Breakheart Hill

wrong. My answer was always the same, a quick shrug, followed by “I’m okay.”

But I was not okay. I was in romantic agony. Every thought of Kelli simultaneously inflamed and chilled me. I could not sit in the same classroom with her without being overwhelmed by the most terrible sense of worthlessness. I thought of her constantly, and was constantly in pain. At times, when we worked together in the basement, I could feel the air thickening around me, dense and suffocating. It was an agitation that electrified every sight of her, lent a charge to every sound she made. Everything was either utterly barren or inexpressibly piercing. I could not stand her voice, or even the sight of her in the hallway, and yet, at the same time, I yearned for every glimpse of her. In her presence, and particularly when I drove her home each afternoon, I felt as if I were bleeding from every pore, and there were moments, when she would glance toward me and smile quietly, as if urging me to tell her what was wrong, when I wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and set out across the open field, reeling and bellowing like a stricken animal. It was beyond description, beyond consolation, beyond hope.

It was also in almost perfect contrast to the way Kelli lived during what Luke has forever insisted upon calling her “last days.” For as I became increasingly more sullen and enclosed, biting down on my pain, she became livelier, more self-assured and expansive, casting off the last vestiges of her “new girl” status. She talked eagerly to whatever student approached her, became more aggressive in her classroom comments and even kidded the small knot of “tough guys” who smoked in the parking lot after school. She wrote the story of Breakheart Hill and Mr. Arlington reluctantly told her that it was good enough to meet his research paper assignment. She also wrote two new poems, both of them somewhat less ominous than those she’d previously written, less guarded and unsure. “She was blooming,” Luke said to me years later, “like the spring.”

I can remember very well when he said it. We were driving home from Miss Troy’s funeral, its somberness still reflected in Luke’s eyes.

“One thing has always bothered me,” he said. “Kelli didn’t have a thing with her when she got out of my truck that day.”

I nodded, but said nothing.

“You know how she always had something with her,” Luke added. “A book, I mean. Always.”

“Yes.”

“But not that time, Ben,” Luke said. “And that’s always made me think that Kelli had something in mind when she went up there that day.”

As he spoke I saw the black wheels of the car as they ground up the old mining road, snapping vines and crushing twigs and blowing leaves behind them until they finally came to a dusty halt at the base of Breakheart Hill.

“But why would she have gone up there?” Luke asked.

I saw the car door swing open, two feet lower themselves onto the dusty rut, pause a moment, then move forward determinedly, step by anguished step.

“Of course, Sheriff Stone always thought that she’d gone up there to meet somebody,” Luke added. “Somebody who had a reason to hurt her, I guess.”

The feet disappeared into the green, but I could still hear them rustling through the thick undergrowth, moving more slowly now as they mounted the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.

“Who did he think that might be, Luke?” I asked coolly.

Luke’s eyes drifted away from my even stare.

“Who, Luke?” I repeated, this time more insistently. “Did he say who he thought it was she was going to meet that afternoon?”

Still Luke did not turn toward me, and for a single chilling instant I believed that he was actually going to spin around suddenly and say it to my face, You, Ben. He thought she was going to meet you.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, his eyes drifted back to me slowly, almost reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. He shook his head, as if trying to drive the mystery from it. “She was blooming, like the spring,” he added. “You could see it in her eyes.”

Her eyes appeared to me instantly, and I saw the same luminous energy that Luke had spoken of so clearly that for a moment I found myself unable to imagine them in any other way, and certainly not lightless and uncomprehending, floating without direction, vacant and disengaged, as they had been when they’d looked up at me for the last time.

But even more impressive than the immense energy that flowed from Kelli that spring were the varied uses she found for it. She helped Sheila Cameron begin work on the prom, tutored Noreen in algebra and even submitted a few line drawings for the final issue of the Wildcat. “Just something I thought I’d try,” she explained as she handed them to me.

But most surprising of all, Kelli decided to heed Miss Carver’s request and go out for the part of Juliet in the upcoming school play.

The audition was held in the auditorium, and several girls, including Mary Diehl and Sheila Cameron, showed up to try out for the part. Earlier that morning, Kelli had rather pointedly asked me to go with her. “I’d like you to tell me how I did,” she explained. I didn’t want to do it, but I could find no way out that would not have ended in a frantic and probably tearful confession of wounded love, so I took a seat near the center of the auditorium and glumly watched as each girl recited various lines from the play.

Mary went first, her long, dark hair pouring over her shoulders as she recited Juliet’s balcony speech with an undiminished southern accent. Miss Carver had arranged to have a spotlight narrow in on each of the contenders, and I remember that Mary looked oddly imprisoned in it, a hoop of yellow light encircling her delicately, but confiningly as well, so that, had I been all-knowing, I might have glimpsed her future in an instant of foreshadowed doom.

Sheila Cameron came next. As she recited Juliet’s death scene, the same spotlight that had tightened around Mary like a noose appeared to hold her in a warm embrace. Her blond hair glowing in its light, she let her arms sweep out and reach for her imagined Romeo, calling to him softly but with the kind of inner strength that suggested those depths of character and endurance her later life would prove.

At last it was Kelli’s turn. I noticed that as she walked across the stage, Miss Carver leaned forward slightly, watching her intently, and with a sense of anticipation she had not shown for the other girls.

Kelli stopped at the center of the stage, turned and looked out over the nearly empty theater. The spotlight opened around her, and for a moment she stood in silence, taking a single dramatic pause before she began.

As it turned out, she had not chosen one of the more famous of Juliet’s speeches, but a relatively obscure one, given to a friar, and which ended with a few words I have read a thousand times since then:

Or bid me go into a new-made grave,

And hide me with a dead man in his shroud,

Things that to hear them told have made me tremble …

When she’d finished, I got up and eased myself into the center aisle. The auditorium was nearly empty, but as I glanced back toward the door I could see a single figure, seated in the far right corner of the room, slouched uncharacteristically low in his seat, his football jacket hung loosely over the chair in front of him. I nodded toward him, but he did not see me. His attention was focused on someone else entirely. At first I assumed that he’d come to see Mary do her recitation, but as I watched Todd’s eyes follow Kelli off the stage, then up the aisle toward where I stood waiting for her as patiently as ever, I was not so sure.

He got to his feet as Kelli and I moved up the aisle.

“You did great, Kelli,” he said.

“I think everybody did,” Kelli said.

Todd shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, Mary sort of made Juliet sound like she was from Gone with the Wind, don’t you think?”

Kelli laughed. “Well, maybe a southern Juliet would be interesting.”

Todd shook his head slowly. “No, it’s you, Kelli,” he said with that sense of absolute certainty that only one who had lived such a life as he had lived could truly possess. “You’re the one who should play Juliet.”

I could tell that something in the quiet respect that Kelli could hear in Todd’s voice had moved her, but I could not have anticipated that it would move her to the offer she almost immediately made. “Well, if I play Juliet,