Free Open by Lisa Moore Page B

jeans on fast enough, hobbling down the hallway from Rachel’s bedroom with one pant leg flapping to the side, nearly falling as he dragged the waist over his knees, leaving behind him a trail of coins.
    He had not walked very far down the new cul-de-sac when a car passed him, plastering a sheet of slush to his shins. The car pulled into Rachel’s driveway. Her parents sat for a moment, and then they got out. They had groceries. He watched them make their way up the path. Her mother’s long coat was a gash of fuchsia. He was close enough to hear the aluminum storm door smack behind them. The living-room light came on. He stayed, he had no idea how long, but nothing else happened. The house remained inert. He stood under the streetlight and watched the snowflakes.
    He was overwhelmed with the joy of not being caught. He made a decision, almost a pledge, that he would not sleep with Rachel again. He probably wouldn’t even run into her, but if he did he wouldn’t speak much to her. Lovers slipped out of his life when he was eighteen without consequence. He decided the freedom he’d felt in her kitchen would just be the start. He made a resolution: beam a mild vertigo from your forehead at all times, like a miner’s lamp. In this way you’d always step to the side when ruin tore down the path behind you. You’d always get out before the parents came home. He knew he was stoned but he could never discern which perception, stoned or straight, was most accurate. He promised himself he’d keep one set of thoughts in his left hand and the other set in his right.
    When the phone rang several weeks later Lyle knew by the sound of his mother’s voice it was a girl. His mother said that any girl who called a boy’s house had no self-respect. She spoke loud enough to be overheard. The receiver was lying on a long roll of cotton batting with opalescent sparkles and tiny whiteChristmas lights buried beneath it. Ceramic angels with velvet costumes and paper songbooks were stationed all over the cotton batting. Among them, the receiver looked like an alien spacecraft.
    Rachel just said his name, Lyle.
    It made Lyle think of when he first got contact lenses. He had stepped out of the optometrist’s office on LeMarchant Road and looked up into the branches of a tree and saw, for the first time, individual leaves. Each leaf distinct from the next, rather than the loose weave of luminous, swimming colour he had always believed a tree to be. His own subjectivity, previously transparent, became opaque. He saw his mother’s dark tweed sleeve shot through with minute white seeds, shiny where worn, bristling microscopic hairs of wool. He’d just had time to grasp the sleeve in his fist before he hit the sidewalk. He had fainted.
    Hearing Rachel say his name while standing in his own living room. The music of Jeopardy , a screech from the oven hinges as his mother took out the shepherd’s pie. The garburator eating a vibrant clot of carrot peelings — all of this was so altered by Rachel’s voice that he almost fainted for the second time in his life.
    She said she wanted to talk to him in person . Who had put her up to this? He guessed the counsellor at school, a young feminist with burgeoning, aggressive-looking plants in her window and a box of wooden penises she dragged around the classrooms to show how a condom works. He couldn’t think how Rachel had gotten his number.
    The city sifted through the fist of a snowstorm. Ribbed icicles dripped and shot sparkles. The snow was pink or buttery, blue in the scoops and caves. Shimmery veils flew in twisting sheets off the roofs and the lips of drifts. He knew what the call was about but tried to convince himself otherwise the whole way to the university. Perhaps she thought she could move the relationship to a different plane. As if a relationship were something you took into your own hands. He knew what was coming was big. And if this woman wanted to exert her will over him, such a