The Night Gwen Stacy Died Read Online Free Page B

hours camped outside of Amelia’s bedroom window
     with a folding chair and a notebook, and together, through the screen, the girls would
     write plays with titles like
Amelia and Sheila Save the Day
and
Amelia and Sheila Save the Day Again
. On summer nights, they gave performances on the concrete patio of Amelia’s yard
     and all the adults would line up folding lawn chairs in the grass: clapping awkwardly,
     making stiff chitchat during intermission. When Amelia was eleven, her family moved
     back to Miami. “Well, that’s the way it goes, honey,” Sheila’s father had said. “That’s
     life.” This had seemed an unnecessarily heartless assessment of the situation, but
     it was true. She and Amelia wrote letters for the first few months, but before long,
     they fell out of the habit.
    It was only after a week of eating lunch in front of her locker freshman year, dodging
     hall monitors, that Sheila attempted to stake out a more modest seat in the cafeteria.
     She had sat down at the other end of a safe-looking, half-populated Large Caf table
     and busied herself taking her sandwich and drink out of her paper bag, looking as
     extraordinarily preoccupied with it all as possible, when she heard the boy at the
     other end of the table say, “It’s Sheila Gower, right?”
    Sheila looked up from her sandwich slowly. It was always a shock to hear people you
     didn’t know say your name. It made you wonder what else they knew.
    “Yes,” Sheila admitted.
    “You’re in my English class,” the boy said.
    He looked familiar. For a moment the words
pig
and
toenail
inexplicably flashed into her brain; she heard the words in tandem as a half-chant,
     a whisper. “Second period, Mr. Clemmont?” she asked.
    “That’s the one,” said the boy. “I’m Anthony.”
    “Anthony what?”
    “Pignatelli.”
    Pig Toenail.
Tony Pig Toenail
. That’s how some of the other boys in her English class referred to him. But the
     name sounded different the way he said it.
    Anthony seemed to see that this is what she was thinking because he said, “The ‘G’
     is silent.”
    “Okay,” Sheila said. “Is that like Spanish?”
    “Italian,” he said. “The ‘G’ is fucking silent anytime it comes before an ‘N.’”
    “Sure,” Sheila said. “Cool.” She nodded, but in her brain a neat row of pink toes
     persisted, nails pointed uniformly, dangerously in one direction. She stabbed her
     straw into the mouth of her juice box and gulped furiously.
    “Wait,” said Anthony, “Didn’t you used to sit in the Small Caf?”
    “Briefly,” said Sheila. “But it turns out I don’t have an eating disorder, so it’s
     not really my crowd.”
    Anthony smiled. “You like the stuff we’re reading in English?”
    There had been a lot about disembodied hearts all that year. The hideous telltale
     variety, noisily thumping through the floorboards of a murderer’s home. Then, there
     was the way some poet’s heart was stolen during the cremation of his drowned body,
     and how his wife wrapped the damaged organ in a poem, like a piece of meat in butcher
     paper, and placed it in a drawer of her desk for thirty years. The point of everything
     they read—even freshman year—seemed to be about how life was short and everyone should
     just sleep together before they all died.
    “You mean all that gather-ye-rosebuds crap?” Sheila asked.
    It wasn’t crap, not really. It was fascinating to conjure one’s death and imagine
     life to be so brief a glint of a thing that all it made sense to do was grab hold
     of the closest breathing body and not let go. “I think Mr. Clemmont is maybe a little
     too invested in this unit,” Sheila said finally.
    Anthony was laughing. “Definitely,” he said. “The guy is like obsessed with sex. If
     I have to ‘unpack’ one more metaphor about virgins and coy mistresses this semester
     I’m going to vomit.”
    “Second period is way too early for unpacking virgins,” Sheila