“I must be dreaming”, he thought after opening his eyes. He was lying under a mound of blankets, a heating pad on his shoulder and Ginni was mopping his brow with warm water. At this moment nothing could have made him happier.
There was an odd high-pitched whine in his ears that Simon could not identify. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before; somewhere between a dog whimpering and the sound of his old Ford pick-up spluttering to life. He blinked several times and saw that Ginni was making the noise, crying over his frozen corpse suddenly returned to mortality.
“Simon Peters you rotten stupid idiotic fool. What the Hell did you think you were doing trying to walk through that blizzard out there? What if you had gotten lost? You almost died as it was. How you were able to see where you were going I’ll never know.”
“I couldn’t”, he croaked. “The storm dropped on me pretty sudden. I was almost here when everything turned white. All I could do was keep moving forward and hope I ran into the building. The last thing I remember was thinking you might be out there too, coming for our date. I…I had to find you. I turned towards your dorm but got blown over a couple times. I tried again and knocked myself out on something.”
“You were damn lucky then because we found you way over on the far side of the dorm.” This was a new voice, soft mellow and full of life despite the obvious concern, “You banged your head on the last light post. Seems you went a bit further than you thought. If you hadn’t turned right then you would have gone out into the fields. No one would have found you until spring.” Jody’s face floated into view along with a pretty brunette hanging onto his sleeve.
“Well, you could have made me the final object in your annual scavenger hunt.” He knew the joke was weak but then so was he. And Simon drifted into joyful sleep as Ginni continued to bathe his face in her warm tears.
No sky shone through the windows when Simon awoke again, only a uniform white powder from sill to lintel. No longer did he feel cold. In fact the blankets wrapped tight around him were now hot and stifling. He struggled for few seconds until, free, he swung his legs off the bed and stood. Everything seemed to work oaky. Fingers moved, toes twitched and his head wasn’t throbbing near as much as earlier.
Out in the living room a lively conversation was taking place. He could hear Jody having a grand time bantering with Ginni; occasionally helped by another girl’s voice he didn’t recognize. He walked gingerly into the room and eased himself onto the couch next to Ginni.
“Hi”, was all he could manage at that moment. No one had ever saved his life before and Simon was not completely sure what the right thing to say was. Jody smiled broadly; his date offered a slight nod of the head; and Ginni wrapped her arms tightly around him as if to say ‘he’s mine and nothing is ever going to take him from me’.
“Guess I nearly met my Maker huh?”
“Pretty close,” said Jody becoming serious for the first time. He nodded toward the raven-haired woman who was mixing drinks in the kitchenette. “We were fortunate that Sophia was here. She’s an RN and working to become a doctor. After I dragged you in looking blue as a Swedish iceberg she jumped into action. ‘Get him in the tub with warm water’ she yelled. ‘Rub his arms and legs to get the circulation going’. It was just like on ER.”
Sophia walked in from the kitchen carrying a large tray of hot buttered rum in steaming mugs. “It was nothing. I’ve done five years in an ER in Boston. Every winter we get dozens of homeless who refuse to go to the shelters. Not a night goes by that one isn’t brought to us half frozen. Most of them would be dead if their blood wasn’t 20% alcohol. It freezes at a lower temperature so they just go to sleep. Some wake up, some don’t.”
She handed out the heavy cups and Simon sniffed at it warily. He didn’t drink much and then mostly just beer. Somehow getting hammered right now didn’t seem like a good idea.
“Go on,” she said, “It’ll thaw out your insides. Only one for you though.”
He sipped at the thick brown liquor and choked instantly. Everyone else was enjoying theirs but it was far too strong for Simon. “Thanks”, he whispered hoarsely. “Maybe I can finish it later.”
A rather mundane conversation broke out and Simon couldn’t seem to keep his head in it. They exchanged pleasantries with Sophia who was from just north of Boston. After high school she had taken a couple years in a nursing school, graduated with honors and went to work at Boston General, one of the busiest ERs on the eastern seaboard. Not until the topic came around to choice of schools was Simon able to focus again. He had a question for Ginni that somehow had never come out in the midst of their kissing.
“Hey babe, I always thought you were going to Georgetown. How did you wind up here?”
Few people had ever seen Virginia Shelton blush. She was too logical and sophisticated for all that childishness. But just now her face turned a bright crimson. “I was all set to go there. My parents had even negotiated a lease on an off-campus apartment. They were about to sign when I burst into the room crying, ‘I don’t want to go to Georgetown. It’s too far away. Can I stay in-state…please?’”
She gazed ruefully at the others and added, “Kinda dumb huh?”
Sophia looked at her kindly and replied, “Why do you think I spent five years in Boston. I didn’t want to be more than ten minutes from my dad”.
Jody chuckled and said, “I’d give anything if my mom could be closer. I applied at every school between Canada and the gulf coast. This was the only one to accept me.”
“How come?” asked Simon, now truly interested in what was being said.
Now it was Jody’s turn to blush. “You might not believe this but I have a tendency to play pranks on occasion.”
The room burst into gales of laughter that drown out the sound of the storm. Jody joined right in until it died down and then went on. “The deans at my seven high schools kept a file on me and just passed it around as I moved from here to there. New Orleans Police Department picked it up after I graduated. I never broke the law…bad.”
Sophia wore a look of shock on her face, “Surely you didn’t do anything that bad. I mean, you didn’t get arrested or anything.”
Jody looked for all the world like a boy with his hand in the cookie jar, “I am the kind of guy that just can’t leave well enough alone. If someone needs to have their ego punctured or attitude adjusted I can’t help myself but I’ll find a way to publicly humiliate them. It made me quite a few enemies down in NOLA. So they sent word to all the colleges up and down the coast. UVA was the only one to give me a second chance. I promised the admissions board that I would tone it down.”
“Alright Martin, you’ve been bragging about these jokes for months now. I bet I can top anything you’ve done.” Simon was feeling much better now.
One could almost hear the ‘waa-waa’s and high whistle as the two men began to face-off. They took the measure of each other wondering who would draw first and if this would be their last.
The challenger made his move. “I once put talcum powder into my mom’s hair dryer. When she turned it on the whole room filled with white smoke. She looked like a chicken leg ready to be fried.”
Jody scoffed, “Pfft. Kid’s stuff”. “My senior prom I spiked the punch with sleeping pills. There were students and teachers passed out all over the gym floor. When the cops arrived to see why none of the kids had come home they thought they had found an orgy.”
“Boor-ring!” My first job was with a taxidermist. Sometimes he would let me keep the extra parts. The mayor was running for re-election that year and I didn’t like him very much. I managed to fix a tail to the mayor’s coat just before he made an appearance at the lodge hall. So there he was, talking about how people could trust him without question and he’s wearing this skunk’s tail. He didn’t get 10% of the vote that year.”
“That was you!?” Ginni screamed. “You little sneak! I worked on his campaign that year and you cost me the election.” She pouted good-naturedly for a few seconds as the boys went on.
“Bah, dirty political tricks. My first job I replaced all the shrimp in the gumbo with rubber ones. Old Fat Sal the trumpet player wrenched out a tooth trying to chew it up. Played with a whistle ever since.”
Simon shook his head, “No style at all. Try this: I found out that our mill used a certain plastic fiber in all the elastic bands they made. The mall promised to only stock locally made goods. This meant that every girl in town had unmentionables held up by our elastic.”
At this point in the story Ginni turned red for the second time that evening. She excused herself on the pretense of needing to use the ladies room.
“Weird thing about that stuff, if it got really cold it would turn brittle. So I went to the dance hall and began shooting off CO2 fire extinguishers. Everyone thought it was good fun. Later I put in a CD of a test tone that I knew would resonate with those fibers. Within 10 seconds every panty, bra and garter belt in the place had fallen to the floor.”
Jody lit up like it was Christmas morning. “Oh that’s good. That’s really good. But I can top it. I have a bunch of cousins and two of them were so picky about who they would date that they got into their twenties having never been out at all. So I talked each of them into signing up for online dating. Then I faked a girl profile so I could talk to Billy and a guy to talk to Sally. I strung them along for two months before they wanted to meet. Then I set them up together. I thought it was going to be the funniest thing.”
Sophia appeared rather worried now. “Did they ever catch on about you?”
“Nah”, he answered in a melancholy tone. “They been married six years now and couldn’t be happier.”
“You were lucky they didn’t think you were a stalker or something.” Simon snorted.
“I have a stalker.”
The incongruity of the statement with their merriment caused a silence to fall. Ginni had just come into the room and spoke without anyone noticing she was back.
“Maybe not a stalker so much as an admirer. Apparently he’s an old student from twenty years ago named Harvey. A friend of mine from town knows him, says he’s a bit touched in the head and has been taking classes for all this time. He came into the Red Cross office where I volunteer and began talking to me. He’s come back every day for a couple weeks now. Yesterday he asked if I had done any modeling for a photography class. I thought he was just an old guy hitting on me and told him off. I think he was crying as he left. Poor guy. Mark says ole Harvey probably has seen a model that looks like me sometime. He’s taken every class the school offers.”
Simon rose and took Ginni in his arms, “Babe, there ain’t no one that looks like you.”
They kissed eagerly while Jody made a retching noise in the background to Sophia’s great annoyance.
Over the next few weeks their friendship grew into something deep pure and real. Simon knew this was more than just a romance when he hit upon the idea for a gift.
“The Stone”, he thought, “I can have a jeweler set the stone into a ring for her.” Never mind that it weighed a couple pounds and would have been measured at somewhere around 500 karats.
The more rational part of his consciousness hit the brakes hard. “You know what you are thinking don’t you?”
“What? I just want to give her something. Something that says…”
“I love you?”
The often disjointed pieces of his self-awareness suddenly clunked, rattled and then began to whirr. New ideas slowly emerged from that rusted and unused machine.
“I love you? I suppose…” A flood of images and assumptions began to overrun his thoughts.
“Adults fell in love, not kids like me.”
“You’re 20 years old Simon. Not a kid anymore.”
“But Love? Really in Love? Married in a little house with a white picket fence and 2.3 kids running around?”
“Why not? You already spend most of your time together. Didn’t she bring you dinner just yesterday when you had to stay late in the lab? Don’t you think about ways to make her smile? And what about all those nights you lie awake imagining the two of you…”
“Okay I get it!” he said out loud, scaring the freshman lab assistants. One of them dropped a beaker of ballistics gel which hit the ground with a squelching crack and wobbled furiously.
He took a very deep breath and let it out in a low whistle. “I think I do love her”, he thought. “I’d rather be with her; doing whatever she wants than anywhere else. I want to make her happy.”
A warm glow spread from Simon’s heart to every portion of his body. It was like slipping into a perfectly heated bath. All doubts and fears were washed away in the realization that he had found someone he cared about more than himself. He felt wonderful.
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