The couch only fit four, and there was a little unspoken drama about seating arrangements. Cindy and Hannah went for the floor, in one of those self-sacrifice contests girls get into when there are boys around, and Cindy won by perching between Danny’s legs. So Hannah and Paul and I had to arrange ourselves. After some wordless three-way strategizing Hannah wound up between us.
Ten minutes into the movie, Paul actually did the thing where you pretend to yawn and then lower your arm onto the couch behind the girl. I had seen people do this as a joke, and I was astonished that he would be so bold and ignorant as to try it for real. Hannah didn’t flinch, but a minute later she leaned forward and cupped her chin in her hands, her elbows on her knees, leaving Paul’s arm lying uselessly on the back of the couch. After a reasonable interval, he withdrew it.
Halfway through the movie we heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and a straggly-haired silhouette in a dressing gown appeared. I felt Hannah tense up. “Hannah, it’s time for your friends to leave,” her mother said.
“Oh, God, I’m really sorry,” Hannah said to us. She walked us to the top of the stairs and hugged each of us in turn. I knew that something more was required, something that would cement whatever bond existed between us, and so I brushed my fingers against the side of her neck, and she gripped my forearm and squeezed.
And then the four of us were cramming into the car, Cindy and I in the back seat. I hated forcing everyone to make a detour, but it was past midnight and there was no other way for me to get to Sheridan. As a nondriver I could only calculate routes that took in familiar landmarks like school or my dad’s apartment, so we spent forty-five minutes rolling through empty streets until we came to the body shops and strip-mall restaurants of my neighborhood. Driving through the darkness we nursed a mood of grown-up seriousness, breaking the silence occasionally to say things like “God” or “Poor Hannah!” while my heart thrummed with astonished joy.
Cindy approached me at my locker on Monday morning, which she had never done before. “That was fun Saturday,” she said, with a smile that advertised secret knowledge. “Hannah thought you were really cool.” My heart and stomach began spinning in different directions along multiple axes.
“Oh yeah?” I said. It seemed important to convey indifference, in order to suggest that I found out girls thought I was cool every day. Fortunately Cindy would not be deterred.
“Don’t you think she’s totally pretty?” she said. I didn’t realize at the time that this is a trick girls use to make you think other girls are pretty. It still works on me now.
“Yeah, definitely!” I said, and Cindy, seeing that I was in the bag, smiled. She leaned against the row of lockers and took a notebook and pen from her backpack. Danny was watching us from down the hall. Cindy wrote Hannah’s name and phone number, from memory, on a corner of a page, tore it off, and handed it to me. We didn’t say anything else about it.
At home that night I stared at the number and wondered what I could possibly do with it. Would a girl think about romance while her father was dying? I imagined him clinging to life, wanting only to see her graduate high school, unwittingly wrecking my one chance at love. Or he would die and Hannah would retreat from the world into a protracted period of mourning. I brought the phone from the kitchen into my room. Even with the cord stretched to its full extent I had to sit on the ground by the door. What could I say when she answered? I considered various opening lines and tried to imagine all the possible replies to each, so that I could construct a flowchart with responses to each of her responses, but the project quickly became unmanageable. I had no idea what boys and girls said to each other on the telephone, or indeed anywhere. I returned the phone to the kitchen.
The next day I found Cindy and Danny standing in the school hallway, his arm around her shoulder. She looked unslept and bedraggled. Cindy never wore visible makeup, but she must have had some kind of cosmetic regimen, because today it was evident by its absence.
She let Danny speak for her. “Hannah’s dad died,” he said quietly, like a messenger in a play delivering his only line.
I phoned that night. “Hannah, it’s Eric,” I said. There was no response. “I just — Cindy told me about your dad, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Oh — oh, Eric!” she said. “Oh, wow, thanks for calling!”
“Sure,” I said. “Cindy told me about your dad, your father, today.”
“Yes, it’s really sad,” she said. “But I have my whole family here, and everyone’s been praying for him, and I know it’s going to be OK.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Yeah. It is going to be OK.”
“I mean, it’s not up to me, it’s up to God,” she said. “It’s going to be hard, not getting to see him. But it’s not — it’s not something I’m meant to understand.”
“No, right,” I said. Everything she was saying was alien to me — I didn’t think about death that way — but I wasn’t going to argue.
“I should go,” she said easily, as though we’d been talking about school. “Everybody’s downstairs.”
“Oh, OK,” I said. I had failed to get my balance, and now my time was up.
“Would you — would you call me tomorrow?” she said.
“Sure, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll call you tomorrow!”
“Great,” she said, like a normal teenager. “Talk to you then, Eric.” We said goodbye and hung up, and I sat there on the floor of my room, my back against the door, wondering what had just happened.
Hannah Pronovost was a virgin, as I was, but that didn’t make the playing field level. She had investigated the gamut of non-penetrative options with Ryan from Christian Youth Fellowship, who played the acoustic guitar and had big soft eyes and no evident sense of humor. They had broken up, for complicated and melodramatic reasons, but the possibility of a reunion was an immovable feature of the landscape of our relationship. It would never have occurred to me not to tolerate this.
Astonishingly, less than a month after Hannah’s father’s funeral, with no negotiation or warning, we began to have sex. This could only have taken place within the atmosphere of neglect that overcame the Pronovost home in the wake of the patriarch’s death. Judging from the photographic portraits that appeared like mushrooms on every surface in the house, Stan Pronovost, a man of unnaturally upright bearing, would never have allowed us so many hours behind the closed door of Hannah’s bedroom, but his widow, sitting slouched and glassy-eyed at the kitchen table, scarcely noticed my presence. There was something unhinged, too, in Hannah herself. The guards had left their posts, and no one was left to check her loneliest impulses. With no basis for comparison, I didn’t recognize that normal rules had been suspended; instead I came to assume that any girl, in the right mood, could be seized by the white wildness that appeared in Hannah Pronovost’s eyes.
As an unspoken condition of the sex I went with her to Friday night teen services. Hannah squeezed my forearm encouragingly whenever I joined the singing or said amen. I hated the obvious techniques by which my feelings were manipulated: the rousing songs, the energetic junior pastor, the gentle aerobic lift of all that standing and sitting and standing again. (Who could respect a God who would trick his followers in such mechanical ways?) But we learned how to have sex, and we said I love you, and from then on the barriers to entry — the improbability of that strange moment when two people start kissing for the first time — no longer seemed insurmountable. For a while Hannah Pronovost needed someone, and I made myself into the person that she needed, and while it wouldn’t scale it was at least a proof of concept.