Prairie Silence by Melanie Hoffert

Author:Melanie Hoffert [Hoffert, Melanie M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4474-2
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

On the night it happened, we were at Samantha’s apartment. She lived a few miles from campus in one of the buildings that looked like every other building in the city. Her place had tan walls, a kitchen—with black-and-white-checked linoleum—that opened to a living room, a bathroom with gold fixtures, and a balcony.

Early that evening Terry left to get milk. By this time I had deduced that there might be tension between the two of them and that this tension might involve me.

“She’s scared to leave me alone with you,” Samantha said, confirming my intuition, when the door closed.

“I don’t get it,” I responded. I still had an underlying attraction to Samantha, but it was more like a device to keep me breathing until I found someone else who could really understand me. I had no intention of letting either of them know about my dormant feelings. I knew by her words, however, that the two of them must have developed secrets of their own.

“Who knows? She’s paranoid.” The sarcasm in Samantha’s voice did not match the steady gaze of her eyes. “Let’s look at that book,” she said, changing the topic. I jumped at this, not wanting our discussion to go any further.

“You guys are going to give me so much shit,” I said. They had begged me to show them my senior book. They wanted to see my pictures of prom and homecoming, events they never took part in because their cynicism had developed years before they left high school. They too were from small towns, but their relationship to their past seemed pained, poisoned.

By this time I had started to forge my own new style. Rather than the clothes I wore in high school, I wore pajamas and stocking caps to class in the morning and jeans with flannel shirts at night. I still wore makeup, but less. So I knew they would delight in the pictures of me in my prom dresses, my hair perfectly coiffed, and my face painted in Clinique makeup, which Jessica had brought back from Fargo and instructed me to use. I would validate that the pomp and circumstance they had not participated in during high school was—as they suspected—a masquerade. Surely there were others like them, or others like me, roaming, disguised, in the small-town lands. I was the proof. They wanted to see it. They treated me as their little pet, so that every new development, every layer revealed, solicited glee from my new masters.

Samantha and I went into to her bedroom to start looking at my book while we waited for Terry. I skimmed by the pictures of Jessica as fast as I could. I had carefully printed some of our favorite Bible verses under our pictures. I wasn’t too excited to have them notice.

“No way!” Samantha kept repeating as she paged through the homemade scrapbook with her mouth wide open.

I jumped when the door finally slammed. “Hey. Where are you two?” Terry called. Great, we’re in the bedroom, I thought.

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