Craving's Creek

Chapter 1-3

I knock on Alistair’s front door and wait.

God, I hope he lets me in.

My palms are wet and I rub them hard down my jeans. I’m always too nervous when I go over to his house. His mother is onto me big-time. She sees right through my little “we’re just friends and I don’t want to get into his pants” game.

I look through the screen door and see her ambling down. She’s very heavy and hasn’t been seen in anything but that faded blue housedress since Alistair was born. She almost died when she gave birth to him. His parents had him when they were both forty-five years old.

They call him their sweet miracle boy. Alistair played baby Jesus at Christmas until he was six and couldn’t fit in that make-believe manger.

“What is it?” Mrs. Genet asks, her large, unhappy face peering at me through the screen.

“Um, is Alistair home?”

“Yes. Upstairs.” She stands in the door, barely allowing me in, but I slither by her anyway and quickly climb the steps up to the second floor, every creak of wood bringing me closer to him.

Upstairs, I slow down and take a second to steady my heart. “Hey, it’s me,” I say, speaking up into the attic’s open trapdoor. “Can I come up?” I wait and listen to the sounds of suburbia coming from the open windows. After a while, I begin to despair. Sometimes he doesn’t want to see anyone. Even me.

But finally I see his white hand sliding the narrow ladder down to me. As soon as the bottom of the ladder touches the floor, his hand disappears. I wait a few seconds and climb up. I poke my head in the open floor. It’s beautiful up here. All shadows and light. Like a church. And it smells like him. Everything up here is his.

He’s sitting on the scratched hardwood floor, bent over something. I see his hands working furiously. He’s sewing. When I’ve made it up there, I bend my head to avoid knocking it on the slanted ceiling and watch him for a while. I like watching him work. He’s been making his own clothes for years. I don’t know how he does it.

After a few minutes, I can’t wait anymore. I want to hear his voice. Need him to look at me. “Why didn’t you come to school yesterday?” I ask him, kneeling, careful not to disturb anything around him.

He won’t look up at me. His white-blond hair shines in the dusty air. “I had a migraine,” he says in a delicate voice, the needle threading faster now.

“Was it bad?” Alistair has had migraines since he turned thirteen. They sometimes cause him to have hallucinations, which he calls visions. I worry about him. I worry about his head.

He finally looks up at me. “Yes, and the…angel came again.” His eyes are more mysterious to me than the end of the world. “He was standing right there.” He shows me the spot. “But he had black wings this time.”

I swallow hard. I hate it when he talks about that damn angel. He needs to get out more. He’s always alone up here. “What are you making?” I ask, changing the subject. I catch the scent of his breath in the air between us. He’s been chewing on blueberry gum. The scent of his breath makes me horny.

“A shirt.”

“Yeah? It looks pretty good.”

“You really like it?” He holds the shirt up to me, close to my shoulders, my neck. “Hmm, it could fit you,” he says, frowning. He doesn’t notice I’m blushing so hard I think I might be glowing. “I can make some adjustments.” He assesses the shirt I don’t especially like. “I’ll finish it for you then.” He seems pleased and that’s all I ever want.

Just to please him.

“Cool,” I say, leaning back from him. I know our first kiss is coming. It’s going to happen soon, but I won’t rush it. It’ll come. It’ll just come.

Alistair stares down at the mess around him and, for a second, looks like he’s about to weep. I don’t know why he gets the way he gets. It’s like watching a solar eclipse. You know the sun will eventually slide out from under the moon again, but for a moment, your whole world is black. “I haven’t gone outside in two days,” he whispers sadly. Sometimes his migraines get so bad, he can’t stand the sunlight. It’s caused him a lot of grief in the last four years. And he’s lonely.

I don’t want him to be lonely. “Wanna go walk around the new houses and write on the walls?”

“Yes, let’s do that,” he says, standing. He’s short enough to stand without his head touching the ceiling. If he hugged me, which he’s never done, I’d feel his mouth on my collarbone like a moth landing on my skin.

Deftly, he climbs down the ladder and I follow suit. He shuts the trapdoor and locks it. He sticks the key inside his pocket and puts a finger to his lips. His lips are always a little red because he chews on them all the time. “Don’t wake my father up,” he says, and when he says that, the hair on my neck rises.

His father scares the crap out of me. He’s all about muscles and Jesus loving. The Genets are into religion hard. Alistair attends church three times a week.

When we reach the front door, Alistair looks back at his mother dozing off in front of the television. In the other worn-out armchair, his father is slumbering too. The television is blaring out more bad news about Rwanda.

I open the door for us, but for a moment, Alistair only stands there and watches his father with a haunted look.

I can’t leave the house fast enough.