been bothered by Stacy that day, he quickly forgot it. That very weekend, they went to a concert with friends in Green Bay. The next week she came over for dinner, and they held hands underneath the table. Their kisses, with her back pressed against the Camaro, were just as passionate as they had been before.
By mid-October, Johnny’s mind was more or less occupied with wrestling, anyway. His schedule was packed with predawn runs, after-school practices and weekend scrimmages. Mom and Dad agreed that this would be a good distraction for him, and things seemed to be settling down. There had been no more notes in the wash—either Stacy had stopped writing them or Johnny had become better at hiding them, and after a while, Mom started to soften toward Stacy, encouraging Johnny to invite her over on weeknights to study. “Better to keep them under our noses,” she’d say to Dad.
Stacy stopped by now and then in the evenings that fall, when Johnny was newly showered from practice, wet hairs still curling on his neck. She and Johnny “studied” in the kitchen, their feet entwined beneath the table, while Mom banged dishes noisily in the sink. They “studied” on the living room couch, textbooks balanced on their knees, Stacy’s head fitting perfectly into the crook of Johnny’s neck, while Dad snoozed in his recliner. Watching them, it seemed to me that they were drawn together like barbed wire to cow magnets.
I kept a close eye on Stacy at all times, half in love with her, half scared of what she might do. Sometimes it felt as if I’d imagined the whole scene in Johnny’s bedroom, the bedsprings squeaking, her protests that she wasn’t going to leave.... Sitting on the couch next to Johnny, she seemed as sweet and harmless as a slice of apple pie.
I couldn’t help watching her stomach, too—to see if it began to pooch out the way it happened with the married women at church. First it was a rounded blip, then a tight waistline, and before you knew it we were gathered in the church basement among streams of blue or pink crepe paper, discussing stretch marks and twenty-hour labors.
If it happened to those women at church, it could happen to Stacy Lemke, too. I spied on her whenever I got a chance, peeking at her stomach around the edges of my history textbook. I tried to imagine slender Stacy with her belly button protruding, her hands gripping the sides of her stomach, lowering herself carefully to sit. And what would Johnny be like as a father? Proud? Embarrassed?
It was funny because this—or something like this—was what I’d wanted last summer, when my heart had done a lopsided somersault every time I’d bumped into Stacy Lemke in town. I’d wanted Stacy for Johnny so that I could have a bit of Stacy for myself. But somehow, I thought, it had all gone wrong.
“Let me braid your hair, Kirsten,” Stacy coaxed on one of those fall evenings.
I considered, then shook my head slowly.
“Aw, come on,” Stacy said, reaching for me playfully.
“I don’t know.”
She reached for me anyway, her hands gathering a mess of hair at the back of my neck. Last summer I would have loved this. I would have melted into a puddle at her touch. Now I remembered the way she and Johnny had laughed at me, and I pulled back. “I don’t want to.”
Stacy sank back into the couch, frowning, her arms folded across her chest.
Johnny sighed. “Don’t you have some homework to do, pip-squeak? Something upstairs?”
I slipped off the couch and plodded to my room, where Emilie was engrossed in this month’s Seventeen. The cover read, “Thirteen Ways to Wear this Skirt.” How could there be thirteen ways to wear a skirt? I could only think of one.
“Do you think Johnny and Stacy will get married in our church or her church?” I asked.
Emilie gave me a look of disgust and went back to her magazine. “They’re not getting married, dummy,” she said. “They’re just dating, that’s all.”
“But if they really love each other—”
Emilie dog-eared a page of the magazine and set it aside. “Let’s put it this way. If they get married, it’s because she’s pregnant. If she gets pregnant, her parents will kill Johnny, then her. So there won’t even be a wedding to worry about. Capisce?” That was her new word, picked up from TV.
I sighed. “Capisce.”
Even after careful watching, I really couldn’t tell if there was a difference in Stacy. Johnny, on the other hand, had become suddenly gaunt. He had gone on the wrestler’s diet like he did every fall, shedding the weight he’d gained during the spring and summer. It wasn’t unusual for Johnny to hit 190 pounds in the off-season, although he wrestled in the 160s. In the past, he’d eaten egg-white shakes for breakfast, ran laps around the barn, jumped rope, sprinted up the bleachers, lifted weights in the gym. Sweated, then sweated some more.
But this year, he’d lost much of the weight without even trying. I didn’t notice it when he was bundled up in sweatshirts and warm-up pants, but when he sat across from us at the kitchen table in just a T-shirt, his arms looked positively scrawny, his chest sunken. Any sign of a bulge on his stomach—Aunt Julia’s lingonberry kuchen, Mom’s beef brisket—had completely disappeared.
“Are you trying to drop another weight class or something?” Dad asked one night when Johnny refused a second helping of Mom’s turkey tetrazzini.
Johnny shrugged. “I ate something before practice.”
Dad sat back in his chair, studying Johnny carefully. “Does Coach want you to drop more weight?”
Johnny looked back at him. “I’m not dropping weight.”
“Sure looks like you are.”
Johnny shrugged again. He brought a spoonful to his mouth slowly, as if in rebuttal. “Well, I’m not trying to.”
“But you are,” Mom said pointedly. “Are you feeling sick?” She reached across the table for his forehead, but withdrew her hand when he pulled back.
“I’m fine,” Johnny insisted. “You’re making too big a deal out of this.”
Later that evening, Dad called Coach Zajac, and Coach recommended less running and more weight lifting, more carbohydrates and fewer vegetables. “Coach says we’ll get him back on track,” Dad said, hanging up the phone. “Although he might not be a bad wrestler in the 150s, if it came to that.”
Mom pursed her lips together, shaking her head. “You two wouldn’t care if Johnny was a skeleton, so long as it gave him an advantage.”
When I dreamed that night, it was of Johnny on the mats, a skin-and-bones cadaver performing some strange, macabre dance. In the stands, Stacy was watching him, her hands folded beneath her belly.
eleven
Winter, which had only been flirting with us up to that point, made a serious appearance in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Overnight, everything green disappeared beneath thick white snowdrifts. Mom dragged the boxes of our heaviest winter sweaters down from the attic, and we began listening to the local news each morning, praying for a snow day. It was so cold that Kennel was allowed inside the barn, where he terrorized our farm cats, essentially treeing them in the hayloft. One Saturday, Dad and Jerry cut down a fir from the woods behind our property and lugged it inside our house, then left it to Emilie and me
