All We Know of Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin Read Free Book Online Page A

tired.
    “No, I do. I mean . . .” I go on. “I think if you really love someone, you can meet them now just as easily as later, right? I mean, how do you know?”
    “You don’t,” she says.
    I started feeling that this girl could have just been one of my friends, even with all that blue eye shadow, even with that wedding ring. Maybe we rode the school bus together for years. We were never in any of the same classes and didn’t see each other outside of school, but we are really close friends. Summer friends. And neighborhood friends. Or just bus friends.
    Oh, right, my bus is outside.
    I wonder if it’s fixed yet, or what?
    “Hey, can I just take this with me?” I say suddenly.
    “Sure, I’ll wrap it up,” she says, sliding the plate back toward her. “By the way, I’m Lorraine.”
    “I’m Natalie,” I say, turning my head to look again out the window, the window that looks out across the highway, to the gas stations and the video store, the doughnut chain and the pancake house, and I watch as a long silver bus, the one with the picture of the running dog on the side, the one on its way from Connecticut to Florida, gathers speed and moves off with the flow of traffic.
    Lorraine sat and watched the PBS special flicker on the screen in the darkened classroom. “There are fifteen different words for snow in the Eskimo language,” the narrator began. “Snowflake, frost, fine snow, drifting particles, clinging particles, fallen snow on ground . . .”
    And so on.
    Lorraine let herself fall into the movie as the camera passed over the frozen, nearly bluish glaciers, dipping and rising along the rounded formations. She was tired in a way she had never been before. After weeks of running to the bathroom between every class, even getting up in the middle of the night to check for her period, for drops of red, Lorraine finally bought a test kit — the most expensive, most accurate one. She had driven two towns over to find a pharmacy where no one would know her.
    The results had been pink — positive.
    Lorraine knew now (no matter what she decided to do about this) that she was forever separate from her classmates, though she could hear them talking behind her. When they realized their teacher was absent, most of the kids had cut out completely. The rest were fooling around in the back of the room. One kid even lit up a cigarette. The substitute teacher that day was too afraid to say anything. She just sat there pretending to be really interested in the documentary.
    And so on.
    Crust on fallen snow. Fresh fallen snow on the ground. Fallen snow floating on water. There was whiteness everywhere, falling from the sky, suspended in the wind. “There could be no one single word for something as important as snow,” the narrator went on. “It would be like a human infant being referred to just as ‘baby’ for his or her entire life. Language defines culture.”
    Lorraine instinctively reached down and rubbed her belly. It was flat. Flat as it ever had been. It seemed nearly impossible, and yet, of course, it was entirely possible.
    Three more kids left the room. Lorraine turned around and watched them go. The room brightened when they slipped out, then returned to darkness with the click of the shutting door. Dust hung suspended in the long beam of light that stretched from the projector to the screen. Lorraine let her eyes settle into a blur, staring at the movie.
    “For example,” the voice intoned, “do we call a buttercup a weed or a flower?”
    A weed or a flower?
    “Is it defined by its beauty or its wildness?”
    What words would define me now?
Lorraine thought. Carson had used the word
love.
He had told her he loved her many times. There should really be at least a few more words for love in the English language. Maybe it would help clear things up a little. Prevent these kinds of things from happening.
    Certainly the love she felt for her parents was a different love altogether from the love she felt