The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely Page B

fault, I guess.”
    â€œHello? Let’s get real here. We were all there together.”
    â€œGet real? People do that?”
    â€œJesus, you’re cynical.”
    â€œLook,” I said, trying to sound a little warmer. “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
    â€œWell, I did,” she said. “I thought it was cool. I thought you were pretty cool.”
    As she spoke it felt like she reached through the phone and brushed my chin with her fingertips. I had to pace while we talked. “Thanks.” I could barely say it.
    â€œI felt bad”—she lowered her voice—“like I was a stuck-up bitch. And then I figured we got you in serious trouble.”
    â€œI don’t think that. Besides, nobody said anything to me. Believe me. Remember? None of us were supposed to say anything. You, Mark, Sophie, me. I don’t know, dumb, deaf, blind, and dumber?”
    Her laughter came through the phone like a hug. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.
    Neither of us spoke for a moment. There was only her breathing, and I could picture her running her hand through her hair while she was thinking. I could see the tilt of her head and that slope of neck I was so used to studying in Mr. Weinstein’s class. I waited. “Listen,” she finally said, “I’m trying to get a jump on my New Year’s resolution. I’ve decided that I need to become less of a bitch. It’s hard, because everybody else around me is one, but I want to try. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be different, you know?”
    â€œYeah. I know how you feel. I want to become someone else too.”
    There was a pause. “So, listen. Sophie and I were going to call Mark and hang out today. You want to come?”
    And, all of a sudden, I had plans. Not an activity, not a job, not some prearranged social disaster waiting to happen that Mother had set up. I had plans to hang out like a normal kid my age. I’d been invited. Get real , Josie had said, and I wondered if that was what they were when they all hung out. Real . In school there was a script. I could talk about the homework, or the books we were reading. I could talk about geometry theorems, but I never talked about how they twisted together in my mind like the braids Josie sometimes wore in her hair. I would never tell her how I noticed that. Was that what I was supposed to talk about now? What I really noticed? I did want to get real, but what had they noticed about me? What was real about me? This was what I thought I had wanted, but now I wondered.
    +    +    +
    Josie and Sophie picked me up a little while later, and we headed to Josie’s house. Ruby, Josie’s family’s housekeeper, made us hot chocolate while we waited for Mark. Even though our families had once been close, I had never really hung out with Mark alone. As far as I knew, neither he nor I hung out with many of the other kids at CDA, but his cultivated distance somehow gave him the appearance that he didn’t need anybody else. I admired that more now.
    When he arrived, he came right in through the kitchen door without knocking. He kissed Ruby hello. He kissed Sophie and Josie hello too. “Donovan’s in on this too?” he asked the girls, but it was a rhetorical question. “Good to see you again, dude,” he said to me. He stuck out his hand, and I took it.
    â€œSorry about the last time,” I said.
    â€œDude,” Mark said, “it was all my mom. She flipped. Let’s not even talk about it.”
    Josie led us out the back door and up the hill to the pool house. We turned on the stereo and sat on stools around the bar. Mark stood behind the bar, packing a bowl. He got it cooking and passed it. Josie had us exhale through a little cardboard tube filled with dryer sheets.
    I hadn’t said much since I’d gotten there and, after the weed, Sophie and Josie wrapped