The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And signal when you change lanes,” she said, swerving into the passing lane. Without signaling.

  “If I pass the test, can I take the car tonight?”

  “Already? Christ.”

  “Just to celebrate. After this, I’ll pretty much be taking it to work and back.”

  “Celebrate, huh. The cops’ll be peeling you off a tree.”

  “Cheer up. Maybe I’ll hit a guardrail instead.” In the middle of arguing with my mother, I’d actually forgotten about Julia for five minutes. As soon as we started talking about car crashes, though, I remembered. Not that I knew whether Pam and Julia had hit a tree, or a guardrail, or something else. I’d managed not to know the exact details. But thinking about it made my breakfast roll into a ball and try to push itself back up my throat.

  “Yeah, keep up that attitude. Those DMV guys love a smart-ass.”

  I swallowed down the breakfast along with thoughts of Julia, and the accident, and everything else I would rather forget. I flipped open the driver’s manual and pretended to study the rules I’d already read about five hundred times. At least Mom left me alone while I was reading.

  I spent the morning mostly waiting in lines while my mother sat on a plastic chair reading People magazine. “Aren’t you done yet?” she’d ask, every time I reported back to her after making my way through another line (written test, eye exam, road test, picture). Finally, license in hand, I could say yes.

  “Want me to drive home?” I asked her.

  “You think my heart can take it?”

  “Now who’s being a smart-ass?”

  “Watch your mouth.” She smacked the side of my face. “Okay, you can drive, but if you crash the car you’re paying for it.”

  “I love the way you believe in me.”

  She grunted.

  I got us out of the lot and onto the main road without anything going wrong. The two-lane road went straight through fields that used to be farmlands. Every year while I was growing up, more of the houses had boards over their windows and skinny trees growing in their driveways. Tom and I played in some of those houses when we were younger. We would pry off a board and slip inside, tiptoe through the empty rooms where only mice lived anymore. I used to wonder if the flats would eventually turn into a ghost town. But now there were new developments edging in, treeless tracts of identical houses with golf-course grass. These new places had names like “Floral Meadows” and “Riverview Estates,” which made my brother laugh every time we drove by them.

  When Mom and I were on Route 17, Austin Chadwick’s red car went screaming past us, passing on the shoulder. “Asshole,” Mom muttered.

  “You got that right.”

  “You know him?”

  “He goes to my school.”

  “I ever catch you driving like that, I’ll cut up your license and flush it down the toilet.”

  “How many hundreds of times are you going to tell me that?”

  “I want to make sure you get it.”

  “I get it, I get it.”

  Dad and his friends were gone by the time we got home. Mom said she had to get ready for her shift. “Enjoy your last day of freedom,” she said. “Tomorrow you’ll be sweating for pennies with the rest of us working slobs.”

  “When you put it that way, I can’t wait.” I took a breath and said, “Thanks for coming with me.”

  She waved that away. “Hell, I had to.” But I think she was glad I said it.

  Syd was supposed to call me when she finished dinner, so I read more of the notebook while I waited for her. I was up to an entry from last November, written about two months after I’d started seeing Julia.

  I did what I always did when I read the notebook: locked my door and shut off all the lights except the one over my bed. Not that anyone had ever walked in on me or would care if they did. But I wanted to shut out the world as much as I could when I opened this book.

  Dear C.M.,

  I can’t stop thinking about you. I’m supposed to see Austin tonight, and I’d rather chew on sandpaper. If I have to listen to one more story about how wasted he got, or the magic chemical mixture he invented to clean a smudge off his car seats, I’ll hang myself. Why do I stay with him? You never ask, but sometimes I wonder if it bothers you that I’m with him. Maybe you’re even glad. It lets you off the hook. I told you once that you wouldn’t want to be my boyfriend, and you didn’t argue with me.

  The thing about Austin is, we have a lot in common. We both like dancing and partying, and it’s fun until he gets too drunk. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, I go to his house and the family’s sitting around with the Sunday paper all over the place, and maybe we play a game or something, and it’s nice. I belong there. With Austin, everything fits. With you, I never know.

  Austin again. Julia wrote a lot about him, a lot more than I wanted to read. Sometimes her attitude seemed to be that she belonged with him, so I’d better live with it and not ask her for anything more. Other times she’d go on and on about how she’d had enough of him and really wanted to be with me—the same bullshit she’d told me at the river. Both attitudes were somewhat fake, I thought. That is, she didn’t completely love Austin, but she didn’t completely hate him either. I guess she stayed with him because it was easy, because it was what everyone expected of her.

  There must have been some reason besides that, though, something I was missing. It was hard to believe that a girl who went swimming in a black satin dress cared about what was easy and expected.

  Syd called as I was closing the notebook. “Colt? Did you get your license?”

  “Yes.”

  She squealed. “So where are we going?”

  “Wherever you want. Except I can’t use up more gas than I can pay for.”

  “Let’s drive to the top of Black Mountain.”

  There was a park up there, where kids went to party, or look at the view, or screw around in their cars. “What for?”

  “For the view.”

  “At night?”

  “You can see the lights.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want.”

  It would be my first time up Black Mountain Road since the accident. I’d always known I would have to do it sometime. I figured it might as well be tonight.

  chapter 6

  Black Mountain Road wound upward beneath pines and oaks, maples and hemlocks. You couldn’t see most of the houses from the road, just the gateposts at the ends of people’s driveways. A lot of the houses had names. Tom and I used to joke that if we gave our own house a name, it would be “Rusty Acres” or “Swampside Manor.”

  I was glad that I didn’t know exactly which curve on Black Mountain Road was the curve. It could’ve been any one of them, and there were no mangled guardrails to give me a clue. Kids had made one of those flower-and-candle roadside shrines up here for Julia, but I wasn’t sure exactly where, and it had been moved down to the cemetery on Morgansfield Road after the funeral. I’d never visited it in either place. To me, that wasn’t where Julia was.

  I’d never taken in all the details of the accident. I hadn’t wanted to picture it; I didn’t want that night to live in my head. It was only now that I wanted the whole story. The notebook had cracked me open, brought back Julia’s voice. It was like I still had something important to find out about her. About us.

  I didn’t notice I’d been holding my breath until I let it out at the top of the mountain. Syd misunderstood my sigh. She said, “See, I told you it was beautiful.”

  I parked facing the view. The trees of Black Mountain, a wild dark tangle, filled the slope below us. The flats spread out at the foot of the mountain in a carpet of lights.

  A few other cars clustered at the far end of the lot. One streetlight stood close enough to us
for me to see Syd, but not close enough to throw a real glare into the car. I wiped the windshield with my sleeve, but most of the spots were on the outside.

  “Imagine seeing this out your bedroom window,” Syd said, gazing at all those lights where there used to be nothing but farms. “I wonder what it’s like to live up here.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Do you think they even notice it? To them it’s probably ordinary.”

  “Probably.” I’d been to Julia’s house a couple of times when nobody else was home. Her room didn’t face the view—her windows looked out onto pine trees—and I couldn’t remember looking out any of the other windows. I had crept through the place like a burglar, trying not to leave fingerprints anywhere. I didn’t belong there.

  “I’m going to live up here someday.” Syd stared as if she could take hold of the mountain, and all the land around it, with her eyes.

  “Not me,” I said. “I’d rather live on the river.”

  “Well, I’ll live up here and you can come visit sometimes.”

  “Sounds good.” I figured she was only dreaming, but the practical details nagged at me. “How would you make that kind of money, though?”

  “I think . . .” She licked her lips. “If I tell you something, promise not to tell Nick and the other guys?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think I want to be a doctor. The kind that takes care of little kids, you know?”

  “Why does that have to be a secret?”

  “Oh, the guys would make fun of me. Remember how Nick was when your brother got into college? Anyway, I don’t know if I could make it. It costs a ton of money.”

  “You’d be good at it.” When I was eight and cut my hand on a broken bottle, Syd was the only kid in my class who could look at the stitches without flinching.

  “I talked about it to Mr. Morea, and he said, ‘You know you have to cut up a cadaver in medical school.’ Then he stared at me like he expected me to faint or something.”

  “So what’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘Yeah, I know, but what worries me is the money. How am I going to pay for eight years of school?’”

  I laughed. I would’ve loved to see Morea’s face when she said that. He was always trying to rattle her. People underestimated Syd because she was quiet and small, and she usually wore a big old jacket of her father’s that made her look even smaller. You’d think Morea would know better by now. When we first used microscopes in his class, he insisted on leaning over Syd and working the knobs for her, like it was too complicated for her to figure out. She finally told him, “You’re putting it out of focus,” and flicked his hands away.

  “I bet you could get a scholarship,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “You could. You’ve got the grades for it.”

  Syd shrugged and went quiet.

  I rubbed the steering wheel. The cracks in its cover caught on the skin of my hands. I stroked the smooth patch where my mother had wrapped black tape around one of the first cracked spots. She no longer bothered patching the wheel; she said the whole thing would be covered in tape.

  I liked the feel of the wheel, liked knowing all I had to do was start the car and I could go anywhere I wanted. Not that I had anyplace special to go. Just knowing I could was enough. When I looked over at Syd, staring out at the lights and dreaming about her Black Mountain future, I thought maybe she’d like that freedom, too. “Want me to teach you?” I asked.

  “Teach me what?”

  “To drive.”

  “Really?” She smiled. “No, my parents would kill me.”

  “Who has to tell them?”

  “They would kill me,” she said again, but her laugh was so excited that I took her hand and guided it to the wheel. Half teasing, half ready to hand her the keys if only she asked, I slid her hand along the steering wheel.

  “See, doesn’t that feel good?”

  “Colt!” She pulled away and slapped my shoulder. “Don’t tempt me. Me not driving is one of the few things my parents agree on.”

  “If you say so.” I was having second thoughts myself. Mom would slaughter me if she found out I used her car to give driving lessons when I hadn’t even had my license for a full day yet.

  Syd sighed. “On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t notice. They’re so wrapped up in their own bullshit lately.” She rested her head against the back of the seat. “My dad’s sleeping downstairs again.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I waited for her to go on, but instead she changed the subject. “Tell me about the driver’s test,” she said. I told her, and then we got quiet again. A couple more cars showed up, but they parked far away from us. We were still just sitting there when someone knocked on the window. We jumped. I hadn’t heard anyone walk up.

  Keith Groome crouched there, looking in at us. I rolled down the window a couple of inches. He was so close I could smell the beer on his breath. I said, “What do you want?”

  He sneered. “What the hell you doing up here?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “White trash is supposed to stay down on the flats.”

  “Go to hell,” I said, and rolled up the window. He banged on the glass and hollered.

  “Oh God,” Syd said, “let’s just go.”

  “Why? This is a public park.”

  “Come on, please. I hate this.”

  “Relax. He’ll give up.”

  “Well, I can’t concentrate with him screaming like that.”

  I went for my door handle, but Syd grabbed me. “No, don’t. You know I hate fights.”

  Groome hammered on the car roof.

  “This is so stupid,” Syd said. “Can we just go?”

  “Okay.” I started the engine. “Maybe I can run him over.”

  “Colt!”

  Groome had already stepped away from the car by the time I put it in reverse, but instead of backing straight out, I turned the car in his direction. I wasn’t really trying to run him over, but I didn’t mind if I scared him a little. He picked up a rock and flung it at the car. It hit somewhere in the back; we heard the thunk. I rolled down the window again. “You’re going to pay for that, asshole.”

  “Sure, here’s a quarter!” he yelled.

  “Just get us out of here,” Syd pleaded.

  I took off, forgetting to be scared as I brought us around the curves of Black Mountain Road. I pulled over near the bottom because I was beginning to think I was too mad to drive. As much as I missed Julia, I didn’t want to meet her on the same stretch of road. I looked over at Syd.

  “I hate it,” she said. “They think they’re so much better than us.”

  I shut off the engine and the lights and put my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I told her. She pressed her face into my chest.

  A car came screeching down Black Mountain Road then. It flew by us, with four others right behind it. They headed toward the Higgins Farm Bridge, and I laughed.

  “It’s Groome and his friends,” I said. “They didn’t even see us!” I couldn’t stop laughing. I imagined them tearing around the flats, trying to teach me a lesson, and here they had driven right past me.

  “They make me sick,” Syd said. “There’s something seriously wrong with Keith Groome.”

  “Don’t let them get to you.” Even under the oversized jacket, I could feel how tense she was. I held her until her body loosened, softened. “I’ll take you home now.”

  “Okay.”

  I dropped her off and drove back to my place without seeing Groome and his friends again. I checked out the back of the car with a flashlight, but I honestly couldn’t find the dent Groome had made among all the other dents, dings, and scars.

  I read another page in Julia’s notebook as soon as I got to my room. I didn’t go
in order this time, but just opened the book anywhere, to a date in January. I didn’t read it because I was thinking about Julia as a person. Instead, I liked knowing how pissed Groome and Austin and those guys would be if they knew I’d been with her. Opening the notebook was almost a kind of revenge. Until I read the entry.

  Dear C.M.,

  I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t show up last night. I had a good fuming fit and threw a few snowballs in the river, waiting for you. Then I saw your name on the absence lists in the office. Turns out you haven’t been in school for a week! So you never even got my note asking you to meet me.

  Are you sick? I want to call you. I just looked up your family’s number. I’m pretty sure it’s yours because the address is on the flats, near the Higgins Farm Bridge. Would you want me to call you? I feel so cut off from you. It seems crazy that I don’t even know how you are. Sometimes I love the fact that nobody knows about us. We have this secret, so juicy I can feel my mouth dripping. Other times, like now, it seems stupid to hide this way.

  It’s later: I just talked to you. You didn’t sound mad. Your voice felt good in my ear. I’m glad I called.

  I remembered that, all right. Last winter I got the flu, and I was out for almost two weeks. At the end of the first week, Julia called. I didn’t have a fever anymore, but I still felt horrible, beaten up and wrung out, not to mention bored. My brother had brought me a bunch of library books, but I’d read them, and I’d memorized the daytime TV schedule. Watching that much afternoon TV, I had discovered that there were about ten personal-injury lawyers who would be thrilled to take my case, if I ever had one. And I could have an exciting career in heating and air-conditioning. Anyway, I was lying there in the sheets I’d sweated on, trying to work up the energy to take a shower, when Julia called.

  “Are you sick? I was worried about you,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ve got the flu.” I held the phone away so I could cough. “Sorry. I’m getting better.”

  “When are you coming back to school?”