If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

I DO THAT SOMETIMES

CONCLUSION

When Anigel returned, her girls raced to her and Binh said, “Oh my God, you are the coolest. You’re just like The Red Tent.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s this book where these women, every month when they have their period all go into a red tent together and just hang out.”

“It’s not just women,” Freestar said. “It’s the women from the Bible.”

“I don’t read the Bible,” Linh said.

“Well, you should.”

“Anyway,” Linh dismissed this, “they stop working every month and just have this girl’s club and pamper each other. It’s awesome. I want to do it so bad. We should start a red tent.”

“You all do what you want,” Anigel said, “but I bleed a lone.”

Niall Dwyer, who was there because Cameron was there and he would need a ride from her said, “Actually my mom and my Aunt Lee said it was selfish and gave a bad name to women to act like your period was some big sickness.”

“You ever had a period?” Anigel asked him. “Or, anything, little man?”

“I’m just repeating what they said.

“Well,” Anigel said, ignoring that these women were also Cameron’s mother and aunt, “I don’t know those white bitches and they can fuck off. But I will tell you this, some bitches don’t like other bitches to take up space cause they never learned to take up space for themselves.”

Niall blinked.

“And you can tell those bitches I said that.”

“I don’t think I will.”

“Actually, I wish you would. And now, girls, let’s get to practice.”

They practiced outside because the weather was nice and Anigel didn’t think it would stay this way much longer. Boys were there. They always were, as if hanging around OLM in the afternoon wasn’t much fun. After five thirty, the football players arrived to join the rest of them. Ralph was there, feeling himself. Anigel would have never thought about that if Russell hadn’t let slip a story about him and some cheerleader against the back of a field house. She had to admit she loved him. She didn’t love many people, but she did love Russell. Gil had confirmed things and she didn’t respect many people but she respected Gilead Story. Now Chris Knapp arrived and he arrived with that Mark Young. They must have been friends and she didn’t know much about Mark Young except that he really liked Gilead which made him a man of good taste, which must have made Chris Knapp alright too.

“I didn’t care this much about high schoolers when I was in high school,” Anigel thought, and she would say that when she got home tonight.

“Have a good night, Ani,” Cameron said, coming out of the gymnasium where they had gone to change back into regular clothes.

She gave Anigel a quick hug and Linh came out and did the same, waving as she went to Jeremy Bentham’s car.

But Cameron usually went home with Linh and Jeremy. Tonight, though, she came to Chris’s car, and Mark climbed into the backseat.

Chris Knapp was a strange wolfish looking boy, a combination of rumpled and handsome, with an always five o clock shadow and naturally spiky hair.

“I promise we’ll take good care of her,” Chris told Anigel. “In fact, we’re taking her straight home.”

“Alright,” Anigel affected a shrug as she gathered her things and moved toward her El Camino.

Why would he think she cared? Except she did. She was coming to care about this place and these girls.

With the kids leaving now and six o’clock approaching, Anigel could see what had always been true, how Rosary was on the less than good side of town, near where downtown became Westhaven. The old clapboard houses looked especially lonely rather than dangerous, and there was a feeling in the air that it was time to get going. Few kids left, and Ralph was among them. She drove down Main until she reached downtown and the bus station, the Osco, the few almost tall buildings and turned south on Brigham, heading toward Caroline and John and remembering her childhood in this part of town.

She was always surprised that town wasn’t very big, that her part of town wasn’t but fifteen minutes on a good day from Chayne’s house on Curtain, but now she crossed over the river into Little Poland and she remembered Bill Barnes. They’d been in eighth grade at Saint Celestine’s and that year she liked to stay in for recess as much as possible and didn’t like having to go outside and deal with other kids.

Bill said, “Hey, Annie, what about this?”

He had leaned back in his chair. She was erasing the chalkboard for Miss Scanlan, and she didn’t shriek, but she did reel when she saw that Bill, who was grinning at her, had taken his dick out and was stroking it as he leered at her.

“Give it a suck,” he said. “I think about you giving it a suck all the time.”

Anigel can never remember what she said. She’s embarrassed by the whole thing. She just remembers Bill putting it back in his pants and how she was always afraid to be left alone with him. She was afraid for another two years until she went to Rosary, and as she continues down Brigham Street, she’s angry at this boy she hasn’t seen in almost ten years for making her afraid.

No one ever thought of her as afraid. She had become what people now see by the time she was sixteen. Every morning she would wind her way from East Street to Westhaven Avenue to Banner and stride half dressed into the hallways of the old school, climbing up to the crowded girl’s bathroom where she and they finished their hair, put on the little bit of makeup the nuns wouldn’t make them remove and finished one cigarette before heading to chapel.

Senior year she’d at a party and on her way to the bathroom when she walked in and sees Domenico Battista leaning against the sink, getting his dick sucked by Laura Parnelli who always acts like sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Anigel’s face heats up and she hears Bill Barnes saying, “Give it a suck. Give it a suck.”

She was never sure if she imagined the look on Dom’s blissed out face as he stroked Laura’s hair and told her suck it, give it a suck. She thought about Cameron in the car with those two boys. It momentarily flashed through her head that they might be raping her. She threw that nightmare out, except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was a real enough thing for girls from Rosary to get from boys at OLM, one of the reasons she’d gotten tired of religion.

But Mark and Chris were more likely to rescue a puppy from a burning building than to do something violent, and she knew they had experienced violence. That poor Mark had been in the car crash that killed his best friend, though apparently he never talked about it, and there were rumors about Chris, about abuse, about how he had been the same age she was when Bill Barnes had done what he had done. Something had been done to Chris. It wasn’t much talked about. She doubted he’d want to discuss it.

On Calvert Street, three blocks from her sister’s, she stopped and looked at the grey edifice of Saint Celestine’s. What a love hate relationship she’d had with this old church. But no, it was love, and in fact that she hated how much she loved it.

It had been in the heat of spring she had turned her back on all of this, on churches and faith. It was in the early night of an oncoming fall, as she parked her car in front of Saint Celestine’s and walked up the steps, that she acknowledged that maybe she had not been completely right.