Deja vu All Over Again

by Larry Brill

  Nate had always been easygoing, quick with a smile or a joke, and she suspected it wouldn’t be long before he was the new best friend of everybody who passed through the faculty lounge. That was Nate. As for her, if wrinkles were a way to keep score, she was beating him by a mile. He must have had it easy out there in the real world. She was happy for him. She had commandeered a long table in the faculty lounge a few days earlier to collate the latest three-page edict from the district that she would distribute to the teachers when Seth Naylor got him talking about his career in Hollywood. She got the pages out of order as she eavesdropped and found herself comparing Nate’s life to her own. He didn’t brag. He didn’t need to because his life seemed glamorous and successful. Seeing him again, especially here at their old high school, made it obvious she hadn’t progressed beyond the campus they shared long ago.

  Oh, and he was single and unattached. As if that mattered. It did not, though she found it intriguing. When she asked, he admitted he hadn’t been immune to divorce, but who was these days? It was a twenty-year marriage; he had told her that much but little else.

  “I think these belong to you.” She handed him the two notecards he had planted in her mail slot and sat down across from him at the table.

  “How long did it take for you to realize it was me?”

  “When I saw you in Russell’s office. Maybe it didn’t sink in until the next day. The first day I was so surprised to see you again and forgot about the note. But when you left another one this morning, there wasn’t any doubt. And that was before Carla saw you and ratted you out.”

  “The munchkin? Busted. She walked in but I thought I got away with it. I thought I was sneakier than that.”

  “You used to be. But it did make me think of the first time you did it. I assume that’s what you were trying to do.”

  Nate took the card, held it to his temple and closed his eyes. “Thirty-two, thirty-eight, fourteen. That was the combination on your locker our freshman year when I started sneaking notes in there for you to find.”

  Holy moly. “You remember the combination number? After all these years?”

  “Nah. I made that part up.”

  She laughed. Yes, that would be too weird, but she had fallen for it.

  “You caught me a lot quicker this time. I would have felt like an ass if you didn’t make the connection to high school.”

  Nate’s easy laughter drew her into reminiscing along with him about the close group of friends they had shared this corner of the campus with, friends who scattered after college and were now only faces familiar from their high school yearbook. It was a kind of sentimental, revisionist history that would lead you to think only good things happened back then. The concrete reflected daylight in a way that, today at least, was like a warm, white cocoon that comforted her.

  “I’m developing a real bad habit,” Nate said. “I’ve been walking over to the Dairy Barn every day this week, the way we used to do with Meg and Ben and everybody. Remember that? Hard to believe it’s still there. And you can still smell the grease in the air, so thick you can practically wear it home.”

  “Funny. It’s so close and yet I never think to stop by these days.”

  “Then come with me. We’ll make it a field trip or something like that.”

  “Maybe we could do that sometime,” she said. Then she asked him what brought him back home, generally, and to a teaching job at Mt. Hamilton High specifically.

  For the first time, she saw his smile fade, though he didn’t avert his gaze and there was something in his eyes she couldn’t define. Disappointment? He thumbed the penny he had taped to the card in her mail slot that morning. Now he peeled it off and pinched it. “It’s simple. I needed a change. Look around you here,” he said as he waved his hand. “Does it get any better than this?” Then the corners of his mouth turned up, pushing the wrinkles at his eyes so that his entire face smiled at her. He held up the coin. A penny for your thoughts. He was playing a game, a mild version of Truth Or Dare that he invented. It had been their private game, played as teenagers when they were alone and deep into long, rambling conversations after a date or on a walk home from school. Now it was her turn. He handed her the penny.

  “I can’t tell anymore. I came back, oh, more than a dozen years ago for the job, and some days it feels like this is all I know. It may be all I’ll ever know.” She said it as she gazed at the coin in her hand. Nate took it back and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger.

  “That’s not so bad if the memories are good. I love this place.” He never took his eyes off her and handed the coin back.

  “We had some good times,” she said. “But I was never as enamored with high school as you seem to be. To be honest, I just don’t think about those days that much. Only now and again.”

  She expected a joke, a dash of humor in case he was disappointed in some way. When he didn’t pop off right away, she held the penny between them. Then she placed it in his palm. Your turn.

  Nate patted the back of her hand and stood up. “I would bet there are more good memories than you remember remembering.” He beckoned her to walk with him. He led her around the edge of the fountain. He told Julie he was thinking about how they dyed the water red after beating Piedmont in football their junior year.

  “Oh, Lord. Not that.” Although it hadn’t crossed her mind since leaving high school, it was suddenly, surprisingly vivid now.

  “Everybody was standing around; you were at this edge, I think. I grabbed you and threatened to throw you in.”

  She remembered how everyone had egged him on and how he’d leaned her over. “I almost lost my balance.”

  “But I had you tight. Pulled you back and let you get away.”

  “Let me? I shoved you and you fell backwards into the water.”

  “I let you get away with that, too. But then when you saw the principal, Mr.… Mr.…”

  “Conklin.”

  Nate gave her a sideways glance and winked. “Yeah. Conklin. Anyway, what I remember most was when you saw Mr. Conklin coming, you jumped in after me. And there we were, both flat on our backs in water up to our ears.”

  She watched the water stream from the nozzle in the center. It was a fun memory for sure. When she raised her head, his eyes were twinkling with his head tilted slightly to one side. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m wondering… What ever happened to that girl? The girl in the fountain?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Fountain Girl. Where is she today?”

  She wasn’t sure how to answer. What did he want her to say? Was he disappointed in her? Maybe, and that was unsettling. “The usual place kids go, adulthood. She got married and had a family. Lost a husband. Raised the kids alone because what else could you do? Fountain Girl grew up.”

  Nate sighed, understanding yet amused. “You did a great job of it. But Fountain Boy? Fountain Boy, not so much. He’ll always be a kid for better or worse.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Day at the Fair

  By Sunday afternoon, the boy and girl were in trouble. The first plot twist, a roadblock for their relationship, happened right on schedule, right around page twenty of Mulligan, the script Nate was working on, the one inspired by a spark from Eppie, and one that had badgered him with daydreams and nightmares ever since. Write me! He had floated the story to his agent back in June.

  An old fart, obsessed with the past, moves back home with his ditsy hippie parents and tries to recreate his high school days in order to woo the girl who got away.

  His agent, Jack Hewitt, after ignoring the first three emails Nate sent with the idea and a few details, was unimpressed but encouraged him to keep at it until he came up with something decent. “Maybe it’ll grow on me. Send me more if you get around to it.”

  Unfortunately, “more” was in short supply. He was too preoccupied with the reality of living the story to make up some fictional plot development in what
would be the first act if he ever got serious about fleshing out a script.

  It was Eppie who told him Julie was widowed, available and working at their high school. As head of the district’s HR department, she pulled strings to help him land the job there. He thought he’d be looking forward to a date with Julie by now, but life bitch-slapped him again. How else could he explain her getting engaged only one week, one fucking week, before he arrived on campus to commence wooing? It was so ridiculously cliché he couldn’t have scripted it better. So that’s what he did.

  He finished typing the scene where the girl he named Julie flashed her engagement ring at the boy and gushed about how perfect her fiancé was, how perfect their love was and how perfect their future would be together. Then he attached the latest pages to an email back to Jack. Of course, none of the gushing had really happened, but he was disappointed that his chance to rekindle something with Julie was snuffed out immediately, before he could even find out if there was a reason to try. At least he had answered that nagging question of what if he had a second chance. So now he was going to write it the way he felt, and he felt like shit. That little chip of diamond on her hand taunted him each time their paths crossed.

  It didn’t help that he had wasted his Saturday evening entertaining his former grade school teacher, Mrs. Garner, and her single daughter, Edith, at his mother’s blind date setup. Edith had pinged him with a text message Sunday morning suggesting they arrange a date sans parents because it was obvious they had so much in common. The girl was trying too hard, and that was just one issue. Nate figured the only thing they had in common was divorce. She went on and on about her ex’s faults, and Edith listed every one of them for Nate over the course of drinks before dinner, dinner, dessert, a post-dessert nightcap and well past the time any reasonable guest would have left. By the end of the night, he pitied the husband, thought highly of him for choosing divorce over homicide and understood why she was still single.

  When his mother asked how it went, he had a pat answer:

  “Edith’s not the right girl for me.”

  But that begged the question, who was the right girl? He flopped down across his bed and stared up at the poster of Raquel Welch in her prehistoric lion-skin bikini. He loved eBay. It had been a snap to find that poster again and put it up on the ceiling where it belonged. So, too, Luke Skywalker, who brandished his lightsaber on the wall near his desk. Getting his bedroom back to the 1970s was complete. His mother had unearthed boxes of junk he hadn’t thought about in years. He picked the best memories and placed them strategically about the room. It occurred to him that if he indeed did find the right girl now, he couldn’t bring her back here for a night of nookie. There was no way to explain living at home at his age to a woman interested enough in spending the night, let alone doing it under Raquel’s critical eye.

  In his disappointment, it struck him that while Julie wasn’t available, she might, just might, be the only woman out there who would understand him enough to cut him slack on that front.

  Later that afternoon, Nate sat in the shade of a tree at the county fairgrounds ignoring the corn dog in one hand and sipping a Coke from the other.

  “What do you think about soul mates?” he asked. “I mean, do they exist? Does anyone really have one?”

  “If they are the real deal, then why the hell did we invent divorce? Answer that one.” Woody, with his cowboy hat tipped low over his brow, sat back against the trunk of the tree keeping an eye on his bandmates as they set up their equipment on the music stage. Woody Wood and the Peckerheads! Live at the Santa Clara County Fair! They had gotten a three-day gig.

  Nate wrapped the nibbled-on corn dog in a paper napkin and set it aside for the next trash can he found. “What if you were soul mates with somebody, except she didn’t know it?”

  Eppie Johnson sat in her wheelchair on his left. “It looks like she didn’t get the memo,” she said. “Sorry about that, Evans. When I told you how to find her, I didn’t know Cooper was engaged.”

  “How could you? It’s a new wrinkle.”

  When Nate called her for a lunch date or drinks, hoping to talk through his discovery of Julie’s relationship with their principal, she suggested Sunday evening, but Nate had already promised Woody he would hit the county fair to catch their act.

  “Fine.” She told him to meet her there. “We’ve been promising my youngest grandkid we’d take her. The hubby can keep an eye on the kids.”

  Now, he found himself sitting between the two people in his life he could turn to for advice. Woody and Eppie were both full of bullshit, but their BS usually carried more than a grain of truth, and they hit it off immediately. Shadows were getting long as the three of them sat across from the music stage on the edge of the livestock arena. Bells clanged and the sound of fun and games rode the breeze from the carnival midway in the distance.

  “I got to thinking earlier today,” Nate told them. “What if you have a soul mate but she had a soul mate of her own? Somebody different.”

  “Now you’re talking. A soul mate ménage à tois. Sounds kinky. I like it,” Woody said.

  “Forget I said anything.”

  “Done. This is getting way too deep for me anyway.”

  Nate had never shared with anyone the dream, or the déjà vu that hit him the first time he saw Julie as a six-year-old. Now it had returned, stronger in some ways, triggered by seeing Julie on campus that first day back. He hated the cliché that his heart skipped a beat when he saw her, but something squeezed him inside. It was her smile that brought back the memory of his first grade déjà vu that refused to let go of him. Later, walking across campus together on their way to the new teacher orientation felt as if they hadn’t grown up after all. If that wasn’t soul-mateness, what was?

  “But now she’s getting married and I’m screwed.”

  They agreed it was a big problem. “Though not insurmountable, I suppose,” Eppie said.

  “She’s not married yet,” Woody added.

  Not yet. It was technically true, but it was too close for comfort. His comfort. “She wouldn’t be marrying the guy if she doesn’t love him, right? So I have no shot. Not now.”

  Nate tapped his ring finger for Woody’s sake and his friend nodded. Eppie, who didn’t know the history of Nate’s messy divorce and his aversion to diamond adorned married women, missed the sign.

  That was his rule. He couldn’t meddle no matter what because a guy didn’t steal another guy’s gal and a gal didn’t steal another gal’s guy, marriage or not. That shit just wasn’t right.

  Woody said, “Looks like y’all have a choice here. Either hang around, stand in line, wait your turn and hope this engagement goes south. Or…”

  “Or what?” Eppie asked.

  “I know a guy named Guido. We could arrange to have Mr. Principal disappear. Dump the body in the bay, in the muck around Alviso. You take him out of the picture and you move to the front of the line.”

  Woody winked at him. It was a cheap shot between friends. Nate knew he deserved it. Guido. It was a character out of a third-rate mob movie and one, not coincidentally, he wrote. The Mob and the Mongoose wasn’t even third-rate good, but he’d paid for his honeymoon with the option money he got selling it to Random Capers Productions. The studio never bothered to make the movie, and Woody joked that they must have buried the screenplay with Jimmy Hoffa’s body. Neither had been seen since.

  “So I’m wasting my time?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You’re writing again. That’s a good thing. Stick with it. If nothing else, you’ll get a story to sell out of it. That’s not so bad.” Woody stretched and stood. His joints creaked and cracked and he uttered a soft “ooph.” He leaned an elbow against the tree. “You and I know the best stuff comes from here,” he said, tapping two fingers over his heart. “This is the one that’ll get y’all back in the saddle again. Put it to good use, partner.”

  “Is he a real cowboy?” Eppie asked when Woody went off to supervise the
Peckerheads’ setup crew. That crew was all of the band members but Woody.

  “Not even. But he talks a good game.”

  Eppie checked her watch and suggested they start for the opposite side of the carnival midway, where her husband would be herding the three grandchildren through all of the rides.

  Nate pushed her wheelchair across the ruts in the lawn until they reached a solid gravel path that led to the carnival midway. At that point she waved him away. She still wanted little help and zero pity. The crowd, or lack thereof, disappointed him. It was smaller and less engaged than he remembered. Even in her wheelchair, Eppie was able to dodge most of the foot traffic. He lurched, bumped by a couple of teenagers running along the midway. They were laughing, the boy tugging the girl while she hopped along behind him struggling to adjust one of her sandals.

  “Sorry, mister,” the boy said when he stopped. He put his arms around the girl’s waist as she leaned against him and finally got her footwear in place. She looked up, he looked down, and they shared the cutest giggle. A nice kid, the boy waved another apology and looked at him as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” No complaints, for sure.

  Enjoy it while you can, kids, he thought as they bounded away.

  Eppie asked about the story Woody mentioned and how it was coming along.

  “It’s not going anywhere right now. It started well; living at home, retro-fitting the bedroom, going to school every day and all that, it’s about as close to making things the way things used to be as I could have dreamed up. Having Julie around makes a big difference. I think it’s having someone from that same little slice of my life that makes it feel like I’ve gone back in time without really going back in time.”

  “Especially when that person is Cooper.” She raised her hand and studied her fingernails, a nonchalantly obvious way to let him know she had his number.

  “And I’ve got you to rag on my ass about her, just like before. So it couldn’t be better.” He swatted the air near her arm, a backhanded rebuke. Then he told her about sitting with Julie next to the fountain at lunch where the bench that had been “their bench” used to be. “Got these iron picnic tables around the quad now, no character at all and you can’t carve your initials in them.” He talked about walking across the campus with her where he could only imagine holding her hand with their fingers interlocked. “But since that part of the story ain’t gonna happen, I guess I’ll make something up.” But his heart wasn’t in it.