"Evening Star" by E. B. Ratcliffe

Would you reveal your true self to the public, no matter the consequences?

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Evening Star by E. B. Ratcliffe

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A red streak of light flashed across the curtains. Robert grimaced and Grace got up to look out the window. There were two police cars pulling into the parking lot and it had started to snow again. She turned around. Robert was kneeling on the bed. He’d grabbed the gun and was watching her.

She held out her hands to him. “Robert, I didn’t tell anyone where you were.”

Robert nodded his head and sat back against the pillows. The gun was cradled in his lap. “I know.”

The snow fell like lace streamers in the dim afternoon light. The school’s chain link fence had two big oaks standing sentinel just outside the school grounds. Everything was shrouded in white. From inside the classroom, the school’s window framed the snowy scene as if a play was about to begin.

The class was studying “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Grace liked Joyce. His words poured over the reader. Words held power. Even the word snow held power. Malleable and as flexible as any word could be. Inuit natives built single word discussions on the base word of snow. They could have a million combinations to describe snow, a million ways for snow to infiltrate their thoughts.

Three boys in jackets and baggy jeans stood outside the fence. Snow collected on their shoulders and caps. The flare of their cigarettes blinked on and off like fireflies. Grace wished she were out there with them. They’d text, trade jokes and try to keep warm.

“Miss Ki are you working on the midterm assignment?”

Grace turned her attention to Mrs. Combs at the front of the class. “Yes Ma’am. I like to organize my ideas in my head.”

“Who are you working with?”

“Robert Lascor.” Robert looked up from his paper and nodded. Mrs. Combs shrugged. “Carry on.”

Several of the other students were staring at Grace. Emily Sims scowled her disapproval. Emily was the easiest to read of the popular kids. Since Grace had gotten a buzz cut, Emily worked at getting under her skin. She posted online that Grace was a dyke. It wasn’t true. She liked boys. Robert liked boys, too. They’d spent hours discussing boys, even though neither of them had yet to have sex with one.

Sex was a word that had at least fifty derivations in English. They could do a midterm on sex as a base word for the English language. She rubbed her temples. There was a literary discussion that wasn’t going to make it to midterms.

If not sex, perhaps love could work. In English, love was an overused and diluted word. Like fuck; it held no power. In Greek, the words for love were powerful and descriptive. Eros meant passionate love and filia brotherly love. Agape was the word for a bigger love, a love of humanity, an unconditional love in the spiritual sense. Grace looked around at the students hunched over their desks. She wanted them to wake up and see that there was something there, agape waited.

English used agape for leaving something totally open and ajar. Mouths are left agape in amazement, wonder and fear. She liked that. It could be a midterm. She liked the idea that the greatest and purest form of love the Greeks defined was somehow related to something left open. Love was found in the open, like the sky. Open, like when a person’s mind and heart were not closed, when people put them at risk, when people conquered fear, agape was there.

She stared again out the window, the snow appeared out of a vast gray expanse of nothing. It was a magician’s trick. She was open to love, open to change. Grace looked forward to college, but it no longer dominated her thoughts. Now, she’d rather grab up Robert. Get him away from his parents. She hated them even more than her own. They’d go to L.A. and get tech jobs at some start-up, maybe. It would absolutely send her mother off the deep end. Mom’s love was not agape. Mom’s love was boundaries and control.

Robert frantically scrawled on and on into his notebook. He wasn’t tapping into a tablet like everyone else in the class. His head bobbed and his long blond hair bounced as if he’d heard the hoof beats from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Grace chewed one of her fingernails. Literary allusions of love would not satisfy Robert. He would want something more real and yet so much less. He wasn’t feeling the moment sliding past, the snow calling to them in its chilled whisper. Instead, on the page, his pencil scratched short staccato bursts in counterpoint to the ticking fingernails of everyone else.

Grace pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose and watched the storm intensify. Snow blotted out anything beyond the fence. She was alone in her admiration. Everyone else was writing, getting a head start, missing out on this minute that stretched into infinity.

The bell rang and Robert swiveled in his seat. His blue eyes alight, he plopped the page torn from his notebook down in front of her. She scanned the white page, stopping about halfway down and focused on the prose.

“Is this about last summer with the gray sky and closed door?” Grace asked.

Robert pointed to the bottom of the sheet.

She rubbed her hand against the stubble at the back of her head. It read like a short play. Robert’s memory open for their classmates’ icy derision. Not going to happen.

Picking up her backpack and Robert’s torn page, Grace stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

Grace marched him over to an alcove by her locker. “Are you serious? You want to come out in front of the whole class.”