Meet Me Here

by Bryan Bliss

  “Will and I come up here,” she says, once I’m sitting down.

  “Oh, I don’t want to know about that.”

  She shakes her head. “To talk, stupid. Look.” Below us, in the valley, lights pulse on and off like they’re on timers. She points to the brightest cluster and says, “That’s downtown, and over there is your house. You can see the whole town up here.”

  The lights seem to move below us, a map of colors that make the city look prettier than it has ever been. The way I always remember Christmas when I was a kid.

  “I thought you’d like to see where we grew up before you leave,” Mallory says.

  “It’s very . . . peaceful.”

  She thinks I’m kidding and hits me in the arm. But I’m not. The sky is more open here—even more than where Wayne and the rest of them are laughing, not fifteen feet below. Above us, the stars fight against the city lights in the distance, seeming to grow brighter with every passing second until they form a blurry union, indistinguishable from one another.

  “Do you think the stars look the same everywhere?” Mallory asks.

  I have to think about it. “Sure. I mean, they have to, right?”

  “So if you end up over there,” she says carefully, “it’ll be like you’re looking at the stars in North Carolina?”

  I nod, but I’ve done this enough to know what comes next, her plea for me to be careful, to choose myself over others—and I stop her.

  “I’m not going anywhere overseas. At this point, unless you’re Special Forces or something, it’s back to normal.”

  “I just figured you’d volunteer, or something stupid like that.” She pauses. “Are you scared?”

  I nearly jump off the rock in surprise. I’m up, walking around the narrow boulder, trying to be calm, cool. But she’s looking at me like I just set myself on fire. Before I decided to leave—to take fear off the table—I would’ve played this so cool. Talked about Jake. About how my family doesn’t know the meaning of scared, ha-ha. All “I’ll do everybody proud.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Sorry. I think I’m just nervous.”

  More pacing as I try to play it off. A “nothing to see here” smile in full effect. I can’t get off the rock quick enough.

  “Hey, hey.” She stands up and looks into my eyes. “What did I say?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Really. I’m just tired. You know?”

  Can she still tell when I’m lying, see through me as easily as she could when we were kids? Not even the smallest lie was safe then, and I hated it. She stares at me with the same knowing look now, an unblinking focus intent on figuring out exactly what’s happening inside my head.

  “We should probably go back down,” I say. “It sounds like everybody’s getting pretty animated.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She starts to say something but swallows it. I take a couple of quick breaths and pick my way through the shadows and branches along the narrow trail until I’m standing next to the fire again, its heat oppressive against my skin.

  “Where’d you two go?” Sinclair asks, grinning like a fool.

  “We were talking,” I say quickly. There’s something in my voice, a strident panic that only gets my heart beating faster. Mallory kicks a small rock over the edge of the quarry, ignoring the entire exchange.

  One of the guys in the group, Steve, whose claim to fame is that he once streaked during a football game, cocks his head to the side and says, “You and Will broke up?”

  This time the confidence she uses to explain Will’s absence is gone. “He’s at home.”

  “I figured you two would be together tonight, that’s all.” Steve cuts his eyes to me, and I suddenly remember how else I know Steve Chapman. He sat with Will in the one class we had together, right in front of me. I don’t know if they’re close friends, but the way he’s glaring at me seems proof enough.

  “I’m doing my own thing tonight with an old friend,” Mallory says, staring daggers at Steve.

  “Okay, okay,” he says. “Turn it down a few. I’m just asking questions.”

  Mallory sighs and pulls a bottle from the cooler.

  “Can somebody please open this for me?”

  Sinclair pulls out his lighter and pops the cap off in one quick motion, handing the bottle to Mallory.

  “Look at Sinclair,” Wayne says. “Dude’s a Swiss army knife.”

  A few people laugh, and the spotlight fades off Mallory as Sinclair shows them the trick. Mallory seems normal enough, laughing when the conversation dictates and playing the part of the happy graduate. But I can tell she’s faking something because I’ve been playing that same part for months.

  Hell, I’m playing it now, sitting next to Wayne and nodding as people talk about cars they got for graduation, scholarships others shouldn’t have won. On the outskirts of the group I catch Steve staring at me like he’s checking up on a younger brother. When his phone rings and he stands up, cupping his hand over his ear so he can hear, Mallory walks over to me.

  “We should probably go,” she says, only to me.

  “All right. Whenever you want to leave.”

  “Right now.”

  She tries to jump over the log I’m sitting on, accidentally kicking a beer bottle into the fire. Wayne gives a good-natured yell, but Mallory ignores him, again saying that we really need to go. But it’s become impossible for me to leave anywhere lately without getting a couple of hugs and more than a few hand slaps. Mallory stands impatiently to the side as it happens. When the last person says good-bye, she nearly drags me away from the fire.

  “All right, everybody,” Mallory yells over her shoulder. “Time for the Mallory show to go back on the road.”

  I grab her arm before she can get in the truck. When she turns around, she looks ready to get in the driver’s seat and take her chances jumping the lip of the quarry.

  “Steve called Will, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says. “And Will’s probably on his way up to the quarry now. I really don’t want to deal with all of that, so can we please leave?”

  On cue, Steve rushes out of the darkness, putting his phone in his pocket. “Where the hell are you guys going?”

  It’s the way he says it. Like he wants me to knock him out.

  “Go back to the party,” I say. “Seriously. This isn’t what you think it is.”

  “I know you talked to him,” Mallory says, giving him a slanted look. It seems to spook Steve, who takes a step back.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “It’s none of his business what I’m doing tonight,” she says.

  “Well, from what I just heard, Will might disagree with that.”

  They stand there, dogs readying to fight. Then Mallory smiles and goes for the throat. “You’re a pretty good friend for a guy Will hasn’t talked about in two years.”

  Steve takes another step back, as if her words were fists. But then he smiles, collecting himself. “Hey, I’m not the one who’s whoring around with some asshole I just met.”

  And then for extra measure he says, “Slut.”

  I go for him, but Mallory gets in front of me, yelling my name.

  “No, let him go,” Steve says. “Let’s see which one of you is the bigger bitch.”

  “Thomas, please. Let’s go.”

  As she’s saying it, Wayne and the rest of the group gather in a half circle around us. Mallory says my name one more time, soft but insistent. Then: “Don’t.”

  When I back down, Steve says, “I always knew you were a coward.”

  Mallory whips around. “Would you please shut up?”

  “I’m trying to help my friend,” Steve says. “But maybe I’ll call him back and tell him exactly what kind of a person he plans on—”

  Mallory’s hand is a blur across Steve’s face. “Shut up,” she says, her voice quiet.

  That’s enough for me. I take Steve by the shirt, the way you would a toddler who’s about to run into the road, and drag him back
to the fire with everybody following. I push him away, ready for him to come right back at me. Instead, he straightens out his shirt and cusses a guy who comes over to help.

  Wayne comes up beside me, looking more than happy to get involved. But I don’t need him.

  “Stay away from her,” I tell Steve.

  “Yeah? And what are you going to do if I don’t?”

  “Hey, Steve,” Wayne says. “You might need a pad of paper so you can jot down all the things my boy could do to you.”

  This punctures the tension, and a few people laugh. Not Steve.

  “I’d like to see him try,” he says.

  Wayne is standing next to Steve now. He puts his hands on his shoulder and says, “Now, why are you going to go and ruin everybody’s graduation by getting yourself killed? Sin, get this man a beer.”

  Sinclair grabs a beer and hands it to Steve, who, after a second of hard staring at me, takes the bottle and says, “Whatever. Fuck him.”

  Wayne claps. “That’s right, son. Live to fight another day.”

  When I turn back to my truck, Wayne steps across the fire and walks with me. “What the hell was that about?”

  “Nothing. Just Steve being an asshole,” I say.

  Mallory is leaning against my truck, staring down at her cell phone. The screen lights up her face. “If Will comes up here, tell him we went to South Carolina or something.”

  “Myrtle Beach. Hell, yes. If you weren’t leaving for the damned army, we’d be doing that shit right now.”

  “I’m going to take Mallory home,” I say. “And then—”

  Wayne gives me a salute, then laughs. He pulls me into a hug. “Shit, Bennett. Next time I see you you’ll be one of those sexy ass men in uniform types. Hell, that’s when we should go to Myrtle Beach.”

  Mallory’s phone goes off, and she silences it. It rings again almost immediately.

  “Be good,” Wayne says. “All right?”

  One more hug, and Wayne’s gone, back to the fire. The last thing I hear him say is “I thought graduation was supposed to be drama free. Somebody—Sin!—beer me.”

  Mallory is deleting texts off her phone, then voice messages, shaking her head the whole time. Without looking up she says, “I shouldn’t have slapped him. But he deserved it.”

  “The way I see it, you’re two for two tonight,” I say. “Two assholes, two more-than-appropriate hits.”

  She finally looks up from her phone and says, “Will’s not an asshole. It’s . . . complicated.”

  She closes her eyes, the phone buzzing in her hands. I take it from her—Will, of course—and silence it. She looks up at me, and I try to explain what I’m feeling.

  “Do you remember when my dad made me cut my hair?” I ask.

  She looks confused at first, but then she smiles. “You worked so hard growing it out, too. It really did look nice.”

  “Well, he’d argue that point with you—probably even today,” I say, trying not to get distracted. “I came to school the next day, and what did you tell me?”

  She laughs out loud. “That I was going to shave my head, too. I was nothing if not loyal.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I was going to shave my head,” Mallory says flatly.

  “I don’t remember that!”

  Mallory screws up her face momentarily and says, “You don’t? We had that whole conversation about how scary I’d look.” As she says it, she cups the front of her hair and pulls it behind her hand, making it look like she’s bald. I laugh.

  “God, I don’t remember any of this. But that’s not the point. What I remember is—” Her phone goes off in my hand, and I want to do something dramatic, throw it into the dark quarry. Instead, I silence it and put it in my pocket.

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The playground is older but otherwise no different from when we were in elementary school. Mallory climbs the steps to the clock tower, which seemed impossibly tall to us as first graders and the height of freedom when we were in fifth grade. She runs her hand along the smooth wood, recently repainted. White as cotton. If I wanted to, I could jump and touch her hand.

  “I always loved it here,” she says, surveying the playground. “Do you remember when I told everyone the wood had termites so nobody else would play on this thing?”

  “That worked for about five minutes.”

  “I still hate Miss Hoffman for ruining that scam.”

  “We were prodigies, obviously.”

  She finally smiles. “Something like that.”

  I stand on the bottom of the slide, coming eye level with Mallory. “But it’s finally worked out,” I say. “The whole place, all to ourselves.”

  She rolls her eyes. “C’mon, I want to swing.”

  I pull myself up, over the railing and follow her across the suspension bridge, still able to hold both of us, and down a second slide that’s barely wide enough for me. And then she’s sitting on the swings again, just like I remember. She could have scabbed knees and a fist in my face the way she’s hanging on to the swing’s chains, leaning forward as she talks.

  “Five bucks says you quit before me.”

  I look at the swing and think about the 120 pounds that have come to pass since I’ve last been on it. But Mallory doesn’t wait; she pumps her arms and legs, sweeping back and forth in front of me. I jump on my swing and try to catch up.

  The wind mutes her laughter, the shriek of objection when she realizes I’m going higher than she does. She tries to change physics, but the extra work she’s doing only slows her down. Soon we’re moving together. Our feet almost touch heaven, and then we come back, falling just as quickly as we rose. Over and over again we rise and fall, making eye contact each time our backs are at the sky. On the next push forward, at the height of the swing, Mallory lets go.

  When she lands, I’m sure she’s broken something. The notebook, which has been in her pocket, ends up a few feet away. Her body convulses on the ground, and I leap off my swing after her. But once I kneel down next to her, I realize she’s laughing.

  “Did you see that? I never got this far as a kid.”

  “You almost hit the monkey bars.”

  “Exactly. Third graders ain’t got nothing on me.” She struggles to catch her breath before saying, “Life was better when we were kids, wasn’t it? Do you remember how long it took for Christmas? For our birthdays? A year took forever. You had to figure out all kinds of things to do while you waited. Now it’s just like”— she makes a zipper noise and swipes a finger through the air—“zoom. Done. You make a decision, and it happens. You barely have to wait for anything.”

  “I don’t know. Look at Sinclair. He’s going to be waiting for NASCAR for a long time.”

  I realize too late that when she laughs this time, it’s different. It turns to tears, which quickly turn to all-out sobbing. She grabs my neck and holds tight. I can feel her tears on my shirt.

  “It’s stupid,” she says. “I was so stupid.”

  “It’s going to be okay. You can call him. Right now, if you want.”

  This makes her cry harder, and when she shakes her head, I’m confused. Before, I would’ve thought it was your typical graduation breakup. Or maybe it was just a fight that got out of hand. But Steve was so adamant, such an asshole . . . it doesn’t make sense.

  A phone vibrates, and Mallory touches her pockets until we both realize it’s mine. She lets go of me and wipes her eyes, as I look at the screen: Mom. I silence the phone, and it’s not dark two seconds before it lights up again, buzzing angrily in my hands.

  “You should answer it,” she says.

  “They just want me to come home,” I say.

  She’s quiet for a second. “Maybe we should. You’ve got so much going on. You don’t need all of this.”

  The truth of her statement feels true, a blanket securely wrapped around me. But she still looks so lost, enough that I have no idea how I could even begin to help her—e
ven if we stayed out all night and a hundred more after that. Whenever I got this way, her answers seemed effortless. Her plans, perfect. And now that it’s finally my turn, I’m coming up short.

  “Well, we need to go bury the can before we go home,” I say.

  It’s all I’ve got. Every card, on the table.

  She sniffs, nods. “And the sign, too. That way it’s always there. Our little secret.”

  I want to take her by the hand, put my arm around her, something. But when she stands up and wipes her legs off, it feels like an ending, a natural stopping point. Something neither of us can deny. As we walk to my truck in silence, that same hollowness that’s filled my stomach for months returns. All that’s left is to go home, take my lumps, and then wake up in the morning and finally leave.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When we get to the bridge, I park the truck in the same place as before. Mallory opens her door, carrying the coffee can and sign with equal reverence. We bury the can in its original hole first and then wrap the sign in an old T-shirt and start digging a bigger, wider hole together.

  Mallory is quiet, but the work unearths something inside me, kinks in my memories of these sorts of moments. They always had an old-movie nostalgia to them, a fuzzy warmth. But more often than not, when we found ourselves here at the end of the day, it was always just like this: wringing out one more hour before I had to go catch hell for whatever reason.

  The hole’s plenty deep, but I’m still digging. Still trying to figure out why my dad has always pushed Jake and, in a different way, me. I see so many people at school who have succeeded in sports or academics, who are tough and brave, and they don’t have to worry about this shit. The expectations they carry begin and end with personal happiness.

  Mallory reaches out and touches my arm. I’m dirty, out of breath, and on the verge of tears. She picks up the sign, holding it high for both of us to see one last time, and gently puts it in the oversized hole. It only takes a few seconds to cover it back up. Like we were never here.

  “We need a rock to mark it. Unless you want to make a treasure map,” she says. “Sixteen steps north. When you see the hooked nose rock, turn left and stand on one foot. That sort of thing.”