Read Online The Dark Path by David Schickler - Free Book Online Page B

move and take Holy Orders.
    I want to talk about this with Father Prince, but I’m scared to. I pace around on Copley Lawn one night, scuffing through fallen yellow leaves. Mason finds me.
    â€œHey, fuckface. What’re you stressing out about tonight?”
    I don’t answer. I’ve never told him about the Priesthood Ache, but he’s practically a mind reader.
    â€œSchick, we’ve both got to go study abroad next year. Especially you.”
    â€œWhy especially me?”
    â€œSo we can get you away from these goddamn Jesuits. Enough of this Catholic bullshit. You really believe that you’re eating God’s body during Communion?”
    I say that I think so. I say that it might be a mystical body, but it’s real.
    â€œThen you know what that makes you, Schick? A motherfucking
cannibal
!” Mason brays his wild laugh, but he’s not kidding. “If this Catholic crap is so important, how come you’re screwing Mara every other minute? Not that you shouldn’t be.”
    I have no answer. I’m guilty as charged. Mara and I can’t stay away from each other. We meet each night in the library. When we get hungry we quit studying and walk to a nearby deli to buy pasta and Paul Newman’s red sauce and we go back to her row house and eat.
    Afterward in her bunk bed we ravage each other. There’s no moan that she makes that I don’t carry down inside me. I’m falling for everything about her. After sex we lie naked, listening to music.
    One night she puts on The Alarm’s “Walk Forever by My Side.”
    â€œReally listen.” She pets my face. “It’s my favorite song.”
    I have my head resting on her abdomen, by her ribs. There’s a scent to her skin here that I can’t get enough of, a smell that’s floral and lightly spicy. I want no man ever to have smelled it before me, just like I want Mara not to be agnostic, which she has said that she is.
    â€œWhy’s it your favorite song?”
    â€œIt got me through a hard time.”
    â€œWhat hard time?”
    She just goes on stroking my jawline.
    â€œWhere are you spending Thanksgiving?” I ask.
    â€œShhh. Just listen.”
    I can’t see her face. There’s nothing in the darkness but her body and mine and the warm white sheets. Her hair crackles with static electricity when I touch it. I graze my fingers over the back of her neck now, feeling her river-rapids scar. She still hasn’t said how she got it.
    â€œI love you,” I say suddenly.
    Her fingertips stop on my face.
    â€œI love you, Mara. Please don’t be mad that I’m saying it. I can’t help it. I’m in love with you.”
    I get my head beside hers on the pillow and look at her. She gazes back with panic in her eyes and each second that she doesn’t say it back to me is torture.
    â€œDavid, please. I’m not ready for . . . just listen to the song.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    PARENTS’ WEEKEND ARRIVES in November. My parents drive down from Rochester. I stand at the campus gates on a Friday, waiting. When their maroon Buick pulls onto 37th Street, I see my mother’s face through the windshield and she sees me and I imagine that she just knows.
    â€œJack!” I hear her cry. “Look at him! Oh God, I can see it . . . He’s fucked somebody! Noooooo!!”
    Of course she’s really just smiling at me and waving as my father parks along the curb. I wave back.
    As far as my parents know, Mara is just someone I’ve taken out a few times. Telling my mother what I’ve done with Mara would make my face explode. But looking through the windshield at my father, I want to tell him the truth. I’ve never kept crucial things from him. I’ve always felt like it would be unmanly, and maybe I feel that way because he’s the strongest, most manly person I know. And the strongest thing about