The Secret Year

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Kirby smiled and said, “Which section is yours, Colt?”

  “This side of the room. I’m busing, though—I’m not a waiter.”

  “That’s okay. Pam, why don’t you get that table for us?” To me Kirby murmured, “She doesn’t want to see any of the Black Mountain kids, so I thought I’d bring her here.”

  “Yeah, they don’t usually pollute themselves by crossing Barney’s threshold, that’s for sure,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Colt, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Forget it.”

  They ordered coffee and pie. It was about ten thirty and pretty slow, so the manager gave me a break. Kirby asked me to sit down with them.

  Pam ate her pie without looking at me. I couldn’t stop staring at her, though. She’d been the last person to see Julia alive. She knew what had happened that night. “How are you doing, Pam?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said, still focused on her plate.

  “How do you like your new school?” God, I sounded like a long-lost uncle at her family reunion. But I didn’t know what else to say, how to start.

  “It’s okay.”

  I wished she would at least look at me. Maybe I could read something in her eyes. The weird thing about seeing Pam after so long was that it made me feel like Julia could come back, too, as if Pam were a gateway to Julia. Time folded back to the night of the accident. I heard the rain hit my bedroom windows again, remembered Syd’s call. That night I’d still had clothes in my room that smelled of Julia. I’d kept them out of the wash for a few weeks, but her scent had faded anyway.

  “Do you still see Austin and those guys?” I asked now, just for something to say.

  “No.” Pam stabbed a gooey chunk of apple, stuck it into her mouth, and chewed.

  Obviously she wasn’t going to volunteer anything. Why should she? I had to push a little. “I guess you miss Julia.”

  “Yes.”

  Kirby gave me a warning look. I knew I should shut up, but somehow I couldn’t. I had to know what had happened. Every detail.

  “Why did she get drunk that night? She didn’t usually.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Pam said. She chopped a chunk of pie crust into halves, quarters, and then it crumbled. “Besides, how do you know what she ‘usually’ did? You didn’t know her.”

  I watched Kirby’s fork sink into a piece of pie. I told myself to stop here, to let that night alone. But Pam was the only person who could tell me what I wanted to know. My stomach clenched. “Did she pass out in the car?” I said. “Was she unconscious when the car hit—what did it hit, anyway?” Kirby kicked me under the table.

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.” Pam pushed her plate away. “God. You didn’t even know her.”

  “I know,” I said, my stomach lurching. A hot wave washed over me, and I swallowed. Somehow I thought everything would be okay if I could be sure that Julia had felt no pain. “But I need to— Look, if she passed out, and didn’t know what hit her, that’s better than if—”

  Pam shoved back her chair and ran out of there. Kirby said, “What is wrong with you, Colt?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She stared at me as if I’d butchered a few puppies in front of her. “What the hell was that?” She dug in her pocket for money.

  “Don’t,” I said. “I’ll take care of the check.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s the least you can do.” She gave me another disgusted glare and left the restaurant.

  I cleared the table and walked over to the register to pay the bill. Then I went into the men’s room and threw up.

  Sunil, one of the waiters, was standing at the sinks when I came out of the stall. “Are you sick?” he asked.

  I rinsed out my mouth at the sink. “Yeah. No. I’ll be okay.”

  “You should go home.”

  “I’m off in an hour anyway. Don’t worry about it.”

  I went back to clearing tables. My hands shook a little, but I didn’t think anyone could tell. As long as I didn’t drop anything, who would care?

  I drove home on autopilot. I was standing in the kitchen pouring out antacids from one of the industrial-size bottles my father always bought, when Tom came in. “Did you have dinner at Barney’s?” He laughed, nodding at the pills.

  “Yeah, funny.” I crunched down on a couple of the tablets. “Dad talking to you yet?”

  “I got a couple more grunts out of him. I think he’s coming around.” Tom opened the refrigerator and stared into it. I had to turn away from the sight of the food.

  I went to my room and opened the notebook, although part of me didn’t even want to touch it. I had reached the first entry from March.

  Dear C.M.,

  I saw you talking to Lindsay Scanlon in the halls today. I see you with Syd all the time and that doesn’t bother me—she’s really like one of the guys, isn’t she? But for some reason I wanted to jab Lindsay in the eyeballs. You don’t have to tell me that’s not fair. I know it’s not. And I still want to know what you were talking about with her!

  Sometimes when I see you at school, it’s like you’re not the same person I meet down at the bridge. I look at you and think: He was with me the other night, he told me about a fight with his father, he wore his big muddy boots in my car and I had to hose off the floor mats the next morning, he ran his tongue along my neck, he was inside me. And it seems like I made the whole thing up, because we don’t talk in public, and even the mud in my car doesn’t seem real. But you belong to me, in a strange way that I can’t explain.

  chapter 13

  At school Syd advertised her relationship with Fred. She was always touching him, ruffling his hair, rubbing his back. I felt like it was a play she put on, and I didn’t want to watch. That first day back from vacation, I left our lunch table as soon as I was done eating and decided to finish the break in the library.

  Kirby caught up with me as I left the cafeteria. “Hey,” she said. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Okay.” I figured if she wanted to yell at me again about that night at Barney’s, I deserved it. She didn’t look mad, but maybe she was saving it up until we were alone.

  She pulled me into an empty classroom and closed the door. It was so quiet that I heard the hand on the wall clock click forward.

  “I know about you and Julia,” she said.

  Had she guessed or did she really know? I wished more than ever that I’d kept my stupid mouth shut at Barney’s. I thought about denying it, but I was sick of lying. I’d spent hours of Christmas vacation gorging on Julia’s notebook, reliving last spring and summer, smelling the river mud and her peach shampoo all over again.

  “Michael told me,” Kirby went on. “I couldn’t believe the things you said that night. . . . I wanted to strangle you. I was ranting about what a jerk you’d been, and he told me why you were so interested in what happened to Julia. Then at least it made sense.”

  I cleared my throat. “Does Pam know?”

  “No. I think you should tell her, though.”

  She was right. But whenever I remembered the look on Pam’s face while I’d tried to gouge the bloody details out of her, I wanted to puke again.

  Kirby said, “Does anybody else know?”

  “Just Michael.”

  She stared into my eyes, as if trying to read the imprint of Julia on my brain. “How long were you seeing her?”

  “A year.”

  “Wow.” She frowned. “You and Austin.”

  I sat down on one of the desks. “Yeah, me and Austin.” It was strange to be connected with him that way.

  She sat down, too. “How did you even manage it? She was always—oh. Forget that, I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “We met late at night, down by
the river.”

  She chewed her lip, thinking. “Michael said that Julia never knew what she wanted . . . that she didn’t like to choose, she always wanted everything.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “How are you doing, Colt?”

  I shrugged and said, “Okay.” Then I thought about that night at Barney’s. “Most of the time.”

  “Well, I know what Pam and Michael have been through, and it’s been awful.”

  “It’s not easy, that’s true.” That was the most I would say. I wasn’t going to slice myself open for her, spill juicy gore out onto the desktop.

  She reached out and rested her fingers on my shoulder. Her hand slid an inch, then another, down my arm. It sent shock waves through me—something about being touched when she was so close to the truth, when I was admitting things I’d never told anyone. Her fingers seemed to burn off the layers of my skin, press into the nerves. I told myself I was just overreacting because no girl had touched me since Julia. And then I remembered that wasn’t even true. I’d forgotten about Syd.

  Kirby might have noticed I was holding my breath; she dropped her hand. “Well, I’m sorry, Colt. If you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thanks.” We sat there for a minute, staring at each other, the way we had the day of the snowstorm. Only this time, she knew everything. I wasn’t sorry Michael had told her.

  I had a shift at Barney’s that afternoon, but while I was getting ready, my father barged into my room. Apparently he had remembered that I lived there.

  “Come outside and look at the cars,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m busy.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Dad, come on,” I groaned. “I have to go to work.”

  “Just for a minute.”

  I finally agreed to tour the front yard when it was clear he wouldn’t leave me alone otherwise. He always believed that if he stood me in front of the cars long enough, talking up their potential, I would fall in love. Never mind that this had failed every other time he’d tried it.

  While he poured out his usual sales pitch, I snuck looks at my watch. I broke into his speech to point at one of the wrecks. “Dad, you had mice nesting in that thing, and there’s a tree growing out of the back. You think you’ll ever get it running?”

  He slammed his mouth shut, whirled around, and stalked back into the house. I hadn’t expected him to get that upset. Tom and I used to tease him about the cars all the time. I almost went into the house after him, but I was late for my shift.

  Dad didn’t say a word to me that night, but that wasn’t unusual. Most times, if he had his beer and his TV, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. What did surprise me was that on Saturday he had all the wrecks hauled away.

  I came home from work to an empty yard. At first, I thought he must’ve moved the cars to the backyard—maybe because of the annual nagging from the neighbors—until I discovered that the two in back were also gone. I went into the house and found my father sitting in front of the TV with a beer. “What happened to all the cars?”

  “What do you care?” he growled at the screen.

  “I was just wondering.”

  “I got sick of looking at them.”

  I didn’t believe that, but he obviously wasn’t going to tell me, so I went into the kitchen. My mother was soaking her feet and having a beer while she watched something boil on the stove. “How was your shift?” she asked.

  “Okay. Where are the cars?”

  She grunted. “He’s still pissed about Tommy. He’s been rambling on about how you’re the only son he’s got left, how he wants to work on the cars with you. I told him if he’s going to try this male bonding shit, he should take you fishing or hunting. Bring home something we could eat.” She picked up her beer and went on, “When you didn’t give a crap about the cars, he gave up on the whole thing. At least this summer we’ll be able to mow the front lawn again.”

  “I get it,” I said, and sat down across from her. “We’re not the sons he wanted.”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Your brother gives us enough of that.” She sipped her beer and sucked foam off her top lip. “What’s going on with you nowadays? You flunking out of school? How are your grades?”

  “Okay. The usual.”

  “Oh yeah? Got any girlfriends? Boyfriends?”

  I laughed. She put her beer down. I could see all the little veins and red spots and wrinkles in her skin. I wondered if it was her job that made her look so much older than she was. I could see how it would; Barney’s was aging me, too. Nothing in my life had made me want to go to college as badly as this job did.

  “Mom, I’m not gay.” I rolled her beer can between my hands, feeling the liquid slosh inside. “And it’s not the worst thing in the world that Tom is, right?”

  “Colt, maybe someday you’ll understand what it’s like to think you know a person and then find out different.” She snatched the beer back.

  I took a shower and went to my room. I got into bed with the purple notebook, looking to forget about Barney’s and my family.

  Dear C.M.,

  I couldn’t stop laughing last night. I’ve never seen you laugh so hard either. I guess we were both in a weird mood!

  I’ve never had that much fun with Austin. Which makes me wonder, seriously, what am I doing with him? We’ve outgrown whatever we had.

  I sighed. The last thing I wanted to read was another entry about Austin Chadwick. As for the night Julia was talking about, a night last August, I did remember us getting on one of those laughing jags where everything seems funny. We hadn’t been high or anything, except maybe on each other. I couldn’t remember the exact jokes we’d made—something about frogs, or crickets? It probably wouldn’t seem funny now. You had to be there.

  I didn’t want to finish reading. What was I going to find, more excuses about why she had to stay with Austin?

  There was another reason I didn’t want to keep reading. I fingered the remaining pages with her writing on them: only a few. It was January now but August in Julia’s notebook, and I knew the end was coming. I didn’t remember every detail about every moment with her, I didn’t remember the frog jokes or whatever we’d laughed about last summer, but I remembered the last time I’d seen her. Now I would have to relive that night, and the way we’d ripped into each other, through her eyes. Then I would hit the blank pages, and it would be over.

  chapter 14

  I couldn’t get Syd to talk to me. When we were all in a group and she couldn’t avoid it, she’d say a few words. Very few, each one edged in ice. It wasn’t what I would call talking, not like before.

  Even at lunch, she ignored me. Fred sat practically on top of her, glaring at me if I moved too close. I wondered what she had told him about our breakup to put that look on his face. Whatever it was, it made our table as much fun as a minefield.

  Kirby saw what was happening and probably heard about it from Syd, too. She asked me to sit with her and Michael. The first time I did it, Nick told me to watch my back. “You can’t trust Black Mountain,” he said.

  “Kirby’s not Black Mountain.”

  “Then why is she always with those guys? I’m telling you, look out.”

  I liked sitting with Kirby because it was okay with her if I didn’t say anything. Michael never felt obligated to open his mouth just because other people were with him, so sometimes the three of us ate in silence. Other times, Kirby and I talked about hiking along the river, while Michael read his books. Then there were the days I listened to them ramble on about their favorite old movies. They also got very excited about a college radio station—“the only one we get around here that doesn’t play sugar-coated shit,” in Michael’s words. Some days I let them be alone togethe
r while I sat at my old table and put up with the freeze from Syd and Fred. I went back and forth, feeling like I didn’t completely belong in either place.

  One night at the end of January, Kirby came into Barney’s alone. She said Michael was home studying for an exam. She ordered hot chocolate and talked to me while I finished my shift. Then we went outside together.

  We didn’t get into our cars right away; we stopped to stare at the icicles hanging from the roof of the restaurant. They ranged from huge pillars to little points; they grew on top of one another and fused into amazing shapes.

  Our breath made clouds in the air, and my ears ached from the cold. Snow had fallen a few days earlier, and the leftovers had frozen into a couple of inches of dirty white grit. We stood at the edge of the parking lot, our feet crunching on the ground as we took small steps back and forth to keep warm.

  “I got an e-mail from Pam,” Kirby said. “I keep wanting to tell her about you and Julia. To explain why you acted the way you did at Christmas.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “I should do it myself.”

  “Do you want her address?”

  I swallowed. “Okay. Yeah.”

  “I’ll give it to you.”

  We stood there, the stars looking extra sharp and clear the way they usually do in winter, my toes going numb. Still I didn’t want to leave.

  “Did you hear about that kid from Deerhaven who fell into the river?” Kirby said.

  I had. He’d fallen through thin ice several miles upriver of our town. He’d frozen to death before they even pulled him out of the water. “Yeah, what about him?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking of him because I was down at the river yesterday, and I really wanted to go onto the ice.”