If I Could Turn Back Time (13 page)

“Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if you could give me a copy of my schedule?”

She frowned. “Your
schedule
? What, do you suddenly have amnesia or something?”

“No, no, no.” Though that wouldn’t have been a terrible explanation. And it was better than what I had … which was
nothing
. “My”—I thought fast—“doctor wants a copy. I mean my adviser. My college adviser. Because I’m thinking about doing a year abroad.” I nodded, as if that totally explained why I’d suddenly need a copy of my second-semester senior-year schedule.

Fortunately, I’d managed to spark Mrs. Perrow’s interest anyway. “Oh,
abroad
! How
exciting
!” She got up and went to a file cabinet and opened the
N–P
drawer and started searching the folders. “Where are you thinking of going?”

“London.”

“
London!
I have always wanted to go there. I just know Princess Di and I would be the best of friends if I could only get over to Kensington Palace at teatime.” She trilled with laughter.

Oh, sad. She’d be horrified to hear that Princess Diana was going to die in a car crash pretty soon. The fairy tale would be well and truly over. No chance of tea with Di in Kensington Palace for Mrs. Perrow, who otherwise probably
could
have charmed her way in.

She was riffling through the files and pulled one out. “Here we are!” It was a thin sheet, almost transparent. I remembered that. “Let me just go and make you a copy.” She went over to a massive copy machine, and it roared to life and spat out one piece of paper, which she then brought over and handed to me. “There. Now, you stay in touch with me and let me know if you go to London, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s your e-mail address?”

“E-mail?”

I glanced at the ancient PC on her desk and quickly reoriented myself in time. E-mail was
about
to become widely used, but it wasn’t there yet, and it would probably take Mrs. Perrow a little longer than kids like me to get interested in it.

“Mail, I mean. Your mailing address. Can I just write to you in care of the school?”

“Of course! I don’t plan on going anywhere. You address it to Jacquelyn Perrow.”

“Will do.” I walked out and thought about that. Did her friends call her
Jackie
? Did she have a vibrant social life when she wasn’t in the school office? I wondered how old she was. Probably not as old as I thought. I would have guessed mid-fifties, but she could have been in her mid-forties. She could have been just a few years older than I was! I knew now that gray hair was a liar.

I stopped in the empty hall outside of view of the office and looked at my schedule. English. Mr. McCarthy. Oh, shoot. If I had to come tripping in late one last time, it
would
have to be in that snide old goat’s class. I briefly considered just skipping altogether, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. If I hid in the bathroom the janitors would inevitably come in and find me and call me out. And I got caught every damn time I tried to leave the campus, even if it was just to go down to Roy Rogers for lunch, so actually
leaving
wasn’t an option.

Nope, I was going to have to face Mr. McCarthy’s music one more time.

Unsurprisingly, he fell silent the minute I walked into the classroom, and he stood, like a sentry, watching my every step to an empty desk.

“Miss Phillips,” he said, but in a very different tone from the one Mrs. Perrow had used. “I suppose it was overly optimistic of me to expect that on one of your very last days of high school you might be able to get yourself into school on time.”

It was amazing how small I felt. And how quickly. “I
was
here on time,” I said.

He made a point of looking at the clock on the wall. I was seven minutes late. Might as well have been half an hour to him. Jeez, he was just as bad as I remembered him.

“I was in the office,” I explained. Truthfully, for once. “Talking to Mrs. Perrow.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“No, really!” I started to take out the copy of my schedule to show to him, but he wouldn’t buy my ridiculous story nearly as handily as she had. “I lost my math book and had to go pay for it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, so there was a bit of a backup.”

He lifted one eyebrow, but I could see his uncertainty in his eyes. It was a plausible story. And suddenly my strength surged. Why was I feeling intimidated by this guy? He was a classic Little Big Man. He didn’t want to actually
follow up
or go check out my story, he probably didn’t even want to bother punishing me all those times he’d threatened to. He just wanted to feel big by making me feel small, and he’d almost done it.

“You can go ask her if you want!” I said, knowing, now, that he wouldn’t. I leaned back comfortably in my chair, raised my chin, and looked at him.

Checkmate
.

Boy, it was a
lot
easier to deal with teachers once you had almost forty years of living under your belt.

He shook his head, the only thing he could do even resembling a threat, and cleared his throat. “As I was saying before Miss Phillips’s grand entrance, you have learned a lot of things in this class this year.…”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I passed Tanya twice in the hall—looking at her perhaps a bit too longingly, hoping for a note—until finally, on our third and last pass, she slipped me a folded piece of paper the way she had so many times during ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. I opened it eagerly.

Stop looking at me like a baby bird looking for a worm from Mom!!!! I don’t have anything to say except it’s almost the last day of school and I’m so glad I could scream. Satisfied???????

I had to laugh. Even today, Tanya would say the same thing. I’d wanted to revisit one of her old notes, like,
Oh my God, A.H. just farted in class and everyone knew it was him and now they’re calling him “Piggy”! I want to tell them to stop because it’s mean but it’s so funny!
or,
J.M. was moved to the seat right in front of me. I think now is my chance! Also, what do you want to do this weekend? I think my ’rents are going out of town. Party at my house?

There had been a million of them once. What had I done with them all? Had I, somewhere along the line, been going through my things and decided those precious, irreplaceable tokens of my childhood were clutter and thrown them out? I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one. Which was weird, because I’d kept track of all of my diaries since I was twelve and you’d think I would have treasured these time capsules from another point of view as much, if not more.

But of course that kind of thing couldn’t be done authentically on command.

I wanted to savor my last last week of high school—that is, assuming this weird phenomenon didn’t happen again, and how could I assume that?—but it went so fast. The last days of school are not typical ones: Classes aren’t about teaching anything. It’s just a matter of turning materials and books in and saying good-bye, signing yearbooks and pretending you hoped to soon see people you actually hoped you’d never see again.

But there were a few particularly melancholy standouts. Not just young Tanya, handing me a snide note but in a familiar way; there was Christopher Lotsky, a friendly, smiling, moon-faced guy who had died in a small plane crash just a couple of months after graduation. (It had been hard to believe until there was a neighborhood swap meet a few years later and I bought an ice crusher from his mother and carefully asked, only to find out it was true.) I watched him kiss his girlfriend by her locker … their hands lingering until they were just fingertip to fingertip before they went their separate ways. I’d heard they were still together when he died, but there’s no way to tell if that was really true. I sure didn’t ask his mom for the most painful, specific details.

There was also Doug Holborn, who was a real pothead and who managed to get hit by a car on his bicycle sometime after graduation and was never quite the same again. No girlfriend there, but a confident, probably stoned (but definitely content) swagger that said all was right in his world, and would be forever.

Forever didn’t last so long after all.

Then again, there was Haley Nichols, who went on to be a semi-famous local newscaster for a really long time, and whom I assume was happy; and poor shy Destin Kingsford, his real name, who later came out of his shell and produced one of the most popular HBO series ever. He never spoke of his upbringing, and I think that was because he was somewhat shunned for being a shy, effeminate theater type, but he did go on to build a spectacular life, and I never saw even a hint of shadow in his red carpet pictures in later years.

It was such a strange, emotionally evocative experience. I saw them all, there in the fear-scented halls of high school, eyes a little wide, walking uncertainly into their various futures, no idea what was really ahead of them. It was almost exactly like being on
The Price Is Right
. Destin got the vacation package, the pop-up camper, the Hamilton Beach mixer, the whole shebang.

Doug got the goat and a hasty good-bye.

Better luck next time.

Honestly, it wasn’t really a vantage point I’d recommend. I think there’s a reason most of us can’t see the future: It’s sad. Even when it’s happy, it’s a little sad. Tinged with losses and things, and people, left behind.

But I also ran into Julia Green, whom I’d gone all the way through elementary school with, and then had seen briefly on a layover in Chicago, of all places, and found we really connected. I wished I’d kept up with her, but it was fun to see her teenage self again, since I’d been trying to remember how I could have forgotten her, considering how simpatico we were when we met up. We’d even stayed in touch for a year or so via e-mail, sending our recollections of our shared childhood, like diary entries. She remembered Bambino’s Pizza at Cabin John Shopping Center, and talked about how she and her sister would argue over who got to sit in the front of the station wagon on the way home after picking it up, holding the warm box on her lap in the cold of winter.

I also ran into Greg Betz. I’d had the hots for him since we were both at Cabin John Junior High School, and nothing had ever come of it. We’d talked, hedged toward actual communication, but never kept it up.

I remembered this one time when he walked me all the way down Gainsborough Road, from the school to my house on Candlelight Lane, holding my umbrella for me. I’d glanced frequently but—I hoped—surreptitiously at his dark curly hair and bright blue eyes. And when I say curly hair, I mean the kind girls would kill for, not some crazy “rainbow hair wig” you’d get for Halloween. It was wavy and glossy, and he was a few inches taller than me, which was good if I wore heels, and he had these blue, blue eyes.

How was it that I’d never wondered what happened to him? Maybe because he was just that quiet, that understated. Did he ever remember me and that semi-rainy walk home from school we’d shared? It was funny, but it felt silly to think he might, since wistful memories seemed to be the domain of women and I’d have almost thought less of him if he’d thought of it as I had.

Yet I did wonder. If I ran into him on the street, would I have to explain who I was until we both expired in the embarrassed blue silence of his unspoken,
I’m sorry, I just can’t recall
…?

At any rate, I did see him that day and, wow, he was really as hot as I remembered. I don’t mean that in a creepy way, as a woman talking about a guy twenty years her junior, but we all know what it is to see a kid who’s about to grow up into a knockout.

Everyone knew Brooke Shields was going to be gorgeous from the time she was, what, twelve? Younger? I don’t know, but somehow no one got the “creepy” label for that, yet I felt kind of creepy looking at Greg and thinking about how wonderfully he’d age.

But why not, right? For one thing, I was his age, technically, here, and for another thing, he was currently, wherever he was, my age
now
, so this was a totally legit way to think about someone.

Not that I was thinking about Greg, because I wasn’t, beyond that point.

I was thinking about Brendan.

Or, rather, trying
not
to think about Brendan. The Brendan thing still had me totally freaked out. I realized that, by whatever magic, I was actually eighteen. And it was not in any way oogie for one eighteen-year-old to hook up with another. That was normal. In fact, that was normal enough for someone to travel in time to
do
again, if such a thing were, for some reason, necessary for one’s development.

No sooner did I have the thought than he appeared, coming toward me in the hall, and scooped an arm around my ribs and swept me around the corner into an empty alcove.

He kissed me.

And it was fantastic.

Oh, my god, he was young, strong, and wildly enthusiastic. A man hadn’t wanted me as much as Brendan
clearly
did for so long.

“Better stop.” I smiled against his mouth. “Or you’re going to cause a spectacle in public.” It was a joke we’d had the whole time we were together; it was so easy to excite him and so difficult to calm him down that he’d invariably end up sitting at places much longer than might otherwise have been proper because he couldn’t get up.

“You’re driving me
crazy
.”

“Ditto.” I meant it. I guess the vodka was still in my system a little bit, because I was dizzy with desire.

“Let’s skip tomorrow night and get a hotel room.”

I laughed. “We can get a hotel room anytime.” Now that we were eighteen, that was true. I remember how heady it felt when we’d first realized that.

“Then why don’t we?”

Because we’re basically just kids, and kids are meant to sneak around and do it in backseats and unsupervised homes. It’s what “youth” is.

“Because you’re cheap.”

He was a little defensive. “Do you know how much it costs to fill my car with gas?”