The Ice Queen

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Authors: Alice Hoffman
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance
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the first time he played with blocks. Now with his hands afflicted, he worried that architecture might no longer be an option.
    Renny was only twenty-one, but he seemed older once he got to talking. He gazed at the other students passing by. I saw what was in his eyes. The others had no idea of what he’d been through. They were moving through a world in which people didn’t limp or have holes in their heads. In their universe no one wore gloves when the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees. No one woke in the middle of the night, in pain, alone. A stranger in his own life.
    “Do you think every person has one defining secret?” Renny asked.
    I laughed, nursing my own most current secret, Lazarus Jones. “Don’t you think we’re more complex than that? Don’t we all have endless secrets?”
    “Little, bullshit ones. Sure. I don’t mean those. Who do you love? Who did you fuck? Everyone has them. I mean one defining secret. The essence of a person. If you figure that out, you figure out the riddle of that particular human being.”
    “Is this your way of getting me to confide in you?”
    “Maybe. Just give me one of your bullshit secrets. But be careful. That might make us friends.”
    I was surprised. Though he was a stranger to me, I’d thought he had assumed we were friends. Renny, it turned out, wasn’t easy to fool. I suppose he was used to people shrugging him off. The sun was in his face, blurring his features. All in all, Renny wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but not a single girl walking by had glanced at him. The limp, the withered foot, the hole in his head, the gloves. That’s what they saw.
    Would it hurt me to give him something? Just a tiny bit?
    “I went to see Lazarus Jones.”
    Renny stared at me, then threw his head back and laughed. He might have even chortled. “Now that is bullshit.”
    “Seriously. I did.”
    “Bullshit and crap. Times two.”
    “Fine. Don’t believe me.”
    “Yeah, well then, tell me. Did he really chase Wyman off with a gun?”
    “Unloaded. He didn’t want to be their lab rat.”
    “Wow. Sympathy for the devil. Maybe you really did meet him.”
    “He’s not the devil. And I’m hardly sympathetic.” Now that was bullshit. “He owns an orange grove.” Enough of this. “Okay, so now give me one of your secrets.”
    “There’s one,” Renny said mournfully.
    I followed his gaze. Several young women were on their way to the dorms. Frankly, I couldn’t tell one from the other. They were all pretty and young.
    “The one on the left.”
    The blonde.
    “Iris McGinnis. She was in my art history class in the spring. She doesn’t know I’m alive. I’m insanely crazy about her.”
    “This isn’t your defining secret, is it?”
    Instead of answering, Renny said, “Look at her. No one will ever be in love with me.”
    “You’re not the only one in the world with a terrible love life. I’m right there with you.”
    There was no need for him to know about the policeman in the parking lot or my friends’ boyfriends in high school or the fact that I liked the way the burns on my arms felt, what they reminded me of. Sitting there with Renny, I wondered if choosing the red dress had been an accident. Was there a part of my brain that could still sense red, just as it sensed desire?
    When Renny went to class I walked to my car and headed for the library. I had decided to get the library records in order. It was the least I could do to make up for all my absences. I was taking Frances’s handwritten notations and entering them into the word processor. On each patron’s card Frances had painstakingly recorded every book he or she had checked out. There was one woman, for instance, who had withdrawn every book on architecture that we had, then had ordered more. I wondered if she’d be a possibility for Renny until I came to her birth date and discovered this particular patron was nearly eighty years old. No match, I supposed, for the beautiful Iris

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