So Glad to Meet You

by Lisa Super

  The two faculty members were right behind her. “Everything alright, Father?” They said it referring to Daphne, not the smoke.

  “Yes. This is a prospective student,” the priest said. “We should be so lucky.”

  The faculty members smiled at Daphne and left.

  “I’m Father George. Please don’t tell me if you’re not a prospective student. I like to consider myself an honest man.”

  Normally, there was something off-putting about the black and Roman-collared attire of priests, such formality for a religion based on a notoriously informal carpenter. Father George overcame her apprehension with an assertive handshake. She wasn’t a delicate creature to him, nor a soul that needed to be saved.

  “Daphne.” She shouldn’t have given her real name, but he was a priest. Lying to him was an express ticket to hell. Not that she believed in hell, but still.

  “Welcome to Sacred Heart, Daphne.” His kind eyes eased her nerves.

  “I’m looking for someone. Oliver Pagano?”

  Recognition lit up Father George’s face. “I imagine he’s on the field.”

  “Is it this way?” Daphne pointed to the back door.

  “I’m sorry, Daphne. You’re not a student here, so you can’t go through there.”

  “Oh.” Her knees turned to jelly. She struggled not to slump to the floor in defeat.

  “But there’s a home game Friday night.”

  “Oh,” she said again. Her legs reconstituted, and she grew an inch while attempting to make more than vowel sounds. “Can I do my homework here?” Every night, she wanted to add.

  “You’re welcome here, anytime.” Father George reached into his pocket and handed her a business card bearing his name, phone number, and the Sacred Heart emblem. “Call this number at the Main Gate.” He pulled a pair of scissors from behind the pulpit and trimmed the wicks on the prayer candles. “Call every day, if you like. I’ll be here.”

  Daphne swallowed and nodded, barely able to contain her smile. “Thank you.”

  Over the next hour, a few people stepped in and out to say a brief prayer. If Daphne was distracted by their entrance, they exited quietly without her notice. This place was a homework mecca, while her broken public library was a crowded and noisy substitution for a babysitter and a homeless shelter. She was going to study here tomorrow and next week and the week after. The idea made her head go fizzy. Even reading about the horrors of Gettysburg couldn’t take away all of the carbonation.

  • • •

  She wanted to bring Janine along for moral support. But the merciless teasing—for a boy, much less—wasn’t worth it. Friday night, Daphne arrived at Sacred Heart an hour before the game, paid the entry fee, and sat at the bottommost bleachers, prime real estate for reading names on jerseys. She knew she was in the right place because the bird head from Oliver’s profile photo was cheering at her feet.

  The stands filled up and screamers of all ages, all wearing red and white, packed in around her. By the end of the fourth quarter, Oliver Pagano hadn’t made any passes, blocks, catches, tackles, or touchdowns. He hadn’t incurred any penalties, and he wasn’t sitting on the bench. The masses around her hadn’t screamed his name.

  He wasn’t on the football team.

  Sacred Heart was fourteen points ahead as the final seconds ticked down. Everyone in the bleachers stood and cheered. It was time to make her escape before everyone fled for the exits. She ran along the bottom bleacher, careful not to step on any toes.

  “Oliver!” A female voice shouted.

  Daphne halted and turned to the voice. Beneath her, right in front of the bleachers, most of the cheerleading squad ran and hugged the hawk mascot. She shuffled back to her seat, closer to the hawk, now pushing against the flow of bodies.

  “We did it!” a short, buxom girl squealed, burying her boobs in the bird’s feathers.

  Daphne grimaced. Squealing girls were nails on chalkboards.

  “Oly, are you coming out tonight?” Another cheerleader asked. The hawk head nodded.

  Jason Pagano’s little brother had been right in front of her the whole game, running back and forth as the Sacred Heart Hawk. She’d made a point not to watch him because she pitied the sticky, stinky person in the hawk costume. Her eyes stung imagining the sweat dripping into his eyes, the hot breath hitting the headpiece and blowing back in his face. Even more irritating was the realization that the profile photo wasn’t a reflection of his sense of humor—it was realism.

  The Hawk flapped his wings over to a redheaded cheerleader near the stands. His bird. Something resembling jealousy fluttered in Daphne’s chest, but she blamed the cool night and shivered away the implausibility. She didn’t know Oliver Pagano, and there was nothing to be jealous about. She hadn’t even seen his face, which was probably vastly overrated since it was covered up all the time.

  Facing Daphne, he took off the headpiece. Her suspicions were confirmed: Oliver Pagano was nothing special. The resemblance to Jason was there, but Oliver was taller, his hair lighter brown, and his jaw curved where Jason’s had angled.

  Oliver’s cheeks were bright red, his eyebrows mashed onto his forehead and pointed all directions of the compass, his hair damp and flattened in awkward cowlicks. He suddenly became aware of this and shook his head to reposition the clumps. The result was slightly better.

  In his eyes, Daphne saw mischief, curiosity, and light. Only a tiny shadow of emptiness lurked in his brown irises. Could Jason Pagano’s little brother’s eyes look like this? Shouldn’t they look more like her own tired, doubtful eyes?

  In one way or another, she’d been searching for Oliver Pagano for seven years. Finally, he was right in front of her, laughing in a chicken costume. And Daphne wanted to fly the coop.

  The Hawk

  After the victory, high fives were slapped from every direction. Half the cheerleaders rushed their boyfriends on the field, the other half rushed Oliver in celebration. He glanced at Katrina and watched her mouth curve from a smile to a scowl. But he didn’t care. He was just a man in a costume handing out hugs. He wasn’t going to discriminate because someone was attractive and wearing a short skirt.

  The crowd dispersed, the cheerleaders scattered, and Oliver strolled over to Katrina. She was no longer attempting pleasantries, her arms crossed over the Sacred Heart emblem on her chest.

  He opened his arms. “I’m a hugger, not a fighter.”

  Her pout cracked. The good thing about Katrina was she didn’t know how to hold a grudge. Not yet, anyway. Oliver presumed she would soon learn.

  His arms spread even wider. “Full wingspan.” He hugged her, picking her up and swinging her in a circle.

  She shrieked, “I’m flying!”

  His prospects for seeing the black bra before midnight looked good.

  Oliver headed toward the locker room with Katrina, Joe, and Mitch. Joe Valdivia and Mitch Bryant had succeeded where Oliver had failed, starters on the offensive line. He didn’t regard Joe and Mitch to be his close friends, but they were the closest friends he had, and they always associated as a threesome. Their names combined to become one word, Mitch-Oly-Joe. It had a nice ring to it. They’d been friends as long as Oliver’s mind went back, since T-ball when they were four. They’d sustained the longest friendship of anyone he could name, and Oliver respected tradition.

  Mitch and Joe also continued to be valuable friends because they always knew where the parties were. “Party at Haggerty’s tonight,” Joe said, on cue.

  “That’s what she said.” Mitch grinned. Last year someone had told him he looked like a tall Kevin Hart, and it had gone to his head. He’d been mangling jokes ever since.

  Oliver and Joe exchanged their usual glance of amusement and pity, though Oliver was never sure if the pity was for Mitch or themselves.

  “Because Mandie told us. See?” Mitch didn’t understand that if you have to explain a joke, it’s a failure. “A girl, a she, told us about the party. That’s what she said.”


  “That’s not…” Joe sighed and shook his head, giving up.

  Oliver bit his cheek so he wouldn’t laugh. He was in the mood for a few beers and checked with Katrina. “You want to go?”

  By the enthusiasm of her nod, Oliver understood that she was in the mood for a few beers, too.

  “Oliver!” An unfamiliar voice next to the bleachers called his name.

  He turned around and saw a girl with dark hair standing behind the chain link fence. His stomach clenched. Even from fifty feet away, he recognized the girl from the Friend Request because of the odd haircut and dark makeup around her eyes. It wasn’t his favorite look. Eyes were pretty enough on their own. And he was never supposed to see these eyes in person, these eyes that were now locked on his.

  She gripped the triangles on top of the fence and balanced on her tiptoes. She raised her arm timidly and waved, every inch a struggle. With all they’d been through, it shouldn’t be this hard to say hello. Oliver’s urge to run melted into the turf beneath his feet. He crossed the track toward her. Katrina, Mitch, and Joe eagerly trailed behind him.

  “Hey, that’s Emily Bowman’s little sister,” Mitch said, loud enough for the girl to hear.

  “You know her?” Oliver asked.

  “Facebook,” Mitch answered.

  Oliver waited for an elaboration that never came. They reached the fence.

  “Hey.” She twisted her fingers around the fence as if bending metal would be easier than what she wanted to say. “Good game.”

  That was not what she had come to tell him. He smiled to try and break the tension.

  “The boys in red, it’s all them.” Oliver nodded at Mitch and Joe.

  “The guy in the chicken suit is no slouch.” The Bowman girl’s words were mean, but they didn’t sound mean. Her mouth was straight, but her eyes were shining. She was a silent joker, and he liked her style.

  “He’s a hawk,” Katrina snapped, defending his honor.

  The Bowman girl remained stoic, but Oliver caught the condescending glint in her eye when she shifted her focus from Katrina and back to him. “Can we talk alone?”

  Oliver turned to his friends. “You guys go ahead. I’ll meet you at Haggerty’s.”

  Katrina rolled her eyes and huffed before backtracking to the middle of the field with Mitch and Joe. She was too far away for him to see or hear it, but Oliver felt the gritting of her teeth. The image of the black bra drifted away, and he solemnly watched it go.

  Oliver gestured toward the bleachers. After a quick scan, he didn’t spot anyone who would spread salacious rumors about his involvement with a strange girl of unknown origins.

  Daphne ascended three rows of bleachers and walked across a few paces. She seemed to be counting. Not too high up, not too low. Not too close to the end of the row, but not at the edge, either. She chose her seat with more care than Oliver used when selecting his prospective college. He settled next to her, slightly in awe, studying her face. Close-up, the eye makeup was an abstract painting. The dark, blurry lines blended into greens and blues and purples, but he could only see the colors when she blinked.

  The girl held two folded pieces of paper. The first was frayed, the corners askew. She handed Oliver the second, its creases pristine and symmetrical. “That’s your copy.”

  He chuckled. “Your name is Daphne, right?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, I thought you knew.”

  “I’m Jason Pagano’s little brother. You’re Emily Bowman’s little sister. Do we even have first names?”

  He hoped to connect with her, but she lowered her eyes.

  “Did you get my Friend Request?” she asked.

  “No.” A firm, cold lie. It was convincing.

  “Oh.”

  His lie was rewarded when she almost cracked a smile.

  “Well, I sent you one,” she continued. “I wrote a message.”

  “Maybe I accidentally deleted it.” He hadn’t read the message, so this lie wasn’t really a lie.

  “It was about this.” She nodded at the paper in his hand. “Open it,” she prodded.

  “I am. Geez. I’m getting scolded by the Pony Express.” He unfolded the piece of paper. Pen drawings he immediately recognized as Jason’s handiwork jumped from the page. Oliver moved on to the words, absorbing the puzzle before him, a list of places and experiences in boisterous and scrawled handwriting. He was still making sense of the pieces when Daphne interrupted him.

  “It’s a list of all the things they wanted to do. A list they made together. I found it last week.”

  His eyes were locked on the list, but she kept talking, saying something about the weird message she’d sent. He was so focused on the piece of paper in his hands that her words faded into the sound of crickets and distant traffic.

  “Number ten is blank,” he said.

  “Seems fitting, doesn’t it?”

  For a split second, she looked right through him. Her blue eyes reduced him to a shadow, like he knew they would from her profile photo. He filled his lungs with air, but his body was still empty. She almost sounded…happy? Could anything involving Jason and Emily qualify as happy?

  “Hope you weren’t expecting closure,” she added, tucking her chin.

  “When do you think they wrote it?” he asked. Ten seconds hadn’t been long enough to figure out a timeline. He doubted ten minutes, ten hours, or ten days would yield better results.

  “Before they died.” She crossed one ankle over the other and swung her foot back and forth, a nervous clock keeping time. “Sorry. Bad joke.”

  “Not really a joke, even.”

  She averted her eyes to the field. “Nope.”

  “It was kind of funny, though.”

  Daphne turned her head toward the parking lot—anything so she didn’t have to look at him. “A few months before she…they…died, Emily was happy. I think she wrote it then. Or maybe I just want her to have written it then.”

  Oliver nodded. “Did you show it to your parents?”

  “God, no.”

  He waited for an explanation, but her shoulders slumped without words. Oliver proposed a pact. “I won’t show it to anyone, either.”

  “Okay.” They locked eyes in agreement. “I just thought you should have it. It’s…something.”

  He didn’t know how to describe the list, either. He wasn’t experiencing the usual displeasure that accompanied all things Jason. The sturdy angst he’d grown around his brother loosened at the roots. “That it is.”

  “You have your party to get to.”

  “No. I think I’m just going home tonight. Do you need a ride?” He shifted forward, preparing to stand.

  Daphne hopped up, beating him to his feet. “No, I’ll walk. Thanks.”

  He recognized her anxiety. A similar form resided in his own chest, the fear of getting left behind. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

  She called back from the bottom of the stands. “Yeah. I’ll be in your chapel doing my homework. Just warning you.” She shook her head, scolding herself for what she’d said before disappearing behind the bleachers.

  Oliver sat back. He analyzed the list in his hands: the two pens that had written it, the haphazard spacing, the unreliable capitalization. He’d committed the numbers, their descriptions, their exact punctuation to memory by the time the stadium lights switched off above him.

  • • •

  He drove around for a long time, windows down, the dizzying orange of the Valley lights beneath him.

  Katrina grilled him the next evening over pizza. He explained that Daphne had questions about her sister and his brother, and he would always be there to help answer them if he could. He left the door open for future collaboration, he told her.

  When Katrina pressed for more specifics, he bowed his head and played the dead brother card. Katrina dropped the subject. Her curiosity wasn’t daring enough to tempt negative emotion. Oliver was best when he was upbeat and carefree. Sad Oliver was pointless.

  Like every n
ight, she and Oliver made out for hours on every flat surface before her parents got home. Oliver determined that if a crime were committed in this house, he’d be the only suspect. He imagined the CSI agents shining their blue lights, his patchy fingerprints glowing white all over the walls like reverse spots on a Dalmatian.

  “Are we going to homecoming together?” Katrina asked between kisses.

  Girls and those silly dances. Oliver figured he could have saved up a few months of rent and moved out when he’d turned eighteen if he’d pocketed the money his parents had given him for the suits, tuxes, shoes, corsages, limos, and dinners that separated these dances from being just another Saturday night party. Jason had never attended high school dances, so Oliver’s parents contributed generously to the Oliver Pagano Formal Fund. Not that Oliver minded the dances. Like any party, he always had a good time no matter how many beers were guzzled or tears were shed. What bothered him was the way Katrina had asked him to the dance.

  Are we going to homecoming together? She had whispered it while pushing him against the kitchen counter and nibbling on his ear lobe. Did not being her boyfriend mean she couldn’t ask him basic questions without trying to trick him into acceptance? He sucked in his breath, ready to push her back and make her face him. He would tell her that he wanted to go to the dance. She didn’t need to turn him on to get a false positive that she could wave around as evidence. He would always answer with the truth no matter what was going on under his boxers. His words would be received with relief. Or they could be rejected with scorn. And he had a desperate yearning to see her black bra again.

  He let the black bra win. “Yes.”

  • • •

  For the next week, Oliver tried to ignore the list, stomping it down into the deep crevices of his mind. But Daphne Bowman kept climbing up the tunnels, setting the list afire. Flashes of her fingers gripping the fence, her legs keeping time in the wind, the jagged edges in her blue eyes struck him at all hours of the day. With this piece of paper, an unknown part of Jason had been resurrected. Finally, Oliver possessed a sliver of his brother he could relate to. Oliver owed it to this bond to breathe life into the list instead of burying it. The only person who would understand how to revive it would be Daphne.