Free The Sudden Weight of Snow by Laisha Rosnau

than under his mattress. I hear the
swishswish
,
swishswish
, of a hundred private school boys’ hands rubbing between sheet and skin at night, all hearing the sounds of each other, feeling too good to care. These boys are different from the ones we have now. These are boys with perpetually rolled-up jeans, hightop sneakers, freckles. Norman Rockwell replicas with longings that smell like soap, snapdragons, the pages of magazines. These boys fish in swimming holes and build tree houses and when they finally do have sex for the first time, it will be brief and intense and consensual. Granted, they will think less of the girl, but will remember the white cotton of her panties for years as the last good, innocent thing.

    The first day I didn’t have to return home immediately after school I felt exhilarated. Not knowing what else to do with this sense of freedom, I skipped my final class and spent it in the girls’ bathroom. I stood on the toilet and smoked, exhaling out of a high window, then read magazines. I kohled my eyes until I didn’t recognize them, combed my long hair until static electricity shot sparks off my brush. I knew I wasn’t getting ready to go anywhere – there was nowhere to go. Krista would be working at her mom’s store that afternoon, so I was at loose ends. I walked a long route home to prolong it. With my long hair collecting snow like a veil, my eyes blacked out, and my thin body rendered even more shapeless by layers of clothes, I imagined myself a young bride from anothercontinent, trying to escape an arranged marriage in a cold country, a winter I didn’t understand. When I eventually got tired of walking, I propped up my thumb, didn’t think anyone would stop.
    A brand new white pickup truck pulled over and Rob Hanshaw’s face grinned from the other side of the window. I had to stretch up to a step to reach the passenger door. “Where ya heading?” he asked with a chuckle.
    “Um, I live on Pottery Road, out by the golf course, do you know it?”
    “Yeah. Sylvia, right? You go to SCSS? I gave you and your friend a ride to that party.”
    One high school in town; nowhere else I could’ve gone. “Uh, yeah. I go by Harper.”
    “What?”
    “My name, I go by Harper.”
    “Hey, whatever cranks your frank, you know what I mean.” Rob Hanshaw winked, showed me the tips of his teeth. “So you, uh, doing anything?” He asked eventually. I was thinking of how I would have to wash the black liner from around my eyes somewhere between Rob Hanshaw’s truck and my house, wondering if snow would work, the imagined pain of that thought already pinching my brow. Rob elaborated. “I mean, now. You doing anything now?”
    “No,” I said in a tone that I hoped would convey that I didn’t necessarily want to do anything. It was four-thirty, cloudy, the sky going from pink to a wash of grey that passed for twilight.
    “Ever been to the lookout behind the course?” Rob asked.
    He was talking about a bald spot at the turn of a switchback where a small fire had burned the trees to the ground, left an unbroken view of the golf course, the Salmon River rendered flat and motionless, the locked grid of town. “Yeah.” It was the site of several bush parties, always broken up early because the car lights were visible from town.
    “You wanna go now?”
    I hoped for a shared joint, rolled thick and sweet, thought we might listen to the radio, maybe kiss a little, so I answered, “Yeah, sure.” I watched the field behind my house bump by as the truck attacked potholes on the dirt road that led up to the lookout. Watched my hands fold and unfold in my lap, then stopped when I realized what I was doing.
    Rob Hanshaw had brown hair, brown eyes, and brown freckles. He was one year out of high school, worked at the mill, and was the object of several crushes. He was handsome in a dull, small-town way. Cheeks perpetually flushed and a bit of dirt under his fingernails. A baseball cap and a pair of