The Prayers in Rossford

It took three years for Fenn to like Chuck Standard. Freshman year no one really did. He was always calling attention to himself, making fun of everyone. Making fun of Fenn. The fourteen year old Fenn Houghton had a sense that there was a game everyone was playing. He didn’t know how to play it, and didn’t care to learn.

Chuck never left him alone. Now he can’t remember how they went from annoyed and annoyance to friends. But by junior year this is what they were. By junior year Fenn had found some sort of place and was thinking about going out for a play at Loretto. Adele was there at the time and had told him about it. Saint Barbara’s usually did musicals, and Fenn didn’t have much interest in those. Chuck had gone on and on about the Wiz, which he was in that year, and Fenn was going to have to go and see it.

Chuck, who was called Chuckie, sometimes, had turned himself into Chuck E. This was how he introduced himself, and for some reason people outside of Saint Barbara’s, especially white girls over at Saint Margaret’s went wild over him when he did.

Fenn was fair to Chuck. He, frankly, did not understand what was so gorgeous about him. It must have been his personality. Chuck was very narrow, his face was almost sunken. He violated dress code with large belts, pants too low, V necked red rayon shirts from his parents’ closet. He was the opposite of Fenn, who was—at the time—conservative.

Chuck was reputedly a child model. Freshman year he rode down the banister from the second to the first floor singing:

I’m so pretty,

I’m so pretty

Chuck is pretty

Suck my titty!

Also, Chuck had a tendency to moon people. He had a tendency to moon Fenn. Again, the fifteen year old Fenn was not the nearly forty year old one. He was devoutly Catholic and deeply sensitive. He turned his head every time Chuck did something like that. In the locker rooms, when there was a swim class, he tried to ignore those stripping and concealed himself as best he could.

At Saint Barbara’s first computer lab, on computers that bore no relation to anything in existence today, but had been state of the art twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, while Fenn was trying to type without looking at the keyboard, he heard Chuck saying, “Get Fenn.”

Ben, Chuck’s cousin, said, “Fenn. Fenn. Look.”

“Look at—”

Fenn turned around.

Once again, there was Chuck’s ass hanging out of the seat, and he was chuckling and flashing his ass in the middle of class. And then, just before the carcinogenic Father Cliff came by, Chuck pulled his pants back up again.

For the first time Fenn was keenly aware of missing the sight of that ass. He began to wonder if there was another way he might see it again. He realized, to his embarrassment, that he was stiff between his legs.

And that was when Fenn Houghton began to wake up.

“I don’t think I should go to Hollywood after all,” Chuck said their senior year.

They had been study partners a year by now. In all other subjects, through all other years, Fenn had excelled. Fenn was smart, though what Fenn would do with that smartness, no one knew. But it was junior year, when Fenn had to deal with chemistry and geometry that he and Chuck became study partners. For a year now, they had been struggling through math and science, Chuck coming over to the old house Lula lived in now, where Fenn had his room at the top floor, under the attic space that was still Adele’s.

“I can’t count on Hollywood.”

“I never did,” said Fenn.

“I saw you in that play at Loretto. You could do some Hollywood.”

Fenn just looked at him.

“I think I would rather do Loretto.”

“You want to stay in town for school?”

“I don’t know,” Fenn shrugged. “It’s good enough for Adele, I guess it could be good enough for me.”

“Father Ron says we need to start thinking about that now.”

“Father Ron is a man who’s spent his whole life wearing one outfit and living off the Church.”

Suddenly Chuck began singing, “I’m so pretty…”

“Don’t start that again.”

“I’m so pretty—”

“Are you pretty as a covalent bond? Define a covalent bond.”

“I don’t know what the hell that is,” Chuck said.

“I’m so pretty,” Chuck stood up.

I’m so pretty

I’m so pretty

I am pretty and witty

I’ve got titties

Look at my boodie!”

“Good God,” Fenn said, feigning offence. And then he was aware that he was only feigning it. That Chuck had done it again for the first time in over a year. So much of Chuck was angles and bones, but this right here was soft and dusky, the color of deep caramel, and Fenn wondered what it would be like to touch it. What Chuck, who was dancing around singing, would do if he touched it. So just before he could pull up his pants, Fenn did. He did at the same time he felt he was stiff in his pants, and Chuck shuddered and stopped dancing.

In the room they stood like that. Chuck with his pants down in front of Fenn leaning over the bed, stroking him tenderly. And then Fenn caught Chuck’s slim hips, and pulled him to the bed. Suddenly they began kissing, Chuck’s long hands reaching to hold his scalp, Fenn’s hands pulling up his shirt, wanting to see him naked, amazed at the length of Chuck’s naked body, the brown and tan and gold of it, the bareness and the narrowness of it, the length of the penis in the spring of dark brown hair, how it rose up. Chuck’s hands were on him now, helping him undress, though he had been ashamed of his body before. He wasn’t thin and narrow. He wasn’t sexy. No one wanted him.

And then Chuck was on him. Chuck’s mouth was sucking him, and then they were kissing again and for instruction, the whispered desires in Fenn’s flesh guided him, all that afternoon they guided each other while the chemistry books lay open and abandoned and as the sun set and the bed creaked, their bodies spasmed, and they groaned with orgasm.

“This is nuts.”

“I thought that every girl in the world liked to take moonlit walks on the beach.”

“Firstly,” Nell said, shoving her hands into her coat, “I haven’t been a girl in a long time. And second, most girls don’t think about walks on the beach in February.”

“Well, I could always take you back,” Bill said.

“No,” Nell pulled him by his mittened hand. “No.”

“I used to come to the beach all the time in winter,” Bill said. “When I lived here. I still do back home. But the Atlantic has this way of not freezing. Here… You see some of the waves just sort of freeze in the middle of breaking over the water. The forms are amazing. And… walking on a frozen beach. That’s something.”

Nell shoved her hands, and therefore one of Bill’s, deeper into her pockets and shivered, not with cold, but with the pleasure of the grey white sky, and ice grey water and the chunks of white ice.

“It is. It’s a whole other world. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for showing me this other world.”

“I wish I could show you everything. I wish we could show each other everything,” Bill said. “You deserve it.”

And then, they were looking at each other.

“What are you laughing for?”

Bill, chuckling, looked away and said, “I don’t know.”

His face was red, and Nell didn’t think it was the cold. She turned his face toward her, and then, just like that, they were kissing. Bill’s mouth felt so good on hers. She opened her mouth to his tongue, the first tongue in a thousand years, giving into the pressure of his mouth and his hands on her face, giving into Bill, into what she had wanted since that first day. Giving in.

And then, just like that, they pulled from each other in fear.

“I’m so sorry!”

Nell didn’t know if she had said it, or if it had been Bill.

“I’m so…”

Bill turned around and looked at the water. When he turned around, a change had come over him. He looked… less soft.

“Bill…” Nell began.

“Com’on, Nell,” he said briskly. “I’ll take you home.”

There was a rapid banging on the front door, and Dena got up from the beanbag in the library, shouting: “I got it, Mom!”

But when Dena reached the front door, Nell was already coming down the stairs.

“Deen,” Milo said, walking in as his girlfriend opened the door.

“What’s up?” she looked at her boyfriend.

“Grandma sent me here.”

“Barb? What for?”

“For—” Then Milo stopped, and looked up at Nell.

“For you, Mrs. Reardon.”

“Huh?” Nell said, coming down to them. “Whaddo you mean, Milo?”

“Grandma loves you,” Milo said. “Both of you, really. And she’s sure that Bill does too.”

“Well, Bill’s married,” Nell said, surprised by her own sharpness. She put a hand to her mouth, but Milo didn’t notice.

“It’s not just that,” Milo said. “He left a note. That’s all he left.”

Nell looked at Milo strangely.

“What are you saying, Miles?” Dena said.

“He packed up,” Milo told them. “Uncle Bill’s gone.”

End of Part One