The Society of S Read Free Page A

van’s doors and sides were the company name and logo: GREEN CROSS.
    Mrs. McG said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Nonetheless, her left eyebrow and right hand twitched.
    Mary Ellis Root made a low-pitched sound, a kind of growl, and slammed her way back to the basement, trailed by a lingering odor of metal.
    “I never talk to the Green Cross man,” Mrs. McG said.
    The deliveries always came to the back door that opened into the basement. Mrs. McG’s face said that her day had been ruined in the space of a minute.
    I left my chair. I took my mother’s cookbook down from its shelf and leafed through it. “Look,” I said, to distract her. “She put four stars next to this one.”
    It was a recipe for cheese bread made with honey. Mrs. McG peered over my shoulder at the recipe, her face doubtful. I leaned back slightly to feel the warmth of her body, without touching her. I felt that this was as close to a mother as I was likely to come.

    Being home-schooled had some advantages, I suppose. I didn’t have to worry about what to wear to school or how to make friends. Periodically I had to take a state-mandated examination, and every time I answered all the questions correctly. My father had stuffed my brain with knowledge of history and mathematics and literature; I could read Latin and some Greek and French and Spanish, and my English vocabulary was so advanced that I sometimes had to define for Mrs. McG the words I used. Occasionally Dennis taught me science; he’d been a medical student at one time, he said, but switched to biology, which he taught part-time at the college not far away. Because of his training, Dennis served as our family doctor and dentist, except when I was very ill, as I was two or three times; then Dr. Wilson was called in. But Dennis gave my father and me vaccinations and annual checkups. Luckily, I had strong teeth.
    Dennis taught me how to swim, using the college pool, and he was my friend as well. He was the only person in our house who liked to laugh and to make me laugh. (Mrs. McG was too nervous to do more than smile, and even then it was a nervous smile.) Dennis had dark red wavy hair that he had cut every month or so; in between it grew almost to his shoulders. His freckled nose curved like a hawk’s beak. Like my father, he was tall, around six foot three, but Dennis was stockier. He had a temper, too; he never hesitated to tell off Root when she was particularly rude or abrasive, and that made him a hero to me.
    One late winter day when I was twelve, Dennis told me “the facts of life.” He blushed when I asked him questions, but he answered every one. He patted me on the head when I couldn’t think of any more questions. After he’d gone back downstairs, I went to the bathroom mirror and looked at myself. Dark hair like my father’s, blue eyes, pale skin. Something stubborn in my face.
    Later that same afternoon I sat and watched the icicles that hung like awnings outside the living room windows slowly drip drip drip. For months the days had been one color: gray. Now I listened to the coming of a new season.
    Outside, my father stood in the driveway. He seemed to be talking to himself. From time to time I’d see him there, oblivious to the weather, deep in conversation with no one.

    Mrs. McG asked me once if I was lonely, and I had no idea what to answer. I knew from books that people had friends, children had playmates. But I had my father and Dennis and Mrs. McG (and Mary Ellis Root, alas), and I had all the books I wanted. So after a few seconds I replied that no, I wasn’t lonely.
    Mrs. McG apparently wasn’t convinced. I heard her talking to Dennis about my “need to get out of the house.” She went on, “I know how much he loves her, but overprotection can’t be good.”
    And soon after that, I found myself in Mrs. McG’s car one rainy afternoon. The idea was that I’d come to dinner at her house, meet her family, then be driven home well before