studying for his GED, and one night when we were driving back from a
job, he told me he was going to try a semester at a community college.
He wanted to study law.
There was a play that summer at the Worm Creek Opera House, and
Shawn and I bought tickets. Charles was also there, a few rows ahead
of us, and at intermission when Shawn moved away to chat up a girl,
he shuffled over. For the first time I was not utterly tongue-tied. I
thought of Shannon and how she’d talked to people at church, the
friendly merriment of her, the way she laughed and smiled. Just be
Shannon, I thought to myself. And for five minutes, I was.
Charles was looking at me strangely, the way I’d seen men look at
Shannon. He asked if I’d like to see a movie on Saturday. The movie he
suggested was vulgar, worldly, one I would never want to see, but I was
being Shannon, so I said I’d love to.
I tried to be Shannon on Saturday night. The movie was terrible,
worse than I’d expected, the kind of movie only a gentile would see.
But it was hard for me to see Charles as a gentile. He was just Charles.
I thought about telling him the movie was immoral, that he shouldn’t
be seeing such things, but—still being Shannon—I said nothing, just
smiled when he asked if I’d like to get ice cream.
Shawn was the only one still awake when I got home. I was smiling
when I came through the door. Shawn joked that I had a boyfriend,
and it was a real joke—he wanted me to laugh. He said Charles had
good taste, that I was the most decent person he knew, then he went to
bed.
In my room, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. The first
thing I noticed was my men’s jeans and how they were nothing like the
jeans other girls wore. The second thing I noticed was that my shirt
was too large and made me seem more square than I was.
Charles called a few days later. I was standing in my room after a day
of roofing. I smelled of paint thinner and was covered in dust the color
of ash, but he didn’t know that. We talked for two hours. He called the
next night, and the one after. He said we should get a burger on Friday.
—ON THURSDAY, AFTER I’D finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the
nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts,