Chapter 40a

Note: I was planning to rewrite the ending (I always rewrite endings) when I revised this novel, but I got such good ideas from talking with a few readers that I wanted to tackle it right away.  So here is the beginning of a new ending.  These alternate-ending chapters will be marked with an a. They begin right after Chapter 39, Gavin's meeting with his advisor, Jeremy Frick. You will see some similarities to the ending I had before, but also some significant differences.  I hope you enjoy it!

It was three in the morning, and Gavin’s beside table was vibrating.  Text message.  Ding. Ding.  Ding ding.

“Shut up.”  He rolled over so he could reach the phone, pulled it off its charger.  He couldn’t really see it in the dark, his vision fuzzy from sleep, so he pressed all the buttons at once.  The screen lit up, went dark, then dinged and lit up again.

Rona.

Pick me up at six.

At six when?  This morning? He rubbed his eyes, slid his finger over the screen of his phone, the only light in the dark bedroom.  The screen turned sideways.  Then the phone turned off.  Fuck. He was too sleepy to deal with this.  He turned it around in his hands, pressing buttons until he got it to turn back on.

Okay, there. Previous messages:

Divine Sharpness.

Bloomington.

Saturday.

But I hate The Divine Sharpness, he thought.

No, don’t be stupid, he didn’t hate it.  He’d just seen it too many times. At least twenty between his sophomore year of college and his second year of graduate school, any time it was playing anywhere. And after that, when he didn’t think he could stand it one more time, someone would always invite him and he felt weird saying he was sick of it, so he would go, every time, until he could recite the whole thing word-for-word. Then the words stopped meaning anything. It was like floating in water that was your exact body temperature, like you couldn’t tell where your brain ended and the play began.  After that he declared a moratorium: no more Divine Sharpness.

That was a few years ago, though.  He didn’t have it memorized anymore. Anyway, when Rona Gomez invited you to a play, you had to go.

Ok, he texted back.

Cool.

He put the phone back on the table, tucked his arm under his head and closed his eyes.  Then he rolled back and found the phone again.

Is Sinder coming? he texted.

No. Just us.

Just us. What did that mean? That sounded like it meant something for sure.  In a week and a half, she’d be getting on a train with Sinder and riding to New York, and now she wanted Gavin to take her to a play in Bloomington?  Just us?

Okay. See you then, he wrote.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, watching the rectangle of light from the phone as it faded, disappeared into a dark swirl of blue and purple patterns.

Just me and Rona.  Watching The Divine Sharpness in Bloomington.  Just us.

He tried to make his brain sleepy again, but he couldn’t stop staring at the patterns on the ceiling.  There was something sinister about them, demonic, like if they had faces they would be grimacing like gargoyles.  But they didn’t have faces.

He closed his eyes to shut them out, but they were still there, dancing across the insides of his eyelids.

* * *

His stomach turned over when he saw her in front of the dorm.  She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, head bent over a book, hair falling across her face.  It was just like when he picked her up to go to the isolation tanks, except now the trees had tiny white blossoms, the students had less clothes on, and everything seemed warmer, slower, sleepier.

Rona was in gray jeans and a black t-shirt, a little too big, but she had sandals on instead of boots.  Plain black flip-flops. Dark, serious clothes, good for having a talk.  Which they certainly were going to be having, what with the late-night invitation and the just us.   He wondered what it would be about. Moving to New York, probably, certainly, but maybe something else.

I’m in love with Sinder.

I’m in love with Dean.

I’m in love with you.

Ugh, cut it out.  It probably wasn’t any of those, probably just about New York.  Anyway, there was no point guessing what Rona was going to say, no point ever doing that, because the only sure thing was that it would be something you’d never predict even if you had a million tries.

She hopped into the car, dropping the gray backpack in front of her knees.  “I’m so glad you wanted to go with me. I know you’re probably sick of The Divine Sharpness.”

“No, not sick of it.”  He felt stupid lying so he kind of mumbled.

“I bet you could see it a hundred times and it would still be amazing.” Her voice had that glow to it, and if he glanced sideways at her, her face was a blur of rosy pleasure.  Better not to look.  He kept his attention on the road, the intersection where they turned onto 231.  Fields of little sprouts, green spring trees.  Low cement wall. That patch of bare dirt on the shoulder, where she had offered him the blow job.

“It’s just a small production,” she was saying. “It might not be that good.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“I’m so excited to see it.”  She did sound excited, like really excited.  Excited in that Rona way, infectious, like you had to love whatever could motivate something like that. “The whole setting sounds so crazy when you read it. I can’t imagine what it’s like to see it, you know, performed.”

“Bloody,” he said.

Then he remembered: fuck. He was wearing a white shirt.  His favorite white shirt, a short-sleeve button-down with a woven texture, sort of stylish but not metrosexual or anything. 

You were never supposed to wear white to The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.  Never.  He didn’t have a sweater in the trunk or anything, did he? No, of course not.  Hopefully they’d be sitting far enough from the stage that it wouldn’t matter.  

“I’m going to have to start going to the theater more,” she said. “Since I’ll be writing a play.  It’s probably going to be hard to write a play about trees.”

“It’s a play?” He knew she was doing something about trees, but he’d never really understood what it was.  He had been imagining kind of a giant notebook full of marker-drawings.

“Well, I guess technically it’s more of a performance piece. I mean, it’s going to have dance and music and art in it.  But it will have a script, for sure.  I’m going to really need to study my Stump to make sure I do a good job.”

“What’s the play about? I mean performance piece.”

“It’s about this girl.”  She leaned back in her seat and stretched her bare feet up on the dashboard in front of her.  Her toenails were painted some dark color, maybe black. No, more like purple. It made her feet look kind of wild, like she was a bird of prey or something. “This girl who moves into the forest and tries to become a tree.  She’s studying with this kind of elder tree, Old Laurel.  But of course she can’t really become a tree.”

“Because people can’t change.”

“People can change, but only into different kinds of people.  A person can’t learn to think the way a tree thinks. People and trees are just different.”

He stared at the flat road ahead and wondered why she wasn’t asking him about New York.  Weren’t they going to have a talk? How long was she going to make him wait?

Of course, it was possible they weren’t going to talk at all, that this really was just about watching The Divine Sharpness. Maybe she didn’t even remember that she had invited them to move with her.  It might have been just a passing whim, one of those blissed-out I love you man moments people had at parties and forgot ten minutes later.

And if so, Sinder was making a giant fool of himself with all that packing and giving away his possessions.  Maybe he’d get to the train, and Rona would have changed her schedule without telling him.  He’d be all alone, on a train to New York with no friends, his life’s possessions packed into a single suitcase.

He shook his head.  Stop it.  Gavin wasn’t an ethicist or anything, but he knew it wasn’t cool to wish bad things on your friends.

The theater was weird and tiny and you had to walk through a dark creepy alley to get there, but that was pretty much like ninety percent of the Stump plays he had ever been to.  Half the theater was filled already, college students in dark colors, or red t-shirts even.  Someone snickered as he walked past, a girl pointed, it had to be at him.  Whatever.  Are any of you your generation’s most promising Stump scholar? No, I didn’t think so. 

Rona led him to some seats in the middle, which wasn’t super far from the stage since the theater was so small, but hopefully far enough.  She tucked her backpack under a metal folding chair—they had been set up over a plastic tarp, bad sign—and sat down. He lowered himself onto the seat next to her. Even through his jeans, the metal felt cold against his ass.

“Is your shirt going to get messed up?” she asked, poking at the tarp with her purple tonail.

He shrugged, tried to think of something blasé to say: No big deal, it’s not like my favorite shirt or anything.  But the lights were dimming, Rona’s face fading out, until he could just see a little ridge of light across the top of her nose.

Some creepy orchestral music, a recording that cut off abruptly as the curtain opened. And then there it was: the heart, throbbing, slimy, dripping red.  The regular pulse of its beats, projected through the room, ba-bump, ba-bump, stifling.  And there were Bo and Mi, like carpenters in white overalls, arms crossed over their chests as they sized each other up.

Rona’s hand was on his knee. What did she want?  He felt her hair fall on his shoulder, her breath near his ear. 

She was whispering something, but he couldn’t make it out over the heartbeats.

“What?” he whispered back.

“You’re not coming, are you?” Her whisper was a little louder, a tiny bit of voice to it.  “To New York.”

Buh-bump.

Buh-bump.

“I don’t think so,” he whispered back, as Bo stepped to the front of the stage and began to speak. 

<Chapter 39

Chapter 41a>