by Meg Gardiner
I put a hand on my hip. “It isn’t your reunion.”
His smile was wicked. “Wanna bet?”
He pushed through the door.
Nobody was faster on his feet than Jesse, metaphorically speaking. Anything he thought up, he could undoubtedly pull off, despite being five years younger than everyone else here, and having grown up in Santa Barbara, and the fact that nobody in my graduating class had been anywhere near as gifted and good-looking, or paraplegic.
“Dammit.” I chased after him.
Inside, I found him beneath the strobing disco ball, at the sign-in table. Ceci Lezak was searching through a box of name tags. Her taffeta ruffles covered a build like a furnace. Her hair was sprayed into place with pointillist exactitude. She looked harried.
“I can’t seem to find it,” she said.
Jesse leaned an elbow on the table, smiling at her. “Student council was never better than when you ran it. I remember that cool campaign slogan. . . .”
“ ‘Lift Off With Lezak.’ ” She stopped hunting and beamed at him. “Why don’t I make you a new name tag?”
Oy. I walked up. “Hey, Ceci.”
She clapped her hands together. “Evan, wow. Look at you, all fit and tan and . . .” Eyes on my outfit. “Spick and span.”
“You’re very festive this evening.”
“And you’re a writer and all.” She handed me my name tag and a welcome pack. “You’re not going to do an exposé about tonight, are you? Reveal our old high school secrets in print?”
“No. I won’t blow your cover, I promise.” I stared at Jesse, tapping my index finger against my lips. “You look so familiar.”
Ceci smiled. “This is Jesse Blackburn. He was our foreign exchange student.”
“No, that’s not it.” I snapped my fingers. “Of course—Court TV, the trial. When did you make parole?”
The door opened and heat swarmed over us. In the doorway stood a suburban Brunhilde, blond, ungainly, and six feet tall.
“Oh, my hell, you’re really here.” Abbie Hankins laughed deep in her throat and engulfed me in a hug. “I win the bet. Fork it over, Wally.”
Her husband lumbered through the door. He was taller and even rounder than Abbie, a Saint Bernard in a garish Hawaiian shirt. She passed me to him as if I were a rugby ball. He lugged me against his side, laughing.
“Thanks for costing me twenty bucks, Delaney.” He saw Jesse. “Dude.”
He grabbed Jesse’s hand and pumped it. At the table Ceci laced her fingers together, smiling expressively.
“You’re looking debonair tonight, Dr. Hankins.” She ran her gaze over Abbie’s sundress. “That’s sweet. Wal-Mart does such fun fashions nowadays.”
A woman strode up wearing a reunion committee name tag and a dress that made her look like a spangled boar. Ceci waved her close, whispering and nodding at Jesse.
“There’s no welcome pack for him, nothing. And I shouldn’t be handling the table all by myself.”
“Should we call Kelly?”
“No. This is the last straw. I bet she had a few belts to loosen up before she came, and now she’s home trying to put her lipstick on without running it up to her ears.”
Realizing that we were listening, they shut up and pasted on Go, team! smiles.
Ceci gestured to Jesse. “You remember our exchange student?”
The boar wrinkled her forehead. “Sure. Right . . . So good you could make it.”
They bit their tongues, staring at him. I knew they saw the wheelchair and little else. They hadn’t seen the headline, One Killed, One Critical after Hit-and-Run. They hadn’t watched Jesse spend these last years rebuilding his life. And they couldn’t see that he looked better than he had in a long time. A deranged driver had blown him off his feet, but flashbacks, chronic pain, and grief at losing his best friend in the crash had kept him down. When finally he had sought help, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, at last, he was on the mend.
Wally was suppressing a smile. “How are things back in ...”
“Manitoba. Good.” Jesse took the name tag from Ceci. “And I was a political prisoner.” He turned and headed into the club.
Ceci held out a welcome pack to Wally. “It has your fifteen-year commemorative pin, the Dog Days Update book, and coupons for ten percent off at Krause’s Auto Body.” She handed Abbie her pack. “Discounts at Weight Watchers, too.”
Abbie smiled. “How’s their program working for you?”
Ceci colored. Abbie and I strolled after Jesse.
“What’s with her?” I said.
“She’s the dental hygienist for Wally’s practice. She’s an anal-retentive neat freak who thinks she could run his life much better than a slob like me.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “She’s been coming on to him for years.”
I managed not to gape. Abbie and Wally had three happy blond children and always seemed to make each other laugh. We should all be so lucky.
Above the bandstand hung strings of red lights shaped like chili peppers. The band was pumping out old pop rock, the jump juice of our youth. People crowded around the buffet table, their plates piled with coleslaw and weenies toothpicked to pineapples. Fusion cuisine, desert-style. The acreage of shiny spandex on display could have covered the Hindenburg.
I smiled, suddenly glad to be back.
China Lake is the navy’s top weapons-testing facility. I was thirteen when the U.S. Navy transferred my family here. It was not the California of my dreams, consisting instead of crystal skies, shrieking fighter jets, jackrabbits, and blowing sand. When we drove into town my mother, who had weathered transfers from Norfolk to D.C. to Pearl Harbor, inhaled sharply.
My father, driving with one elbow cocked on the window frame, smiled and said, “Welcome home, Angie. Again.”
She smoothed her hair against the wind and peered back at my brother and me. She had on her game face. This is what we do. We’re a navy family. Chin up. Right then, my stomach hurt. Twenty years later, this place was more or less my hometown.
Abbie stuck by my side. “Man, look at Becky O’Keefe. Tell me my butt isn’t that big.”
“Not by half.”
“You’re a lousy liar.”
I stopped. “Oh, no.”
On the wall behind the buffet hung a display of photos, blown up to poster size. Jesse was parked in front of it, shaking his head.
“Rock my world. Now I’ve seen everything,” he said.
The photo showed me standing on the football field at halftime of the homecoming game, wearing a fake ermine stole and a cockeyed rhinestone tiara. I was clutching the arm of my escort, Tommy Chang, and looking surprised out of my head.
Jesse’s mouth skewed to one side. “Evan Delaney, homecoming queen.”
“Can I get a drink before you start in on me?” I said.
“And you never told me. All this time I’m thinking of you as the tomboy, the sprinter, the outsider. . . .”
Abbie nodded.“Dirt biker, creative writer, girl gladiator ... ”
“He doesn’t need any help,” I said.
“Talk about a cover story,” Jesse said. “Did everybody in China Lake live a double life?”
“Yes. Like you.” I raised a fist. “Fight the power. Free Canada.”
He gazed at the photo again. “Who’s that in the background?”
“Valerie Skinner.”
“Your mortal enemy?” He leaned forward. “Why does she look blurry?”
“She lunged and knocked the tiara off.”
“She looks like a rottweiler. She really held the grudge that hard?”
Abbie grabbed a pineapple weenie. “Like a vise grip.” She looked at the posters. “I wish they’d put up the one of you getting the tiara back from her.”
Jesse looked at me.
“I tackled her,” I said.
“You speared her. It was majestic,” Abbie said.
I glanced around at the crowd.
“Don’t worry.
Last time anybody saw her was graduation. You’re safe.” Abbie waved to a stout woman across the buffet table. “Hey, Becky.” Under her breath she said, “She’s still making those appliqué shirts.”
Indeed, Becky O’Keefe was wearing a pink sweatshirt with bobbles and glitter. Abbie trotted over and hugged her.
Jesse leaned back, shaking his head at the photo. “A coup attempt. Wild. Did you have Valerie flogged?”
“For your information, I made a damn fine homecoming queen.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “And do not speak of my hair. If you compare me to Jon Bon Jovi I will dump you on your ass before you can shout.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” He thought about it. “Twisted Sister, maybe.”
I strode to the bar and asked for chardonnay. He followed, ordered iced tea, and sat tapping his thumb against his knee, wearing a cocky look.
“Tommy Chang isn’t anything like you described him.”
“Not a word, Jesse. Nada. Zip it.”
He glanced at the photo. “I pictured this ultracool rebel, Bruce Lee meets Clint Eastwood. But—”
“Tommy was not that short.”
His smile was dazzling to the point of infuriation. “I think it’s sweet. Frodo wins the hand of the queen.”
I took my chardonnay. “Don’t you have cows that need milking back in Manitoba?”
A woman walked up to the bar. “Evan?”
I set down my drink and shook her hand. “Ms. Shepard.”
“Shepard-Cantwell.”
She was in her early forties and looked ready for Wood-stock. Her dress may have come down off the wall at the Guggenheim, considering that it mixed newspaper headlines with fake fur and glass eyeballs. She smiled at Jesse with the oversweet gleam of the professionally condescending.
“Sorry that we never met when you were an exchange student.”
His tone was mordant. “That’s okay. My English is much better now.”
“It’s wonderful that you were able to travel all this way, considering.” She turned back to me with a brittle smile. “I hear you’re still writing. It’s great that you found an outlet for your imagination.”
“Thanks.” Nitwit.
“How are your parents?”
“Good. Divorced.”
“Oh. Well. That’s a shame.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Your dad had such panache. Even when he was raking us teachers over the coals, we couldn’t help but be impressed. Give him my best, won’t you?”
She swanned away. I downed half my wine. An outlet for my imagination. Birdbrain.
Jesse said, “Let me guess. Art teacher?”
“The art teacher. It was her class where Valerie stole my journal.”
China Lake was a place where you had to make your own entertainment, generally involving sports, garage bands, and drinking. My hobby was writing. Valerie’s was revenge.
In high school I scrawled my own world in a journal containing every poem and hissy fit and spasm of lust that spilled from my pubescent soul, and one day when Ms. Shepard stepped out of the classroom Valerie took it from my backpack.
She denied it, vociferously. But she spent lunchtime reading sections aloud in the girls’ room, including my fantasies about Tommy Chang and Keanu Reeves, and how I considered her a crude, skank-faced, butt-scratching diva.
“Ms. Shepard asked the student teacher if he’d witnessed it. I can still see him, this prissy little guy going on like a howler monkey, telling her I was jumping to conclusions.”
“And Ms. Shepard thought you had an active imagination?”
Ms. Shepard saw surfaces, not subtext. First impressions were her thing, and she had drawn her first impression of me two weeks into my freshman year, the day our class took the field trip to Renegade Canyon.
“She called me an instigator.”
“So, on top of everything you were a troublemaker? What else are you hiding in your secret past? Animal sacrifice?”
“You really want to know?”
I stepped off the school bus that day into the heat, pulling a baseball cap low on my head. We were fifty miles down a deserted road on the far reaches of the naval base, on a field trip to study the petroglyphs, prehistoric art carved into the canyon walls.
Ms. Shepard waved to us. “Everybody over here. Bring your sketch pads.”
I shielded my eyes against the ferocious light, walking with my head down. The sunblock was hidden in my backpack, beneath my journal and a dog-eared copy of Ender’s Game. Pale skin, pale poetry, science fiction: Even I knew I was a geek.
The canyon gashed for miles through black rocks splattered crimson and yellow with lichen. Carvings covered the walls like graffiti. Snakes. Deer. Bighorn sheep. Weird human figures with spirals for faces and shock waves erupting from their heads, rising ghostly and vivid sixty feet above me. The light seemed to hum.
Ms. Shepard trudged through the soft sand, waving. “Imagine the young hunters hidden among the boulders. Picture the shamans carving these images to bring success to the hunt.”
I stared up at the figure of a horned human with feet like talons. Someone pushed past, knocking my shoulder. Her voice came as small and sharp as a needle.
“Watch it, Nosebleed.”
My hand shot to my upper lip. Valerie snickered and walked on by.
Ms. Shepard frowned. I found a wad of Kleenex in my pocket, but my nose wasn’t bleeding. I felt a zinging sensation along my arms. Valerie had gotten me again.
Ms. Shepard twirled in a circle. Her peasant skirt flared and her chandelier earrings danced in the sun. “When shamans drew the prey animal, they gave the hunter power. Look. Can’t you see it?”
I’ll say. The walls were covered with bighorn sheep. And hunters spearing sheep, archers shooting sheep, dogs attacking sheep. Plus creepy sheep: two-headed ones, and big ones with little ones inside. It was mayhem.
“And these symbols. The snake represents fertility. And the spiral is the Mother Earth navel from which man emerged.”
There were snickers and audible icks. And behind me, whispering.
Valerie and Abbie and Tommy were inching back from the group. Shooting a surreptitious glance at Ms. Shepard, Valerie slunk between two boulders and took off. Abbie looked around, checking that the coast was clear, and spied me.
She froze. Behind her glasses, her expression said, New girl, don’t rat me out. Then she whispered, “Want to come?”
Tommy nodded beside her. He was a wiry kid with powerful brown eyes and a convincing aura of cool, and whenever he looked my way my stomach hollowed. He mouthed, Come on, and slipped between the rocks. I followed.
Abbie took off like a rocket, blond hair flying. Tommy and I sprinted behind. He shot me a smile. Exhilarated, I smiled back, thinking, I’m in.
The break in the rocks led up a trail. After a hundred yards we caught up with Valerie. She was laughing. Until she saw me.
“What’s she doing here?”
Valerie had hips and boobs, wore tight tops and her jeans slung low, and smelled of perfume and cigarettes. She was domineering, popular, and cruel, and after two weeks of high school she ruled the freshman class like a hegemon. I couldn’t figure a way around her, because wherever I turned she was in front of my face.
Like right now. “Why are you tagging along?”
Abbie shoved her glasses up her nose. “I said she could come.”
Valerie stepped up, inches from my face, and I felt myself shrinking. She tossed her brown hair over her shoulder. I was slow to recognize the deviousness behind her eyes.
“You can come on one condition. You answer this riddle.”
“Okay.”
“If you didn’t have feet, would you wear shoes?”
“No.”
“Then how come you’re wearing a bra?”
I blinked. A hot stone weighed on my stomach. Braying with laughter, Valerie ran ahead.
Abbie yelled, “That’s mean!” Taking my arm, she pulled me along. “Come on.”
; I complied, legs watery, climbing up the trail through yellow light and a hot breeze. I hid my face from Tommy. Valerie said bra; she made him think about my . . . Oh, God.
He called to her. “Where is it?”
“Just ahead. My dad sets up targets out here.”
We squeezed through a crack between boulders and came out on the side of a hill, overlooking a valley. The sky was blue glass. Sand gleamed in the sun. Below, an access road ran to a complex of cinder-block buildings where Jeeps were parked.
Abbie put her hands on her hips. “We came all the way for this? That’s just, like, buildings. Where are the jets? There aren’t even targets set up.”
Valerie scanned the horizon. “I thought for sure . . .”
Soldiers in camouflage appeared outside the buildings. Some hopped into the Jeeps. One was talking on a radio. And one had a pair of binoculars to his eyes, sweeping the hills.
He called to his comrades and pointed. At us.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Heads swiveled to stare. They began pointing and shouting. There was a flurry of movement, men running toward the Jeeps or back to the buildings.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to be here,” I said.
The flash lit the desert floor. White light wound with orange, fireballs erupting from the buildings. The boom hit us and echoed off the rocks.
Valerie clapped her hands over her ears. Tommy dropped to the ground with his arms over his head. Abbie shouted, “Oh, crap.”
Flames poured into the sky. The buildings disappeared, billowing black smoke. One of the Jeeps lay flipped upside down like a turtle, burning.
“I don’t think that was supposed to happen,” I said.
Flames and smoke towered into the sky. After a second I caught an acrid whiff. Down on the valley floor, soldiers ran to and fro outside the ring of destruction.
“Something’s wrong. Did they all get out okay?” I said.
One of the Jeeps swung around and began driving toward us, flinging up dust. The voice inside my head said, This was secret. You weren’t supposed to see.
“Oh, God.” Abbie sprinted away, back down the trail.
Tommy jumped up and ran after her. The Jeep lurched over the sandy ground below us and began to climb the incline.