Wildwood Read Free Page B

had swollen up so it looked like he was sitting on a basketball. Jeanne had decided the penis was the ugliest of any body part and she was really glad she didn’t have one and that she hadn’t seen Billy Phillips’s. She finished her cobbler, washed her dish and left the dining hall. Bells rang every hour at Hilltop so she knew it was after three. Too soon to go home.
    Jeanne’s mother had fallen off the water wagon again so she had a pretty good idea what awaited her at home. Mrs. Hendrickson would be sitting in the little den with a book open on her lap and a tall glass of water beside her. It wasn’t really water; it was vodka, only Jeanne wasn’t supposed to know that except one time she had sneaked a taste.
    Instead of going home she walked around the far side of the rose cloister, across Casabella Road and scrambled up the hill to the flume that had until recently carried water from the reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to the town below. She hoisted herself up and walked along until she had a clear view of the Santa Clara Valley. The calendar in the school kitchen had a view of the valley at blossom time: from Rinconada to the San Jose foothills, nothing but prune plums and apricots in bloom. Under the picture it said, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” In August all Jeanne could see were trees and green and a few streets and houses. In the distance—exactly eleven miles from Rinconada according to the sign at the town limits—she made out a half dozen medium-tall buildings in San Jose and beyond the little city the rolling eastern foothills the color of late summer gold.
    The hills looked like breasts. Jeanne didn’t have any yet. She hadn’t started her period even. But she knew it would be soon. She had looked up puberty at the library and found out that the few hairs sprouting under her arms, which she carefully kept cut back with scissors, meant she was on the edge of, just beginning, puberty and pretty soon she would have to buy Kotex and a belt and remember to bring an extra one to school or she’d bleed all over everything like what happened to one of the girls in her class last year.
    She would be glad to start her period even if it did mean she couldn’t swim or go on hikes or ride her bike for five days out of every month. The sooner she grew up the sooner she could go to Cal and get away from her parents. Her brother Michael had gone to Stanford and Jeanne didn’t think she could stand to walk where he had, maybe sit in the exact same classrooms as he.
    No one ever said so, but Jeanne knew Michael and his buddies had been drinking when their car hit the abutment on the Bayshore Freeway. Three years had passed since he died and she still felt angry with him because he had broken his word to her. She remembered a time when she was small—only six or seven and he was in high school—and she told him he shouldn’t drink beer or he’d end up being like their father. Michael had laughed and promised her he would never do that. The lie was bitter in her memory. Jeanne had vowed she would never be more than a light social drinker. She would never be like her parents.
    She lay down on warm boards over the flume and folded her hands behind her head. There were a few clouds, harmless white puffy things in funny shapes. An elephant, a face with a big nose, one looked like a penis. She started thinking about Billy Phillips again. Something dug away at the edge of her memory. She chewed on the end of her braid as she tried to think. It was important, whatever it was.
     
     
    The evening of the day Billy Phillips died, Liz Shepherd tried to tell her parents what had happened. Twice she went into the study where her parents worked after dinner. She had practiced her speech, not wanting to waste their time. A bad accident had happened. Hannah got scared. Billy Phillips did something nasty . . . Her father read in his Eames chair and her mother sat at the desk correcting papers.
    “Yes, Liz?” She