Althea and Oliver Read Free

other would have to watch you go? They cleaned frantically for hours. Finally, Althea sent him home because he was running a fever. He went to sleep that night and stayed that way for the better part of the next two weeks, and while he was gone she’d noticed there was something different about the way she missed him. It was colored with impatience and expectation, as if they had been in the middle of a conversation, interrupted just as he was about to tell her something important and she was forced to wait for the right moment to ask, “What were you going to say?” She was missing something that hadn’t even happened yet and couldn’t happen until Oliver was awake and accounted for and finally paying attention.
    It had been her mother, of all people, who had intuited the shift, coming right out on the phone one day and asking if she and Oliver were having sex.
    â€œI don’t expect your father to talk to you about birth control,” she’d begun, and Althea had cut her off at the pass, saying that her health class had covered the subject thoroughly. Nevertheless, Alice had barreled on. “Are you two still having sleepovers all the time? You’re too old for that now, you know; you can’t be sleeping in the same bed like you did when you were kids.”
    â€œOur raging hormones have yet to get the better of us.”
    â€œThere are places where you can go to get the Pill. You don’t even need to involve your father.”
    â€œI just told you I’m not having sex. Why would I need to go on the Pill?” Althea responded.
    â€œYou know, it can make your breasts bigger, too.”
    Althea had never told her mother of the shame her flat chest inspired, and she had marveled then at how, in their first conversation in months, Alice could identify the unbearably specific miseries Althea never shared with anyone. Althea had handed the phone to Garth out of sheer embarrassment, and he took the rest of the call in his study with the door closed. He had emerged red-faced and poured himself a scotch, and after that started leaving the basement door open when Oliver was over. Her parents’ apparent confidence that she and Oliver either were or would soon be sleeping together only made her more disconsolate as she pitched and turned in her bed at night, wondering why Oliver remained willfully oblivious to what everyone around him appeared to consider a certainty.
    â€œThere’s nothing happening with me and Oliver,” Althea had protested into the phone, and in retrospect it was obvious that her vehemence had given her away.
    â€œOh, Thea,” Alice had said. “Be patient.”
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    Oliver wakes her up a week later. In the dark, she hears him padding down the basement stairs, recognizes those familiar footsteps. Garth is a heavy sleeper, and Oliver’s been slipping into the Carter house with his own set of keys for years. According to the cable box, it’s almost three a.m. Sitting on the edge of the couch, Oliver slides an arm around her waist.
    â€œYou’re here,” she mumbles, rolling over onto her back. The quilt slips away, and her T-shirt rides up. He joins her, biting lightly on her shoulder, his bared teeth pressed against her skin through the cotton. “When did you wake up?”
    â€œI’m hungry,” he says. “I want Waffle House.”
    â€œWaffle House is gross.”
    â€œI want Waffle House.” Oliver’s eyes are glassy and swollen, a slight purple sheen to the lids. His icy fingers loiter on her bare knee, and her leg breaks out in goose bumps, calling the blonde stubble to attention in a way that makes her follicles ache.
    â€œBut you hate Waffle House,” she says.
    â€œI don’t care.”
    â€œCan’t I just make you a sandwich?”
    â€œIt has to be Waffle House.” Wrapping his arms around his knees, Oliver begins to rock back and forth, chanting