N E V E R L E T Y O U G O a novel by Lowry Pei Never Let You Go by Lowry Pei Licensed under a Creative Commons license (attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works). Some rights reserved. This work may be freely copied, redistributed, and retransmitted, as long as you attribute its authorship to me. You may not use it for commercial purposes, nor alter, transform, or build upon it without my express written permission. You may view the full license via this link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/3.0/ N E V E R L E T Y O U G O CHAPTER ONE One thing you can’t help learning about life is that most of the time it puts up a lot of resistance, as if you were trying to write a passionate love letter with a pen dipped in molasses. And yet now and then the resistance decreases. One day during the January of my senior year in high school, the stuff things were made of unexpectedly softened and began to flow in unpredictable directions. At the time when it started to happen, I was listening to Ray Charles and John Coltrane every chance I got, I liked to read Dostoyevsky late at night, and I felt as though my balls might crack from the pressure of unsatisfied desire. The girls I knew at school apparently thought that getting good grades meant I shouldn’t have the same needs they and their boyfriends struggled over – but I made a hell of a confidant. I had had years of practice at that, with Toni Anastos, Claire Joseph – who’d once been my girlfriend – and more recently with Becca Shulman. I spent at least half an hour every evening on the phone with one or another of them, hearing about their love lives, philosophizing about the emotions and why people did what they did. No remark dropped in the halls – no gesture, even – was too insignificant to be analyzed at length, second- and third- guessed, squeezed ruthlessly for every drop of meaning in a way that would have thrilled Mr. Kearns, the AP English teacher, if only we’d been doing it to Shakespeare. Those were conversations I couldn’t have with boys, other than my best friend Dal, because if I tried to have them, all I got were variations on “Didja get to second base?” Dal’s real name was Darryl, but that had last been heard some time in grade school. Even his parents called him Dal. He was a terrific ballplayer – when Dal was in Babe Ruth League he made the all-star team – and when you saw him playing baseball you seemed to see 1 Never Let You Go, by Lowry Pei N E V E R L E T Y O U G O exactly who he was. He was a center fielder, responsible for a great stretch of open space that he could somehow cover without seeming to make an effort. He never looked bored out there; he looked as intensely involved as the shortstop, but in a different way, as if the real game were one nine-inning-long thought he was maintaining by a perfect act of concentration from the first pitch to the last out. At times it seemed as though everyone else played inside Dal’s idea. He looked pure to me – not just on the field. Maybe that was making too much of him, but maybe it wasn’t. It’s just that some people’s role in the greater scheme of things is that nothing ugly, or vicious, or cruel is supposed to go on around them; there’s something in them that puts ugliness to shame. And it’s not that Dal was one of those armor-plated, invulnerable people, either – not that at all. He played it the riskiest way of all; he just was. Whereas my other friends had plenty of defenses, that let you know they thought they were living in a difficult world. Well, didn’t all of us? All except Dal. A lot of the time, he didn’t seem to be evaluating the world any more than a river evaluates the fields it’s running through. It was typical of Dal that when we were younger he could overlook the fact about me which was the curse of my existence: I was short. In the seventh grade I was four foot eleven, which made me the shortest kid, boy or girl, not just in my home room but in the entire seventh grade. People made jokes about stuffing me into lockers or even wastebaskets and now and then some gargantuan eighth-grader would try to do it, laughing in a horribly self-congratulatory way as if he were the very first dipshit ever to think it up. Of course these guys had about as much electrical activity in their brain as my cat does when she’s asleep, so it was a red-letter day when they had any kind of an idea at all. The only things I had going for me were that I could run fast, I could talk fast (though talk is useless with your average thirteen- year-old hood), and if I could just manage to stay calm I had a certain talent for rendering myself invisible. It’s one of the things I learned as a child that stood me in good stead later on. It was typical, too, that they seldom tried stunts like that when Dal was around. Not that he was my bodyguard; it was just that even those clowns would have felt stupid doing something like that in front of him. I’m not sure they actually knew where the influence was coming from, but I did. Dal wasn’t crazy about talking on the phone, or I might have spent another hour talking to him every night, after I quit talking to Toni or Becca or Claire. We had something else we did instead. Every 2 Never Let You Go, by Lowry Pei N E V E R L E T Y O U G O once in a while I would get dressed and sneak out of my house at one in the morning, go down the block to my car which I would purposely have parked far away so my parents wouldn’t hear it when I started it up, and drive to Dal’s. Maybe they wouldn’t have been waked up by the grinding starter of that old three-hundred-dollar Ford, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I’d park on a sloping side street by his house, facing downhill; then I’d try to do my invisibility thing as I crossed his back yard, hoping not to see a light in the upstairs windows, and not to be reported by some neighbor as a prowler. Dal’s room was like an afterthought to their house – a little room off the kitchen, far away from the rest of the family who were sleeping upstairs. I tapped on his window. No light went on, but he would wave his hand, and in a minute he would raise the window and silently climb out. We didn’t speak until we were across the yard again and inside my car; even then we whispered as if someone might still hear us, and I let the car roll down the hill a block or two, without headlights, making just a faint sound of tires on asphalt, before I started it. Then we were gone, driving all night. We drove out of the city, straight out until the suburbs became country, out until the road we were on gave out, until we reached some place we’d never been and would never recognize in the daytime, listening to soul music on KATZ with the windows down if it was warm, smelling the rank plant smell of humid marshy bottoms where the organic life was so thick it reminded you of skunk. We had to be in motion, on the move; it was a need like the need to breathe. I felt I was suffocating in the wait to get out of St. Louis, out of the whole Midwest – to go East – somehow that was the direction – and begin what I thought of as another life. That was what we talked about much of the time, me in my malcontented, excitable way and Dal more calmly: a new life. If not about a new life then about girls, about love. We actually used the word. But then Dal and I had known each other a long time. We drove till we were on the verge of getting lost – or of passing some point of no return and simply keeping on going, no longer caring about being caught – and then we turned around and hoped we’d make it back before dawn. On the way back, if there was time and we had any money, we ate hamburgers at some 24-hour diner at five in the morning, and then we sneaked back home into our beds to sleep a couple of hours before we’d meet again at school. Somehow I wasn’t tired the mornings after those nights. Dal and I didn’t know much about going East, except what we read in books – I’d been to New York just once to visit a cousin, and Dal had never been east of Zanesville, Ohio – but we knew we were 3 Never Let You Go, by Lowry Pei N E V E R L E T Y O U G O going there, somehow or other, into a part of the world that felt older, too big to master, a place of shrieking subways and other, scarier depths of city life, intimidating and yet, for us, lit up from within – not the yellow light in the window of home but exactly the opposite, a midnight blue neon over a door that opens for a moment to reveal a stairway down and lets three bars of restless music snake its way out onto the jittery sidewalk.