News of the Spirit Read Free Page B

was better thannothing, affording me at least a certain status among the girls at school; and the Phi Gams saw to it that I attended all the big parties, usually with somebody whose girlfriend couldn’t make it. Often, when the weekend was winding down, I could be found in the Phi Gam basement alone, playing “Tragedy,” my favorite song, over and over on the jukebox.
    Blown by the wind,
    Kissed by the snow,
    All that’s left
    Is the dark below.
    Gone from me,
    Oh, oh,
    Trag-e-dy.
    It always brought me to the edge of tears, because I had never known any tragedy myself, or love, or drama.
Wouldn’t anything ever happen to me?
    Meanwhile, my friends’ lives were like soap opera—Lily’s period was two weeks late, which scared us all, and then Dixie went on the pill. Melissa and her boyfriend split up (she lost seven pounds, he slammed his hand into a wall) and then made up again.
    Melissa was telling us about it, in her maddeningly slow way, one day when we were out at Donnie’s lake cabin, sunning. “It’s not the same, though,” she said. “He just gets
too mad
. I don’t know what it is—he scares me.”
    “Dump him,” Lily said, applying baby oil with iodine in it, our suntan lotion of choice.
    “But I
love
him,” Melissa wailed. Lily snorted.
    “Well…” Dixie began diplomatically, but suddenly I sat up.
    “Maybe he’s got a wild streak,” I said. “Maybe he just can’t control himself. That’s always been Bubba’s problem.” The little lake before us took on a deeper, more intense hue. I noticed the rotting pier, the old fisherman up at the point, Lily’s painted toenails. I noticed
everything
.
    “Who’s Bubba?” Donnie asked.
    Dixie eyed me expectantly, thinking I meant one of the Phi Gams, since several of them had that nickname.
    “My brother,” I said. I took a deep breath.
    “
What?
You never said you had a
brother
!” Dixie’s pretty face looked really puzzled now.
    Everybody sat up and stared at me.
    “Well, I do,” I said. “He’s two years older than me, and he stayed with my father when my parents split up. So I’ve never lived with him. In fact, I don’t know him real well at all. This is very painful for me to talk about. We were inseparable when we were little,” I added, hearing my song in the back of my mind.
Oh, oh…trag-e-dy!
    “Oh, Charlene, I’m so sorry! I had no idea!” Dixie was hugging me, slick hot skin and all.
    I started crying. “He was a real problem child,” I said,“and now he’s just so wild. I don’t know what’s going to become of him.”
    “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Melissa asked.
    “About two years,” I said. “Our parents won’t have anything at all to do with each other. They
hate
each other, especially since Mama remarried. They won’t let us get together, not even for a day. It’s just awful.”
    “So how did you see him two years ago?” Lily asked. They had all drawn closer, clustering around me.
    “He ran away from school,” I said, “and came to my high school, and got me right out of class. I remember it was biology lab,” I said. “I was dissecting a frog.”
    “Then what?”
    “We spent the day together,” I said. “We got some food and went out to this quarry and ate, and just drove around. We talked and talked,” I said. “And you know what? I felt just as close to him then as I did when we were babies. Just like all those years had never passed at all. It was great,” I said.
    “Then he went back to school? Or what?”
    “No.” I choked back a sob. “It was almost dark, and he was taking me back to my house, and then he was planning to head on down to Florida, he said, when all of a sudden these blue lights came up behind us, and it was the police.”
    “The
police?
” Dixie was getting very nervous. She was such a good girl.
    “Well, it was a stolen car, of course,” I explained. “They nailed him. If he hadn’t stopped in to see me, he might have gotten away with