No, seriously. That was my plan. Francesca and I would lay down a blanket on the roof and eat up there in the clouds. She’d talk about how scared she was of heights and I’d make fun of her for it. Then we’d kiss, right there on the edge of the skyscraper. Romance. Danger. Together. The two become one.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have any skyscrapers in Harrisonburg, but we did have an old office building on Court Square that was probably a good twenty stories tall. That would have to be it. I tracked down the owner, James McHone, at his jewelry store next door. He was skinny and bald, perched on a plush antique chair as if it was a throne.
“A picnic,” he said thoughtfully, bringing his knees up to his chest and hugging them. “We might be able to do that. People are always trying to get up there. It’s the best view in Harrisonburg, you know!”
“I thought so.”
“But it’s dangerous,” he said cautiously.
“Exactly.”
“The problem is that when people go up there on the roof, their shoes get it all dirty.” His ring-clad fingers twitched with the thought.
“We don’t need to wear shoes,” I offered. “We can go in socks.”
He nodded. This seemed to be good news to him, so I continued.
“And we’ll bring a blanket to sit on. It’ll protect your roof.”
“Will you be careful?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’ll be careful.”
He nodded. “Okay, you got it.”
“Thanks, James!” I said, slapping him a high five.
“Uncle James,” he corrected.
“Right. Thanks, Uncle James!”
“And don’t forget that when you’re ready to get a ring for this girl—”
“I’m going to come to my uncle James, of course.”
I called Francesca that night to tell her about the plan, hoping she’d be as excited about it as I was.
Chapter 15
“How was your day?” I asked. I was sitting on my parents’ bed. We had two phones in our house, one in the kitchen and one in my parents’ bedroom. When I wanted privacy, which is to say when I was talking to a girl I liked, I used the one in their bedroom.
“Okay,” Francesca said over the phone. “But I had to hang out with Andrew.”
“Yikes.”
“I just felt bad because I’d told him I was busy like ten times in a row.”
Andrew was this other kid from school. He’d been calling Francesca that summer, too. Fortunately for me, Andrew didn’t know the “we should hang out sometime” line, which would’ve stealthily evaded the I’m-too-busy excuses she usually gave him.
“So how was it?” I asked.
“Fine. I guess.”
Suddenly I felt a nearly overwhelming urge to ask questions about her date with Andrew. It was like a sneeze welling up inside my nose, desperate to blow its snot load all over the phone. And like a sneeze, I knew that this gossip session would feel oh so good. We would talk about whether Andrew liked her, whether she liked him, whether they’d make a cute couple. Achoo. Oh yeah. But I was smart enough by age sixteen to steel myself against this urge with every bit of resistance power I could muster from my puritanical upbringing, because to give in to it would be to commit an unforgivable sin in Francesca’s eyes.
Talking about another guy she might be interested in would identify me as friend material. A nice guy. And the only time nice guys finish first is in a race to the Friend Zone.
So even though I was supertempted to pursue a line of conversation about Francesca’s date with Andrew, I overcame my game-killing instincts and changed the subject.
“Listen, I have something we should do together.”
“What?”
“A picnic.”
“Sounds fun.”
“A picnic… on top of a building.”
“What?”
“On a building. Like a picnic on a roof.”
“What for?”
Not really the response I was hoping for.
“Because it will be awesome. We’ll have a great view, there will be a nice breeze, and it’ll be something we can say we did.”
She considered it.
“All right, I’m in.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
I thought I heard her giggle.
“Okay, great. I’ve got it all set up.”
“Sounds fun. I’m excited.”
Excited! This date was getting better by the minute.
“Maybe next week?”
Her voice dropped. “Oh,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m going on vacation next week.”
“How about the week after?”
“It’s a two-week vacation. I could the week after that, though.”
“No… I’ll be on vacation then,” I said. “And the next week I’m working at camp.”
“And then school starts.”
“Bummer.”
After we said our good-byes and hung up, I sat silently on my parents’ bed for a while. I could already feel it. It was like when you’re having a cool dream, like the one where you can fly, and it’s everything you ever hoped it would be, but then you realize this is impossible so it must be a dream and you drop out of the sky and wake up. Once school started, I would be reminded of how popular she was, and how, according to the social order of things, I wasn’t supposed to be cool enough to go out with her. I would lose my nerve.
Chapter 16
The next time I saw her or even talked to her was indeed a month later, the night before school started. We were at a punk rock show at the local VFW post.
I would roll up to these shows with spiked hair and my totally punk rock necklace, a chain of marble-sized silver balls strung together that I owned solely for these occasions. I was what you’d call a poser. I wasn’t even allowed to listen to the music at home. I just liked going to the shows to socialize. And to mosh.
After one particular song, I hopped out of the mosh pit, sweaty and out of breath, and when I picked up my crutches I found Francesca was standing right there in front of me.
“—,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“—.”
I pointed at my ears and then toward the door that led outside.
We went out to the sidewalk. It was dark and humid, and the music pulsed on the other side of the door. We swapped summaries of our vacations, slipping back into an easy familiarity. I had not expected to see her tonight, but as we talked, the memories of the summer lit up in my mind, and the same rushing swirl of excitement and doubt flooded my awareness. There were some kids making out in the bushes nearby. Should I kiss her? I wanted to. I didn’t know if she would kiss back. But if she didn’t, at least then I would know. I would know she didn’t like me. I jingled my car keys in my hand, trying to fill a conversational void while I worked up the nerve. No. I couldn’t do it. School was starting tomorrow. Summer was over. She was popular. I was not. Time to return to reality.
“Well, I’m going home,” I said. “Got to get some sleep before first period tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. We hugged. “Good to see you.”
When I got home I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I looked in the mirror, but I couldn’t make eye contact with myself. I had let myself down. Again. It was so stupid! Why couldn’t I just step up and, I don’t know, be brave or something? I was an embarrassment to myself. And it had to stop. It was time to take a risk. It was time to take action. I looked at myself in the mirror, set my jaw, and nodded.
I got in my car and drove back to the concert. I slammed my car door and marched into the VFW post, waving my already stamped hand at the door guy as I entered. Another band was setting up on the far side of the room. Francesca was sitting against the wall talking to a friend. I was nervous. But I had to do this. Do what? I wasn’t sure. But something had to happen, and it had to happen tonight.
“I thought you left,” she said when she noticed me stand
ing in front of her. I hoped she had not also noticed that I was shaking from all the adrenaline.
“I did.”
Francesca exchanged a look with her friend that I couldn’t read. Then she looked back up at me.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Outside?”
“Okay.”
We walked out the door, across the sidewalk, and to the parking lot without saying anything. I sat down on one of those log-shaped cement parking stops. She followed suit, sitting right beside me.
“I just wanted to say…” I began. What, exactly? What was I doing here? Was I trying to kiss her? Tell her something? I squeezed the top of the cement block so she wouldn’t be able to see my hand shaking.
“I just wanted to say… that I’m really glad I asked you to play golf at the start of the summer,” I said.
Perfect. That was it. All I needed to do was say that, and now she would look at me and tell me she’d never met a guy like me before and she wanted to be with me forever. And we’d kiss.
“I’m so glad you did,” she said.
“And?”
I waited for her to say how much she liked me, how she thought about me every waking moment of every day.
“Yeah, I’m glad you did,” she said.
Why wasn’t this working? Why wasn’t she trying to kiss me or something? Then I realized I myself hadn’t really said anything yet. I hadn’t made a move.
This was all so much more difficult than I had imagined it would be back when I was brushing my teeth by myself in the safety of my home.
“It’s like… you’re so cool,” I said. “I thought you were this person I could never talk to.…”
“People always tell me stuff like that.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. I don’t understand.”
“You’re just, I don’t know, you’re…”
There were so many options, so many ways to say what needed to be said. And they were all there right in front of me, on the tip of my tongue.
But what came out was, “You, and it’s like, wow, I can’t believe I’m talking to you right now.”
I was drowning. Drowning in a raging sea of feelings, coughing and sputtering out desperate, disjointed words while I struggled to keep my head above water. There was a life ring floating right in front of me. All I had to do was reach out and grab it. Tell her how I felt. The problem was, emotional beats rational. Fear trumps logic. Every time.
“Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I said.
Not knowing what else to do, in the following weeks I made the very strategic move of never calling her again. We didn’t have any classes together fall of senior year, and when I’d pass her in the hallway, each of us exchanging a cheery greeting that ended in an exclamation mark, I’d tell myself that it didn’t matter anyway. There was no way a girl like that would ever like a boy like me, right? Right?
Whenever I saw her, I would think back to that night sitting in the parking lot during the concert and wonder: Did I have a chance after all? Was there a possibility that maybe she liked me, just a little bit? When we were sitting there on that rock, was she perhaps feeling a tiny flutter of hope that I would kiss her? If so, was she completely confused—or even hurt—at the end of the summer when I suddenly stopped calling her? Did she think that maybe I was not interested in her in that way, that maybe for some reason I actually wanted to stay in the Friend Zone? Did she wonder if she had done something wrong?
Or maybe she didn’t like me after all. Maybe the golf course prosthesis disaster scared her off. Maybe she kept seeing me after that because she was simply too nice to say no.
At any rate, I graduated high school a semester early so I could pursue my dream of being a ski racer. It took a lot of convincing, but eventually my parents gave me permission to move out to Colorado in December and become a full-time athlete, training every day on the mountain at Winter Park and traveling around the western United States and Canada for competitions. During the ski season, I didn’t think much about girls. All I thought about, really, was skiing. And by the time I came back to Harrisonburg at the end of the ski season, it was late March. It had been so long since I had talked to Francesca that I knew I’d never get another chance with her.
HYPOTHESIS
Subject behavior suggests Francesca may have had romantic attraction toward me, but due to my awkward behavior and fear-induced reluctance to initiate mouth-to-mouth contact, she lost interest over time.
INVESTIGATION
Chapter 17
If I really want to find you on Facebook, no number of privacy settings is going to stop me.7 So it was with Francesca Marcelo. It required a lot of searching and no finding, and then searching for her friends and friends of friends from high school, friending them, then scrolling through their friends for the Fs. Eventually, I found her: Francesca Marcelo.
I messaged her about, you know, hanging out sometime while we were both home for Christmas. She was game. That’s how I found myself standing on her porch on December 26, knocking on her front door and watching that stairway for her to come down, feeling much like I had a decade before when I’d come to pick her up for our golf course date. She appeared at the top of the stairway, and as she walked down I reviewed the script I had created in my mind, the script for our conversation that would lead to all my questions being answered.
But here’s the problem with scripts. They work great in movies. In life? Not so much. Life is too complicated. As soon as you involve other human beings and their unwieldy free wills, you can kiss your precious script good-bye.
She opened the door. Her hair was cut pixie short, and her clothes were even more earthy and hempy than they were back in high school. For a second I was not even sure it was her. But then I looked at those hazel eyes.
“Francesca Marcelo!” I said, smiling.
“Josh Sundquist!”
She wrapped her arms around my neck, and I put one forearm-crutch-attached hand around her waist while I kept my weight on the other crutch for balance.
“Come on in.”
She led me downstairs to the basement to play a game of pool. I hoped, I wondered, if maybe she felt the same pent-up tension I did, the same lingering years-old interest that kept festering, kept saying It’s possible! We could be together! We should be together!
I racked the balls and pushed them into the front of the triangle before lifting it away. I let her break. I didn’t want to beat her too badly.
Francesca and I caught up on biographical information: college, graduation, current employment status, and the like. She asked me about my job as a motivational speaker. Bingo. That was the opening line in my script. She was following it perfectly.
“You remember back the first time we ever hung out,” I began. “When my artificial leg malfunctioned on the golf course?”
She smiled. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I actually tell that story in my speeches.”
“About me?”
“Well, it’s mostly about my leg, but yeah, it’s about you, too.”
I couldn’t read her expression, couldn’t determine whether she was pleased or dismayed with this revelation. I pressed forward, offering, “People really like it.”
“That’s good,” she said noncommittally.
It was my turn in our game of pool, and I was lining up my shot. But I stood upright before taking it in order to pause the game while we proceeded into the dramatic climax of my script.
“In fact,” I said, “people always come up to me after my speeches and say, ‘What happened to you and Francesca?’ And I’m never quite sure what to tell them.” Here was the punch line. I looked straight across the pool table into her eyes to deliver it with maximum feeling. “What happened to us, Francesca?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What did happen to us?”
I froze. This was not part of the script. She was supposed to answer the question, n
ot deflect it back to me. I wanted her to tell me exactly what went wrong, why she didn’t like me. Or to tell me that she did like me and for all these years, she’d been wishing our hanging out had turned into an actual relationship.
But instead of giving me an answer, she had turned the question around. That caught me off guard. I didn’t have the answer. That’s why I had asked her, after all.
I felt like we’d gone back in time ten years, returning to that golf course. I was falling in slow motion, down, down, down, landing on my back beside the tee, the foot of my artificial leg turned at an anatomically impossible angle. I looked up at her in shock and confusion and embarrassment, for a moment frozen there on the grass, unsure of what to say next. That’s how I felt again, a decade later, in her basement. Caught in the headlights. She had asked me a question, but I was too scared to try to answer, almost like I knew exactly what had happened to us but was afraid to admit it to myself.
“Um, I don’t know,” I said.
She nodded slowly, almost sagely. And then she changed the subject, leaving me to wonder about that nod: Was she nodding to agree with the fact that I didn’t know? As in, You certainly don’t know, do you? You still don’t get it, and you probably never will. Or was she nodding to show that she didn’t know, either?
The nod was frustratingly ambiguous but the message clear: This was a question I would somehow have to answer for myself.
EVELYN WILLIAMSON
BACKGROUND
Chapter 18
A neon-yellow indoor soccer ball whizzed past my head.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 7