Miracles

I

Our teacher explained it with experiments meant to get at one fragment of the magic at a time. Today we’re refracting light through prisms. Today we’re in the dark describing shapes. Today we’re circumnavigating the color wheel. Then moving forward, elementary age minds were expected to understand how photons traveled and color reflected and the upside-down mystery at the backs of our eyes came to signify “chair,” “aquarium,” “square,” so, of course, I pretended to see—eager to comprehend, eager to please—but to this day have no idea the way any of it works. I was at a loss with light and fell further behind as we took in sound and love and death and time.

II

She moved here from Lubbock, a metropolis rising up where our plains ended, and we were all streaming to the nurse’s station love sick and queasy. Her short blonde bob, a backpack brand alien at Walmart started fourth-grade stutters and blushes each time she’d pass by. We dated for six days, long enough to talk on the phone twice and hold hands during a football game. That Friday her friend Amy from another school laughed at my Star Wars shirt. “You’re going out with him?” “Sometimes it’s what’s on the inside that matters.” My dream girl.

III

Every Saturday at noon the tornado siren would sound its test. The wail would open slowly, just cooing at first, and then surging. A train coming through the mud room. We lived close to one of their towers and always heard our dogs barking before the waves reached us. I would cover my ears and collapse into a ball, my mother rocking me slowly on the couch. One year they doubled the test length to add an announcement in Spanish. Esta es una prueba, esta es una prueba del sistema de transmisión de emergencia, esta es solo una prueba.

IV

Amy overcorrected then folded her car around a tree. Colt was riding shotgun and both were killed instantaneously. We on the football team had to wear armbands with her initials every game that year, as did the other cheerleaders mourning their lost sister. Her death inspired an all-school assembly and an artist commission for a mural on the side of the softball field. Amy thirty feet tall and swinging a bat, while angels peered down, surrounded with flourishes in gold and green, our school colors. Later that year Garrett hung himself, and it didn’t even merit a mention in our morning announcements. He played guitar not varsity sports; neither of his parents ever forced him to attend church. Some friends graffitied an abandoned railroad car in memorial, playing his mixtape loud on loop all through the night, and somehow that felt like the proper sendoff. It felt just right.

V

For the fourth grade talent show, we wrote a play about Star Wars so long our teacher had to cut us off before the act break. We had never run the whole thing, just kept adding ideas at recess, certain each joke was golden and it would be such a success. So, there I was in the wings, dressed as Princess Leia, crying that we couldn’t finish, and as my father came to grab me, my father the oil field hand cum priest cum school board president, my father, he said a version of what he always said, when the cops explained I’d driven my pickup across the high school lawn or when neighbors reprimanded him for having a son who held another boy’s hand in the senior class photo, that it all was fine and didn’t change an ounce how proud of me he was.

VI

We prayed at assemblies, we prayed in our head, we prayed before dinner, we prayed before bed, we prayed to start car trips, we prayed in Christ’s name, we prayed every holiday, we prayed every game. Star athletes OD’d, creekside a babe drowned, our house was hit with a tornado, then it flooded, then burnt down, a child was struck by lightning, blown-up meth labs left more dead, a family was shot while sleeping, save the daughter under her bed.

VII

It was an ongoing debate whether the fish minded our tossing cigarettes into the pond. Garrett was certain it got them high. Chase agreed but worried they’d get addicted. Ichthys tweakers. Haddock addicts. We’d drive out there to smoke during senior year. Hidden from parents and classmates, we’d park our trucks by the limestone fragments in a grove of dead trees, huddling against the cold. Laughing, devising post-graduation plans, smoke and steam would erupt from our mouths. The water would chop at the dock across the lake, while a cinereal sky tried to snow. One afternoon Chase smoked three and vomited into the water. The fish seemed delighted.

VIII

Trying not to fall asleep atop the fort we’d taken all summer to build, Taylor, Garrett, Chase, and I stayed up chatting and laughing and making plans for the future. Taylor would be a cowboy like his father. Garrett was going to race dirt bikes. Chase wanted to design buildings. My grandparents had told me to say “doctor” whenever this question came up, so I said that. We would of course all live in the same house that Chase would build, with a race track for Garrett and ranchland out back for Taylor. Taylor would be married to his then girlfriend. The rest of us still had six or seven years before we graduated high school and could surely score some brides by then. Underneath the mulberry tree in my backyard, on top of the ugliest fort any of us had ever seen, we drifted off in sleeping bags, trying to make out the stars through a latticework of branches. The last thing I remember was Garrett explaining the best thing about time is how it’s going to speed up—that even though it feels like growing takes forever, this accelerates as we age, until by the time we die, we’re basically flying, hitting the big jump going ninety, camera flash bulbs exploding on every side.