Free Country of Cold by Kevin Patterson

gonna be some night.” Lifting a bottle of red wine to his lips. Must have swiped it from our parents.
    Lester, with detachment: “No doubt thirty years from now it’ll seem to have been a pretty big deal.”
    “Won’t take thirty years.”
    I turned to look at Albert. Something up. Lester talking about how his parents paint a picture of well-scrubbed optimism and hope but when he looks at their class pictures he knows half the people there, still in Dunsmuir, various versions of disappointed ambition and unacknowledged alcoholism, and Lester wonders why the night doesn’t seem a little sadder to them.
    “What won’t take thirty years, Albert?”
    “You really have no idea,” he asked, stated. He started to rock back and forth. I looked at him. Then, with an effort, he climbed to his feet and stumbled back inside. Lester and I watched him go.
    “We should maybe keep an eye on him,” Lester said.
    When Albert and I were four years old we both came down with strep throat. It seemed to have been clearing up, my mother says, when she noticed that I was looking sicker again, and then sicker yet, and then she saw I was peeing blood and she took me to the doctor and he said I had some inflammation of the kidneys, a complication of the strep throat, and that I would have to go into hospital. I did, my mother says, and I took it all well until I learned that Albert wouldn’t be staying with me and then I just howled. It was the first time we were ever more than twenty feet from one another. My mother tells this story more and more often these days, now that we hardly see each other, and keep tabs on one another mostly through her. This tortures her, that we are no longer close, and she imagines that it is even more painful for her than it is for the two of us.
    It was a big problem that I was so agitated, as my blood pressure was already dangerously high, from the kidney trouble. My mother stayed with me initially, and I tantrummed all night long that first night, and the next night my father stayed with me and I was even worse. It came almost as a relief to us all when Albert developedthe same complication and peed blood too. We were put in the same room, and slept in the same bed, the night he was admitted. The rest of the month that we were in the hospital, we were angels together, my mother says. She always tears up at this point.
    The meal took less than a coughing, dropped forked and napkinned hour. There were the speeches, by the class president, the chairperson of the grad committe, the principal, and all that. The speeches were chewy, the chicken impenetrable. For dessert, pineapple upside-down cake. I looked across the room to Albert and Cora, who were finding one another enormously entertaining, in that drunken way, the teachers at their table clucking their tongues, they couldn’t even be quiet for the principal, much less the pineapple upside-down cake.
    And Lester and Charlene looked like end-of-Lent gourmands, so desperately did they fill the time with chewing and swallowing and drinking their water and adjusting and rearranging the cutlery.
    Daphne sat at a table with the other unaccompanied girls, carefully sawing at her Chicken Kiev in her serious and cautious way. I looked over at her often but each time her gaze was fixed upon her porcelain and if she looked up at all during the course of her meal, I didn’t see it.
    And after dessert, the dancing: Cora and Albert, careening around the dance floor. Lester and Charlenedancing—Lester twitching with the grace and enthusiasm of a man in the electric chair, Charlene trying to melt into the crowd around him, mortified, contemplating escape.
    I drifted from corner to corner on the periphery of the jerking mass, talking to classmates that I had liked or admired, Daphne always seeming to be in the opposite corner; all the auto mechanic guys talked to me, and most of the teachers, too. And then someone seizing my arm and flinging me into the twitching