Lost Girl, The

James Morrison

Description

In The Lost Girl, James Morrison finds a compelling lens through the eyes of a young person trying to understand the world and her place in it. In stylized prose both elegant and spare, saturated with irony but fraught with tenderness, Morrison raises questions about modern life that become more pressing by the day.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602359710
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

By the same author Broken Fever


The Lost Girl
A Novel
James Morrison
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2007 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrison, James, 1960-
The lost girl : a novel / James Morrison.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60235-010-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-011-3 (acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-012-0 (adobe ebook)
1. Psychotherapy--Fiction. 2. Loneliness--Fiction. 3. Satire. I. Title.
PS3563.O87458L57 2007
813’.54--dc22
2007014796
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com . For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


For Bonnie, Jenny, and Patty and for Brianna, Cassandra, and Madeline


Contents
I April, 1992
II May, 1992
III June to August, 1992
IV September and October, 1992
V November, 1992
About the Author


A hallowed thing—to drop a life
Into the mystic well—
Too plummetless—that it come back—
Eternity—until—
I ponder how the bliss would look—
And would it feel as big—
When I could take it in my hand—
As hovering—seen—through fog—
And then—the size of this “small” life—
The Sages—call it small—
Swelled—like Horizons—in my vest—
And I sneered—softly—“small”!
—Emily Dickinson




I April, 1992
PLANS
All boys are prideful, but not all girls are innocent.
In her deepest heart Cecelia knew this axiom to be true not only because it was a repeated lesson of the afternoon talk-shows she loved—the girls who gave abusive boyfriends one more chance, the boys who commanded the love of many girls at once—but because the experience of her own life, limited as she knew it was, attested to the truth of it.
Before third-hour, she made plans with Melanie Markovitch to go to the mall the following Saturday afternoon. Then, just as class was about to start, she heard Melanie laughing, two desks behind her, at something Tiffani Brickley was saying. They were laughing at her—Cecelia was certain. With her complexly teased hair and her fastidiously made-up face, Tiffani Brickley never seemed to refrain from making fun even in passing of Cecelia, whose hair was straight and face scrubbed clean. Tiffani’s mockery was of a disturbing and distinctive kind: casual, off-handed, even somehow good-natured, sideward, inexplicably peripheral. Her words of airy contempt were like tiny birds fluttering at the edge of your sight, gone before you knew they had been there. This ephemeral quality made it even worse, for Cecelia felt that there was no real way to justify to herself her own feelings about it. Facing front, a whole classroomful of potential mockery at her back, Cecelia heard Tiffani whispering in her characteristic manner, with that voice of hers, letting you know you were supposed to laugh, even if what she was saying was not funny. Cecelia heard Melanie cluck her tongue in response, pretending she did not want to laugh at something so mean, but laughing anyway.
Well, thought Cecelia. She caught herself rolling her eyes and promptly put a stop to it. Then she drew her breath and counted to ten. Being nice was all she had going for her.
At the end of the hour, a hunched-shouldered Melanie sidled up to Cecelia, hips swinging delicately as she maneuvered among the close-set desks, and told her that she would not, after all, be able to go to the mall the next Saturday. She had forgotten, Melanie explained, but she had already made plans. Could they go the following Saturday? Cecelia knew what these plans were: Tiffani Brickley was having a sleepover after the dance that night, a sleepover to which she, Cecelia, was not invited. It was no surprise that Cecelia was not invited. She was never invited, and it did not matter. But why, in any case, should the sleepover—a thing that would happen at night —preclude going to the mall, in the afternoon? Cecelia lowered her eyes slightly, fixing them on the silver-veined plastic of Melanie’s braces, and replied, distantly, that she would have to see.
ONLY ONE
There was going to be a fight after school. What had caused the conflict no one knew, but word of it circulated so freely through the hallways between classes that even Cecelia, ordinarily well apart from the networks through which such news traveled, heard of it. The fight was to be between Ray Schlesinger and Jeffrey Usick (“ You sick, Usick? ” his classmates taunted him); and it would take place—so it was said—in a vacant lot between Cecelia’s bus-stop and her house. Because of this proximity, Cecelia did not think she could avoid witnessing the fight, and she felt a strange combination of revulsion and curiosity at the prospect of it. She had seen fights on television, on the cowboy shows her grandfather had loved, where the sting of fist on flesh sounded like raw meat being slapped down on the hard surface of a butcher’s counter; but she had seen only one fight in real life. It had been in fifth grade, between two quiet boys whom nobody much cared for, Ricky Lane and Marky Elsenheimer. An explosion of fury in the middle of the playground—and Cecelia had witnessed it only from a distance. Through the legs of jeering onlookers Cecelia had glimpsed the two boys rolling in the dust, kicking and gouging and hitting and biting, without restraint, like two cats Cecelia had once seen, locked in a murderous embrace. The closeness of the struggle disturbed Cecelia, whose own anger (but had she ever felt such anger as this?) compelled her to seek a careful distance from whatever, or whomever, was its cause. Why should hatred, if that was what it was, yield such intimacy? By the time the two boys were separated by indignant principals and belatedly vigilant teachers, they had hurt each other badly, and Marky Elsenheimer bore scars from the fight on his angular, sad-looking face until he moved away the next year.
On most days only Cecelia and Ray Schlesinger dismounted the bus at the stop next to Brayz Hamburgers, a white box of a building with a big plaster mold on its rooftop, depicting a rearing donkey with its teeth bared. On these days Cecelia would tarry so that she could walk behind Ray Schlesinger and watch him until their ways parted at Lancaster Drive and English Street. He had a way of walking that fascinated her. It gave off a kind of exuberant confidence, and this effect was somehow pronounced by the pure white overalls he always wore, which conformed to the shape of his body so as to emphasize the sure rhythms of his gait, the synchronized swing of his hips, the delicate line of his shoulders, at once taut and free. He was a boy of great delicacy, Cecelia thought, even though she was aware that she knew little about him beyond what she could glean from the exact contours of his walk, which she knew (she reasoned) better than anyone. She did not even know which of the houses on English he lived in, though once, driving with Herman, she thought she had glimpsed him mowing the lawn of the big white colonial with pillars on the corner lot, the one colonial in a block of aluminum-sided ranches, its brick a deeper shade of white even than the white of Ray Schlesinger’s overalls. Of Jeffrey Usick she knew nothing except that he was crude and hefty and twice the size of Ray Schlesinger, and he had ruddy, beefy cheeks that imparted a compressed look to the blank face he turned in the direction of teachers who asked him their unanswerable questions, with moist eyes and tight lips that showed he was both sad and angry about his own stupidity. These features made it easy to see already how he would look when he was an old man. As she considered it Cecelia realized to her own surprise—she would not have thought herself sufficiently concerned with such matters to choose a side—that she wanted Ray Schlesinger to win the fight.
On that day nearly everyone got off the bus in front of Brayz Hamburgers. The crowd moved in two linked throngs, one seething around Ray Schlesinger and the other, smaller, around Jeffrey Usick. At the appointed place the crowd formed a charged circle in the center of which the two boys squared off. They hurled tentative but energetic epithets at each other to reactivate the anger that had brought them there, until the most virulent of these words caused them at last to fall upon each other. Cecelia stood outside the circle, her body poised homeward but her face turned reluctantly backward upon the spectacle of the fight. On the other side of the circle stood Melanie Markovitch, watching without significant expression, and beside her stood Tiffani Brickley, fingers of one hand outstretched, inspecting her brightly polished fingernails with something like a pout coloring her made-up face. Cecelia noticed Ricky Lane as well watching the fight from the inner circle, with his fists clenched, and she saw that his look of rage was as stark and as intense as those of th