“Just move, Hill.”
“How?”
“Any way you want.”
And so I did. I’m sure I must have looked like a kid with his pants on fire, but I did my best to imitate and stay up with Mickie. In no time, the dance floor was so crowded you couldn’t move much anyway. That’s when the music changed to Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.”
I turned to go sit down, but Mickie, once again, would have none of it. “I don’t bite, Hill. Besides, I heard the dance ladies are worse than the lunch Nazis. We must keep six inches between us to make room for the Holy Spirit. You think you can stand dancing six inches from me?”
I could. I hadn’t realized it before, or maybe I had, but I knew then, as I danced with one arm around Mickie’s waist and my other, sweaty hand holding hers, that I liked Mickie—“like” being the limits of an eighth grader’s affection for someone of the opposite sex.
I liked her a lot.
At home that night, my mother had the Bible out on the kitchen counter. My father looked just as perplexed as I was when I’d first opened it. My mother simply smiled. “Wasn’t that a lovely gesture on her part?” she said.
“But why did she do it?” I asked.
“To let you know that she’s keeping you in her prayers.”
“Why? The woman hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Samuel.”
“But isn’t this kind of hypocritical?”
“Don’t question her motives, Samuel. Just accept the gift and be grateful for it.”
I stuck the Bible on my dresser, never intending to look at it again. I would have thrown it out, but I thought there was some rule against throwing out Bibles and rosaries, and I didn’t want to be trapped in purgatory for having done so. Throughout high school and college, that Bible remained on my dresser. When my mother died and I sold the house, I found it still there, without even a layer of dust.
It is now on a shelf in my living room.
We all moved on to high school—me with my red eyes; Ernie, the only black kid; and Mickie, the third misfit. Her mother and father would enroll her at the Sisters of Providence, the all-girls Catholic school in Burlingame, but Mickie would not last her freshman year. Officially, she “transferred” to the local public school; that’s what her prospective college applications would state. Unofficially, she’d been expelled for smoking at a school dance, but even that didn’t tell the whole story. Tired of the nuns and what she considered her stifling Catholic education, Mickie orchestrated her expulsion just as she had orchestrated her detention in the sixth grade. She came on to a senior at a dance, one everyone in Burlingame knew to be a pothead. The nuns did catch her smoking, but it wasn’t cigarettes and it wasn’t at the dance. Mickie was in the back seat of the guy’s car, sucking marijuana smoke from his mouth.
PART FOUR
NIGHTMARES AND FANTASIES
1
1989
Burlingame, California
David Bateman pulled open my car door, businesslike and professional. “Step out of the car, please.”
I remembered Bateman as being a good head taller than me as a boy, but when I got out of the car, the disparity in our sizes was more pronounced. The marines had trimmed the fat and sculpted Bateman’s body. His biceps stretched the fabric of his blue uniform, and his forearms looked like woven ropes, complete with a tattoo of the Marine Corps symbol—an eagle atop a globe.
“David,” I managed to say, trying to sound like an adult and not a scared little boy.
Bateman held a long metal flashlight and directed it to a gold badge clipped to his breast pocket. “It’s Officer Bateman.”