CHAPTER
5
E
arly on—after that first night at the bonfire, after our first and second and tenth kiss, when the sunset began coming earlier and the slow plod of summer gave way to the hectic reentrance of back to school—there had been a fight. Our first and only. For me, it had been resolved and forgotten. It was eclipsed by the deepening feelings that had turned out to be love.
It was different for James. I knew that, now. He had carried it with him for almost a year, nursing his grudge through the long cold of winter, holding it tightly while he watched me walk the stage at graduation, letting the resentment grow bigger and wilder until it burst out and knocked us both senseless.
I understood. I’d almost forgotten that once, it had been me who tried to end it.
* * *
I’d waited until the last minute, late in the day. It had been two weeks but felt like longer, our connection so deep and immediate that we’d fallen naturally into a state of constant togetherness. It had been so blissful and easy to just forget that this was going nowhere, that senior year loomed large ahead. Summer had seemed sure to go on forever.
We were sitting on a tiny strip of uneven beach by Silver Lake, sucking on the rough, icy ends of colored freeze pops. He’d brought a whole sleeve of them, all twelve colors, half melted in a cooler full of ice. I watched him eat and grinned. I liked to suck the sugar from them, playing vampire, watching the ice turn pallid and then biting it off in a freezing chunk that made my teeth sing. But James was methodical, patient. He’d take one and hold it, letting the warmth of his hands permeate the plastic, letting the sleeve turn floppy and the ice turn to half-melted sludge, then drink it down in a shot. Two, maybe three gulps.
“I’m off on Monday,” he said. He had been working construction that summer, sweating out the days on roadside duty, waving traffic through a single-lane choke with an orange hard hat and garish sign that said STOP on one side, SLOW
on the other. One day, when I’d had nothing to do, I had driven out to Route 128 and U-turned back and forth along that one-lane pass five times, making faces while he tried not to laugh.
On my last pass-through, I’d flashed him.
Even on the smudged surface of my rearview mirror, I could see his mouth—morphing from gaping shock to a slow grin as I drove away.
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“I could pick you up. You know, after school.”
I laughed and dodged, saying, “You sound like my dad.”
He didn’t smile back.
He asked again, “So I’ll come get you, then? I can meet you out front.”
I didn’t answer, began to fidget as the silence stretched five seconds too long. Then ten. Then: “Listen, James—” was all I managed before he jumped, sinking his teeth into the spot where I’d paused to take a breath.
“Never mind. Forget it,” he said. The words came out clipped, short, wounded. I cringed at the sudden distance, but pressed on.
“No,” I said. “We should probably talk about this. I mean, school’s starting, and we—”
“No, really,” he interrupted again, standing up abruptly and dropping a wrapper still half full of purple slush between us. “That’s fine. You don’t need to spell it out.”
The sun had dipped below the tree line; behind us, the long, lean trunks of the evergreens cast vertical shadows on the water. They made me think of bars, of barriers. Of what might happen if I lingered too long by the lake with this boy who was beautiful and intense and going absolutely nowhere.
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. I wasn’t lying; I did like James, liked him more than I’d ever liked the handful of other guys I’d semi-dated over the past couple years. They were like me—debate team members, scholar athletes, aspiring doctors. Guys who had plans, like I did, to escape through college and emerge on the other end into a bigger, better world. It was a mystery to me that the quiet resolve of my skinny summer fling could make these guys, with their serious plans, seem so shallow and one-dimensional.
But that’s what he was: a summer fling. Not meant to last.
“But I’m not boyfriend material,” he finished. I looked at him, feeling guilty and transparent and exposed. And, just for a moment, feeling worse for what I’d always wanted.
“You’d be a great boyfriend,” I said, testing the idea out loud and feeling surprised when it felt like the truth. “It’s not about that. It’s really not. It’s not you, it’s just . . .” I trailed off in the face of his withering glare; the cliché died on my lips. I coughed and looked down, feeling my cheeks flush.
I wished that I’d waited until later, until nightfall, so that I could have made my pitch—an easy separation, faultless and early, disentangling ourselves from the mess of things before either of us could get hurt—in the safe, insulated cocoon of the dark. Then I wouldn’t have had to see the open disappointment in his face.
My gaze settled on the ground, instead. The earth was in motion, boiling with ants, a mass of red bodies treading and tumbling over one another in their frantic rush for the spilled sugar near my feet. My stomach lurched and I shut my eyes.
The sound of jingling keys made me open them. James was standing a few steps away, looking sulkily at the ground.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. He was fishing in his pocket, turning away. He had called it quits on the conversation. It was over before it began. I scrambled to my feet.
“Would you just wait a second?” I cried. I’d had a plan, an idea of how this would go. This was not it. This was all wrong.
“Wait? Wait for what?”
“I’m still talking!” Annoyance had gotten the better of me. I wanted the last word.
“Fine, but I’m done listening.”
I threw my hands against my forehead in frustration. “You haven’t listened at all! I haven’t even said anything! Why are you so pissed off?”
He shook his head, looking over the water. “I’m not pissed off,” he said. “I’m disappointed.”
“Okay, now you really do sound like my dad.”
It was an ill-timed joke, out before I could stop myself. His eyes narrowed and my smile disappeared.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” I backpedaled. “I just . . . I wanted to talk about this, that’s all. And the last thing I want is for you to be all bitter, or angry at me. I just thought—”
“What?” he said, turning back to look at me. “That we had a Labor Day expiration date?”
I leveled my gaze back at him. Inhaled. Exhaled.
And then, against the urgings of detachment and common sense, allowed a small but insistent sense of possibility to gain hold—the one that kept me awake at night, thinking of him, long after he’d dropped me in my driveway and the red eye taillights of his truck had disappeared into the dark.
“Are you saying we don’t?”
He shook his head and shrugged. I reached for his hand and tugged him back, drawing him down to sit beside me again. I thought he might fight it, might jerk back from my touch and let that last, deadly bit of distance fall into place, but he didn’t.
For a minute, we sat without talking, watching the lake grow glassy in the last light of day, looking out toward the splash where a fish had surfaced and vanished in a bolt of silver scales. James lit a cigarette. A cool breeze came across the water, a harbinger of the coming fall—and, I thought, the one after it. It seemed far, far away.
“I meant it, when I said that it isn’t you,” I said, daring to look directly at him. “But I have plans. And they don’t include this town. I’m going to graduate, and then I’m gone. I’m not staying here a second longer than I have to.”
“But you do have to,” he pointed out. “For the next twelve months.”
“And that’s why this makes me nervous.”
He dragged deeply, then lifted his chin and blew a stream of smoke toward the sky. “This?”
“This, meaning, this.” I gestured at the space between us. Because
yes
, I thought, there was something there. “Twelve months is a long time, it’s definitely long enough for this to get . . . complicated.”
“Complicated?” said James.
“Would you stop that?”
I kicked a clod of dirt at him while he snickered, furious but relieved, at least, that the wounded look was gone from his face.
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”
“This is what I’m talking about, though,” I said, folding my arms and glaring at him. “Do you get that? I don’t know what you’re thinking. It’s been two weeks, we haven’t had time for discussion. So I’m telling you now, if this is just some game to you, I don’t have time to play it. And if it’s not—”
“It’s not,” he said, and he looked at me with so much intensity that my knees went weak.
“Then . . . I don’t know how this works,” I said, feeling my face turning red. I began fumbling with the fringe on my shorts, thinking,
This is why this was a bad idea. Why this IS a bad idea, because love makes people stupid.
“I like you a lot—” I finally sputtered.
“Yeah, I like you, too,” he interjected, watching with amusement as I tried to play it cool.
“—but I don’t want to be one of those girls,” I finished. “You know, the ones who get all crazy and clingy and end up going to the community college ’cause they can’t leave their high school sweethearts behind.”
“Hey, Becca,” he said. “I didn’t say anything about wanting you to stay. I didn’t even say anything about us being together in another three months.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “So now you’re saying you think this won’t last another three months?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
A long time passed before he spoke again, licking his lips and false starting twice before finally putting the words together.
“I just think that this”—he gestured at the air, just as I’d done—“is a good thing. And that there’s no reason to mess with it. I know you’re leaving—I mean, I wouldn’t try to get in the way of that. But in the meantime, we could have a great year. You know?”
I nodded.
Eyes wide open, I penciled him in for graduation day. I signed up to have my heart broken.
“Unless you’re too cool to date the dropout,” he added.
I cringed at the word, thinking of my parents’ inevitable reaction. They hadn’t pressed for details about the mysterious boy I was suddenly spending every day with, and I hadn’t offered any, but the magic don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy couldn’t possibly last much longer. “So you’re really not going back to school?”
“Would you?”
“If I were you?” I said. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll probably get my GED,” he said.
I nodded. I didn’t ask what would come next; he offered nothing further. He had no plans; I didn’t encourage him to make any. In a way, I thought, maybe it even made James a safe choice. I was the person in motion. I had the control. I was the one with a future, visible in the distance. And no matter how attached I became to him, I knew, at the end, that he was attached to Bridgeton. He was part and parcel of this town. And my heart—which had always yearned for a bigger life, which had always been in love with leaving—would lead me away from him when the time came.
And though I’d felt guilty to think of it, the sense of having the upper hand stayed with me as we walked through the woods in the deepening twilight. He took my hand as the sun crept down and the world turned purple, looking back in the last light to the place where we’d just been. I quickened my pace, feeling the pull of momentum.
* * *
Now, peering back from the other side of graduation, at the moment when my longed-for bigger life was supposed to start, it all seemed alien—like something that had happened to somebody else. The quiet confidence, the utter surety, when each of us played our roles so well and everything felt right.
When he knew I’d be gone at summer’s end.
When I knew he would never leave.
“I understand,” I said again, and James nodded, looking toward the horizon, where the sun was disappearing. It was nearly gone, only a painfully bright sliver that burst through the tops of the faraway trees. When he spoke again, his eyes were still fixed on the fading light.
“Do you ever feel like this? Like you’re just stuck?”
“I don’t know, James. I always had a plan.”
“Do you see yourself there?” he asked. “Can you picture it?”
I tried to. I tried to imagine myself at the state university where I would be enrolled come September, walking past the low, square buildings that held classrooms and dorm rooms and offices. I tried to imagine the crispness of autumn, leaves underfoot, the brilliant sky and New England breeze.
Instead, I felt only the grass under my hands and the pressing air—heavy, hot, and damp. The scent of the wild roses clung to everything, insistent, clouding my mind with thoughts of sweat, curling hair, humidity, and the darkening sky.
“Maybe it’s just too hard to see a place that you haven’t already been,” I said.
“I can’t see my future,” said James, his voice barely a whisper. “I try to picture it, and I don’t see anything at all.”