The Raising

The Raising

1

There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:
The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by—
with their backpacks, short skirts, iPods.
The tree they’d stood under during a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum.
There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. There were the pretend-Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, reeking of patchouli and incense and imported cloth, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it for eternity.
And the Starbucks where they went to study, and never opened a book.
Craig’s father cleared his throat and slowed down at an intersection when a girl in tight jeans, flip-flops, and a low-cut tank top walked in front of the car without even glancing over. She was nodding her head in time to something she was hearing through the white wires plugged into her ears. Craig’s father looked over and said, in a voice thick with emotion, “You okay, buddy?”
Craig nodded solemnly, straight ahead, and then looked over at his father. They both attempted to smile, but to someone seeing it through the Subaru’s windshield it might have looked like two men grimacing at one another, each gripped suddenly and simultaneously by chest pains or intestinal discomfort. Sun slid through the car windows in the slanted, distant way of a bright day in early autumn; obviously, their side of the planet was tilting away from the sun. The girl passed, Craig’s father stepped on the gas, and the car moved through the green shade of the huge, leafy oaks and elms that lined the road through campus, and which had been greeting new and returning students to the university for nearly a hundred and fifty Septembers.
“Take a left here, dad,” Craig said, pointing.
His father turned onto Second Street. On the corner a girl with an old-fashioned bike was stomping at the kickstand near the curb. Her hair was so blond it glowed. it was the kind of hair that Craig had always distrusted—too seraphic, almost god-fearing—on girls.
Until Nicole.
But this girl at the curb with the bike was nothing like Nicole.
 This girl had seen too many music videos, and was trying to look like one of the straggly, anemic blondes dancing behind the band. Her hair was greasy. Her nose was pierced. Her jeans sagged down over the sharp blades of her hipbones. She was the kind of girl Craig might have dated for a few weeks back home. Back then, before Nicole.
“Take a right now, dad,” he said.

THE RAISING. Copyright © 2011 by Laura Kasischke. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.