Free As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson Page B

could be the savior of anything—call me
what you will, I never had any messianic delusions.
    In the classroom, I was sullen and aloof, and
I secretly ridiculed the ambitions of the other students. They were
planning to go to college, get married, and have jobs, buy homes
and a stake in the American dream. The seeds of envy were ready to
sprout into hate. I found myself wallowing in bitterness, just like
Father had done. The Coldiron Curse hadn't died with him after
all.
    Virginia became my savior. She was an
outcast, too, but had sought out the role, rehearsed it as a
devoted understudy, and slipped into it like stage costume. She was
from a wealthy family, both parents members of the local school
board. She sat across from me in Biology, and I stole glances of
her out of the corner of my eye, watching her with an admiration
that bordered on worship. When she caught me looking, she would
smile at me with perfect teeth.
    Though I had an affinity for Biology, I
wasn't a top student because I was afraid of standing out, of being
noticed. But I wanted Virginia to notice. With her fine ash-blonde
hair and oval face, she became the meat of my dreams, the main
course of my unformed fantasies. Her eyes weren't bovine as were
those of the cheerleaders and beauty queens. These were cobalt blue
and deep, almost painful to look at.
    She wasn't squeamish about dissection, and
I’ve always admired a girl who had a way with a blade. That
semester, as we graduated from worms to frogs to small sharks, her
savagery escalated accordingly. When her partner was no longer
willing to work with her, repulsed that Virginia was going so far
beyond the demands of the assignments, I volunteered my services. I
had been working alone, shunned, the twenty-fifth student of a
class broken into pairs.
    Virginia had a terrific sense of humor. She
saw right away that I matched her skill with a scalpel. She enjoyed
shocking the others, sticking pins haphazardly into the eyes of the
defenseless dead creatures. Once she fashioned a crude earring by
attaching a fish heart to a looped paper clip and wore it most of
the afternoon. Finally a teacher stirred from apathy long enough to
report her to the school authorities. A quick search of the rules
found nothing prohibiting the ornamental display of animal organs,
though Virginia was chastised for "disrupting the classroom." Of
course, because of her parents' being on the school board, no one
was willing to suspend her.
    Because she was an untouchable, she became
even more outlandish. She began wearing a black leather jacket she
had found behind a bar on Devlin Street. The jacket had a huge
grinning skull sewn on the back, with crimson ribbons of flesh
clinging to the bone. What she was doing in that part of town, and
what would happen when the owner claimed his rightful property, I
never asked. She wore camouflage pants that billowed out above the
ankles and adopted hiking boots long before it became a weary
fashion.
    We quickly became inseparable. She saw behind
the granite facade of indifference I hid behind, saw the sensitive
child inside the man I was awkwardly becoming, or maybe she peeked
through the windows of the Bone House. In turn, I encouraged her
originality and served as a willing audience for her stunts. She
was "Negative Girl" and I was "Her Poet," not because I ever wrote
anything but scribbles on napkins, but because I wore thick glasses
with black frames and she mistook my involuntary solitude for
intellectual disdain. We began meeting at the football field during
lunch, sitting in the bleachers and looking for gods in the April
clouds.
    Our friendship had been based on mutual
distrust of "the system," and our relationship had been confined to
school hours. In some secret locker in my heart, I had stored a
small hope of something more. Certainly not love, not ever again
love, Sally had carved that coffin and Mother had driven the nails.
Virginia caused me to twitch, and she inflicted a vague ache