If You Knew Then What I Know Now (12 page)

She began to cry and I reached out my hand to touch her sweater, but she hopped off the sofa and ran upstairs. I heard scraping and bumping noises, the hollow sound of a closet door, then the heavy bumps of her heels hammered back down to me.

She handed me a big cardboard box. I recognized the markered goofy faces drawn all over the sides, the same goggly eyes and curled smiles. Dark capital letters warned PRIVATE PERSONAL MESSY OUTPOURINGS OF A NAKED SOUL! KEEP OUT!! I knew inside was every note I'd written her, probably every single one. Hundreds of them, sliding over each other as the box tilted in my hands. I never knew she was saving them all. It wasn't as heavy as I would have guessed.

“You have to take this,” she said.

“Why?”

“You have to.” She sniffled.

“I can't.”

“You have to. I can't have these anymore.”

“I wrote them to you. These are for you.” We sat on the couch again, side by side. I set the box between my feet, opened the lid and saw all the notes. I noticed for the first time everything in Claire's house was white. The carpet, the sectional sofa, the vertical blinds, the rugs, the coffee table, the frames on the walls, and then the note in my hand, the whole box of notes on the floor. She couldn't look at me. I couldn't stop looking at the carpet.

After a few silent minutes, I leaned over and awkwardly hugged her because I wanted to leave. The sooner I was out of that quiet white house, the better. I stood and she picked up the box again and I told her I wasn't taking the notes. She slumped down as I yanked the front door open. On the long sofa, she somehow looked smaller than she was. Her sweater was pulled down over her knees and she gripped a crumpled tissue. I wanted to go but I also didn't want to leave her alone. If we drove around and listened to
Solitude
maybe she'd feel better. I told her I'd call her but she didn't say anything back.

On the passenger seat in my car was her note in the plastic bag, the one asking me to come here, the last one she'd ever write to me. Her words were so important, she couldn't take her chances with the storm rolling around above us. Like she protected every note I wrote in her big box with the goofy faces standing guard. Every note was a different hour of the day when I loved her, or wrote to her that I did.

Part of the reason I couldn't take that box from her was taking the notes would mean I'd finally have to take responsibility for them. I knew all along I wasn't being honest with Claire when I wrote to her I loved her or suggested names for the quadruplets she was convinced we'd have. Taking back the notes would be like taking back the feelings depicted on them, and they were always already hers. And it wasn't that I didn't feel anything for Claire—I loved her very much—as my friend. Because I had such a hard time talking about my
feelings, the notes were her only evidence of our relationship. She collected them all hoping the accumulation would equal the physical affection she desired from her thin, high-voiced boyfriend who borrowed her
Phantom of the Opera
soundtrack and memorized all the words.

With her last note in my hand, I stared back at her front door and thought about her sitting there. I wished she didn't have to be in that sad white house where everything looked perfect but nothing was. I remembered how one morning before school started, she and I sat together in a quiet hallway and she said, “I don't know what I would do if I didn't have you.” I asked her what she meant. She opened her mouth almost immediately to answer but didn't say anything. We sat mute until the bell rang a minute later, and I always wondered what her answer might have been.

 

“Cold cuts will take the paint off a car, if the sun is hot enough.” I've heard this somewhere, and just knowing it makes me sound as if I am capable of such a thing. The car windows are rolled down, Angie's hair is flying all around her face like she's underwater. Houses, cars, and lawns blur past us. We drive to Jon's house where we hope Kevin will be, around a narrow curve, up a slow hill. We're chanting “BE THERE! BE THERE!” with tight red faces. I'm bouncing the container of cherry bars on my lap, wet residue streaking the inside of the lid in sugary ridges. One more turn right, one left, and there's the house, at
the mouth of a dead-end court. Kevin's car
is
there, as if we summoned it, as if we screamed, willed, and commanded it there. This is perfect. We can almost see his face when he trots out to his car after piling up the family's mail in the kitchen and calling the dogs back inside, and there, across his windshield is the weirdest mess he's ever seen. My grandma's homemade cherry bars as vandalism. The stereo plays the fast chorus of The Carpenters' “We've Only Just Begun,” because it's true.

As we turn in the cul-de-sac, though, we see them. Kevin and Claire, both of them, walking out of the house, staring at Angie and me. We look at each other because we thought we were summoning his car, and accidentally we summoned him, and Claire too. On their faces are smiles until they stop smiling because we look so ridiculous, chanting and screaming out of the open windows. They don't know what we're up to, but it's pretty obvious that whatever it is, they're on the wrong side of it.

Seeing them side by side, I realize something I can't ever tell Angie. I don't want to rub these cherry bars on Kevin's car as a message about him and Claire because it's not him that I care about. My actual concern is that Claire cannot date anyone ever because I don't want her next boyfriend—if it's Kevin or anybody else—to start kissing her. That would be the explanation to everyone that what was wrong with Claire and me was me. That's why Kevin and Claire can't get together. That's why it's actually fine that Angie still likes Kevin, and for her, these cherry bars are some kind of bizarre flirtation. That's
why I must believe that Angie and I have only just begun to live because only I know my hidden difficult secrets. I'm already nostalgic for our present because the future is so impossible.

In front of Jon's house, Angie pulls her car over, jams it into park and switches off the engine. “Get down,” she whispers. “Hide. Pretend you're sleeping.” This sounds reasonable at this moment, even though Claire and Kevin have just seen us drive past them, just seen our dumb, surprised faces. We slump down into the foot wells and curl up. I shove the cherry bars under the seat—they are a dead giveaway. Angie fits under her steering wheel. My face is crammed between my knees, I can't see anything. As Kevin and Claire walk closer to the car, I reach up and turn off the music.

O
ne of the smart mouths is showing off but we're ignoring him. He's attempting a tricky shot when he trips and wrecks on the gymnasium floor. His smug face squeaks across the polished wood and the noise ricochets off the cinderblock walls along with the other kids' voices. I do my best not to notice because I'm close to winning my Solitaire game. Lisa, the other supervisor in the gym right now, sits across the table from me snapping down her own cards. Neither of us likes the fallen smart mouth or any of the others in his crew, and we smirk at his comeuppance. I'm seventeen years old and after this summer, I'll be a senior in high school. Lisa's older, a college student somewhere. All the supervisors here at the Y think she's too weird to talk to, except me.

We've got seventy-eight children between five and fourteen years old under our charge. To get this job, I was supposed to be eighteen, but my mom knew the director so he bent the rules. If anybody asks, I've been instructed to lie, but I have a hard time keeping my story straight. I'm a short pale guy with skinny
wrists, pink knees, and a boy's high, unchanged voice. A couple of the smart mouths look older than I do.

Despite my obvious young age and small body, Lisa is considered the misfit of all the supervisors. Her hair is dyed an unusual reddish-brown like apple juice and she draws on her eye makeup asymmetrically—one eye outlined in black with a dramatic, pointed corner, the other lid shadowed darkly like a bruise. But as exotic as her makeup might be, her clothes are plain and somewhat sloppy: dark long-sleeve T-shirts, soft jeans, scuffed sneakers with beautiful designs drawn in glitter. It's this contradiction that I find so mysterious and irresistible.

In fact, the other supervisors leave Lisa and me to ourselves, and I savor the idea that they associate me with her. We're not really friends, but lately we have begun to talk more about books and music. She let me borrow a CD of hers where a woman moaned out a song about being raped, and it sounded so theatrical and sophisticated, it thrilled me even if I didn't entirely understand it. Lying on the floor in my bedroom, I listened to the song repeating for hours until my dad shoved his face through the door. “
What
are you listening to?”

Lisa gives up on Solitaire, and as she reshuffles, she asks where I'm going back to college. I confess finally I'm only a high school senior.

“Oh, really,” she says, not looking so surprised. “Where do you go?”

I tell her. It's one of a few high schools in our suburban Missouri town near St. Louis.

“One of my best friends used to go there. He finished last year.”

I ask who. “Justin Curtis,” she says. “Do you know him?”

“Yes!” As shy as I am, it feels like a miracle that we actually know the same person, even if my school isn't very big. Most of my friends are other theater kids—a whole group of us who devote our after-school hours to acting like other people. The revelation that I know her friend Justin feels like one more link in our emerging connection. I didn't know him well, but I'm not about to tell Lisa.

Justin and I were on the school newspaper staff together when I was a freshman but I haven't talked to him since that year. He was as much a misfit in our school as Lisa is here at the Y. He was a tall and skinny boy—skinnier and paler than me. Where I look underdeveloped and puny, Justin's thinness and whiteness appeared anemic, sickly. His shoulders pulled together in front of his chest. He brushed his hair in a pouf in front, where it was dyed blond, and then in back where the natural brown color showed through, it was cut shorter and swooped down in a curly tail that he nervously fingered. His lips were pink and chapped because he never closed his mouth, almost as if he was unable to breathe through his nose; he seemed to stare and quietly pant like he was always waiting for something to end so he could go.

But more than just his hair made Justin a misfit. His soft, girlish voice, sounding like a string of whimpers rather than sentences or words, and his limp walk. He was often called a certain word—in the newspaper room, the hallways at school, and probably in his classes. I recognized the word because it was also sometimes called out to me. I always felt it land on my skin with a sting, but I found if I pretended I didn't hear it then I could also pretend I didn't know what it meant.

The smart mouths in the gym with Lisa and me will grow into the kind of kids who use that awful word. The one who fell down earlier is in front of us now, showing us the long pink mark on his arm. Lisa and I have no sympathy. We know who this kid is, so we don't care. He walks off discouraged, throwing his arm around, muttering under his breath.

“So,” Lisa says, once he's gone. “Would you want Justin to call you or something? I'm sure he'd want to hear from you.”

“Sure!” I say. “It would be nice to hear from him too.”

 

By the time Justin calls several weeks later, my final year of high school is underway and lonely. My best friend Angie is back with her boyfriend Kevin for the third time. They are utterly devoted to this renewed relationship, so they spend every Friday and Saturday night together, just the two of them. For the first month of the new year, on weekend nights, I shamble around the house throwing myself on the sofa, staring at the phone,
my pathetic hopeful voice already recorded on Angie's parents' answering machine pleading for her to call. If I'm feeling up to it, I lie across my bedroom carpet and doodle or write poems about despair and hardship. One particularly inspiring Friday night, on a notebook illustrated with teardrops, I discover that the words “bedroom” and “boredom” share all the same letters. My mother watches with concern, suggests mall trips or movies but it's no use—to be seen with her in public is worse than being alone. My only choice is to wait for Angie's inevitable tearful phone call delivering the news that she and Kevin are finished, that's it, and I should come over immediately.

If I was normal I'd go on my own dates, but I'm not, so I don't. I'm not interested in dating, though I did have a girlfriend for almost a year, but that didn't go anywhere mostly because I didn't let it. At school, I see how students pair off, this girl for that boy, but there's no similar impulse inside me. I want to be around girls—particularly Angie, if Kevin would leave her alone—I just don't want anything more. There's something different between me and them—the boys paired with girls. And as much as I am intimidated by those tall and loud young men who barrel down the school hallways, I'm still drawn to them, interested not by being left out, but because I want to watch and memorize the way their bodies strut and shout. I know there's something deeper and more complicated to my inchoate urges, but I do my best to ignore it. Years from now, I'll see that by
not dating at all—after that first girlfriend, whom I never even kissed—I could successfully sidestep the whole question of who I wanted to date without having to think very hard about why.