The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Great,” Kirby said. “Then I just have to worry about the guys from the flats.”

  “I’ve been talking to Nick,” Syd told her. “I finally convinced him enough is enough. The only one who still doesn’t want to let things drop is Ryan Coates.” Groome hadn’t called the police on anybody, but he was making noises about getting Ryan back for the smashed windshield. I think he cared more about the car than he did about his face.

  “How did Groome keep the cops out of this, anyway?” I said. Even my parents would’ve insisted on an explanation if I’d come home looking like he did that night.

  “He told his father that it was a fight, and the other guy got the worst of it,” Michael said. “He didn’t have to tell his mother anything. She’s in France with her latest boy toy.”

  “His father believed that story?”

  “Brains don’t exactly run in the family. Testosterone, on the other hand—”

  “What about the car?”

  “It’s at the garage,” Syd said. “Apparently Keith told his father something about hitting a post.”

  “Hitting a post,” I repeated, and scratched the back of my neck.

  She laughed. “Yeah, I know. Like Michael said, the Groomes aren’t known for their brains. And since Keith’s father never actually saw the car, I guess he didn’t question it. Anyway, Keith is trying to get the money out of Ryan Coates.”

  “Why doesn’t he just smash Coates’s windshield and get it over with?” I said.

  “Like he slashed your tires?” Michael said, with a superior smile. “A tire for a tire, a windshield for a windshield?”

  “God, let’s talk about something else,” Kirby said.

  Groome walked past my table in study hall. The second I glanced up, he shot out, “What are you looking at?”

  The beating he’d taken hadn’t changed his attitude. The fact that I’d used my own jacket to soak up his blood didn’t seem to matter to him either. I was beginning to think Kirby and I should’ve let him bleed to death. I looked at the bruises on his face—red and purple, black and yellow—and smiled. “I like what you’ve done with your face, Groome.”

  “You better watch yourself, Morrissey.”

  “You threatening me? Maybe next time it won’t be just your tires that get cut up.”

  “Watch yourself,” he repeated, and stomped away.

  On Saturday night, I worked at Barney’s. It was the first warm night we’d had this spring, and I kept drifting near the door to try to catch the breeze from outside. “Colten! Get back to your station! And smile!” Al told me.

  Around eleven, during the pie-and-coffee hours, a whole crowd of Black Mountain kids came in. They were dressed up, the way Julia had been that first night, and half-drunk and noisy. I remembered Michael talking about a country-club party tonight. They must’ve come from there.

  They sat in my section. Austin stood in the aisle, face pink and eyes glazed, his chest out. When I tried to get around him, he said, “You want to take over our spots, we’re going to take over yours.” It took me a minute to realize what he meant: They were coming to Barney’s because we’d gone to Black Mountain Park.

  Well, that was a fair exchange, I thought, since the park was a hell of a lot nicer than Barney’s Steakhouse. In fact, if Austin would say the word, I’d be happy to move into his mansion and drive his car.

  I set their tables for them. That was humiliating enough, until they started saying things like, “Oh, my napkin’s a little crooked. Could you straighten it for me?” Or they’d throw their silverware on the floor and say, “Oops. Dropped my fork. Could you get me another one?”

  After I’d brought them about three times more silverware than they ever should’ve needed, I sent Sunil over to them. He kept his perpetual smile, no matter how many times they changed their orders or asked stupid questions like, “The blueberry pie, what kind of berries does it have?”

  They lit cigarettes. “Excuse me, no smoking please, thank you,” Sunil said. One person would put out a cigarette, and then another would light up, and they’d go through the whole routine again. Then they started pretending they couldn’t understand Sunil’s English.

  “Excuse me? What’s that you said?” Big cloud of smoke in Sunil’s face. “Where you from, anyway?”

  Sunil’s face began to gleam with sweat, but he never stopped smiling. Al would’ve wet his pants with proud joy over that invincible “friendly, welcoming” smile.

  When the orders were ready, Sunil beckoned me into the kitchen. “You know these people?”

  “They’re Black Mountain shit. Why don’t you accidentally spill a pot of coffee in someone’s lap?”

  He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No need for that.” He peeled back the top crust of one of the pie slices. “But you can spit in their pie.”

  “What?” For a second, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. Sunil had never, ever been nasty to a customer, no matter how badly the customer treated him. But he held the pie open for me, and I spat.

  “Very good,” he said, and patted the crust back into place. I hoped it was Austin’s slice. I laughed as Sunil carried it into the dining room. I didn’t come out until I could keep a straight face.

  I decided I wouldn’t clear their table until after they’d left, but there was a table near theirs I had to clean off. While I was doing it, one of the guys lobbed a lump of pie crust at me. It hit me in the shoulder. A couple of the other kids laughed, and then a strawberry, coated with gooey pie filling, flew my way. That one splatted on the floor, but another one hit my arm.

  We had deep plastic pans to scrape the food waste into, and when I saw more food flying at me, I picked up the pan and caught the scraps. I didn’t think about it; it was kind of a reflex. After all, I didn’t want the food to land on me, and I didn’t want it to land on the floor, because I was the one who’d have to clean it up.

  A couple of them laughed in surprise when I caught the food. One of the girls threw a piece of doughnut, only this time she was aiming for the pan. I moved the pan enough to catch it. And then they were all doing it. It had become a game, with them laughing and pitching food and me catching it. (Well, most of it, anyway.) I didn’t know why this had turned from an ugly scene into comedy, but it was all right with me. They were laughing as they picked up their checks—all but Austin. He still scowled at me.

  One thing about those rich kids: they tipped big. When Sunil counted up the total, he said, “I’m almost sorry I let you spit in their pie.”

  chapter 21

  On Sunday night, Kirby and I were in my bedroom. I lay on the bed, more asleep than awake, while she paced the room, naked. “Wake up, Colt,” she teased. Sex always relaxed me, but for some reason it made her restless.

  She stopped in front of my desk and flipped open the purple notebook, which I’d forgotten to put away after that night on Black Mountain. “What’s this?”

  Well, that made me sit up. “It’s Julia’s.”

  She stared down at the page for another minute, then turned back to me. “Julia’s?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t Michael tell you? That’s how he found out about me and her in the first place.”

  “Right,” she said. “He did tell me.” She read a page. I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to slam the book closed, but I was afraid of where that would take us.

  “So why do you still have it?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s her diary, right? Don’t you think her family wants it back?”

  I’d never thought of that. The letters were written to me, and they weren’t the kind of things most parents would want to read about their own kid. Julia wrote about having sex with me and getting drunk with her friends. She wrote about cheating on Austin—the guy her family loved. Why would
they want to see any of that? “No,” I said. “Michael’s never asked for it back. He didn’t even want to read it.”

  “He told me he showed it to you because Julia would’ve wanted that. I’m sure he didn’t mean for you to keep it.”

  “You don’t care about the Vernons having it,” I said. “You just don’t want me to have it.”

  Her mouth twitched. “Even if that’s true,” she said, “can you blame me?”

  I wished she would sit down. Instead she stood there naked, next to my desk. I looked away from her. My underwear lay on the floor. I picked it up and put it on. Kirby just stood there, watching me. I found my jeans and put them on, too.

  “Why don’t you at least ask Michael if he wants it back?”

  “He won’t want it,” I said. “She wrote it to me.”

  “You mean the whole thing’s like this? ‘Dear C.M.,’ it’s all about you and her?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “God, Colt! Why are you hanging on to it? Even if the Vernons don’t want it—get rid of it!”

  I didn’t want to throw it away or give it back. It surprised me to realize that, because in the two months since I’d finished it, I’d had it sitting in a drawer. I hadn’t looked at it again until the other night when I couldn’t sleep. “Not now,” I said.

  “Not now? What the hell does that mean?” She slammed the notebook closed. “I told you when we started going out that I wasn’t going to compete with a dead girl.”

  “It’s not like that.” I walked the floor, kicking at our clothes and shoes and the empty condom wrapper.

  “Then what is it like, Colt? Do you love me or not?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  “How do I know that? Because you said it once in the middle of sex? You’d say anything then.”

  “It wasn’t in the middle,” I said, but her face told me that wasn’t the point. “Kirby, don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do what? I’m supposed to believe you love me when you’re clinging to your ex-girlfriend’s diary? It’s sitting right here on your desk while I’m in bed with you! You know how that makes me feel?” She stormed over to her clothes and started picking them up off the floor. “What is so damn special about Julia anyway? Will you tell me that?”

  I knew I could stop this anytime by promising to get rid of the notebook. I kept telling myself to promise that, but the words snagged in my throat. “Kirby, this is crazy. You’re the one I want.”

  “You have a strange way of showing it.” She pulled her shirt over her head. “Call me when you get over Julia.”

  Everyone gradually forgot they were mad at Kirby about the fight at Black Mountain. Groome beat up Ryan Coates because of the windshield, and things went back to normal. Only, between Kirby and me, things weren’t normal.

  I missed her. I’d wrapped her into my life more than I had any other girl before. Julia might have lived in my head while I was seeing her, but Kirby was in my real life, full-time. We’d only been together a few weeks, but we’d seen each other every day at lunch. And whenever I didn’t have to work we walked along the river or hung out in my room or went to the movies. This week, when she wasn’t talking to me, I felt like I was walking around with an invisible Kirby next to me. A cold, silent Kirby.

  After three days of her avoiding me, I opened the notebook one last time. I read an entry at random, an entry from last July.

  Dear C.M.,

  Just lying here listening to music. Pam and I were up at Blueberry Lake all day, and I think I got sunburned. My face has that tight feeling. Everyone was there, Austin and Keith and Tristan and Adam, but I managed to get away for a few minutes and sit under some pines by myself. I love the way pines filter sunlight. I rolled in the needles because they smelled so good. I would’ve liked to stay under there for hours.

  But everybody was waiting for me, looking, calling, and I had to go back to them.

  I brought the notebook to school. I handed it to Michael at his locker, between classes.

  “What?” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Julia’s notebook. Thanks for showing it to me.”

  “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “Well, it’s your family’s now. I thought you might want it back.”

  He stared at the book, as if I were trying to hand him a spitting cobra. “All that slop she wrote about you? No thanks.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Are you out of your mind? They love Austin. They wouldn’t even want to know you exist.”

  I slid it back into my stack of books, relieved. He studied my face.

  “You know, Morrissey,” he said, “Kirby’s better than you deserve. Why don’t you concentrate on her?”

  “I am. Why do you think I’m trying to give back the notebook?”

  “I assume it’s because it bothers Kirby. She hasn’t spoken to you all week.”

  He was the last person I wanted to talk about Kirby with. “That’s none of your business.”

  “You’re a great one, aren’t you? Leading her on while you read my sister’s notebook. What do you do with it anyway, sleep with it between your legs?” He took a book out of his locker and slammed the door. “Hell, just throw it away.” He smiled then, a cold smile, and said, “If you can.”

  At lunch I told Kirby how I’d tried to give the notebook back, how Michael wouldn’t take it. “So what are you going to do with it?” she asked.

  “Pack it away somewhere.” I didn’t want to throw it out. I couldn’t just stick it in the trash. I hoped my answer was good enough for Kirby.

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  Syd and Nick came up to our table then. “I can’t believe you’re actually sitting with me, Nick,” Kirby said. “After all, you couldn’t even stand to have me in your car.”

  “Hey, I’ll forget about that night if you will.”

  “Why should I forget it? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Syd put her hand on the table between them. “Shut up, both of you.”

  Kirby gave Nick a dark look—I knew she still thought he should apologize—but she didn’t push it.

  “Let’s go outside,” Syd said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Michael joined us as we got up from the table. Everyone went into the hall and headed for the doors at the back of the building. But Kirby took my hand, held me back. Michael looked over his shoulder at us. He didn’t say anything, or even blink, as he watched Kirby draw me into an empty classroom.

  Kirby and I found the darkest corner of the room, where nobody could see us. “I missed you,” she whispered, pulling me close to her.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Do you have to work tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too bad.” But we made the most of the ten minutes we had left of lunch.

  chapter 22

  On the surface, the trouble that spring started with Mr. Barent, but I knew Michael was behind it.

  Mr. Barent was the advisor for the student literary magazine, Quill. It came out twice a year, in winter and spring. I read some of it when I was a freshman, but it was full of stories about Black Mountain parties, and poems by Black Mountain kids about how miserable they were. After that, I never read it except when Julia showed me her poems in it. She was on the staff. Michael was, too.

  The first issue after Julia’s death—the December issue—had had a photograph of Julia and an article about her, written by the editor. That seemed to wrap up Julia’s link with Quill. But somehow, that spring, Mr. Barent discovered a file of Julia’s work in the Quill cabinet, and he decided to publish it in a special section of the spring issue.

  I figured that Michael either gave Barent the file or left it where he knew Barent would discover it. I was pretty sure Julia hadn
’t left these poems sitting around in the Quill file cabinet; I thought Michael must’ve brought them from home. Because they were all poems she’d written to me.

  I knew they were for me because she’d shown me some of them, and she’d copied others into the notebook. Lots of them described things we’d done together. Of course, I didn’t see this collection—I didn’t even know about it—until Quill came out at the end of April. It had an introduction written by Michael about how his sister had written these poems, and she’d died a few months ago, and her family wanted to share her art with the world. And by the way, the world might also like to know that she’d written these poems for her boyfriend, Austin. To top it off, there was a photo of Austin and a sickening paragraph written by him that ended, “I love you, Julia baby. Peace forever.”

  I wanted to puke when I saw this thing. Literally: I felt the sourness creeping up the back of my throat. I saw the magazine in study hall. I’d picked up a copy after hearing people talk about it, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it.

  The Black Mountain kids thought it was “so beautiful,” and some of the girls sighed for poor Austin, who must be having such a hard time. I read Austin’s paragraph again, wondering if he actually believed she’d been writing to him. After all, she described things he’d never done with her. One of the poems even referred to my brown hair, and Austin was blond. Didn’t Austin find that strange? Didn’t Barent? Didn’t everyone? Maybe they just saw what they wanted to see.

  I couldn’t stop reading Austin’s stupid paragraph. I was sick of him. Julia’s notebook had been full of him; the school halls were full of him. He’d had her 90 percent of the time. Did he have to take my 10 percent, too? He might as well cross out my initials in her notebook, and replace them with his.

  I flipped through the pages of Quill again, the pages full of scenes from my life that had now become scenes from Austin’s life. In the last poem, Julia called the river water liquid ebony. She wrote about us dissolving in it, melting into water where a patch of moon floated. Austin hadn’t been there but I had, and now he was swallowing every bit of her left in the world. With Michael’s help.