Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

  It had taken me years to find a vintage-based uniform that I liked and Lisa approved of. Sneakers or boots, always. Jeans, almost exclusively, in various states of wear, with an inverse relationship to the frilliness of the top: new for a well-worn blazer; ripped for a dainty cap-sleeved blouse. I put my hand on a polyester cruise shirt with a palm-tree pattern. “You want Old Lady When She Was Young and Chic,” Lisa said.

  “What’s this?”

  “Old Lady.”

  “Maybe that could be my thing. I don’t have a thing.”

  “I don’t have a thing either.”

  “Yeah, you do. You’re all theater and look at me expressing myself I’m so expressive.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?” She was doing some kind of veil dance with a large beige girdle.

  “If I wore this top, people would say I’m quirky.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the only quirky thing about you is wanting to do it with Tom Petty.”

  “Speaking of hot guys . . .” I’d been trying to get up the courage for three days to tell her about what happened at the lighthouse, the longest I’d kept anything from her. She wouldn’t approve of what I’d done, plastering myself to some stranger’s face when there was a perfectly good Joshua Spring to tickle my tonsils, but I couldn’t tell anyone before I told Lisa, and if I didn’t tell someone soon I was going to lose it. Each night when I curled up in bed, I cradled the memory of the stranger like a new toy, though it was beginning to seem less like a memory than a dream.

  “We might need one of these next year,” Lisa said, holding up a Noel University jersey. “What’s wrong? Why are you smiling without your eyes?”

  “Nothing—”

  “Bullshite. You look like a stuffed elk.”

  “It’s just, you don’t want to go to a university up the highway, do you?”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad. We’d know lots of people, and they have a great theater program.”

  “As great as Aurora’s?”

  “Sure. Well, almost. And their sports teams are definitely as good.”

  “Basketball, maybe.” Wait. “Is Keith planning to go to Noel?”

  “No. I don’t know. If he gets in.”

  They’d only been dating for two months. We’d been talking about moving to the city together forever. Aurora also had a history of science program that Nat had her eye on, a hockey team the boys approved of, and for me—it was in the city, and since I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life, that was all I needed.

  “It’s not like we’ll be stuck at home,” she added. “We can still live in the dorms.”

  “You think the Sergeant is going to cough up for residence if I can stay at home and drive that car he gave me?”

  “You could live in that car. It’s big enough.”

  “We could all live in that car.”

  I smiled, this time with my eyes, I hoped, but my warning gauge was still quivering in the yellow zone.

  “Forget I mentioned it,” Lisa said. “It’s way too early for us to be thinking about this. Who knows what could happen in a year?” She picked up the girdle and slingshotted it at me. “Were you going to say something about hot boys?”

  It no longer felt like the right moment to describe how the stranger’s hand had tentatively touched the small of my back when I kissed him, how I could still feel the weight of his thumb pressing lightly on my flesh through my shirt.

  “I was going to say that we should hit the mall again, see if that cute guy who gives free drinks to redheads is working at Orange Julius today.”

  Lisa plopped her bag on top of the wooden bin. “I’ll give you five bucks if you can convince the lady at the register that you were wearing that shirt when you came in.” She plunged her hand into the bag and pulled out her wallet triumphantly. “And a thousand more if you promise never to wear it again.”

  Keith and Joshua were hanging out in the food court with some guys from the school basketball team and the county swim team, which Joshua had joined. “It’s like how you can entertain a kitten all day with just a cardboard box,” Lisa said as we watched them from behind a pillar flicking straws and ketchup packets at one another.

  “Seriously!” one of the basketball players was yelling. “This dog had balls as big as my TV set, I swear.”

  “Did you know they would be here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I swear.”

  “Let’s go over.” I peeled off the horrendous shirt, which I still had on over mine, and crammed it into her bag. “If we act like the other night was a big deal, it’ll be a big deal and it’ll suck at school next week.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good—”

  I was already walking away.

  “Hey, guys,” I said. “Whatcha doing? Planning your prom dresses?”

  “Go to hell,” Joshua said.

  He tried to storm off, but he was so big and the space between the tables was so narrow that his arm caught mine, knocking me sideways. He walked on.

  I stood there for a second as everyone stared at me, Lisa with her hand over her mouth. Then I followed him, my sneakers squeaking on the fake marble floor, grasped his elbow, and yanked.

  I was usually pretty good at comebacks, which sometimes made me think I was smarter than I actually was. Much like how my long, wavy hair compensated for the plainness of my face, so naturally I was hugely vain about it. No, I’d never been in an airplane, never met a Jewish person (I think?), wasn’t entirely sure if Mongolia was a real country that just sounded like a made-up place, but I could be quick, and quick can make up for less than clever.

  Not this time.

  “I don’t think so, asshead!”

  Joshua turned around, eyes dark with rage, and it dawned on me that he could hurt me if he wanted to. Then he blinked and the first tear dribbled through his long bronze lashes.

  Shocked, I let go of him and he ran. He ran straight into a lady carrying a tray of drinks, and left grape soda footprints in his wake.

  The rest of the guys started howling, even Keith.

  Fucking boys.

  Six

  “See you at midnight,” Matthew said.

  I laughed. For the record, not because I planned to end up at Long Fellows that night. Oh, I’d thought about it—not going to the bar but the fact of it, sitting beside the highway east of Veinot, luring a Come From Away with its semiliterary name. If only I had a fake ID, I might have been able to manufacture a chance encounter, but I had no excuse for strolling past the farm up on the ridge that wouldn’t be obvious and desperate.

  As predicted, Mum and Dad had decided to stay overnight at Aunt Joanna’s in the city, a two-hour drive away, and as predicted, there was a shack party to celebrate the end of the first week of school. I was driving Nat, so I wasn’t drinking, but I wasn’t coming home before I had to either.

  “What makes you so sure I won’t tell Dad you missed curfew?” Matthew asked, peering into the pot of chowder that Mum had left simmering for us on the back of the stove. She had also set out two bowls, two napkins, two spoons, and a note reminding us that there was bread in the breadbox. (There was always bread in the breadbox.)

  “Because you’re not a tattletale.”

  “I’m not lying if he calls and asks if you came home on time.”

  “Say you don’t know. Say you went to bed early and didn’t wake up when I came in.”

  “But what if I didn’t go to bed early?”

  I tried rolling the sleeves of the fitted green tweed blazer that Lisa had found to go with my sloppiest Levi’s. Better down, she’d say. I rolled them down. “You’re in tenth grade now, buddy. You gotta learn to handle this stuff.”

  He scowled a pretty scowl at me.

  Anyone who thinks that being attractive isn’t an advantage in life, let me introduce you to Matthew Warren, a brainy, frail young fellow of fifteen who was growing up in a place where, for boys, size and athletic ability were the only curren
cies accepted. I had height and hair, and the rest was makeup and attitude. Matthew had refined features: large brown eyes, perfectly arched brows, and very white, very straight teeth. There was something almost glossy about him, the way light reflected off his surfaces. Being pretty—and you would have said he was pretty, not hot, since he hadn’t sprouted hair below his eyebrows yet—meant that people thought of him as quiet and shy, not scrawny and awkward. He wasn’t weak, he was unthreatening. He wasn’t nerdy, he was smart. And he knew the trick to preserving all this was to say as little as possible at school, which made him slightly mysterious. But in another year or so, once everyone in his grade was driving and going to shack parties, he would be exposed.

  “Do you want to come?” I asked. “Check it out?”

  He scrunched his well-sculpted nose. “Nah. I’m going over to Tim’s to play Super Nintendo.”

  “Suit yourself. Just don’t not come because you’re chicken.”

  “Why would I be chicken?”

  “The Elevens?” His wince told me I’d nailed it. “You’d be with seniors.”

  “Yeah, but you won’t be around all the time, and I don’t need some of those guys knowing my name.”

  I reviewed the week with Nat on the way to the party. Mr. Gifford, who we’d had for economics in eleventh grade, was teaching a new class called Modern World Problems, and what with everything going down in Somalia (famine), Bosnia (genocide), and Nicaragua (earthquake), it seemed unlikely to make him cheerier. Someone was pregnant already—one of the headbanger girls—and Doug O’Donnell had been kicked out of class twice. The first time was for having bong breath at nine in the morning, the other for standing on his desk after Miss Aker delivered a moving sermon on the power of poetry.

  History and French were the only classes that Joshua and I had together, but it had been hard to avoid him all the same. He didn’t exactly blend into the crowd, and we kept making accidental eye contact. I noticed he’d started focusing on the tops of the lockers as he navigated the hallway, rolling over the occasional tenth grader who got in his path.

  Since there was no shack to be had that weekend, the party moved out to the quarry, which was basically a gigantic sand pit. “What are you going to do if Joshua comes?” Nat asked as we turned onto the dirt road that would take us through a patch of forest to the pit. Drunk kids were stumbling out of the parked cars that lined the shoulder.

  “Oh, probably make him cry.”

  At that moment my headlights lit up Lisa walking with Keith and Joshua. She hadn’t told me they were coming together. After what happened in the food court, did she honestly expect that we were all going to hang out?

  I realized then that I should have told her about the stranger. If she knew I’d thought of him approximately ten thousand times over the past week, she’d understand what a lost cause this thing with Joshua was—not because I was being my usual heartless self, but because no matter how hot and adoring he was, no matter how perfect it would be if two best friends dated two best friends, nothing Joshua had said or done since the first grade had filled me with as much hope as hearing the stranger say, See you at Long Fellows!

  “I changed my mind. I’m not staying,” I said, pulling over. “Bill’s driving. He can take you home.”

  “Is he bringing Tracy?”

  “I think so.”

  Nat made a noise that was somewhere between a retch and a squawk.

  “Then go with these guys.”

  “You can’t avoid Joshua forever. You’ll never get to be around Lisa.”

  “He’ll get over it eventually,” I said. “Right now, I can’t take him losing it again.”

  “Couldn’t you . . .” She sighed and tugged on her denim miniskirt. It was a warm night, but Nat was always cold and I hadn’t been able to talk her into a jacket or tights. Now her thighs—or as Bill called them, her skin-dipped femurs—were covered in purple blotches. “If I were you and Joshua was all over me, I’d pretend to like him. At least I’d have a date for the prom.”

  It’s not like that hadn’t occurred to me—faking it. Please. I once convinced Bill for a whole day that I wore glasses (an old pair I borrowed from Dad’s dresser) and always had, just because. But I didn’t know how you were supposed to fake feelings, and anyway, once someone has told you to go to hell, it’s probably too late.

  “Here.” I shrugged off my blazer and passed it to her, then reached into the glove compartment, took out a set of keys on a hot-pink feather chain, and handed them over too. “Go have fun. If you want to try your luck with the Tongue, you have my blessing. And give Lisa her keys for me?”

  She’d left them behind in Modern World Problems. I was forever rescuing Lisa’s keys.

  “Yeah, alright. Thanks for the jacket.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked as she got out of the car.

  Nat pulled the blazer over her thin sweater and leaned in. Her lemon-scented hair lay against the green tweed like finely sheered white ribbons. “I’m okay,” she said. “I just wish someone would look at me the way Joshua looks at you.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt said that you should do something every day that scares you. You say she wasn’t talking about sneaking into a bar. I say you can’t prove she wasn’t.

  Long Fellows could pass for a small hockey arena from the outside, with its aluminum siding and tiny windows. Even after I ditched Nat, I hadn’t meant to land there, idling in the orange lights of the parking lot. But that word, cold-blooded, had taken occupation of my head again with the slamming of her door. It followed me through town, back onto the old highway, into the next town and the next. I couldn’t outdrive it like I couldn’t outrun it.

  I wasn’t cold-blooded. I had kissed a stranger at the lighthouse. I wanted to do it again. And then what? I thought, not-so-gently rapping my forehead on the steering wheel, will you date this grown man? Bring him home and introduce him to the Sergeant? Do you think he’s sitting at the bar dreaming of pinning a corsage on you before the prom? Lisa was wrong: I wanted to be a member of a club that wouldn’t have me as a member.

  Maybe, maybe if I saw him one more time, I could get him out of my system.

  I cataloged the risks as I tugged open the door to the bar and crossed a dark, crowded, smoky room with black walls, a sticky floor, and “Sweet Home Alabama” thumping on the sound system. I could get booted for underage drinking. I could spend hours listening to “Sweet Home Alabama” on repeat and he might never show up. He could show up, take one look at me, and head for the hills again. But whatever came, it would evaporate into the night. I was more than twenty miles from home at a honky-tonk bar off the highway that no respectable person—in my parents’ eyes, anyway—would go to. I probably wouldn’t see any of these people again. As long as the bartender didn’t call the cops on me, no one had to find out.

  “Pint of Morgan’s, please.”

  “You got ID?” the bartender asked.

  “Not on me.” I leaned into the bar. It was as sticky as the floor. “Come on, I’ve been here a million times.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Sure I have.” I mouthed a little Whassup? to an imaginary acquaintance in the corner. “Remember, we had that whole conversation about—about draft beer.”

  “No . . . Hang on. Are you the one who always pays more for two half-pints because they stay colder than one full pint?”

  “That’s me. Half-Pint. That’s what my boyfriend calls me. I call him Home Brew.”

  Nice touch, I thought.

  “So why did you order a full pint?”

  “Because you won that argument.”

  He considered this, then brightened. “Drink faster.”

  “Drink faster. Classic.”

  He poured me a Morgan’s. “I’m cutting you off at two, and don’t show up without your ID again.”

  “Does a whole pint count as one or two?”

  “One,” said a voice behind me. I thought, briefly, it was the stranger, but when I turned around all I
could see was a wall of hair. It separated into a group of long-haired dudes pushing through the crowd toward a small stage. Great. Would they be doing heavy metal covers or new country covers?

  Another beer appeared at my elbow.

  “From the gentleman at the end there,” the bartender said. “That’s two of two.”

  I peered down the bar.

  Oh.

  No.

  The “gentleman” had to be fifty. He did not have all his teeth.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the guy on the stool beside mine. He looked like he belonged to a biker gang: long, curly black hair, shiny and crisp; bushy beard; leather jacket that was too tight around his gut.

  “Am I supposed to go over and talk to him now? The guy who bought me the drink.”

  He leaned over and checked him out. “No.”

  The biker guy gave the gentleman a salute that seemed to mean both thank you and piss off. “Come on, Half-Pint. Band’s about to start.”

  I was uneasy as I followed him to a table. Did sitting with the biker guy mean I was now with him? He was slightly terrifying, with his furrowed expression and a large circular burn scar on his temple that suggested something deliberately pressed against it. One hand was wrapped in a thick, dirty bandage. “Barbed wire,” he said. “Maybe I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Let’s see.” He slammed it against the table, making me jump. “Yep.”

  The biker guy’s name was Bobby, and he’d founded the band when he was sixteen. They were based in the city but played bars and campuses all over. “Mick there on the left is filling in for me tonight,” he said. “Hope he’s good. He’s a friend of a friend who happened to be around.”

  Among the long-haired and long-bearded dudes onstage was the Come From Away, tuning an acoustic guitar. His eyes were even brighter under the stage lights, his hair mussed and shirt rumpled like he’d traveled all night to get to the gig. Now I knew his name: Mick.