The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Holy shit,” Tom said, when I’d finished.

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly tired enough to sleep right there on that bench.

  He tilted his head back and looked up at the stars. “It’s funny. I lived right down the hall from you last year, and I never knew this was going on.”

  “That was the point. Nobody was supposed to know.”

  “Yeah, I can see you got off on the secrecy. So, how’d that work out for you, Colt?”

  I started to laugh. “Great. Can’t you tell?”

  I guess he knew I couldn’t talk about it anymore, because he scooped up the mattress. “We’d better get this thing back to the dorm and start blowing it up. I hope it doesn’t take all night.”

  chapter 24

  I stayed with Tom all weekend. On Saturday he had to work in the library. I read some of his books, watched TV with his roommate, and walked around the campus for a while. I met him and his boyfriend Derek at a Mexican restaurant for dinner.

  Derek shook my hand as if we were a couple of businessmen, then reeled off an original comedy routine all through dinner, complete with celebrity impersonations. Before I met him, I never would’ve believed that anyone could outtalk my brother. Maybe that was why they’d gotten together.

  When Tom went to the bathroom, Derek wound down. “Tom thinks I’m trying too hard, I can tell,” he said. “Sorry if I seem a little manic, but you’re the first person in his family that I’ve met. He says your father won’t even talk to him, so I don’t have too many shots at this.”

  It struck me as funny that Derek had been trying to impress me. “Relax,” I said. “If you can put up with my brother, you don’t have to worry about me.”

  After dinner, we stopped by a party. It still surprised me for some reason—I guess because it was so new to me—when Tom put his hand on Derek’s shoulder or his arm around Derek’s waist, but I was getting used to it.

  I didn’t drink much at the party. I didn’t need to. Since I’d told Tom about my last night with Julia, I’d been feeling half high already. I hadn’t realized I’d been lugging that night around with me, hadn’t felt its weight until I finally let it go. So now I just drank one beer and watched my brother show off his ability to dance on tables without tipping them over, and his skill at making up song parodies on the spot. What with Derek’s impersonations, they had a hell of a routine worked out.

  I let myself stop thinking about Julia and Kirby and Austin, let myself stop wondering what I was going to do next about that whole mess. I didn’t flirt with the girls at the party or try to make them think I was a college student. I didn’t try to be anything. I was just there.

  I took the bus back on Sunday afternoon. Dad was up, and sober for a change, when I got home. “So you went to see Tommy,” he said when I walked in the door.

  “Yeah.”

  “How—how is he?”

  “Good.”

  He cleared his throat. “Did he say when he’s coming home?”

  Tom had told me he was thinking of staying up at college all summer, working and taking classes. But all I said to my father was, “Why don’t you ask him?”

  I left the room and took a shower, but I know he called Tom that night.

  All day on Monday, kids told me Austin was after me. “He knows where to find me,” I said. I think they wanted me to go charging up Black Mountain and tackle him first, but why should I?

  I did wonder what I was going to say when he finally confronted me. I had never known if he realized that Julia cheated on him. Even if he’d never suspected me, couldn’t he tell there was somebody? Didn’t he ever notice she kept part of herself back?

  Kirby came into the restaurant that night, just before my shift ended. I hadn’t seen her since she’d screamed at me in the cafeteria on Friday, and my stomach bucked when I saw her now. I couldn’t tell anything from her face.

  “You’re off soon, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I checked the clock. “Five minutes.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “All right.” I wiped off my last tables of the night and punched out. We walked to her spot in the parking lot. Before she could say whatever she’d come to say, I told her, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are. But—”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She leaned against her mother’s car, crossed her arms, and stared at me. “Let me ask you something,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I called Pam this weekend. She said you told her you felt guilty about Julia. Is that why you’re so obsessed? Is that why everything always comes back to Julia?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Get over yourself,” she said. “You weren’t even there that night.”

  I could never explain it to her. I could never tell her what I’d done to Julia’s car and why. I did know that even though I’d played my part by scratching the car, I hadn’t made Pam skid out on Black Mountain Road. But my guilt was a lot bigger than that. Sometimes I thought the accident was punishment for our having been together at all.

  “She wormed right into your brain, didn’t she?” Kirby said. “She didn’t deserve you.” When I didn’t say anything, she went on, “Look, I know it makes me sound like the world’s biggest bitch to bring it up now, when she’s dead. You’re probably tired of hearing it.”

  “I know you never got along with her.”

  “She was a snob. She once said that Syd should watch out or she’d end up barefoot and pregnant at seventeen, because that’s what happened to girls from the flats.”

  Julia had a horror of getting pregnant before she was ready. As much as we flung ourselves into sex, as much as we risked by being together, we never risked that. My old girlfriend Jackie had once said she’d let me try sex without a condom, “just for a minute, to see what it’s like,” and God did I want to, but I knew it was a stupid idea so we didn’t. Julia would’ve cut off her own head rather than make me an offer like that. “You don’t know what it’s like, to worry about something taking over your body, your whole life,” she said. And it was probably good she felt that way, because with her I might’ve been tempted to take stupid risks.

  “She looked down on people,” Kirby went on. “Julia thought everyone should fall down and worship her. And it kills me to think you fell for that. I mean—did you think you weren’t good enough for her?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  She stared at me, as if waiting for me to go on. I recognized Julia in what Kirby said, the self-confidence that sometimes came off as arrogance. That was the part of Julia I liked the least. But Kirby didn’t know the rest. She didn’t know the Julia who could laugh at herself, who called me when I had the flu, who liked getting her feet muddy in the river. It would take hours to tell Kirby those things, and even then she might not believe me, because I could never describe all the layers of Julia.

  She sighed. “You’re so caught up in her. I don’t know why you even tried with me.”

  “I love you.”

  “You only say that when it’s forced out of you.”

  “It’s not easy for me to say . . . but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it.”

  “I know. I love you, too. But Julia keeps getting in the way.” She pulled out her car keys. “You need some time to get over this.”

  “Time away from you, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  We stood there for another minute. She examined her keys as if she’d forgotten what they were for.

  I took one step toward her, but she shook her head. So I walked away, and we got in our cars. She went back to the base of Black Mountain, while I went home to the flats.

  The phone rang sometime after I’d gone to bed. I was the only one who ever answered it at night, since my
mother slept with earplugs, and my father was usually passed out. Before I put it to my ear, I woke up enough to think maybe it was Kirby, calling to say she’d changed her mind.

  It wasn’t Kirby. It was some guy yelling, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He slurred too much. I figured it was one of my father’s drinking buddies. I was about to hang up when I caught the name “Julia.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You better stop telling your fucking lies about Julia.”

  I sat up in the dark. “Chadwick?”

  “You prick. You think she woulda touched you?”

  I took a breath. I’m not sure what I was going to say, but I never said it, because he started bawling.

  When Julia died, I’d watched Austin for signs that he’d taken it in the gut the way I had. I hadn’t seen any at the funeral, where he’d been his usual polished self, practically posing next to the casket as if he were an actor in a movie about a funeral. At school he’d looked solemn, the way people expected him to look, but I couldn’t see anything raw in him. But then, who was I to talk? I hadn’t gone around with her death all over my face; I hadn’t flung myself into the grave with her.

  I sat there listening, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t believe Austin Chadwick was crying in my ear. Maybe I was dreaming.

  “Jesus,” he sobbed, “why she do it?”

  “What?”

  “You.” He sniffed, then coughed. “She musta been mad at me.”

  “Austin—”

  He inhaled, so loud I could hear it on my end of the phone. “You think she loved you?” Now he was yelling again. “She didn’t love you. She didn’t love you.” And he hung up.

  For the rest of the school year, Austin let his eyes skim over me like I wasn’t there. I don’t think he even remembered that he’d called me. He graduated that spring.

  Plenty of Black Mountain kids accused me of outright lying about Julia. Some of the others said she’d been slumming. I’d always thought it meant more than that to her—I was almost positive it was more than that—but I’d never lost that last little piece of doubt.

  I called Kirby at the beginning of June, just before finals, but she said, “I’m not ready to talk to you, Colt.” She sounded like she might not ever be ready. I realized then we were never going to get back what we’d had. So that was one more thing I would just have to live with.

  chapter 25

  On the last day of school, I packed Julia’s notebook in a box, along with my junior-high diploma, and some other things I didn’t need to keep in my room anymore. I stuck the box in the attic, next to the boxes Tom had stowed up there when he went away to college.

  I walked down to the bridge. I had always thought of this spot as belonging to Julia and me, although we hadn’t always had it to ourselves. A couple of times, I’d found kids partying here and gone home without seeing her.

  Once, we were in her backseat when a car pulled up. She had me get on the floor with a coat over me while she buttoned up and looked out the windows. “Some kids I don’t recognize,” she reported. “Just to be on the safe side, I’ll drive us out of here.” Sitting there on the gritty floor, muffled by the coat, I felt as low as I’d ever felt with her, like the garbage that had to be swept under the rug when company came. I was about an inch away from ending the whole thing, but she pulled into the lot of an abandoned gas station to let me up. She hissed, “We almost got caught,” her eyes bright and her fingers already reaching for me, and I dove into her again like I’d never dreamed of leaving.

  All year I’d been walking this riverbank with her voice and the lines of her notebook in my head, living those highs and lows again, trying to keep her. But we’d had only so many nights together, and the notebook had only so many pages, and that world was never going to get any bigger. The truth was that I couldn’t have kept her even if she’d lived. At the end, we’d both been pushing at the walls of our secret world, pushing at each other. We’d given each other everything we could. It wasn’t enough for either of us anymore; we’d outgrown her backseat.

  I walked down to the river’s edge and squatted, my boots sinking in the silty muck. I dipped my hands and forearms in the water, splashed it up over my head. The Willis River was always muddy, with a strange moldy smell to it, but on this day it felt clean.

  acknowledgments

  I owe thanks to all the people who gave me feedback, support, and encouragement while I worked on this book, and to those who helped shape it and bring it to the bookshelves. I couldn’t have done this without the amazing Nathan Bransford and the wonderful people at Viking, including Sam Kim, Abigail Powers, and especially Catherine Frank.

  I am grateful for the friendship and support of Teresa Bonaddio, Kelly Fineman, and Colleen Rowan Kosinski. Thanks also to Jessica Dimuzio (VMD) and the Milestones Critique Circle of Chestnut Hill; and the online communities of Debut2009 and 10_ers. It’s been my privilege to interact with the Classes of 2k9 and 2k10.

  Special thanks and love to my family: my parents, James and Cheryl; my sister Bonnie; my grandmothers, Dorothy and Jane; my grandfathers, Bradford and Clarence; my stepson Will; and most of all, John, the best husband in the world.