Page 15 - WTP Vol. VIII#2

at the Lensic, though her father had tried to say she couldn’t go and watch the nudity, the indecent kisses. The second time she’d been sitting behind Quinn, there with some friends of his from karate. All the while Romeo spoke lines of breathless love, she’d wanted badly to lean forward and touch Quinn’s devastating cowlick, to feel the different textures of his sun-streaked hair—wavy on top, long and swept back, and buzz-cut against the soft skin of his neck. Now Bruce Dermott made fun of the “girly” music, of course, and turned the radio dial to another station, to what sounded like mariachis.
But then Quinn turned it back and there were other things she liked—”Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Honkey Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones, just out, and “Get Back” by the Bea- tles, which she didn’t like nearly as much as the song on the other side of the single, “Don’t Let Me Down.” That was her favorite.
Serious, tow-headed Bo walked in, wanting the stu- dio. The youngest of the Freys.
“I’ve got to practice,” he announced. At ten, his voice still pure, he’d been selected to sing the boy shepherd at the Santa Fe Opera that summer, at the beginning of the third act of Tosca.
“Practice later,” Quinn said imperiously, sweeping his unruly hair backwards out of his eyes with an impa- tient hand. He seemed to be in a bad temper too, not clowning as he usually did with Bruce.
“I can’t. I’m going to Victor Quintana’s birthday party later. It’s pizza—and I get to sleep over.”
“Goody for you,” his brother said in a sneering baby voice, unfolding from the futon gracefully and in a single movement getting up and plucking the sheet music from Bo’s hand and holding it way up above his head, out of the small boy’s reach.
“Give it back, Quinn,” Anya snarled at him. “I’m going to tell.”
“I live in dread!” Quinn pantomimed, fingers spread wide, palms out, before his face as if to ward away some horror, after letting the sheet music drop onto the knock-off Oriental rug on the gray concrete floor, a rug which Samantha the cat had shredded in one corner.
Back in the house Quinn turned the radio on loudly, drowning out Olivia’s still persistent piano. She protested, but he just said “Chill out, Sis,” and flung
“Los Alamos was just a fact of life to Jodi,
as taken-for-granted as
the Anasazi cliff dwellings nearby. As her schoolwork, grammar and math.”
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