Where You Go

by Claire Cain

  “So, you’re leaving?” he asked with a kind of edge that came out of nowhere since we hadn’t talked to or seen each other in weeks. He said it like it was a personal affront.

  “Sorry?” I shut the car door and turned to face him directly. I suppressed the nervous excitement that crept up the back of my neck when I heard his voice.

  “You’re leaving. My mom just told me you got in everywhere you applied and it’s just a matter of the financial aid packages. So you’re leaving in the fall,” he said, a little less gruffly. He stood there looking big and focused and basically like the embodiment of every single one of my teenage dreams. His dark hair was messy and a little long, but his jaw had squared off in the last few years. I hadn’t stood and just looked at him in a while, and he seemed a bit more like a grown-up than me in some way.

  I felt painfully aware of my body—its size and proximity in comparison to his, and what he might be seeing in me as he looked me over. I felt positively delicate at 5’5’’ in the face of his 6’2”, which continued to be a relief following years of middle school riddled with moments of towering over him and all of the other boys. Then he grew six inches in the span of eighteen months, and I finally felt like I wasn’t so far ahead of him. Then, he just kept going.

  I squared my shoulders to him and took a breath.

  “Yes. I’m leaning toward Columbia but it’s the most expensive, so we’ll see what they come up with.” I gave him a small smile. I wasn’t uncomfortable with my achievements—I was proud and ready—but it felt strange telling him about them. Maybe because I wasn’t sure he’d even gotten in to college or bothered to apply. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart—rather, he was brilliant. It was just that I knew he was never there, never in any of my AP classes or anything else. Come junior year, he’d just kind of checked out.

  “You always talked about New York. I guess I never thought you’d do it.” He squinted at me, but I couldn’t read whatever it was that was in his eyes.

  “Why would you think that? I’ve planned on leaving for school since eighth grade.” I felt defensive at his suggestion that he didn’t believe in me. Why wouldn’t he? What about me would say I didn’t mean business? I knew my face betrayed my confusion at his disbelief. Or at least I hoped it showed confusion and not the deep ache with which my heart was now pulsing.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He shook his head and his toes busied a rock underfoot. “It just seems crazy. We’ve been here all our lives, and now we’re leaving. Seems unnatural or something.” He said this, his blue eyes clouding over and looking into mine, trying to find something in them. I couldn’t tell what, but I wished I could give it to him.

  “Well, it’s pretty normal. Kids do this all the time. That’s sort of what the whole point is, isn’t it? Launch out on your own and live a little? Try not to come crawling back after graduation and hole up in your parents’ house like some jobless failure?”

  He snorted a laugh. “Yeah, well. I’m not going to be crawling back, that’s for sure.” There was the edge again. One hand reached back to grab onto the back of his neck—a familiar gesture I’d seen him do whenever he felt unsure or uncomfortable.

  “What school did you decide on?” Was this a safe line of questioning? I had no idea what else to talk about. It’d been long enough since we actually talked, and there hadn’t been a time in the last three years when our interactions were less than tense. I knew that on my end there was a bit of unrequited crushing, but what was his issue with me?

  “I’m enlisting.” He kind of spat this at me, like he knew it would be a shock.

  “Huh?” The sound was more a whoosh than a word, and I felt my stomach clench in a weird way. “Enlisting?”

  “Yeah, Army. It’s been my plan all along, and after 9/11, I knew there was no other option for me. I don’t want to be stuck with my head in some stupid textbook when I could be doing something that actually matters.” He stepped toward my car, crossed his arms, and leaned against the door. My pulse picked up its pace as I felt the air shift around me, disturbed and buzzing from his nearness.

  “But… you don’t want to do school first?” I tried not to sound too motherly. He had a mom—a great one, and I didn’t want him thinking I thought I knew everything. He’d told me I was a know-it-all once, and I never forgot it.

  “No.” He seemed almost angry, like he was proving some point I wasn’t grasping by saying it.

  “Well, good luck, I guess. I mean, that’s really great… or I hope it is. I hope it’s the right thing for you.” I stuttered and fumbled with my response. I didn’t know why it shocked me since it wasn’t a huge surprise that he’d go Army—he had often mentioned it, or at least I’d heard it was a possibility. But I had assumed he would go to college first. There was nothing wrong with starting now, but it filled me with a sense of dread.

  “Thanks. I head to Basic on Tuesday. Good luck to you, too.”

  I didn’t speak immediately since I was still searching for what I could say that would be supportive or… something, but before I could get a word out, he’d pushed away from the car and turned on his heel. I heard him say, “Well, see you later, Alex.”

  I waved weakly, knowing he couldn’t see me with his back to me, but I couldn’t find my voice to say goodbye.

  Chapter Two

  That same summer we said goodbye, while Luke was slogging it out in boot camp, I spent my summer working and interning for a local event planning company. When Luke’s mom passed me his basic training mailing address, I shoved it in my desk drawer and tried to forget about it between wedding receptions and the formal art auction that was my pet project. But soon enough, after hearing how lonely he was and how much his family’s letters meant to him, I decided to write.

  Ok, that wasn’t true. One night at a little get-together a few weeks after graduation, I heard another friend of mine, Amber Watkins—someone who certainly hadn’t been his childhood best friend—say she wrote Luke a letter. I felt jealous and annoyed and decided I’d write him once a week. So I did.

  At the end of the summer, just before taking my flight out to New York, finally off to college, I saw him again. He was back for a few days in the wake of his training. I saw him in the parking lot of the mall, sun glinting off his sunglasses and no doubt burning his scalp through his buzz cut. He seemed taller and somehow bigger all around. He seemed grown.

  “What? How are you here?” I dropped the bag I planned to load into the trunk and ran over to him, feeling my stomach flip at the sight of him. He smiled back at me, totally uninhibited, and pulled me into a hug before I knew what was happening. I crushed into his firm frame. It was the first time we’d hugged since we were kids. “I guess letters worked as a form of bribery to stay my friend.”

  “You look great, Al. About ready to head off to New York, huh?” he said, ignoring my first comment, while his broad, warm smile was still in place. He held me away from him by the wrists, gently, and his eyes skated over me. I felt my cheeks warm at his review and I chuckled nervously. I couldn’t figure out what else to do with his close attention or the way I felt like a whole butterfly farm had been released in my stomach.

  “Well, yes. But that’s not exciting. How was basic training? How do you not look emaciated and ill like so many who’ve gone before you and been starved? Casey Whitlock came back last year looking like the angel of death!” I tried to look him in the eye, but the sun blared just over his head, blinding me. Casey had gone to Marine Corps boot camp the year before. He was somewhere out there, saving the world, but the week he came home for leave after boot camp, he looked like he’d lost twenty pounds he didn’t have to begin with.

  Luke grinned and shook his head. “I ate everything in sight every time they gave me a chance. And I was lucky enough not to get too sick, so that helped, though I did lose weight. Now I’m a few months older, and maybe a bit smarter about some stuff, a bit dumber about others. I heard Basic makes you dumb, and I can confirm, the ‘Army dumb’
syndrome is real.” He still held my wrists, but I felt a heat where his hand met my arm and stepped back a bit, using the discarded bag and my open trunk as an excuse. I walked slowly back over to my car, making sure he was following me.

  “Well you look good. The haircut suits you. You look hardcore,” I said. He beamed at that, and then his eyes seemed to shift from smiling to serious all at once.

  “I want you to know that after we talked in the spring, I changed my plan a bit.” He always had a knack for sincerity.

  I remembered overhearing my mom say something about that to my dad after Luke went home one day. Earlier that day, Luke had dived into a flower bed to save a Frisbee, smashing the daylilies to death. His apology, which was lengthy and amazingly sincere, had brought my mom to tears. And the thing was, he wasn’t manipulating her. He was genuinely that sweet and knowing he’d done something wrong must have pained him, based on the way he bared his confession. His sense of justice was stunningly strong, even at ten.

  I set the bag in the trunk and closed it, turning back to him. “You did?” I couldn’t imagine what might have changed in the wake of our clipped, almost unfriendly conversation that past May.

  “Yeah, I thought about the college thing. It’s not that I didn’t want to go, but I felt this urgency to get started with my life and do something. I ended up talking with the ROTC guys up at Miller College, and I signed a contract with them. So now I’m back, and I’ll be earning my degree first and then commissioning when I graduate. I’ll start as an officer.” It might have been my imagination, but I was sure he stood a bit taller as he said that.

  “Good for you. So four years until you’re back at the Army stuff again?” I felt relieved at this news on several fronts.

  “Well, not quite. Probably more like two since I have my associate’s degree. I’ll start as a junior in the fall and be right on track to graduate and commission in two years.” He said it casually and leaned against the bumper of my car, waiting for my response.

  “What? Wait. How do you already have an associate’s degree?” I couldn’t make sense of that news.

  “I was taking classes at Miller College all through high school. You know the Early College program?” His smile was a little triumphant, like he was glad he could spring this on me and also surprised I didn’t know. I knew that smile well.

  “Are you kidding me? This whole time I thought you were some underachieving slouch who thought he was too good for high school, and now I find out you were an overachieving genius who was actually too good for high school?” I couldn’t believe it. This did not line up with the Luke I’d known in high school. Or at least the Luke I imagined I knew but never saw or spent time with.

  This version was markedly more dangerous. I had a thing for guys with brains who knew how to use them. My thought that he seemed more mature or experienced months ago was right—he had been. He’d moved on to college before he ever left high school.

  “Ah, well not so much too good as just kind of over it. After sophomore year I could feel myself getting restless and talked to the counselors about what I needed to do to graduate early. It wasn’t an option, but I did summer school to get all the rest of my high school classes done and by junior year I was taking classes at Miller.”

  “I’m—I just—I feel like such a jerk for thinking you were a slacker. It’s not like you were ever like that before, you just…”

  “I just wasn’t into school? Or good at it?” he asked with a brilliant smile. I could hardly look at him. The sun was behind me now and yet he was still too bright.

  “Well, yeah. Yes. But I guess you figured it out. You always have been determined when you make a decision.” I’d always admired that about him. It was like if he decided to do something, the universe got in line and made it happen. Like he had the power to speak his future into existence.

  Ok, maybe that was a tad dramatic. But when he wanted something, he did it, even if it wasn’t in his wheelhouse. This happened countless times as we were growing up, whether with a science fair project winning due to his unwavering determination to make his project the best or his maddening ability to charm any of his middle school crushes (I didn’t know about the older ones as we’d not been that close). This latest news was a prime example of that tenacity, or whatever it was.

  “Thanks. I see how you could think that. But hey, before you have to run, I have to say thank you for your letters. I—it meant a lot. You taking the time to do that—it meant a lot.” He reached out and touched my arm lightly and suddenly I felt incoherent.

  His blue eyes were twinkling at me, all smiley and friendly and sincere, and his hand was on my wrist, and I felt about as close to hysteria as I’d ever been.

  I swallowed down the words bubbling up, the quick confession that wanted to jump out of my mouth. I leashed the impulse to pounce him and finally feel his lips against my own.

  I cleared my voice. “I’m so glad your mom passed along your address. It was fun to write you. I’m surprised you didn’t get bored with the letters, but I’m glad they helped. Pretty much the least I could do.”

  I tried to sound casual, but his thanking me was important. I’d shared a lot with him in the letters about my hopes for college and what I’d do after, and several times in the weeks of writing to my silent pen pal, I had to stop myself from asking weighty questions like, “Why didn’t we date in high school?” or say things like, “I always thought we’d end up together.” Somehow, I kept those feelings under wraps.

  “I don’t think I could be bored with you, Alex. Not ever,” he said lightly, and I had to look away from him. I swallowed and took a deep breath before meeting his eyes again.

  “Well listen. Keep in touch, ok? I know we’ll both be busy, but I don’t want to read about your receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in the newspaper—that news has to come from your lips, got it?” I joked.

  The fatal mistake was saying anything about his perfect, lush lips, because now I was looking at them—the bottom one fuller, the top curved and peaked in just the right way, so right that I swayed toward him a little, and he undoubtedly saw me do it. I shook myself to force my eyes away from his mouth.

  Before I finished mentally punishing myself for being so obvious, he was leaning toward me, his previously inspected lips brushing against my cheek and his voice clear and strong in my ear saying, “I promise,” before he leaned back away.

  “Bye for now,” I said softly, still tingly and shaken in the wake of his nearness, the feel of his lips on my cheek, and the brush of his smooth, shaven face against mine.

  “Bye for now,” he said and then sauntered off in the direction of the mall.

  A day after our first modern day encounter, Monday, I worked to convince myself there was nothing to be nervous about. This was Luke. Old friend. Childhood friend. We were meeting to catch up, have a friendly meal, and go our separate ways as friends. Because we were friends. So this was no big deal.

  So I wore jeans. I didn’t want to look too done up and figured if I wore basically anything other than jeans, I would. But I wore my best fitting jeans, the kind that hugged my curves just right, and depending on my level of carb consumption at dinner, may or may not fit as well by the end of the night. Because also, I planned to be a fully functioning adult woman and eat a real meal rather than let my general gut-bust of nerves prevent me from eating. If I prided myself on anything in life, it was that I wasn’t dainty about food.

  So I was wearing jeans that may or may not fit in a few more hours, and I was going to eat. I wore a v-neck black t-shirt and my nearly black hair long down my back and tried to wear enough makeup that I felt good but not so much I looked like I was trying. Because again, this was a friend thing.

  As I widened my eyes to swipe on a layer of mascara, I knew I didn’t stand a chance being near him again and acting normal. I still felt the same crazy urge to yell at him for being gone (even though I had been away too), and then crush myself against him. How would I sit still acr
oss from him and act like it was a “fun seeing you again” moment instead of something I’d thought about so often it might as well have been my one and only reoccurring dream?

  How would I sit at a table with this man, look into his painfully blue eyes, look at his gorgeous, chiseled, completely appealing face, and still hold a conversation?

  I shook my head at myself in the mirror, feeling excitement tinged with a sense of doom that accompanied the knowledge I was more nervous for this date with my old friend than I’d probably ever been for any other night out. I took a deep, grounding breath and made my way to the stairs so I’d be ready when he arrived. The doorbell rang just as I started down, and I clutched the bannister to steady myself.

  As I knew he would, Luke arrived promptly at six and I managed to avoid tumbling down the stairs into the hallway of my childhood home where he met me at the door with a relaxed smile. He greeted me through the screen door with a calm “good to see you” and seemed far too relaxed compared to the edginess I couldn’t ignore roiling around in my own stomach. And that was before I had a chance to really look at him.

  When I saw this man wearing jeans and a plaid blue and white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up at the elbows, I did not feel my mouth go dry. My hands did not get clammy as I inspected him through the flimsy screen door still between us and noticed his perfectly styled hair and clean-shaven jaw. I did not wish I could pee again, one last time, and surreptitiously check to make sure I was wearing deodorant. No, I marched out confidently and greeted him with a “good to see you” in return and a wide smile.