Mathilda Savitch. Victor Lodato

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       7

      This morning, after breakfast, I went outside to smoke a cigarette. It was from my mother’s stash, which she keeps in various hiding places around the house. Ma doesn’t smoke anymore, that’s the story we’re supposed to believe. The lie of the universe, one of many. Ma doesn’t drink either, if you want to have the whole blanket over your head.

      The cigarette is extra long. I decide not to light it, Ma will smell it. It’s just as good to hold it in your hand. I haven’t actually smoked a cigarette yet but I’m going to at some point, and how you hold it is significant. My way, I’ve decided, will be to hold it between my forefinger and my thumb, like a man. When you hold it like this you have a kind of power.

      The family next door, the Ryders, are having a new swimming pool put in. I don’t know what was wrong with the old one. There’s a bulldozer going, the noise is amazing. When the sun comes through the dust, it’s weird, like poison gas.

      On a hill above the pool is a white gazebo. It belongs to the Ryders but they let me have a birthday party there once. When I was ten. I wore a blue dress with yellow ribbons on it. The gazebo doesn’t have any walls, just columns and a roof, and with the dust from the bulldozer blowing through it, it’s like a postcard from Ancient Greece. I hope they’re not going to knock that down too.

      Kevin Ryder is by his back door watching the destruction. I go over toward the fence to make him notice me, but he doesn’t. Kevin’s brother was one of Helene’s lovers, by the way. They used to make out in the gazebo.

      “Kevin!” I practically have to shout to get his attention.

      We both move a little closer to the fence.

      “Do you have a light?” I ask him.

      He puts his hand up to his ear. I can’t hear you.

      I tap the cigarette against my mouth to make him understand.

      Kevin looks confused. He shakes his head. He’s wearing a big silver chain around his neck and his hair is blue. It’s a completely different person from when he was little. He also has black fingernails. But his face is still the face of a baby, even though he’s probably thirteen already. I wonder what his mother thinks of his hair. She probably fainted when she saw it. God, I’d love to make Ma faint. Just once, just to teach her a lesson. But the truth is people don’t faint as much as they used to. In the old days people fainted all the time.

      Suddenly the bulldozer stops, it’s like a waterfall of silence. Kevin and I stand under the roar of it.

      “You smoke?” he says. “You’re allowed to smoke?”

      “Oh yeah,” I say, “just not in the house.”

      Kevin nods his head, maybe he’s underestimated me.

      “What did you do to your hair?” I say.

      “I’m not gonna keep it,” he says.

      I tell him I like it.

      “I don’t know,” he says. He turns away from me and looks at the destruction again. He starts to play with the chain around his neck.

      “I have to get going,” he says.

      I ask him does he want to go up and hang out in the gazebo. I fake puff on my cigarette. He just stares at me.

      “Come on,” I say, “like the old days.”

      “I can’t,” he says, “I have homework.”

      Homework? I think. A boy with blue hair should not have to do homework.

      “How’s your brother?” I say.

      Kevin nods his head and then looks at his boots. I wonder is he afraid of me. A lot of people are funny around us, Ma and Da and me. They don’t want to get too close to the curse of the Savitches.

      I have a letter from Kevin’s brother under my bed, an e-mail he sent to my sister.

      “Does he have a new girlfriend?” I say.

      “You shouldn’t smoke,” Kevin says.

      I fake puff on the cigarette and blow the invisible smoke in Kevin’s face.

      “See you Mathilda,” СКАЧАТЬ