by Amanda Grace
“The road?”
“Yep. I didn’t even know there was a trail on this side, until I was standing at the top last week and someone appeared on the opposite side, where the trail emerges.”
“It’s prettier,” I said. “I’ve always preferred this way.”
You nodded. “Yeah. I like this side better.”
You were talking about the trail, but I imagined you meant something about me, too, like you enjoyed hiking together.
“Can I ask you a question?” you said.
“Sure.”
You glanced over at me, still breathing hard. “My class seems easy for you. You were the first one done with that pop quiz. How’d you get to be so smart?”
I smiled and looked down at the trail, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. “I don’t know. My dad’s a PE teacher at Enumclaw High School. He’s really driven, wants me to succeed. He’s always been there if I needed help, and I knew what the expectations were. If that makes sense.”
You blinked. “Wow, did that suck? That you went to school with your dad there?”
Two things occurred to me in that moment:
(1) I wanted nothing less than to talk about my father with you.
(2) You’d asked that question in past tense, because you assumed I had graduated. But it was past tense, Bennett. It still is. I was never going back to high school because I was in college. Maybe I didn’t have a diploma yet—I won’t for two more years—but I was in college, and that’s what mattered.
That’s why, when I answered, you have to know I wasn’t lying to you. I know it was still a deception in every way that matters, but I liked the way you were talking to me. Like we were equals, just a boy and a girl on a hike.
They say we weren’t just a boy and a girl but a man and a girl, and so they should know that when I responded, I led you to believe I’d graduated. It was the first of so many half-truths. Just remember, Bennett, that at this point I still never dreamed you’d come to care about me, that we’d really become something. I just wanted someone to talk to me like you did. Someone who didn’t see me as the same old bookworm, too studious, the wet-blanket sort of girl, but instead could build a whole new picture of me based on what I told him.
That’s what I wanted. To paint my own picture for once, instead of taking over the one my parents had so carefully outlined.
“It was kind of unfortunate,” I said, laughing like it was no big deal. “I’m just glad that part of my life is over.”
“I bet,” you said.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked, desperate to change the subject as I watched him walk right into the trickling creek bordering that part of the trail, his paws squishing in the mud.
“Voldemort,” you said, grinning at me in that special way of yours, the one that was crooked and perfect in the same instant.
I laughed, and you joined in, and the moment held a certain kind of glow.
“He chewed up my favorite pair of shoes the first day I brought him home, so I couldn’t help it,” you said. “I usually just call him Mort because, you know, I’m probably too old to have a dog named Voldemort.”
“And how old is that, exactly?” I asked casually. My legs were burning by then, but I couldn’t bear the idea that you’d think I was out of shape, unable to keep up.
“Older than you,” you said.
Maybe in that moment you were trying to put that wall up between us, erase the easy camaraderie. Your tone hadn’t been sharp, but your meaning was clear.
You were telling me you were too old for me, that if I saw you that way, I shouldn’t, that I should reel it all back in now, stamp down any childish ideas I had.
But it was too late for that. I’d started falling for you the moment I’d lain eyes on you, even if I didn’t know it that day on the mountain.
“Oh come on,” I said, my legs burning with the exertion of our hike. “Give me a hint.”
Your eyes sparkled as you looked over at me, like you were enjoying the easy back-and-forth of our conversation.
“Let’s see. I’m told the most popular song the year I was born was ‘La Bamba.’” You reached out and snapped off a twig as we passed a little bush, then you started stripping off the leaves, leaving them behind us like a trail of bread crumbs.
“You really are ancient,” I said. “Isn’t that song from, like, the Middle Ages?”
Your laughter was infectious. I hope I haven’t taken that from you. I couldn’t bear to know you don’t laugh like that anymore.
“The ’80s, thank you very much. What about you?”
“What about me?” I asked, staring at the trail again, realizing too late I’d opened a door I should have left alone. Why had I asked you how old you were when clearly that only shone a light on my own age?
“What song was popular when you were born?”
If I’d told you it was a song by Diddy, before he was P. Diddy, back when he was Puff Daddy, would you have known? Would you have known I was just a kid, that I wasn’t worth your words and your smiles and your laughter?
So I waved my hand in the air and said, “I’m not sure exactly. But it has got to be better than ‘La Bamba.’”
“Hey, some great music came out of the ’80s,” you said, your voice both playful and indignant.
“So did Pee Wee Herman.” I shuddered in an exaggerated way.
“Oh please, like the ’90s were better,” you said, bumping your shoulder with mine. You knew I was born in the 1990s—knew I was younger than you—but I’m sure you were thinking of the other half of that decade, the early part.
I grinned at you and bumped back. “We are responsible for Nirvana,” I said.
I looked it up when I got home that day. Kurt Cobain died before I was born, you know. Three years before I was born. I don’t know why I brought up Nirvana at all. I don’t even like them. But when people think of the 1990s and Seattle—Enumclaw being a suburb of Seattle—they can’t not think of Nirvana.
So maybe in that moment, on that quiet mountain trail, I unknowingly planted the idea that I was older, that I was around when Nirvana was still together. If that was true, I’d be at least nineteen, and that would make everything that happened okay.
“And how can I possibly argue with that?” you said.
We were nearing the top by then, a place where the trail plateaus. Voldemort ran ahead, chasing a squirrel into the brush, and you let him go, turning to see the vista before us.
I’d been wrong about the fog. By the time we reached the top, it was little more than wisps hanging low over a few distant fields, clinging to the edges of the big red barns.
“This view never gets old,” you said, your breathing still labored as we stared out at the sprawling dairy farms and green foothills. “I could see it every day and never get tired of it.”
Did you know you can see my high school from the top of that mountain? I didn’t point it out that day, for reasons that must be obvious now, but if you ever go hiking there again, look to the west. You’ll see its tan buildings stretched out in the distance, where the green farmland meets the infinite blue sky.
“Yeah, it’s gorgeous. I just wish we could see the mountain,” I said. By “the mountain” I meant Mt. Rainier, of course.
You turned around and glanced back, but the higher elevations were still shrouded in gray clouds. On a clear day it’s breathtaking, all craggy rock and snow-covered peaks, the kind of thing that sells on postcards all over Seattle. In Enumclaw, it’s up close and personal. Zoomed-in.
Voldemort jogged out of the tree line then, and I reached down to scratch him behind the ears. He sat down, leaning into my leg, and this time I didn’t cringe at the slobber and mud that was sure to adhere to my clothes, because if he was yours, how could I not adore him?
“He likes you,” you said.
“Ahh, but he is no ordinary dog,” you said, your blue eyes bright, alive in a way they weren’t inside your classroom.
“Oh?”
“He’s Lord Voldemort!”
I laughed and we headed back down the trail, which was much more leisurely then the strained hike up.
We fit together, me and you, like two pieces snapping into place.
Ten years isn’t so much, you know. If I’d been twenty and you’d been thirty, would anyone have even cared? It seems cruel that four little years were so important, so life-changing.
It was only two that mattered, really. The difference between sixteen and eighteen.
The difference between love that can span a lifetime, and love that can never happen at all.
That afternoon, I sat curled up on my bed, leaning against the wall, my fingers on the keyboard, typing your name into a little white box.
I liked the name “Bennett” the instant you said it. It suited you. It was aristocratic, and sophisticated, and it fit my image of you sipping tea or ale or some such drink in a foreign country.
I don’t know why I was so immediately fascinated by you, but I was. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the history of the universe who has read so much between the lines, to believe something is growing and building even if it hasn’t been acknowledged.
Like that website, Missed Connections, that’s just filled with stories of guys and girls meeting and going separate ways and never forgetting each other, even if they’d never actually spoken. It’s a beautiful sentiment, don’t you think? That some lonely guy living in a big city thinks he met his soul mate even though he never spoke to her, and then she slipped through his fingers, so now he wants a second chance?
It would be nice to know if you believed in things like soul mates. Maybe if you do, we’ll find our way back together again.
In any case, I wasn’t on that site then. I was on Facebook, and I’d just found your page, and my heart went whoosh when your picture came up. It must have sounded like a baby’s sonogram heartbeat, moving so fast like that.
“Bennett Cartwright” isn’t such a common name, I guess, because it was so easy to find your page. You were wearing a T-shirt that hugged your muscled frame and your brown hair was shorter in the picture, not quite falling into your eyes like it does now.
You didn’t look that much older than the seniors who’d just graduated last spring, when I was a sophomore. Like maybe life didn’t span so far between us.
Your last status update?
New quarter has started. Let the shenanigans begin.
Does that strike you as a funny update, looking back? You were twenty-five. I know that now. Twenty-five and three-quarters when we met, because we celebrated your twenty-sixth birthday together. That seems young for a college professor.
I didn’t know it then, but that year was to be your first as a full-time, full-year professor. The year prior, you’d done only a few classes, not a full load.
That day, when I stared at your Facebook page, I wanted to know what kind of shenanigans you thought would be in store. I wanted to be a part of them. By that point in my life, I’d never been a part of anything that could be described as a shenanigan. No pranks, no detention, not even so much as a week of being grounded.
I was So Very Perfect.
I scanned your page. It wasn’t private, and I was able to see all kinds of pictures. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I saved a few of them on my computer.
I guess it doesn’t matter if I tell you that. Mom took my computer away a few days ago, which is why I have to handwrite all this. I’m sorry for my handwriting, by the way. I hate it. This letter looks like it was written as part of a first grader’s alphabet handbook: upright and rounded where it’s supposed to be, angled just right elsewhere.
Sterile.
But I’m pretty much on lockdown right now, without a phone or a computer or anything, so you’re stuck with it.
That day, as I scanned your page, I found something I didn’t even know I was looking for. I smiled and sank back into my bed, that one word ringing over and over in my head.
Single.
You were single.
You should know, Bennett, that I was happy. It wasn’t because I thought we’d get together. I knew that couldn’t happen. I didn’t even expect you to want a girl like me, not like that anyway.
But I wanted you to be single the same way a little girl wants her pop star, boy-band idol to be single. It’s not because she thinks she’s going to marry him. It’s because she can’t stand to picture the boy she loves—even from afar—with another girl, loving on her in real life when all she has is her imagination.
I wanted you to be single because I thought it would just about ruin those two hours of class every day to think of you married. To think of you going home to a pretty, womanly wife, maybe your high school sweetheart, and knowing I was still in high school.
All I wanted was to talk with you, maybe build up some sweeping Pride and Prejudice love story for us.
All in my head, of course, but what else was there for me to do? In this house with all that homework and expectations and pressure? My parents loved me—I don’t know if that’s true anymore, after all this—but I wanted a different kind of love.
And so knowing you were single made it okay for me to fantasize about you asking me to stay after class. Made it okay to imagine kissing you.
I know you’ll think that’s a stupid thing to say. Because your marital status was never the important piece of information.
No, Bennett. The most important thing, according to you, according to them, is that I’m sixteen years old.
I wished all weekend that your class was more than Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. I wished with all my heart it was five days a week.
When I walked into your classroom on Tuesday—five minutes early, of course—and you saw what I was wearing, your eyes dipped lower, like they did on that first day, but it was for a different reason.
You were looking at my chest because of the T-shirt I was wearing. Because I’d prowled the malls all day Sunday, after our little hike, and I was wearing a black shirt with NIRVANA splashed across it.
You grinned at me in that unabashed way of yours, in the way of a man who knows who he is, what he wants. “Well played,” you said.
I smiled. “I was going to wear my Hammer pants, but they were in the wash.”
You shook your head, fighting a smile and losing miserably.
You were back in your sweater-and-button-down-with-slacks ensemble, and I have to admit I really liked that. I liked it because the Bennett I’d met on the mountain, with the long-sleeved T-shirt and Nike warm-ups, was meant only for me. Katie and all of your other students only got Mr. Cartwright, the professor.
We had something no one knew about.
It wasn’t that we were trying to keep secrets, it was just that they came naturally to us. We shared that hike and we came back that Tuesday and we both knew something had shifted, but neither of us spoke of it.
I hadn’t told my mom about you when I returned home after the hike.
I didn’t tell Katie about it while we sat together in class that day.
But I thought of it, over and over.
I felt like an adult with you, Bennett. Not like a lost girl with a pretty, perfect shell, but like an adult in control of her life, going after the things she wanted. I felt like I’d finally stepped into the cockpit and decided to chart my own course.
Do you see me differently, now that you know the truth? Do you think I’m just a kid … and a stupid one at that? Or do you still see the girl I was all along? The smart one who aced all your tests and made you laugh?
That day, you paced leisurely back and forth
as you lectured, and on occasion you caught my eye. Only for a moment, but that moment, it mattered to me.
It mattered more than you knew.
A couple days later, I had to drop by the high school for the first time since last spring. As I shoved open the double doors of the main hall, silence greeted me.
It was strange, walking the halls, hearing the dull thud of my footsteps on the worn carpet, listening to the clang of a distant locker slamming shut. The classroom doors around me stayed closed, classes in session. Beyond them was the low hum of voices.
It had only been a few months since sophomore year ended, but it felt like ages. Like I’d graduated years ago and was swinging by to say hello.
Silly, that feeling. I was still enrolled at EHS. I was still a student. And yet, as the always-effervescent Marina Reynolds, a girl I’d once feared, rounded the corner, her familiar piercing gaze roving over my outfit before she smirked, I didn’t get the usual twinge. I didn’t pull on the hem of my shirt and I didn’t dart my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t see me.
I had a secret, Bennett, a secret that would trump any of their high school trophies, cheerleader skirts, or prom dates. It was like a candle flickering inside, warming me, dashing out the darkness.
That’s who you were to me. A glint of warmth in a world that had felt so cold, so empty … so damned meaningless.
I rounded the bend. The Main Office sign greeted me, and I slipped through the doors, heading down a corridor that would bring me to my high school counselor’s office. I had to see her regularly to plan my coursework. Not every college class at GRCC counted toward the specific requirements of high school graduation, so she needed to review my plans, be sure I would enroll in the right classes for the upcoming winter quarter.
I guess it was just lucky that Biology counted toward my diploma. What if it had been Chemistry, Bennett? I never would have met you.
Wait, maybe that doesn’t make it lucky, not for you. Maybe it was a stroke of doom.
Her office door was open, so I tapped on the fake oak veneer and she looked up from her blackberry, her frown twisting into a too-bright smile. “Madelyn! You’re early.”