School Days

They left the couch, a show about child prodigies gone insane in their twenties, and in her room he pulled loose her knotted drawstrings. Outside, snow. Frost clinging to power lines like cake piping, a blizzard fooling everyone and, for once, lingering. She breathed in and nodded, the hair under his palm short and prickly as iron shavings. Through the afternoon they touched each other, trading off—stopping now and then to make quesadillas, blush as they came out of the bathroom. He’d reach for Kleenex but she’d push up onto her knees and say, Let me, and bend her head to his abdomen, the way she did over a microscope in chem lab, curling her hair behind her ears, tucking the pendant on its chain into her shirt. Webs of ice spread from the corners of brittle windows, and the stuffed elephant on her bed—did he have a name?—was missing a marble eye, caught in a wink.

Wednesday came. Thursday. He drove down Edith with the heater on high, a beanie, a parka, ski mittens. His breath pluming in front of him as he waited for her to answer the door, the tongue of the lock licked slowly back in its bolt. They didn’t talk. They kissed and napped and felt their bare thighs pressed under sheets printed with royal corgis.

The last morning, as the thawing began, he hit black ice and floated into a ditch. He missed the telephone pole, and a neighbor in Carharts pulled him out with a cable and winch. He explained to her why he was late, pointing to the dented fender, the icy brush wedged in the radiator, the fan of mud up the left side—proof of gallantry—and they stood in the cold on her porch looking at the car, like it contained some answer, or a metaphor they’d draw on later. Inside’s heat moved out around their ankles and dissipated, and they stood on the frozen brick looking, afraid to move, as if they would dissolve if they drew their skin away and went back to what they could feel.