Before You Go

by James Preller

  Becka rolled her pants to the knees and waded a few feet into the warm, low surf. “You ever go skinny-dipping in the ocean?” she asked. “It’s religious.”

  Jude didn’t comment. The girl had no clue. He saw that the beach had slowly emptied out, only stragglers remained, families squeezing out the last minutes of pleasure before getting into their cars, a few joggers in both directions, a lone fisherman casting a line into the ocean, back bent and eternally hopeful.

  “We should head back,” Jude said.

  “They’ll wait.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I saw you,” Becka said. “At the bowling alley last night.”

  Jude picked up an oyster shell, rubbed his thumb across its ridges.

  “I looked up and you were there,” Becka continued. “Then you were gone.”

  Jude snapped the shell between his fingers. It was dry and brittle from too much exposure to the sun. He rolled his eyes, looked to the sky, watched clouds assemble. He felt an anger pulse through his body, rising up in his throat. “You know why,” was all he could muster.

  “I can explain, Jude.”

  “I don’t care,” he lied. He stepped closer to her in the water. “You should have told me, that’s all. You lied to me, Beck. You said you were sick, you weren’t going out. Is he your boyfriend?”

  Becka shook her head no. She fidgeted with the strings of her hoodie. “I hate it when one string becomes longer than the other,” she said, frowned, shrugged, stalling for time.

  “I just thought that…” he stopped talking, couldn’t find the end of the sentence. He wasn’t used to talks like this, letting her inside. His instinct was to flee, just turn and head east along the shore, and run, run for miles.

  Somehow she kept him there, water to his knees, this girl with tangled hair.

  “Jude, I know you can’t understand, but I really need to try to explain. It’s important.”

  Jude crossed his arms, nodded. He’d listen.

  “I’ve had this stupid crush on that guy—his name is Brian, by the way, if it matters to you—ever since I was in junior high,” she said. Becka was talking quickly now, in a hurry to get the confession over, receive her penance. “He’s friends with my brother, been coming to our house for years. And all this time, I’ve been, like, invisible, Matt’s little sister.”

  Jude didn’t want to hear the details. The ocean droned on, churning like a malevolent machine.

  “Then last night—”

  Jude interrupted her. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m just a friend, right?”

  “I saw you,” Becka said in a louder voice. She locked her gaze on his eyes, until they were the only two people in the world, just Jude and Becka. “And I felt like such a jerk.”

  A bubble of hope burbled up Jude’s chest. He suppressed it and waited.

  “I used to obsess over this guy,” Becka said. “My big brother’s friend. He was always there and he never saw me. Then last night, for the first time, he did. And it kind of threw me off balance. And the funny thing is, Jude, he’s a total creep when it comes to girls. I knew it the moment I saw you walk away. I mean, I’ve always known it—Brian is like the biggest egomaniac on the planet, and we have nothing in common except for my brother.”

  “So you’re saying it’s over?” Jude looked away, afraid of the answer.

  “I’m saying,” she said, “that you’re the one I like.”

  Jude watched a big wave roll in, building and gathering from behind Becka. He reached out his hands, said, “Hold on.” The water hit her from behind, about shoulder high and with force, pushing her into his arms. She lurched forward, stumbling, and before he knew it, they were both knocked down in the water, twisting in the undertow.

  “Are we okay?” Becka asked, struggling to her feet, clothes soaked through. There was urgency in her voice, almost panic. “I really want us to be okay.”

  Jude said, yeah, they were okay. But in his secret heart, full of shadows and unkempt corners, he honestly had no idea. She baffled him, and yet he ached for her even in his puzzlement.

  “Let’s get back to the others,” he said.

  Becka smiled and her face glowed, as if lit by candles. She was a natural beauty, no doubt about that. “We’re already wet, might as well go swimming.” Becka tugged at his hand, pulled him deeper into the ocean. And there she turned and waited, timing the surf before diving headfirst just as another perfect wave broke and shattered. Jude followed into the crash of roiling water, pounded by a hundred charging hooves, until he bobbed to the calm surface again, the sky still blue, the sunrays like diamonds glittering across the water, Becka beside him, eyes beaming, a searchlight on rocky shores.

  SEVENTEEN

  “What do you want to hear?” Jude asked. He sat cross-legged on a blanket in the park, holding an acoustic guitar. Becka reclined on her side, languid, liquid almost, and lazily replied, “Just play.”

  He wasn’t nervous. With a guitar in his hands, Jude felt confident, at home. He went through some songs that he knew would impress her, sometimes fingerpicking, mostly knocking out easy riffs and asking her to “name that tune.”

  “You’re a different person with a guitar,” Becka observed.

  “Different? How?” he asked.

  “My guitar teacher Jess—he’s crazy good, by the way, plays in the Centipedes—talks about something he calls a musical personality, which can be totally different from a person’s ordinary personality.”

  “So somebody could be quiet in everyday life,” Jude said, “but strap a guitar on him, and he turns into an extrovert.” Jude mulled it over. “Sure, that makes sense to me.”

  They talked music for a while, swapped the names of favorite bands. For some reason, Jude found himself going overboard about his love for the Cure, in his words, “one of the most underrated bands ever.”

  Becka wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know, kind of old, aren’t they?”

  “Uh-oh,” Jude said. “If you don’t love the song ‘Pictures of You,’ I don’t think we can be friends.”

  “Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted,” Becka joked. “Do you write songs?”

  “No,” he lied. He had written quite a few, in fact, each one more fabulously bad than the last. The songs would stay buried in the vault.

  “Really? I’m surprised. You seem so … inside.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Becka paused, picking her words carefully as if they were shells in the sand. “It’s like, with you, it’s not all on the surface. There’s something underneath.”

  Jude could live with that, hidden depths, secrets, and he didn’t disagree.

  “Sing something,” Becka suggested.

  Jude ran his fingers along the fretboard, pentatonic scales he’d played a million times, shook his head. “Um, no,” he said. “I can’t sing.”

  “Yeah, you can,” Becka said. “Just open your mouth. Everybody can sing.”

  “Not me,” Jude answered. He put down the guitar, reached for some bread and cheese. It was Becka’s idea—this picnic in the park—and she had brought everything to make it just so: a blanket, bread, cheese, fresh strawberries.

  She took up the guitar, strumming hard, and sang in a high, clear voice, and it was Jude’s turn to watch, to marvel. She was so natural about it, authentically herself, as confident as a flower opening its petals to the sun.

  “My friend Corey wants to meet you,” Jude said between songs.

  “Oh, yeah?” Becka grinned. “Sounds like a big deal. Epic, almost. Is that like bringing me home to your parents? I get to meet Corey?”

  “Yeah, it’s exactly like that,” Jude said, straight-faced. “I was thinking I could invite him to the softball game Wednesday night.”

  Becka nodded, strummed absentmindedly. “Can he hit?”

  Jude shrugged. “Corey is one of those guys who can do anything, but he’s more into pop culture than playing sports. Movies, books, music. He works at the
bike store on Wantagh Avenue, near the train station. Supersmart guy.” Jude didn’t fully understand why, but he needed for Becka to know Corey, to like him. And, he guessed, for Corey to like her. It was probably dumb, but he wanted the dots to connect, like the stars of the Big Dipper. Jude, Becka, Corey, all friends. He’d seen a lot of guys get new girlfriends, and suddenly they were, like, gone. Vinnie did that a lot. He’d hook up with a girl and disappear for weeks, like a spy who’d gone deep cover. Jude didn’t want it to be that way with Becka; he wanted her to fit into his world, and that world began with Corey, his best friend.

  Becka shifted and lay on her back, resting her head in Jude’s lap. Looking skyward, she observed, “It’s a tie-dye sky.”

  Jude laughed. Only Becka could see the world that way. He admired how alive she was to things, the minor miracles of the everyday world.

  She picked up a strawberry, brought it to her nose, and breathed in. It reminded Jude of one of the first days he saw her, that little nibble she took of the pretzel. “You eat like a rabbit, you know that?”

  Becka poked out her two front teeth, twitched her nose. “I always smell my food,” she said. “A habit, I guess. A rabbit habit. Do you think it’s weird?”

  “No, I like bunny rabbits,” Jude said.

  “Lie next to me,” she told him. “Let your hands drop down to your sides.”

  Jude scooted down beside her, content under the tie-dye sky, all blues and purples and shifting clouds.

  “I always think of the earth as a round ball, just spinning in space,” Becka said. “Close your eyes. Can you feel it?”

  Jude tried to imagine the great curve of the earth, like he was lounging across some giant exercise ball. It wasn’t working so great, but he did like the feel of Becka’s body next to his. They were in the middle of a grassy meadow, sparse with itinerant commuters, dog walkers, and Frisbee players, but they all dropped away, and Jude felt entirely at peace with this singular girl.

  “It’s a miracle we don’t fly away,” Becka said, her voice a whisper. “The earth spinning around and around—you’d think we’d just fall off.”

  “Gravity,” Jude said.

  “Science,” Becka scoffed dismissively. “Don’t think so much. Can’t you feel it in your fingertips, the curve of the earth?”

  Jude listened to the distant voices of a family carrying across the field, felt the lingering warmth of the near-evening air. He knew what Becka wanted him to say, so he said it. “Yes, I feel it—sort of.”

  He remembered something and told her a story. “When Lily, my sister, was little, she used to have all these stuffed animals, you know. We had this big ceiling fan in the living room. I was about five years older than her, so I used to climb up on this little step stool, and put all her stuffed animals on the blades of the fan.”

  “You were teasing her?” Becka asked.

  “No, she loved it,” Jude said. “Once it was all set up, I’d climb down and let her flick on the wall switch.” He allowed himself a smile and soft laugh at the memory. “The blades would turn slowly at first, but one by one the animals would fly off. We’d make bets on which one would hang on the longest. Lily laughed so hard. She’d ask me to do it over and over again.”

  Becka sank into the grass, basking in the story’s warm glow. “Nice,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, it was,” Jude said. “I haven’t thought of that in a long time. Funny I’m telling you this.”

  A quiet came over them, but not a silence that needed to be broken. It was not awkward or uncomfortable.

  Finally, Becka spoke. “When things get too complicated,” she confessed, “when I begin to take myself too seriously, I try to remember this feathery feeling. Like I could just float off the earth and fly away.”

  “Specks on a spinning globe,” he said, thinking of it as whirled, not world, a revolving mystery, drifting like dust in a tie-dye sky, or animals hurled from the blades of a ceiling fan.

  “We’re tiny parts of this immense universe,” Becka murmured. “Like flowers in a great garden.”

  Jude remembered that feeling when he was a little boy, turning round and round in his backyard, dizzy and falling to the ground. Drunk with wonder. He hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time. Usually he felt more likely to sink to the earth’s dark core than to levitate into the sky.

  “Does it make you feel insignificant?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” Becka said, her voice soft, mellow. “I feel like I’m blessed, part of some unknowable mystery.” They lay in silence together. “Are your eyes still closed?”

  “Yes.”

  He sensed her movement, rising on an elbow. He felt her lips on his mouth, and they kissed.

  “Thank you for forgiving me,” she said.

  Jude couldn’t locate the name for this feeling, the string of a child’s helium balloon slipping through his fingers, this sense of floating skyward, knew only a boy’s confusion and thrill and desire, the heart’s thrup and thrum. Kiss me again and again until all the stars crowd the sky like scattered salt on black rock. He pressed into her again, his heart on her lips.

  Is that what it is, he wondered, thinking of love? Could this be it?

  EIGHTEEN

  The softball game was set for six thirty, to end at dusk. Corey came via bus, and the short walk over to the softball fields west of the water tower, looking lean and sinewy in long shorts and a loose sleeveless shirt.

  Jude sniffed. “Is that aftershave you’re wearing, Corey Man, or did you soak in a bath of rose petals?”

  Corey shook his head as if forlorn, made no reply. “You sure they’ll let me play?” he asked.

  “It’s just a game,” Jude answered. “Really, who’s gonna stop you?”

  Slowly the players gathered, some coming directly from work, others pulling up in cars, lugging coolers. It was a warm, still night. Jude introduced Corey to his coworkers, guys like Ivan, DaJon, and Billy. Corey and Roberto greeted each other like long-lost Ping-Pong partners.

  Roberto turned to Jude, grabbed him by the shoulders, and solemnly intoned, “As my hero Ron Burgundy said in Anchorman, ‘For just one night, let’s not be co-workers. Let’s be co-people.’”

  Corey’s gaze turned to two girls as they approached the field. “Is this her?”

  Yes, it was. Becka Bliss arrived with Daphne. They had become friendly of late. Becka wore gym shorts and a three-quarter-sleeve baseball jersey, with a Mets hat screwed backward onto her head. She looked like an athlete, ready to play, and cute as a puppy. Daphne’s hair was pulled back, showing the fine, porcelain features of her face. Her shirt was undersize, revealing a toned, tanned belly. It was one of those moments that occurs when a seemingly ordinary girl—someone not on the male radar, which scans the seas like a nuclear sub, ping, ping, ping—shows up one day and blows everybody’s mind. A revelation that most often happens in September, after a nine-week summer, and ends with an astonished question or two: “Did you see Daphne? How’d that happen?”

  The game was hardly an athletic contest. Just various people joking around, making ridiculous plays, standing in the outfield with beers in hand, more worried about spilling than catching, everybody laughing and having fun. Corey played exceptionally well, though, hitting long balls into the beyond, racing around the bases like a jaguar. Daphne seemed interested in him, and Corey enjoyed her attention.

  “You like her?” Jude later asked Corey.

  “Becka? Yeah, she’s great. I love a girl who can turn a double play,” Corey said.

  “I mean Daphne.”

  Corey pondered the question. “She available?”

  “Looks like you’ve got a shot. You think you can get a ride home?” Jude asked. “If Becka and I…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Worst-case scenario, Roberto’s got wheels,” Corey answered. “I’ll be fine, Jude. You two can go make out under the boardwalk, or whatever it is you wild and crazy kids do these days. Who knows? Maybe I can find a better-looking dri
ver.” He got up and wandered over to where Daphne sat, eased down beside her like Miss Muffet’s spider, and the way she turned to him with an authentic smile told Jude he didn’t have to worry much about Corey’s ride home.

  After the game, folks dispersed in different directions. Corey and a large group, including Daphne, headed over to the boardwalk at Field Four. Jude and Becka veered away from the crowd, at the stage in their new relationship when they sought only each other, and walked barefoot to the Atlantic’s rim. Becka had brought a big blanket and wrapped it cozily around their shoulders, huddling close. As they moved away from the lights of the boardwalk, Becka gazed up at the night sky. “So many stars,” she said, “and a quarter moon. It’s beautiful, Jude.”

  They stopped at the crest of the dry sand, before it sloped down to the surf, and laid out the blanket. Becka said, “They say each star is a soul looking down on us.”

  Jude gazed up, wondering. “So if you die?”

  “You become a star,” Becka told him. “My mother says that people don’t have souls; we are souls.”

  “So you believe in God?” he asked.

  She looked at him in full seriousness. “I believe in magic.”

  A new mood settled over Jude, a restless, wordless quiet, and he thought of Lily, his lost sister. He considered the stars above.

  I wish I may, I wish I might …

  “What is it?” Becka asked. “Sometimes you get this look on your face, and it’s as if you’re far away.”

  Jude had only told Corey his secret. His family knew the truth, of course. But now, for reasons he could not fathom, he felt the locked-away words begin to form somewhere in his belly, rising up to his mouth, some inner demon to exorcise. He wanted Becka to know.

  Listen:

  Jude lay with his back on the blanketed beach and said, “Can I tell you something?”

  He felt his body beside hers, his bare arm against her soft skin. They were alone together—together, and yet still alone—the sand beneath them, cooling in the night air. It felt good to be with her in this way. He sighed, ready to begin. “You know about my sister, Lily … Little Lil, we called her.”