Free Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore Page A

Theboys next to us offered us some of theirs, and we took it, in turn, placing our own mouths where theirs had been on the wet paper, then passing it along, like a communion plate or a petition of ash and saliva: a large, smoking spitball shot out at all the teachers of the world. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” The crowd roared, and the band started up.
    For the next hour electric guitars wailed and keened in protest of all that we were forced to be in this life. “Man, oh man,” murmured the people around us. Four boys climbed up on the second-tier railing and swayed back and forth to the music, their limbs occasionally jolting and spazzing. It was a dance style I’d seen before. It was acid—something that scared and fascinated me. “Do you want to take a trip, a sugar trip, a trip to sugar mountain?” I’d been asked that before at bars. “No thanks,” I’d said. For all my recklessness, I feared chromosome damage. I feared accidentally starting a brand-new species. I believed all the talk about damage to your very
genetic material
—though it turned out later not to be true.
    I could have been up there with those boys.
    There was a slight snap in the air from the lake, and Sils and I huddled under the blanket for warmth. Feeling the heat of her so close, I thought about how seldom we slept over these days, me in that sleeping bag at the foot of her bed, or she at the foot of mine, the routine intimacy of that, our talking out into the dark of our rooms, the cemetery quiet out the window and us with our jokes and sighs and then our sleep, side by side in duet, our breaths staggered like a round. Only once had we ever had a fight—she accused me of having deliberately developed a laugh like someone else, someone named Leslie Fish. She accused me of wanting to hang out with Leslie and be like Leslie, which summoned up such outrage on my part that I struck Sils in the arm and then rushed home in tears, waiting the week out until at last we were friends again.
    It had been true about the laugh, and I never laughed like that again.
    Now everyone on the lawn stood and so did we, in our large blanket cape, and the whole audience lit matches for an encore, the ground around us like some fantastic birthday cake in the dark, but the band refused to come back. So we packed up and made our way toward the exit with the crowd. I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.
    I looked toward the lot where we had parked, but the car seemed not to be there.
    “Let’s call a cab,” said Sils.
    “What do you mean?”
    “With the money,” she said. “Let’s take a cab back home.”
    “There’s probably someone here we know.” I was reluctant to spend the money like this.
    “Like who?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe Markie Russo and those guys,” I said. Markie Russo had once had a crush on Sils and I was sure he would have given her a ride home in a second. But everyone was heading purposefully toward their cars and I recognized none of them. We were still walking with the blanket around us, like medieval orphans.
    “There’s a phone,” said Sils, and so we called a cab. Hiller’s Cab Company. “I’ll be there as soon as possible,” said the voice at the other end. We waited right there by the phone booth, smoking cigarettes, tapping our feet, watching the dispersing crowd.
    The cabbie who came for us was a strange dwarf of aman: balding, shiny head; fingers fat as wursts; his body squat and globular; his legs so short and misshapen there was some apparatus constructed on the pedals of the cab so that he could drive.
    We got in, gave him my address, and he pulled out of the parking lot. The traffic was heavy from the concert and jammed at the next corner near the main light. In