His blue eyes were shaded with black eyeliner all the way around. What, no lipstick?, my mind joked, out of sheer nervousness.

"Good to finally meet you," I said, with considerable effort.

He clutched a brown paper bag, and my eyes kept darting to it, fearful of what it might contain. He was still examining me, from the doorway. "The room assignment said you were from Sunriver."

"Only in a way. I'm really from London."

"Oh." He seemed to come alive a little. "Cool. Thought I heard an accent."

"And you're from...sorry; where was it?"

"Beaverton." He drew a pair of sunglasses and a pack of clove cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and tossed them onto his bedspread. "It's near Portland." He reclasped both hands on the paper bag, and slowly opened it.

I watched, almost holding my breath. I'm not sure what I thought it would contain--a gun? a bottle of absinthe? the skull of a cat?

Instead, he pulled out a little clear plastic box. "Ran out of thumbtacks," he said, "so I went over to the store. Got some Oreos and milk, too, if you want any." He tilted the open bag toward me.

I relaxed, in amused relief. "That sounds lovely. Thank you."

Half an hour later, we were sitting on the floor, facing one another with our backs against our beds, the open pack of Oreos and two U. of O. mugs of milk on the floor between us. "So I guess I'll try to do theatre on campus when I can, but career-wise," he was saying, sucking crumbs off his fingers, "fuck, I have no idea. How can you answer that when you're 18, you know?"

"Completely," I said. "I've chosen my major, but I sometimes fear I'm only taking the easy route, following what my parents did. Being a lazy bugger when I should be striking out on my own."

"Nah. You have the connections; you ought to use 'em. Besides, you get to travel the world when you go into tourism," he said. "I'd go into it myself, if I had any customer service skills." He swigged his milk. "Enough about careers. Let's cover the important stuff. What kind of music are you into?"

I squinted past him at his posters, which he had finished putting up. "I like that band, that one, and that one," I said, pointing at each in succession; "I'm not too keen on that one; and the rest I've never heard of."

He looked over his shoulder at them. "You should have. Most of them are from your country."

"Anglophile, are we?" I smiled, flicking my gaze toward the Union Jack.

"Oh. Yeah." He scratched sheepishly at his scalp. His fingers disappeared in the black tangle. "I wouldn't have hung up that flag if I knew you were actually English. I can take it down."

"Yes, how dare you fly our flag, you bloody Yank? No, honestly, I don't mind. I'm perfectly used to seeing it."

"I've never even been there," he sighed. "I'm a total American poser."

"I'm sure you'll be sick of everything having to do with England, after living with me for a year."

"I doubt it. If I save up enough, I'm ditching this place and running off to the U.K." He threw away his crumpled-up paper towel. "By the way, I should warn you: I've never had a roommate before. I'm an only child."

I spread my arms. "In great company, mate."

"You too? No siblings?"

"Not a one." I shoved the Oreo tray back into its plastic casing and leaned back. "So: as my roommate, what is the one thing you're likeliest to do that will drive me mental? Let's get these issues on the table straight away."

He nodded, resembling a bobbing black palm tree, and ran his tongue over his teeth while considering his answer. "Be moody and listen to depressing music, and whine that everybody hates me," he said.

"No problem. Should I keep a suicide hotline on speed-dial?" I took my mobile phone out of my pocket.

"Shouldn't come to that. What about you?"

"My most annoying quality?" I pressed a phone button with my thumb, and smiled at the long scroll of names and numbers that appeared--almost entirely women. "I'll bring home girls," I said to Sinter. "And get up to things you'd rather not see."

"Hm." He frowned up at his funereal decorations. "Will this stuff kill the mood?"

"Not at all. It'll be a conversation piece." I put the phone away. "Well, looks like it's 5:00. Want to get some dinner? The dining hall should be open."

"You're willing to be seen in public with me?"

He was joking, but only on the surface. From a quaver in his voice, I sensed he meant it, which I found touching. "Sure." I jumped to my feet. "Why not?"

"Got to say," he confessed, as we walked down the hallway, "I was worried you'd be a bonehead jock or something."

"I was worried you'd be like Patrick," I answered.

"Who's Patrick?"

"Oh, let me tell you all about that."
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(Chapters 5-7 or thereabouts to come mid-week, if there's any demand. Thank you if you read this far!)