There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald

Author:Casey Gerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

chapter FIFTEEN

It all started when he made me wait.

Well, some of it started when he sent his first message.

Sup?

I’d kept that message open for a long time, though it didn’t take long to read. Kept it open until Joan walked toward my station at the back of the South Oak Cliff computer lab, almost in time to see his message on a dating portal that also sold pornography. I later learned that this was called synergy, a great thing that exists because two lesser things combine. I wish I had known that then. I would have said: River, we could be a synergy, baby. But I didn’t know.

So there was his short message and his face that resembled my mother’s, at least in tone and peculiar beauty, and his eyebrows. Each brow looked like one half of an old ice-block tong, made of wool. I wondered if they came naturally like that, if he came naturally like that. I wondered if this was what they called love at first sight, though now I know it was not love. It was just the birth of my want for this boy—not to lie with him, not to speak with him, but . . . to be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust, with him. No one else would ever see or touch him again. And we’d both have a natural glow, forever.

It took only a few months of phone calls and online chats for this want to grow into, or maybe from, a need to pour myself freely and fully into something or someone—or, at least, into River. And the need was so great that it was as if I tried to channel all the Big Bang’s noise through a single small speaker, through him. This, I understand, is not healthy, for a speaker or a teenager, nor did it make much sense. But I figure we all have a person in our lives who takes up more space than good sense would allow, than we ourselves want to allow. So there they are, there he was, in the space beyond reason, where I wanted to be.

But then he’d made me wait.

Sure, he had a good reason: At sixteen I was illegal, according to the state of Texas. But I’d never met a boy who made me wait, and had never met a nineteen-year-old who was afraid of the law. So either because I was intrigued or because I was insulted, I waited.

Two more years passed. Red came, and others. And in that time River became, for me, less of a person, more of a mission unaccomplished, never failed. Maybe that’s what love is. Probably not.

Whatever the case, I turned eighteen and went—was allowed to go—to see him in the flesh. He was my prom date, I guess you could say.

I had to do a lot to get to him that night. Had to stay up late, and plan, and lie. None of this was out of the ordinary. But I also had to steal a car.

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