Hello, community,
Today, I’m embarking on a new project for you. I’m writing a new short story and, over the next week or so or probably more, I’ll be posting the various drafts until I arrive at the first complete rough draft. Yup, you’re going to see me writing out loud. I hope you enjoy this! So here’s the beginning.
Note: This story has already been rewritten twice since I first posted it.
In 1985, John and Gabriel were freshman at St. Cataldo University in Spokane.
John was from a small logging community near the Canadian border north of Spokane, halfway between two other small towns you haven’t heard of. His father was the town cop and his mother was the school principal—small town royalty.
Gabriel grew up in a house with picture windows on Seattle’s Lake Washington. His parents worked for different law firms because they wanted their marriage to endure. They were devout Catholics. Most of the students at Cataldo University were casual Catholics but Gabriel was like his parents. He believed in transubstantiation—the bread and wine were absolutely the blood and flesh of Christ. He was one of the twenty or thirty students who attended Mass every Sunday in the university chapel.
John had a little bit of extra money. Gabriel the Real Catholic had a lot.
They were randomly placed in dorm rooms next to each other on the southwest wing of Agnes Hall. In 1985, there were no algorithms that paired roommates so John was predictably matched with a kid from a Montana farming town and Gabriel was matched with a dude from San Diego.
City boy met city boy. Country boy met country boy. But friendship doesn’t work that way. Friendships don’t pay attention to the rules.
Gabriel the Catholic and John were strangers on that first day of college, best friends by the end of the first week, and were on their way to being lifelong friends.
At Christmas break, after their first semester, they switched roommates. There were no hard feelings. Everybody knew it was the right thing.
Gabriel (never Gabe) had the only personal phone on the wing—a landline that was the most important technology in the dorm. There were community phones that accepted calls but you could only make outgoing calls to local numbers. So Gabriel the Catholic charged his wingmates to use the phone for any long distance calls. His parents paid the bill so it was all profit for him. One dollar for three minutes if you were calling your friends or family back home. Two dollars if you were calling your long-distance girlfriend. People in love were always willing to pay more, though Gabriel waived the fee when the call ended in a breakup. He liked to think he was a romantic. He’d taken a Poetry 101 class, read Keats, and wrote a sonnet called “Ode to Lake Washington” that his professor said was “earnest.” He was in a study group with a girl named Linda. They read the famous poem about the red wheelbarrow in the rain. Gabriel didn’t understand it. Nothing seemed to happen. There was no story. But Linda said, “It’s like the poem is a camera taking a picture.” Gabriel was stunned by her insight. It was the beginning of his love for her.
Gabriel the Catholic also had the only personal TV on the wing. A little color thing with unpredictable reception. It was almost exclusively used to watch The David Letterman Show and Saturday Night Live. But, in January, he was watching in the early morning when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. He was alone at first but then John and ten or twelve boys crowded into their room to watch. They were young and dumb but nobody was young and dumb enough to make a joke. They allowed themselves to silently, seriously, and collectively grieve. And, soon enough, a few other boys and girls from other wings arrived to watch. Gabriel barely looked at the other kids. He was transfixed by the epic disaster. He knew it was the first time in his life that he’d witnessed something historic, a tragedy that he’d never forget. He thought he might cry when they showed a photograph of Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who was supposed to be the first amateur astronaut in space.
Then Gabriel heard sobbing. At first, he thought it was somebody on the television. Perhaps an astronaut’s spouse or parents. Or, most tragically, a child. But Gabriel realized that somebody was crying in his dorm room. He turned away from the TV and saw that it was Linda, his poetry study partner. Gabriel was surprised to see that she was weeping into John’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. How had Gabriel missed the beginning of that relationship? How had his prayers for Linda’s affection gone unanswered? Gabriel the Catholic saw John kiss the top of Linda’s head. Damn, damn, damn. Gabriel understood that his two friends had already been physically, emotionally, and spiritually intimate. It was an intimacy that would last for decades.
It was the beginning of Gabriel’s unrequited love for Linda. In that moment, he felt two kinds of grief.
He turned back to the television as a reporter said, “In 1967, we lost three astronauts to a fire during a simulated launch, but this is the very first time we’ve lost astronauts during a real flight.”
If We Speak as Men, If We Speak as Angels - First Draft