Donny had been just the right age to seem older, too old to relate to, quite. He was probably three years older. Nobody else of that age lived nearby, though, so when they were little she was the closest thing. He lived four houses up the road, not far, but a lot of work for children's feet. They met most days, in school and in church and in between.
Everybody liked Donny because he looked so frail and vulnerable, pale with pale eyes and loose straw on his head. He smiled a lot and his teeth were all out of order; for a while then he had braces and after that they weren't so bad. Even when he was a little older, though, there was always something out of place and out of line about him--his clothes would be crooked, his chin unshaven, his socks and shoes reversed. His family never had a lot of money. His clothes had always been someone else's. He made her shy.
By the time he was killed he was nineteen, with a light beard and a craggy Adam's-apple. Those last few years he seemed to swell from boy to man again and then again, every season freshly, so that he must have been several times a man; he was still small, still gaunt, but there was something about his face and the back of his hand that looked like adulthood. He still smiled and his voice was always pretty high.
He was shot with a rifle by an angry and small-minded man: it was the sort of death he was bound for. All good people knew it. That's the way the story goes. It was another boy from school, and it wasn't even Donny that he was really mad at. He just felt mad enough to shoot people if he wanted.
It was winter, the last time she saw him, and her mother's family was visiting. Donny was around the whole day, which was less usual at that age. He spent most of the day with her cousins Nathan and Rich, running around off in the woods somewhere, while she was at home with the rest of her relatives. Not long before dinner the three of them came tumbling out of the brush again, high-stepping through the snow like tipsy colts. And that was the moment that most stuck with her--you don't get to choose them--Donny grinning with no hat on, his jacket open and his throat as white as his breath.
Later that night after dinner was well over she drove him home. She huddled against the chill that was still with her from the walk to the car, and let the engine idle with the lights off, waiting for it to warm up inside. Donny spread his hands out on the glass to melt the ice outside, so that clouds of melt billowed out from his fingers until the water burst from them and ran like lightning down under the hood.
She drove around a while in the dark and the quiet, talking with Donny. They hadn't talked so much for a long time. It was as comfortable as always. He died five weeks later, after Christmas.
"People keep asking me what I'm going to do. I still haven't figured out what to say... I don't really see that it matters. You know what I mean?"
She was eight years old, in church, and he found her there for the first time, Sunday, after the service was over, hiding under the stairs, not crying but staring. He talked to her a long time then, too. He said the most confusing things, a lot of things, he told her he understood, and it was okay, try not to be afraid so much.
It was her heart, he said, her heart and her soul, they were just a little too faint, too small, and she should always be careful of them. And he laid his hand on her head, and his other across her heart: it was very quiet and she was quiet, and only at these moments could she remember that he'd ever shown sweat at the hairline that way. Was that really how it happened? He would do the same thing again and again while they were growing up, like in the car that last night, and at the strangest times, not even always when they were alone. All at once his voice would come up to her: how you doing? And he'd put a hand on her head and one on her chest and leave them there a minute, and then usually chat a little bit. And nobody around would act like anything that happened, but for her it was like she suddenly woke up.
Christine, Dreaming