Last year, though, for the first time since graduation, Ty begged off. Said he wasn’t feeling well, though now I’m sure it was just another red flag, another alarm bell that I overlooked. I came home with flushed cheeks and “You won’t believe it” stories pouring out of me, but the house was silent. When he got home thirty minutes later, I was knee-deep in editing college applications, and I remember noticing that he was sweaty and seemingly recovered.
“Feeling better,” he said before he ducked up the stairs toward the shower. “So I went out for a run.” I nodded and hadn’t thought of it again until now. Your memory does that sometimes, plays that trick on you, rewinding passing seconds of your life, and you realize you overlooked the most important details of that bygone moment.
“I don’t know who I am without you.” Tyler’s words vibrate through me. Slowly, I am understanding that indeed, every part of who I have become in Westlake is pinned to him in some way as well. The problem is, I don’t know how to unpin myself. Maybe it was always this way, I contemplate, as I kiss my dad hello and Dante jumps on the stage to kick off the festivities. Maybe it was just that I never thought there’d be a time when defining myself outside of Tyler would actually matter. But now, I can’t go anywhere—anywhere!—and not see him, even though, of course, I recognize the irony in this, that I’m only seeing him everywhere because he is gone.
The thought of this, of him, of this ridiculous shebang—the Westlake glitter flitting through the air, the crowd gathered to cheer on these men choking on their glory days—makes me want to heave my insides out. Who throws these men these stupid parades? Why do we give one stinking shit about what they did three goddamn decades ago? I do wish Tyler was here, I realize, but only so I could smack him clear across the face. God, wouldn’t that feel good.
I am sinking into that vision, of his skin against the palm of my hand, of me letting him know just how much he has fucking disappointed me, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I spin around, violence still on my brain, and there is Eli.
He is out of breath, the edge of his forehead dotted with sweat, so when he runs his hand through his hair and says hello, his bangs sort of stick there, aloft, jutting out toward nowhere.
“I knew I’d find you here,” he says, then adds, by way of explanation, “I ran here, had to double check that the yearbook staff was on time and set up to photograph everything.” He cocks his head. “You okay?”
I start to respond, but Darcy’s voice reverberates over the speakers, and the crowd emits a supportive cheer as she thanks them for coming out, which I find sort of endearing, considering these folks would show up for a Westlake Wizards prostate exam, but Darcy has never been one not to embrace an audience. I push Tyler away—poof—yes, I can eradicate you just like you did me.
The drum plays a steady percussion and the guitar kicks in with a searing wail, and Darcy is off, both pulling us in and pushing us away as she enters her frenetic, transcendent state onstage. I thrust my hands into my purse and pull out the Nikon. Click. Darcy leaning out toward the crowd like she is a superstar. Click. Darcy’s eyes folded shut, lost in the meaning of a lyric. Click. Darcy nearly smiling now, absorbing the approval and applause of the crowd.
“She’s mesmerizing,” Eli leans in and says over my shoulder into my ear. He smells like minty toothpaste.
“Too bad Tyler isn’t here,” someone says into my other ear, and I look over to find Ginny Bowles parked next to me. Ginny graduated beside me, was a fellow cheerleader for the duration of high school. She also harbored a crush on Tyler well into our college years, and now, despite marrying Chuck “the Chicken” Stanley, who now runs the local auto repair shop, she still makes googly eyes and pushes her breasts higher toward her neck and at Ty every time she has the opportunity. “I hear he’s moving out of here for good.”
I shrug, hoping that will shut her up. Just shut up! I raise the camera back to my eye.
“So it’s true that he left you?” Her breath is too close to me and smells like old Juicy Fruit, her fuchsia lipstick smeared on her front teeth, reminding me of a crazy, drunken clown.
“Oh, shut up, Ginny,” I say, and her penciled-on eyebrows pop.
“I was just asking, for God’s sake,” she sniffs.
“You’ve never been just asking.” The camera is down now, and I turn and size her up, wondering if I can take her in a fistfight if I need to.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she says, open palmed, faux-innocently.
“What does that mean?” I yell. “Do you have any goddamn idea what that even means, because it doesn’t mean what you think it means! You’re not the fucking messenger, Ginny! If you can’t learn to put on your lipstick properly, at least learn to use your clichés properly for Christ’s sake!”
Even with the din of Darcy’s music, people have turned to stare.
“Hey, hey,” Eli says beside me. “Come on now.” He clutches my elbow and drags me two steps away. “Want to get out of here?”
The crowd is throbbing now, red and white all blending together to create a flashing, snaking vision of my rage.
“Yes,” I say, my pulse racing so furiously I can feel its echo in my neck. “Yes, let’s go. Please, get me as far away from here as possible.”
I suggest lunch, but neither of us is really hungry, and besides, Eli notes, he has a better idea. He drives for about fifteen minutes, not saying much, mostly listening to the country music station that whinnies out of the radio of his old BMW. “I can tell you’re not from here,” I say, “because no one around here would drive a BMW.” He laughs and asks if it counts, since it’s from 1992.
“Darcy always wanted a BMW,” I say. “Which is sort of fitting. She never undersold herself.”
“Is everything okay from back there?” he asks. “I mean, we don’t have to talk about it, but I thought I’d be sure.”
“It’s just crap from the past. You know, high school.” Ginny Bowles. Like she hasn’t wanted Tyler forever. I stare out the window at the rush of the jewel tones blending together as we coast by. The leaves have already turned with the colder-than-normal fall air, and soon, they’ll be plunging from their perches, eventually renewing themselves, but not until they deem it safe enough to bloom.
“Ah, the proverbial crap from the past. Is there any other kind of thing from your past?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I’d like to think so.” Maybe I should just let her have him. Or go narc on her that she’s still trying to get into my husband’s pants. Yes, maybe tomorrow I will suddenly need an emergency oil change and pay a visit to the Chicken.
“I admire your optimism.” He bobs his head and turns up the radio just a smidge. I lean my head back into the crook of the seat and close my eyes, grateful for Eli’s ability not to need anything more from me, for his appreciation of silence when someone else might yammer on through, for his understanding that everyone needs to come unraveled every once in a while, even the people who seemingly have it totally held together.
“We’re here,” he says after we cycle through another song that I recognize but can’t identify. He kills the engine, and I push my heavy eyes open from the brink of sleep.
“What is this?” I ask. An abandoned rest stop that I’ve driven by before on my way to Seattle sits a hundred yards down, and a few broken beer bottles are crumbled near our tires.
“An old hiking trail I found a few weeks back.” We slam the car doors shut in unison. “I wanted to get away for the day, so I asked Scotty Hughes for some off-the-beaten-path places. He actually mapped out something down the road, but I found this instead.”
“Scotty Hughes? Who runs the lunchroom?” Who’s sitting in the auditorium right now painting sets with Susanna?
“Yeah, he just does the lunchroom thing for the paycheck,” Eli answers, stepping off the pavement curb and onto the knobby dirt ground. “He’s into extreme sports on the weekend. Competitive stuff.”
My forehead wrinkles as I digest this, that people have u
nanticipated layers even when you’ve stared at their surface for years, that happiness—Susanna’s, mine, who knows who else’s—can be uncovered even when you’re sure it’s lost its way to you, even via a detour to the dingy school cafeteria.
“Come on,” Eli says. “Take out the camera.”
I scoot around a tumbleweed of fallen branches and do as he says. As we start to ascend the leaf-littered path, barely discernible amid the overgrown nature, I’m overwhelmed with what a relief it is to have someone else lead the way. I unsnap the lens cap and slide it into the pocket of my bag, my breath keeping time with my pulse. Truth told, my muscles have atrophied these past few weeks, and I can already feel the burn in my glutes, my thighs mocking me. Oh, God, am I going to pay for this over the weekend.
Eli wanders ahead of me, looking back occasionally to make sure that I haven’t keeled over, but mostly leaning and crouching, snapping and clicking, tilting his head at various angles to capture just the right moment with his camera. I manage to get hold of my breath, and then I do the same—lose myself behind the lens—and it’s impossible, as we make our way through this untouched acre of forest, not to think of those days when my mom was sick and Darcy and I fled to the woods in an effort to bring back a piece of it for her.
I don’t know how long we’ve been hiking when Eli whispers down to me, frantically flagging his arms in my direction, beckoning me up.
“Look!” he says almost inaudibly, pointing toward a depression in the vegetation to our left. My eyes adjust through the camouflage of leaves and branches, such that at first, I see nothing but a wild mass of woods. And then, my brain sorts it out, like one of those IQ puzzles that kids take for college prep, and the picture is so clear I can’t believe I couldn’t see it in the first place.
A baby deer is curled amidst a pile of broken sticks and flaky mud, its eyes closed, its gawky legs angled inward as it rests.
Eli moves in slow motion, silently raising the camera and snapping.
“Where’s the mom?” I whisper, like Eli would have any idea.
He shrugs a tiny shrug, as if even moving his shoulders could mar the serenity of the moment.
I want to get closer for a better shot. So I inch forward, slowly, slowly, the deer undisturbed, still quiet. But then I get a little braver, a little more bold, and move faster, mesmerized by this marvelous stolen glimpse of nature, trespasser that I am.
My eyes are fixed on the animal, and so, when my feet give way beneath me, my nervous system takes a good three seconds to catch up with my body. I am tripping, my hands flailing outward, my camera already on the ground, sucked down by gravity. I land on my side with a bruising thud, a jagged branch scraping against my cheek.
“Are you okay?” Eli rushes over, his camera swinging around his neck like a pendulum.
I glance behind me and see it now, a giant pocket of earth that had been masked by broken twigs, scattered foliage.
“That hole,” I say, out of breath and terrified and embarrassed all at once. “I didn’t see it.” I look ahead and notice that the baby deer is gone, fled, shot into the woods. My cheek burns, and I press my hand against it, pulling back my fingers to discover ripe, red blood.
“Jesus,” Eli says, crouching down. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I say, pressing myself into a seated position. My left ankle throbs, and my knee feels twisted.
“It’s not nothing,” he says, and reaches into his backpack, rooting around for something until he pulls out a napkin. “It’s all I have.” He smiles, offering a lame little thrust of his shoulders.
“You probably weren’t expecting a casualty.” I smile back, taking the wadded napkin and holding it against my wound.
“Eh, I’ve seen worse.” He scoots away some leaves with his hands and plunks down.
“Me too,” I answer, then pause. “Sorry about the deer.”
He waves a hand. “You saw a shot you wanted and went after it.”
We sit there in silence as the woods settle into themselves, the branches occasionally cracking, the remaining few birds occasionally calling out to each other, the squirrels occasionally scurrying near, but not too near, to us.
Finally, I signal that I am up to walking, so Eli stands, offers me a capable, firm hand, and lifts me to my feet. From there, we navigate toward home.
The auditorium is full—as I knew it would be—and the show has sailed by nearly without a hitch. Well, there was a small hitch or two—the curtain that twice got stuck halfway open; the wayward light that crashed down stage left, nearly beheading one of the Pink Ladies during “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee;” Wally’s ever-present, emasculating, overzealous jazz hands—but still, as I hover backstage for the penultimate number, I can’t help but be a little elated, a little high on life at what we’ve pulled off.
Onstage, CJ struts front and center, inhaling her clove cigarette, tossing it to the floor, snuffing it out with her toe. She’s made that transformation that we all know is coming but that is shocking all the same—from good girl to good girl gone wild, with her painted-on pleather pants, her cleavage-enhancing tank top.
“Sandy!” Wally exclaims.
“Tell me about it, stud,” she says back.
Darcy and her merry gang of music makers start in with the intro, my toe tapping along, my joy spread wide across my face.
“I’ve got chills, they’re multiplying! And I’m losing control!” Wally croons, falling to his knees, exactly like Phillip McKinley did way back when for Susie, back when we were still unscarred by everything that the future would bring. “’Cause the power, you’re supplying, it’s electrifying!”
The crowd starts to cheer now, loudly, an echo of our thoughts, that for these two glorious hours, these kids were nearly goddamn perfect. I see Susie, opposite me on the other side of the stage, and she gives me a thumbs-up, biting her bottom lip in an attempt to disguise just how goddamn perfect this was, just how right I might have been about this whole shindig all along. Even though I lost my way, left the details to her and Darcy, discovered that a high school musical—or a high school prom—can’t change the tenor of the soundtrack of your life. Still, though. It can change something, even for a moment, for these two passing hours.
“You’re the one that I want, the one that I want.” CJ shimmies and Wally shimmies back. “Ooh-ooh-ooh. The one I need, oh yes indeed.”
I mirror Susanna’s grin, and then watch them, the two of them, Wally and CJ, ripe and glorious and deserving to bask in the reverence for every last second that it’s offered. And then the audience claps louder, and louder still, and I applaud along with them, and then the lights go dark, the curtain shutters for the finale, and they bring the house down.
twenty-one
The rain begins slow and steady on Tuesday morning. It feels cold enough for snow, but no, it just drip-drop, drip-drops endlessly, a whitewash of water outside my office window. The windows are firmly shut now, keeping the spiders at bay.
Tyler will be back in three days; he finally texted, “Back this wkend, sorry 4 late notice.” I was still on a high from Grease, but then Tyler’s text came in, and pfft, there went all that bravado, all of that golden, blissful pride I’d reveled in since Sunday. The pizza I’d stuffed myself with at the after-party made a riotous appearance through my bowels, and yes, despite my bluster, despite my roiling anger—that fireball from the past few months—as the hours counted nearer to his arrival, I found myself not so much furious, but just gut-wrenchingly, heave-over-the-toilet panicked.
“You should just flash to see what happens,” Ashley said when she called from the hospital yesterday. “Just, you know, flash on him, because maybe you’ll find a way to make it work.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d tried to already, that I was so desperate that I’d given up my pact to stop messing with these visions, but that I couldn’t see anything. Nothing! That two nights ago, I’d stumbled upon a self-portrait from my senior year and stared at it for the
better part of an hour until my eyes went fuzzy and a bleating headache forced me to quit. It was only then that I realized that this portal had so far only been possible looking into someone else’s life, not my own. That simply looking at my own life was cheating. So if I really did want to know what was going to happen, which I’d long decided I didn’t, but if that weakness struck, I had to buck up and piece together the mysteries of the other visions, the puzzle parts that I refused to unite. No thanks, I thought, setting aside the picture. No thank you at all.
Tyler called last night with his flight arrangements, and though Austin will be the one picking him up and housing him, he asked if it wouldn’t be too big of an inconvenience for me to steal a few boxes from the storage room at school to save him a few bucks in packing. I hung up the phone and wanted to murder him for asking—Good God, haven’t you asked for enough? I should have said, but curtly agreed because it seemed like the easiest option.
And today, three days from Tyler’s arrival, with the rain pitter-patting outside my office window, the prom invitation is lying on my desk atop three bursting folders of college applications, all due in less than two weeks. “Westlake Does Paris!” the creamy paper sings in a gold cursive font. I still haven’t adjusted to the fact that I will likely be attending prom alone, for the first time since, well, ever. I’d be happy to go with Eli simply for the companionship, but I suspect his allegiances, despite our friendship, are elsewhere. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask him about a girlfriend on the drive back from our hike in the woods, he offered a vague “It’s complicated,” and I promptly lost said nerve to press him.
My door creaks open and CJ pops her head in, her vibe still glowing from the rave reviews and the mad applause when she brought the house down. “You’re the one that I want!” This girl does indeed know what it is that she wants. Screw her circumstances, screw her broken town, screw the fact that the deck has been stacked against her. She’s always known what she wanted, and I look at her now and smile at her guts, her integrity, her unwillingness to accept what her future might have had planned when she planned otherwise.
The One That I Want Page 18