RAPHAËL AND I STARTED SPENDING ALL OUR nights at the motel. We couldn’t go to his parents’ apartment or mine if we wanted to be alone. We were blowing the little money that we had, but we didn’t care. The belt slid from the loops of his pants like a snake through the grass. We lay facing each other with our foreheads and knees touching. We lay in the shape of a heart. I started to have the first inkling of why it might feel good to leave home and be part of a different family.
We left the motel one afternoon and went for a walk in the park. The clouds were like a group of sheep that was gathering to be shorn. There was a scent called Five Minutes Before It Rains. If you put it on your neck, whoever kissed you would cry.
All the people in the street had to rush up stairs and more stairs to close all their windows before the rain flew in. The laundry was being pulled in so violently that it screamed.
“Everyone to the lifeboats! Everyone to the lifeboats!” a boy was yelling.
Children who just wanted a few more minutes were still outside playing. Their mothers’ voices calling them in were like pieces of paper. The wind crunched them up and threw them away before they could get to the children’s ears.
Raphaël stood at the side of the pond and began throwing bits of bread into the water for the swans. They all started heading toward him. They looked like they were on their way to devour him. One stepped out of the water with its large black feet. It held its wings in front of it, like a naked girl with only her socks on, holding her hands over her privates. Raphaël turned toward me.
We started to feel a few drops of rain. We ran and climbed onto the merry-go-round just to keep out of the rain. We sat on a chariot that was being pulled by two zebras. Raphaël pulled a tiny box out of his pocket inside his jacket. It was a little brown cardboard box that had a drawing of a mourning dove on it.
“Let’s get married,” he said.
I felt a rush flood through my heart. I didn’t know whether the feeling was love or whether it was the excitement you feel when you are doing something that you know is stupid but you are doing it anyways.
He put the ring on my finger. It was a mood ring. It was turning green and yellow. It was turning every colour in the rainbow. Sometimes I was so afraid of love. It gave you the feeling you had when you were shoplifting and you were walking out of the store with something concealed under your jacket.
There was a drug dealer who sold a kind of acid called Happily Ever After. That was the only time I had ever heard that term applied to anything in real life. Everything I knew about marriage pointed to it being a horrible, hateful endeavour. And if there were any two people who would be incapable of a stable marriage, it had to be Raphaël and me.
It felt like I was doing something terrible when I said oui. But God help me, I wanted to see what was on the other side of that word.
The rain started coming by in gusts, like groups of frightened deer. We sat on the horses, holding each other’s hands, and looked out at the world. It rained all day. Later it was reported that the rain had taken down a whole fleet of newspaper ships in the pond.