A Complicated Kindness Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’d known his name for years. After that we slowly walked towards the bushes and into this little clearing and then we sat down on a fallen tree and his arms were around me and he said talk to me, Nomi, so I started stupidly rambling on and on about the first thing that came to my mind.
    I heard something once that I liked and I think about it a lot, I said.
    Yeah? said Travis. What did you hear?
    Well, I said, these two people, a guy and a girl, were standing on a dark street in some town somewhere and the girl really liked the guy and had thought about him all the time, about being with him, having a relationship, everything, and the guy, I don’t know, he might have liked the girl, he was a little older and way cooler, and they just happened to meet each other on the street around ten at night, both of them on their way home from somewhere, and the boy said to the girl, hey, hi, how’s it going, you’re uh…and the girl said uh, yeah, hey, and the guy said so talk to me, and the girl paused and smiled and then she said but you’re here. So, I said to Travis, like I had just concluded a lecture on the makings of the A-bomb or something. Do you know what I mean? He said yeah, yeah, he did. He asked me why I liked that and I said I didn’t know, it seemed emblematic of something or other, and he said but he was there and I was talking to him and I said yeah, that was true.
    And then he asked me if I preferred the people I loved not to be around when I talked to them and I paused because I was confused but he understood my pause to be a dramatically flirtatious pause, maybe, and so when I finally did say no he said okay, good, and we sat there kicking snow and watching our breath evaporate and wondering, at least I was, what came next.
    What did come next was a bunch of kids running up to us and saying it’s the countdown, it’s the countdown, like one minute to midnight, come on, come on, so me and Travis got up and walked over to where a different bunch of kids were pretending to throw this other kid, Kurt, or Little Metal Boy as he was often called, into the fire as a sacrifice to the Devil, and other kids, the feathered girls, loud and drunk as usual, were counting down and everyone was talking with a Scottish accentand Janine passed me a hash pipe and just as I was sucking back on it I got kicked in the face by Kurt’s flailing leg and the pipe rammed into the roof of my mouth and tore the skin and my eyes started filling up with tears and Travis put his arm around my shoulders and said happy new year and I whispered happy new year to you too while swallowing mouthfuls of my own blood and when Travis leaned over to kiss me I shook my head slowly but not enough for him to notice and then passed out in the snow.
    Afterwards Travis told me I had fallen without a sound. Just like the explosion of chicken blood in my mom’s Jackson Pollock painting. That’s what snow is good for. That must be why Menno “I love the nightlife” Simons picked this place to wait out the rapture, a place where we could fall quietly and not bother anyone. I woke up a few hours later in the back of Travis’s dad’s work truck, with a carpet on top of me and Travis sitting cross-legged next to my head. His lips were blue and he could barely speak but what he said was: Oh Christ, thank fucking God you’re alive. I thought it was the most original thing I’d ever heard anyone say about me and I began to love him.
     
    Trudie used to work in the crying room at church and we have these pictures of her and Tash and me hanging out in there and there’s this one picture of Travis stepping on my face. He was two or so with a giant diapered ass and I was just a baby lying on the floor and obviously in his way.
    My mom used to unhook the wire at the back of the speaker in the crying room so she wouldn’t be able to hear the man, her brother, my Uncle Hans, who was The Mouth. Tash, when she was older, would bring in a transistor radio so we