Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work Read Free

flannel shirt, curling her fingers into his back, closing her eyes to hide, even from herself, how much she loved him.
    When Mr. Dawson arrived, the team was sitting on their practice balls and on the bench, with their heads low. They hadn’t noticed him come in, fingers splayed out in the air. The game of basketball seemed to him a cruel drama written to parody his frustration, and now he was forced to be its director.
    They had only been together for a day, but it seemed to Natalie as if they had been together forever. There seemed no need to tell him anything; with one glance she knew he knew the years they had not been together were little more than preparation for this moment. She could tell from the turn of his hand hanging out the window of his brother’s car what he was thinking about. He was thinking about her. When he looked at her she had to look away. When he thought about her, she was thinking about him. When he looked away, she looked at him; when she looked away, she could feel him looking at her. She realized now that she had always been looking for him, even though they had been in school together, sitting just a few seats away, standing across the playground from each other, he with his friends at the corner of theschool parking lot by the Dumpster, she with hers by the swing sets. She had seen him but not seen him. She had been alive but not alive, until now.
    On the second day she was not in school in the yellow linen shorts her mother had sewn together from Mrs. Nason’s old drapes. There were only a few places she could be.
    Two days later there was a teacher’s meeting after school to discuss the situation, about which no one, least of all the principal, a tall man with Baptist visions, had anything to say. What can we do? Mr. Wally pleaded, his voice gruffer than usual. This was not, in other words, a passing thing. They could not just hold their breaths. The basketball team would not get to the championship, and every day, the men knew, glancing quickly at each other, they would have to see her leaving at the end of the day, as the days got warmer toward June, in her pink flannel shorts, or the blue satin ones, and the white silk shirt or the tank tops, the red bands holding her hair back from her cheeks, walking down the hill, not with Ron, but to be with him in all the dark crannies of the town, wrapped in nothing but his old jacket, arcing her pale stomach toward the moon, her open mouth barely giving voice to her thought: Dion.
    â€œWhat about your mother?” Dion asked as they were walking by the river. “She comes to pick you up outside the library.”
    She was surprised he knew this, that he had been paying attention to her long before today. Maybe she was right about the way love worked; it had been planned all along.
    â€œMy mother can wait,” she said and pulled him forward, down toward the trees. She leaned into him with her hands flat against his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Her lips tasted a little of spaghetti sauce. He pulled her closer and she let her body stand flat against his for a moment before pushing away. He reached for her pants, but she pushed his hand back, explaining to him that love has its natural course. She took both his hands in hers and stood very close to him without touching him. She explained that if they rushed love it would shatter like glass.
    â€œLike glass,” he repeated, amazed at the way she put it. She was like no one he had ever met. He closed his eyes as she touched his face, covered his lips with her fingers. When he opened his eyes again, she was running back up the trail.
    â€œI’ll see you tomorrow,” she yelled and was gone.
    The rotting smell of the riverbank came to him, and he noticed for the first time that the sky was cloudy and the air quickly growing cool. But everything seemed different, somehow luminescent, awash with mercurial light. He sat down on a rock and watched the water swirl in the