The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Anyway, the Monday after I first saw Julia at the bridge, I didn’t think she would come walking up to me at school, and she didn’t. I figured she’d probably never talk to me again. I wasn’t expecting to find a note in my locker: “Meet me at the bridge tonight, 9:30.”

  I wondered if it could be a joke. Or a setup: I’d go down to the bridge and find Austin Chadwick and his friends waiting to knock my teeth out. But somehow I knew it was real, even though I didn’t see her at school all day. It was like we’d gotten tuned to each other from just one meeting. And at nine-thirty, I went down to the river.

  That night she wore regular clothes, jeans and a white shirt. No more black satin. She was sitting on the hood of her car, waiting for me. I walked up to her.

  “So you are real,” she said. “I thought I must’ve dreamed Friday night.”

  “How did you know which locker was mine?”

  “I work in the office on my study period, for extra credit. I can look up anybody’s locker.” She grinned. “Morrissey, Colten, 238A.”

  “Congratulations.”

  She moved over to let me sit down, but I hesitated. I could imagine myself scratching that showroom-fresh finish. Then she said, “Get up here,” so I did.

  “I’m not planning to swim tonight,” she said. “But you go ahead if you want to.”

  “No swimming? I guess you only wear your black dress for that.”

  “Except when I wear my silver dress, with the tiara.”

  “You don’t really have a tiara, do you?”

  She laughed. “No, do you?”

  “Only five or six.”

  I let silence fall between us and lie there. It wasn’t completely quiet; I could hear crickets and the lapping of the river against the shore. I wanted to touch her but felt like I didn’t have the right.

  “That’s amazing,” she said at last.

  “What?”

  “That you can stand silence. Austin can’t take much quiet. Neither can any of my other friends. It’s like they’re afraid to have time to think.”

  I liked the way we slid from laughing to serious, from talking to quiet and back again. I could’ve sat there all night with her, letting things flow that way. But something made me push, made me ask, “So why did you want me to come down here?”

  “I—” She closed her mouth and thought for a minute. “I wanted to see you again.”

  “Where’s Austin?”

  She winced. “Don’t ask me about Austin, okay?”

  “Then what the hell are we doing here?”

  “Well . . . I’m open to suggestions.”

  I didn’t like her smirk when she said that. It wasn’t that I minded her flirting with me. I just didn’t believe that I could be with her tonight without some catch, some price tag. I thought of the way fish get hooked, the metal biting into their mouths, drawing blood.

  “God, Colt!” She laughed. “You should see your face. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Why should I?”

  She put her hand on the front of my shirt, leaned toward me. I could’ve pulled away but I didn’t. I met her halfway for the kiss and it was as good as it had been the other night. Maybe better. “Remember this?” she whispered.

  “Yeah, I remember. So you want a replay of the other night?”

  “Except I don’t want to stop this time.”

  My pulse jumped. But I said, “And then what happens?” I could almost feel the hook sinking into the roof of my mouth.

  She pulled back. “I don’t know. Do you need to think that far ahead?”

  “Yes.”

  Her bottom lip fell a bit, and she laughed. “I never know what you’re going to say next.”

  I waited.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said to an imaginary audience. “Colt wants to know what is going to happen after tonight. Now, the world could explode, but probably not. Or we could discover the portal to another universe, but probably not that either.”

  “I’m just asking what you want from me, seeing how you already have a boyfriend.”

  “Come on, Colt, what do you want? You want to be my boyfriend and come to the country club, and have dinner with my parents, and sit with my friends at lunch? Or would you rather meet me here nights and let the rest of the world go to hell for a while?”

  She wasn’t really offering the boyfriend role, I knew, but she was right that I wouldn’t have wanted it. Not that way, not putting on the Austin suit and stepping into his shoes. “So you want to meet me here nights,” I said. “No strings. Fine with me.”

  “Isn’t it better this way?” Coaxing, as if she were trying to soothe my supposedly hurt feelings, her hand on my thigh now.

  “Julia, it doesn’t matter to me. You can go back up on Black Mountain right now, for all I care.”

  She snickered. Any time I thought I was going to make her mad, she laughed instead. “You’re going to do that whenever you get pissed at me, right? Drag Black Mountain in between us, like a big old shield.”

  She saw through me; I had to admit it. “Yeah,” I said, “this way I’ll never be wrong. Everybody knows rich people are the evil ones.”

  We laughed together. And then she led me into the backseat of her car.

  I wondered what had happened between the first entry in Julia’s notebook, when she wrote that she had to break up with Austin, and the Monday night when she came up with the arrangement that we had until she died. Why had she decided to stay with him? I read the second entry in her book, which was written on the Sunday before she slipped that note into my locker.

  Dear C.M.,

  I wish I could be strong enough to dump Austin. He’s coming over tonight and I can’t stand the thought of stretching my face to smile, smile, smile, when all I can think about is you. And then he’ll be pawing and clawing me. I guess you don’t want to hear about that, but how do I know I can trust you, after one night? It was so good talking with you, touching you. I thought I was going to melt all over you. How do I know it would be like that again, though?

  I started this journal because it seemed like I’d found the beginning of something with you, but now I’m not so sure. At least I know Austin, I know what I’m going to get with him. I don’t know you, even if it feels like I do. I can’t stop thinking about you, but maybe you’re just a dream.

  I closed the notebook on that.

  Michael Vernon didn’t mention the journal to me—or to anyone else, as far as I could tell. He sort of nodded at me sometimes in the halls, but neither of us spoke.

  I read some of Julia’s letters every day while September turned into October. She had written about everything: exams and grades, fights with her parents, her obsession with getting into Harvard. She described my sixteenth birthday, which we’d celebrated in the backseat of her car. (My seventeenth had passed in a numb haze, a week after her funeral.) She wrote about driving around alone at night and how she liked to lie in bed listening to the radio. She wrote poems full of black water and jagged edges and lightning. She described some of the nights we’d had together, the swampy smell of the river and the heat of my skin on hers, the cramped steaminess of her backseat and the way we used our coats for blankets when the weather turned cold.

  There were times when I wanted to plunge through the whole thing without stopping, wolf down page after page, race to the final entry. I had looked ahead, and I knew that she’d written these letters right up to the day she died.

  But I couldn’t take it. I could only hear so much of her voice, could only spend so long reliving the feel and scent and taste of her, before something in me filled up and I had to close the book. Some days I didn’t open it at all.

  I lived two Octobers at the same time: the one around me and the one in my head, the one I’d shared with Julia. Sometimes I’d get them
confused and I’d expect to see her at the river, scooping handfuls of orange leaves from the riverbank and showering me with them, the way she’d done the year before. This fall had grayer, colder days. When I walked in the icy spitting rain after reading her letters about starry nights, it seemed like more than a year had passed since then.

  At the end of October, I dreamed about Julia for the first time since she’d died. In my dream, she stood in the front entryway at school, just inside the glass doors. Sunlight streamed over her. I don’t know why I dreamed about her in the light, since most of the time I had spent with her was in the dark. Anyway, she stood there smiling at me like nothing was wrong. I said, “They told me you were dead!”

  She laughed and said, “You’ll believe anything, won’t you?”

  And then I woke up, before I could get over the shock of seeing her again.

  That week I saw Austin Chadwick walking with his arm around Emily Barrett. For the first couple of weeks of school, people had treated Austin like a victim of terminal illness. They practically whispered when they talked to him; gentleness oozed from every pore. But that had worn off, and now nobody paid any special attention to Austin. The fact that he was with Emily didn’t seem to shock anyone but me. I wondered what Julia would’ve thought.

  chapter 5

  My whole week used to build up to Friday. The juices gathered, the heat and pressure rose, set to erupt on schedule. It didn’t matter that I got off by myself during the week. At most, that just shaved a little off the edge, kept me from boiling over. I was always ready for Friday night.

  Back then I didn’t have too hard a time shaking Nick and Syd and the others when I wanted to go meet Julia. They knew I spent a lot of time alone. If I didn’t hang out with them, they figured I was just walking by the river or vegging in front of the TV.

  Julia’s life was trickier. She often canceled our Fridays, or switched the days around, because of country-club parties she couldn’t get out of, or dances, or somebody’s birthday. Sometimes she had me meet her as late as eleven o’clock, after she’d already gone somewhere else. When she moved the day, it screwed with my hormones, but I managed. It could be even more exciting when we had to scramble to find a way to meet.

  I didn’t ask what excuses she gave Austin, because I never liked to bring up his name, but once she told me anyway. She said she kept things simple, didn’t invent complicated stories that could trip her up. She’d say, “Look, I just need to be alone. It’s not like we’re married,” and he’d back off. He went out drinking with Keith Groome and Adam Hancock and his other friends while she was with me.

  Now Fridays were flat; the whole week was flat. Sometimes I couldn’t believe I’d had any other life besides reading a dead girl’s words and watching rain beat brown leaves off the trees. Even when I went out with Syd and the guys, I had to force myself to bring my brain along. I was always half a step behind, missing the jokes, forgetting to listen. I didn’t drink with them because I wasn’t sure what I might say drunk, if I would spill something stupid. It was easier to stay home alone with the notebook or walk by the river.

  But on the first Friday in November, I finally had a mission, something to look forward to. I went home right after school so I could catch my mother before she left for work. She had the four-to-midnight shift at Barney’s Family Steakhouse. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, in her uniform, smoking a cigarette. Her feet were up on one of the chairs.

  “Well, look who decided to drop by,” she said. “I figured you’re still living here, since food goes missing from the fridge, and I keep finding the bathroom door locked with Niagara Falls pounding away in there, but I couldn’t be completely sure. Sometimes I forget what you look like.” She squinted at me through the smoke. “Grew another three inches, didn’t ya?”

  “I don’t know.” I was getting tall, that was true. In the backseat of Nick’s car, I never had enough room for my knees. “You didn’t forget about tomorrow, did you?”

  “It’s all that milk you drink,” she went on, as if I hadn’t said a word. “At least I hope it’s you who’s going through that half gallon a day, plus all the cereal, and peanut butter, and roast beef, and apples, and potato chips, and bananas, and ham, and cookies—”

  “I don’t drink a half gallon a day.” Mom loved to exaggerate. “Did you remember about tomorrow?”

  “—because if it’s not you, we’ve got a pretty hungry ghost on our hands.” You couldn’t stop one of my mother’s rants; I don’t know why I bothered trying. She stubbed out her cigarette and sighed. I guess she’d run out of things to say about my appetite, because she finally answered my question. “Yeah, I remember tomorrow. That’s all I need, hell on wheels. Did you study the manual? Because I’m not driving you all the way down there and have you flunk the test.”

  I’d had to wait until my brother left home to try for my driver’s license because my mother didn’t want to insure two teenagers on her car. One was expensive enough, she said. And so I would be the last guy in my group to make that magical trip to the DMV. “Yes, I studied. I passed driver’s ed. I’m all set. Want to leave at nine?”

  “Nine in the morning? Well, if you can get up that early on a Saturday when you feel like it, I’ve got plenty of chores you can do on Saturday mornings. . . .”

  I opened the refrigerator.

  “There he goes again. Colt, would you do us a favor and leave some crumbs for dinner?”

  “Remember, when I have my license, I can bring in some money.” Mom had a job lined up for me at the steakhouse, busing tables. I would start Sunday if I passed the driver’s test.

  She cackled. “Groceries. Uh-huh. That’s the first thing you’ll spend your paycheck on, right?”

  “I will if it’ll shut you up about how much I eat.” I sat down at the table with a hunk of cheese, a box of crackers, and a bowl of grapes.

  She got to her feet, groaning. Her legs were always hurting her. “Come Sunday, you can start your own crop of varicose veins.”

  After she left, I was glad to sit in the quiet. My dad wasn’t home. He was a tiler who only worked now and then. He might’ve been out on a job, but he was probably out drinking. I was a little sorry I’d hassled my mother about the license. I knew I couldn’t count on my father, though, and I wanted that card. Not only would it mean more freedom for me, but it would be the one new thing that had happened since Julia’s death. In the two months since Labor Day, that night had been sitting in the bottom of my stomach. I’d been stuck in some time-dead zone where everything was the same, day after day, and none of it was good. Something had to change. Anything.

  Syd called later while I was in bed, watching some old rerun on TV. “Good luck tomorrow,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “If you get your license, you want to take me for a ride tomorrow night?”

  “Sure. If I can get the car.” Syd’s parents wouldn’t let her drive until she was eighteen. They always treated her as younger than she was, made her wait longer for things than anyone else had to wait.

  “I wish we could go out tonight,” she said. “I can’t stand it here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, my parents had another fight, and they haven’t talked all night. Do you know what it’s like to be in a house with two people who won’t speak to each other?”

  Actually, I did. I’d been at Syd’s house during some of those freeze-outs. You wouldn’t think two people not talking could fill a house, but my mother’s yelling was never as loud as their silence.

  “You can come over here if you want,” I said. “Tom’s bed is free.”

  “Thanks, but they’d never let me out of the house at this hour.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked after a long pause.

  “Watchin
g a stupid show.”

  “What channel?”

  I told her, and she switched her TV to the same channel. We sat there watching the same show, not talking much, neither of us wanting to hang up.

  When I finally got off the phone, I looked over at the desk where I kept Julia’s notebook. I didn’t need to hide it since nobody came into my room. Watching TV with Syd had relaxed me, and I really didn’t want to look at those letters tonight. Sometimes reading the notebook had the same effect on me that Julia herself used to have. I’d come back from seeing her, feeling like I’d had an electric jolt, wanting to tell someone about the night we’d had. Then the next minute I’d want to keep it between the two of us forever. With Julia, I always seemed to want opposite things at the same time. She stirred me up, and tonight I didn’t want to get stirred up.

  I shut off the light.

  My dad and his friends were out in the yard, looking over the wrecks, when Mom and I left the next morning. Sometimes they’d scavenge for parts. Other times they’d stand around bullshitting about the cars they’d once owned and the cars they would buy if they had the money. I never joined them unless Dad forced me to, because I was only interested in vehicles that actually had a chance to get me somewhere.

  The guys stood in a circle, smoking and talking. “Hey, Tommy!” one of them yelled at me.

  “No, that’s the other one. The younger one,” Dad told him. Because I didn’t spend much time with them, I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t tell me from my brother. Even though Tom had curly hair and freckles like Mom, and I had straight hair like Dad.

  As she drove me over to the DMV, Mom said, “Now don’t smash into anything during the test.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Because I was planning to crash into a couple of things.”

  “And make sure you put on your seat belt and check your mirrors. They look for any little thing like that to trip you up.”