The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

“Maybe next week. I don’t know. I still can’t get out of bed much.”

  There was a long pause. I tried to hear her breathing. Then she said, “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  We didn’t say much else, though we stayed on the phone for a while longer. Her voice felt good in my ear, too.

  chapter 7

  On Sunday Syd and the guys came over to shoot targets. My family had a few acres of weedy muck that ran down to the river. Our land was cheap because part of it flooded every year. Twice we’d had water as far up as our house. Out back we had a bunch of different targets, and sometimes we set up cans on top of the junked cars. Dad only kept two cars behind the house; the rest were in the front. My brother Tom’s “sculpture,” a kind of wooden tower about twelve feet high, was in the backyard, too.

  Nick was the best shot, then Syd, then me, then Paul, then Fred. I thought Syd was still shaken up from the night before, though, because she was missing everything today.

  “So you finally got your license,” Nick said to me, when the only one who still felt like shooting was Fred. Fred liked to practice, because he was always hoping to get better. I thought he probably needed glasses but wouldn’t admit it. Anyway, Fred kept going while the rest of us sat on the back-porch steps. There was no room for us on the porch itself, what with the dead washing machine, the snow shovels, the engine parts, the half-empty cans of WD-40, and a pile of old boots.

  “Yeah,” I told Nick, “but I won’t get to use the car much, except to go to work.”

  “How’d you get roped into that? Busing tables at the steakhouse. Christ.”

  “I don’t mind. I could use the money.”

  “Yeah, some of us have to earn our money,” Paul said, leaning back and spreading his arms along the top of the step. He pumped gas thirty-five hours a week. “Who do you think you are, Nick? Austin Chadwick, who don’t gotta work for a living?”

  Nick grinned. “You guys gotta learn to work the system. I told my folks they should just give me an allowance, because if I got a job it would interfere with my grades.”

  We all laughed at that, except Syd. “And they bought that?” Paul said. “How drunk were they?”

  “Hell, no. I gave ’em the old innocent look. ‘Seriously, Mom, I gotta concentrate on school.’” The blond stubble on Nick’s face glinted; he rubbed it to make a raspy noise. Nick liked to go for days without shaving. He thought it made him look tough. But since he didn’t have thick enough whiskers for a real beard, he would shave as soon as the hair got long and wispy.

  Through all this, Syd leaned back against the step above her. She hadn’t said much today. Not that she ever talked a lot, but even when Syd didn’t speak she was still usually part of the conversation. Most of the time, I could tell what she was thinking. Sometimes the two of us would have our own silent conversation, just by looking at each other. But today she stared out toward the river, and I couldn’t tell if she was listening to us. Aside from a squabble she’d had earlier with Nick, over which one of them was going to shoot first, she barely seemed to notice she was with us.

  “You think you’re Chadwick,” Paul told Nick again. “Fuck, I can see you now, living up on Black Mountain—”

  “How’s he gonna work that?” Fred yelled.

  “Move in with some old widow. Like Blankenship.” Paul laughed.

  “Black Mountain Gigolo!” Fred said.

  “Hell, not even Blankenship would take Nick,” I said. Mrs. Blankenship lived high up on Black Mountain. She was about a hundred and two, and she spent most of her time giving money to places that would name buildings after her. If she ever did go for Nick, she’d probably stamp PROPERTY OF BLANKENSHIP on him.

  “I wouldn’t take anyone on Black Mountain,” Nick said. “They’re all bitches and ugly as shit. You seen that Lori Van Allen? You can’t tell her apart from that horse she’s always riding.”

  “Julia Vernon was hot,” Fred said, and turned back to the targets. It felt like ants were swarming over me. I glanced at Syd—she was the only person who might read my mind—but she was still off somewhere else. I pretended that something about my left shoelace was really interesting.

  “She’s dead,” Nick said. “How sick are you?”

  While Julia was alive, I had gotten good at covering, at keeping my face blank and my breathing steady whenever I saw her or heard anything about her. It took a while. At first, it was the little things that almost tripped me up. Like the time I went into a drugstore with Nick so he could buy cigarettes, and I remembered I needed condoms. I almost got them off the shelf before I realized I couldn’t buy a box that big in front of Nick when I supposedly didn’t even have a girlfriend. Or the time I had to explain to Paul how I knew before everyone else that Keith Groome’s father had been arrested for a DUI. I got out of that one by saying Syd had told me . . . good thing she was known for being up on all the Black Mountain gossip.

  I learned. At some point, hiding the truth became automatic. I could flip a switch inside, cross from one side of myself to the other without thinking. Then the crash had scraped me raw. The weeks right after Labor Day had been torture, with everyone gossiping about her death and girls crying in the school halls, but even then I’d gone numb from the constant buzz about it. Now I was raw again, focusing on the plastic end of my shoelace and wishing they’d change the subject to anything else.

  “Pam Henderson wasn’t bad,” Paul said. “Nice ass.”

  Nick smirked at Syd. “Hey, Syd, that’s your cue to tell Paul what an asshole he is, ‘objectifying women’ and all that.”

  “Fuck off, Nick,” she said, flicking a pine needle from the knee of her jeans. I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

  Nick flinched. Syd almost never dropped the F-bomb, so she had the advantage of surprise. And Nick didn’t like to be surprised. He looked around at us and raised his eyebrows in exaggerated shock. “Ooh, is it that time of the month already?”

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  With the same fake interest I’d had in my shoelace, we watched Fred take his next shot. All except Syd, whose eyes were still on the horizon. Nick broke the tension by asking me, “Hey, your parents home?” He liked to help himself to their beer when they weren’t around.

  “My dad, I think.” Earlier that morning, he’d been sprawled in front of the TV in his shorts, watching some infomercial.

  “Shit.”

  “God, Nick,” Syd said. “How can you drink at this hour?”

  “It’s not that early. It’s lunchtime.”

  She made a face.

  “You know, you’re a real pain in the ass today,” Nick said. “What’s with you, anyway?”

  She didn’t answer for a minute. Then she straightened up and said, “My father moved out this morning.” She stomped down the porch steps and went to stand in the yard, a few feet away from us, looking down toward the river.

  Everyone was quiet. Fred stopped shooting. Then Paul said, “Hey, it’s not so bad. I’ve had three ‘fathers’ move out already.” But Nick reached over and gave him a backhanded slap in the ribs.

  The guys looked at me as if they expected me to say the magically right thing. I knew Syd better than any of them, but how should I know what she was going through? My parents were still together, even if they hardly talked to each other. I wished Nick would talk to Syd. His parents had gotten divorced three years ago.

  “We’re gonna get going,” Nick said. “Ready, Fred? Syd, you coming?”

  “No thanks,” she said, keeping her back to us.

  Fred gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder before he joined the guys again. When they had gone, I said, “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded without turning around. We stayed like that until she said, “Let’s go down to the river.”

 
I reached under the steps and pulled out this orange traffic cone that my dad once stole from a road-construction site. I put it on the top step of the porch. That was my family’s signal that someone was out back, so no target shooting. Then Syd and I walked past the cars and the sculpture, past the targets and the berms behind them, through the weeds, down to the river path. If you followed it long enough, this path would take you to the Higgins Farm Bridge. That’s how I used to go meet Julia.

  Weeds rustled under our feet. Bittersweet hung from the trees, its berries shining red, the only bit of color left at this time of year. When we reached a fork in the path, Syd said, “Is the tree house still there?”

  “I guess. I haven’t been there for a couple of years.”

  Dad had helped Tom and me build the tree house. The left fork of the path Syd and I were standing on had once led to it, but now the trail was mostly overgrown. Syd took a few steps to the left and glanced back at me. “Let’s go see.”

  I followed her until she stopped, confused. “I can’t remember which tree it was anymore,” she said.

  “It’s that big one off to the right. And the house is still there, see?”

  We climbed up. The wood was damp, and softer than it used to be, but we tested each board and found only one rotten piece. We sat in the corner, smelling old wet wood and dead leaves. “Remember all those peanut-butter sandwiches?” she said.

  We used to pack lunches to eat here, usually peanut butter. Somehow it seemed like an adventure. We would pretend we were stranded on an island. A couple of years after that, Nick and Paul snuck their fathers’ magazines out here for us to look at. And then I guess we all got too old for the tree house.

  “Am I the only girl who was ever up here?” Syd asked.

  “Yeah. No, wait—Tommy brought Corrie Smith one time.”

  “Corrie Smith? You’re kidding.”

  “Yeah, I think it was the first time he kissed a girl.” I’d caught them, and Tom had told me he “just wanted to see what it was like.” When I asked him what he thought, he shrugged and said, “I don’t see what the big deal is.” I laughed now, remembering that.

  “What about you? Did you ever bring any girls here, Colt?”

  “No.” I leaned back, resting against the trunk of the tree. The damp floor was cold under my jeans.

  She touched my hand then, stroked the back of it. I looked down at our hands and said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She kept stroking my hand. I wanted to pull away but didn’t see how I could. I told myself maybe she was just looking for comfort, even though it felt like more than that.

  A strand of hair hung in her face, so I lifted my hand—the one she was touching—to brush it away. I expected that when I moved my hand it would break things up, but instead she leaned forward and kissed me.

  I shouldn’t have kissed her back. But I liked her—though maybe not the way she wanted. And her father had just left. So I kissed her back, and we didn’t stop there.

  It wasn’t like with Julia at all. It was more like with Jackie; my mind flipped off in different directions. A squirrel wheezed in the tree above us, and the boards in the tree house creaked whenever the wind blew. I kept listening to things like that, and wondering what time it was and whether I had to get ready for work yet.

  I don’t mean that it didn’t feel good to touch her, because in a way it did. It always does. I wasn’t exactly suffering through it. I ran my mouth over her neck and eased my hands up under her shirt. But the whole time I had a rock in my stomach, because I knew I never should’ve taken things this far.

  She was the first to pull away. “It’s getting late,” she whispered, hooking her bra.

  I checked my watch. I had just enough time to get to work. “I need to take you home.”

  “I know.” She pulled her father’s jacket closer around her.

  We climbed down without speaking.

  chapter 8

  The job was simple: set the tables, clear the tables. It wasn’t easy—it wore me out—but it was simple. At Barney’s Family Steakhouse, we didn’t fold the napkins into fancy shapes or anything like that. We just had to get the clean cloth and dishes down as fast as we could. And we had to clear the tables even faster: dump and scrape, dump and scrape. There was always a line of customers waiting in the entry hall. Aside from being one of the few restaurants in our town, Barney’s pulled people in off the interstate with a couple of giant billboards.

  “If somebody asks you for butter or something,” the manager, Al, told me when I first punched in, “don’t just say ‘okay.’ Smile and say, ‘Sure thing. Anything else I can do for you?’”

  “All right.”

  “Because Barney’s is a friendly, welcoming place. Remember that.”

  “All right.”

  I honestly couldn’t say if it was a “friendly, welcoming place” or not. But between the roar of people talking and the clatter of dishes and the sound of kids yelling, it sure was a noisy place. I didn’t even realize how noisy until I stepped outside at the end of my shift, and the silence made my ears ring.

  I went home and collapsed on my bed. Mom came into my room and said, “So, how did you like it?”

  “It’s a ‘friendly, welcoming place.’”

  She laughed. “Poor kid, you look exhausted.” She patted my head and turned to go. “Oh, Syd called,” she said. “She wanted you to call her when you got home.”

  Shit. I’d been so busy at the restaurant, I’d been able to shove what had happened this afternoon to the back of my mind. “I’m too tired. I’ll call her tomorrow.” I clicked off the phone extension that was in my room, set my alarm, and went to bed.

  At school, I didn’t know how to act around Syd. She kept coming up and taking my hand, or sliding her arm around my waist. I’d hoped she would think of Sunday afternoon as a one-time thing, something that had happened when she was very upset. But to her, it was a beginning. Nick and the other guys teased us. Everyone seemed to know we’d gotten together this weekend.

  I went along with it. I didn’t know what else to do. In study hall, Syd told me about her parents’ final fight, which had sent her father banging out of the house with a suitcase in each hand. “He took my suitcase,” she said, “because he only had one of his own.” What was I supposed to do, break into that story to tell her I just wanted to be friends?

  I had to get out of this. It was breaking over me like a twenty-foot wave, too much, too soon. How had everything managed to get so out of control in only two days?

  The truth was, I was still thinking about Julia. She’d been dead for more than two months, and she’d never really been my girlfriend to begin with. Austin had already gone out with three other girls by now. What was my problem? Was I going to end up building a shrine in the corner of my bedroom? Light candles in front of the purple notebook?

  Some of the entries in Julia’s book practically killed me. She agonized over whether her grades would get her into Harvard. She went on for pages about careers she wanted to try: surgeon, biochemist, lawyer, foreign correspondent. The day after I got together with Syd, I read an entry about the places Julia wanted to travel to. Some were places you’d expect, like Paris and Rome. Others were not so common, like Andorra and Kashmir and Patagonia.

  One night at the river, she’d asked me if I’d ever heard of Bhutan. “Between China and India, isn’t it?” I said. She said, “How come we’re the only two people in this town who know that?” I started to tell her I was pretty sure that Mr. Tran, who taught history and geography, knew it, too, but that wasn’t her point. “I want to go everywhere,” she said. “Everywhere!” And now I couldn’t stand thinking about the things she didn’t get to do, the places she wouldn’t see.

  I thought maybe it would be easier to get over this i
f I didn’t have to hide it, if I didn’t have to pretend there was nothing to get over in the first place. I wished there were someone I didn’t have to lie to about Julia. And then I remembered there was one person who knew the truth.

  I shook off Syd at lunch on Thursday by telling her I had to ask someone about homework. I found Michael Vernon eating by himself, reading a book. His glasses made him look less like Julia, but you could still tell he was related to her. They had the same eyes. Seeing her in him made me slightly sick.

  I sat across from him. He looked up, stuck a finger in his book, and said, “What?”

  “Did you read that whole notebook?”

  “Not the whole thing. Parts. Enough to get the general idea. To tell you the truth, there were sections I was happy to skip.”

  I wondered which parts he’d read, but I didn’t ask. Sometimes Julia went into great detail about what we did together. I didn’t need him seeing lines like “you lick invisible honey from my skin” and “you called my name at the end / I wrung that cry from your guts, your knees, your toes / deeper than anyone had ever reached inside you before.” At least, if he’d seen them, I didn’t want to know.

  “Did anyone else see it?”

  “No. My parents asked me to go through her books and notebooks. I gave them most of the poems I found. But that notebook . . . that was different.”

  “She never told you about us, did she?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  Before I could say anything else, Kirby Matthews sat down next to Michael. Kirby was friends with Syd, but also with Black Mountain kids like Pam Henderson. I’d met Kirby in the fifth grade, when we’d built a papier-mâché dinosaur together. She’d given the first boy-girl party I ever went to, back when we thought of spin-the-bottle as major entertainment. I had always liked Kirby—she was easy to talk to—but right now I wished she’d disappear.

  She reached into Michael’s lunch bag and took a carrot stick. “Hi, Colt.”