by Larry Brill
“I’ve been thinking, wondering actually,” she said. “A while back when we all went on that field trip to the Dairy Barn, you asked everybody if they would go back and change something if they could. But you never answered the question yourself. How about it? Would you?”
“In a heartbeat.” He answered too quickly. Now he was trapped and would have to face the inevitable follow-up.
“So what would you change?”
“Oh, I’d say only a thousand things or so.” He hoped it was satisfyingly evasive. “I’ve thought about some really good ones, but it depends on how far back you want to go to start over.”
“Start over? So make it high school. That’s what you’re doing now, aren’t you You are living high school, trying to start over?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, I’d say skateboards. Spending every lunch in the fountain quad. Always talking about people we knew or things that happened back then. It’s obvious. It’s too obvious. Though I haven’t figured out why you’re playing this game.”
Her eyes were wide and she was neither angry nor dismissive. She was puzzled and waited while he didn’t answer, so he told her how life had been beating him like a redheaded step child for years and confessed that he ran away, needing a place to hide until he could get his act together. “I couldn’t think of any place better. I suppose, if you want to know the truth, high school was some of the best years of my life.”
He dropped his gaze and shuffled one foot. It was too honest for comfort. But, damn her, even when they were teenagers, she was the one girl he ever talked openly with, and she apparently had dusted off that magic. In retrospect, he wished they had spent more time necking and less time talking. It might make it easier to look her in the eye now.
“Did you know I was here when you decided to come back and get this job at the school?”
She was trying to read him. He turned and stroked the fender of her Ford. His telltale face was why he never played poker anymore, a lesson he wished he had learned before dropping all the money he got for Dog Days in Denmark in a card game with the film crew on location in Amsterdam. The monetary hit was almost as painful as what they did with his script. Killing off a major character with a rubber chicken full of poisoned Jell-O was the only element saved from Nate’s version.
“Not entirely, but that’s part of it.” Okay, he thought, that wasn’t so hard. If there was ever going to be a time to fish or cut bait, to put up or shut up, strike while the iron was hot and all the other clichés that ran through his mind, the time was right. She watched him, waiting for more—pleading almost, he imagined—for him to say, “Yes, it was all about you.” He was trying to find the words when Julie unwittingly gave them to him.
“All right. Now you’re back in high school. What are you going to do about it since you have the chance? What’s the big thing you would change?”
“Top of my list, huh?” he said. “Remember when we all went up to that swimming hole on the river on the way to Santa Cruz, that summer after graduation? That last get-together before I left for college?
“You had this new boyfriend and kept talking about what a nice guy he was and how happy you were. So naturally, I said I was happy for you to find someone like that. I remember telling you how much I hoped it worked out.”
“It seems to me you practically said I should marry him. It sounded that way as I remember.”
Nate asked what ever happened to that fellow.
“That was James. I married him.”
“Oh. That guy. Well, the point is, all that stuff, all that crap I said was the last thing I wanted to say. Far from it. I was lying. I didn’t know enough to tell you the truth.”
She seemed unsure, like someone whose canoe had drifted into swift water, who feared there were rapids and rocks ahead. At the same time, she appeared to enjoy seeing him squirm. “Then what did you really want to say back then?”
“I should have done back then something like this: I would stop.”
He did.
“I would look into your eyes.”
He did that, too, putting his hands on her arms and turning Julie to face him.
“And I would say, ‘Jules, if you really love the guy you’re with, if this is the guy for you and forever, then go for it. I want you to be happy and that’s all that matters.’”
“That sounds the same,” Julie said.
“Yeah, but today? Let me say, if your guy ever gives you any doubt, any inkling, anything he does that is reason to think twice, like, oh, I don’t know, cheating on you or just being an asshole in general, call me. I’ll be right there to break his kneecaps. If for any reason at all, you want to consider options, call me. I guess what I’m saying is, I’d gladly be your first option.”
“Oh, Nate. I’m speechless.”
“That’s okay. I talk too much for both of us. Always have.”
She looked away. “I’m not comfortable with this. It is sweet, I’ll admit. Flattering. You know the situation. Can’t we be just friends? Don’t spoil it.”
Nate’s skateboard was at his feet; he pushed it with the toe of his sneaker so that it cleared her car. He followed it, putting his back to her.
“I know the situation better than you imagine.” He was angry now. Life had led him to this place and tricked him to love all over again, only to slap him silly. It wasn’t fair. He had to leave before he said something he would regret. The truth about FesterCheater was on the tip of his tongue. He put one foot on the deck of his board, planning to skate away, but turned and faced her again.
“Since you asked, I didn’t come back so we could be just friends.”
“Nate, I didn’t ask for this.”
“No, you didn’t ask for it,” he said. “You can’t always get what you want. But you just might find you get what you need. Rolling Stones, 1969. Best song featured in The Big Chill.”
She called after him but he didn’t look back. He rolled away with the song in his head. He could see the funeral scene from the movie as it played. How appropriate. And he thought if that was their relationship in the casket, at least this time it died a noble death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Yearbooks and Yearnings
By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, Julie had mopped the kitchen floor even though it didn’t need it. She had folded the clothes, gotten in a brisk walk, bought roasted chicken and a lottery ticket at the Happy Yen Mini Mart and Texas Barbecue, stared at the weeds that were starting to overrun her planter box in the backyard long and hard as if that would wilt them away, spent twenty minutes on the phone with Tiffany and left a voice message for her son, Daniel, in Oregon. Eventually she ran out of tasks she used as excuses to avoid doing the thing she wanted to do most. It had been on her mind since Nate left her in the school parking lot Thursday.
She went to the closet in what used to be Daniel’s bedroom. The right side of the closet, behind the sliding mirrored door that seldom got opened, was stacked with different colored plastic storage bins. White bins were full of useful stuff. Blue ones belonged to the kids. Gray ones, under all the others, held memories. It was in the second bin from the bottom, right where she knew it would be. She pulled it out and walked her high school senior yearbook out to the living room, where she curled up on the couch. She meandered through the pages, spending time with the memories from some more than others. Some, buried deep by the decades, felt fresh again. Others teased her with things she should recall but created only vague and fuzzy feelings. She finally reached a page near the back of the book where the photographer got a camera-about-campus shot of her with Nate, yucking it up with friends on their bench near the fountain. Julie had leaned into Nate and bopped his shoulder with her head over some undoubtedly horrible joke he made. The photograph made it look like they were in love. A cute couple doing what cute couples do.
“Lord, the grief we took over that,” she mumbled.
Seeing that picture again warmed Julie not u
nlike the way she felt as she studied it endlessly when she was seventeen. The photographer got it on an early spring day during one of those brief periods when Julie thought her friendship with Nate was about to go to the next level. Silly girl.
Then she finally got it. Seeing that picture again made her feel something she had forgotten, the feeling Nate was chasing. Sure, if she could make every day give her the kind of innocent joy they shared when that photo was snapped, Julie would want to go back and relive those days, too. She almost made it, too, near the fountain after Popcorn Thursday when their hands touched as they walked. The feeling raised her spirits then, and it was stronger as she sat there with the yearbook in her lap. She laid gentle fingertips on the picture. They were a cute couple.
Nearly an hour later, the doorbell rousted her from a dream. She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep, but she woke on the sofa with the yearbook open and face down on her chest. She snapped it shut as she rose. That had to be Russell at the front door, and even though it was ridiculous to think he’d give the picture a second thought if he recognized them, she jumped up with a twinge of embarrassment, the kind that comes with discovering you left a public restroom dragging a foot of toilet paper stuck to the heel of your shoe. Guilt, maybe? Not at all, and she proved it to herself by leaving the book out on the coffee table instead of tucking it on a shelf.
Any vague sense of guilt evaporated when Carla breezed past her after she opened the door.
“You missed a great game last night. We only lost by three touchdowns this week.”
“Sounds like an improvement, but I guess Coach Garcia isn’t going to do any better than Coach Miles.” She leaned out the door and scanned the street. Russell’s SUV wasn’t there. He had promised her that he’d stop by that afternoon. There wasn’t much of the afternoon left.
“You seem healthy. Sound healthy. So what did you do on your sick day yesterday? It wasn’t a sudden case of the flu. Have you got any iced tea?”
“I just needed a mental health day,” Julie said. “I spent some time with Mom, finally straightened out my closet and took some clothes to Goodwill, ran errands, went to the mall. The usual things.”
“Did you buy anything?”
Julie shook her head, so naturally Carla asked how long she spent at the mall.
“A couple of hours, three, maybe.” She finally admitted most of that time was browsing with no purpose, wandering and thinking. “Then I came home and I didn’t do much of anything after that.”
They carried glasses of iced tea back to the living room, where they sat facing each other from the opposite armrests of the sofa. “What’s going on?”
So she told Carla about what had happened and where they ended with Nate in the school parking lot on Thursday. “When I said it was a ‘mental health’ day, I thought it was the best way to avoid him while I sorted things out.”
“It’s not like you to avoid a good tussle. Especially when you’re right.”
But being right wasn’t very satisfying, and after a restless night floating between the comforting nostalgia Nate inspired and annoyance that, no matter how good his intentions were, he might compromise her happiness with Russell, she called in sick Friday morning.
“So let me get this straight. Tiffany calls on Thursday, and you’re talking. She says your mom isn’t taking her medications again and you’re worried about that. She mentions that Joe left for Texas to look at houses. Okay. Now you’re feeling down about that. But instead of coming to me, your best friend, you go spend the afternoon with Nate at his little movie thing. I should be insulted.”
“Yes, you should, but that doesn’t work because you are impervious to insults. I’ve tried,” she said between sips. “But I’ve cried on your shoulder enough. And I wasn’t feeling all that bad. You’ve seen what he’s like, so easygoing and upbeat; I just thought I could use a little Nate Prozac.”
“Prozac, huh?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. You’re the one who says he rubs off on people.”
“And it worked?”
She nodded. “That may be part of the problem now. I was in a bad mood, and I couldn’t think of anybody better to cheer me up. He has to stop making me feel good.”
“That’s bad?”
“It is if it comes between us. Russell and me.”
“Just an observation; it’s not working, Jules.”
Her defenses were mounting, but her immediate comeback disappeared, derailed by the snide way Carla used the nickname Nate had given her. No one else called her that. “Jules? Where did you get that? No, I know where you got it. You’ve been talking with Nate? Tell me you haven’t been talking to Nate.”
“I haven’t been talking to Nate.”
“You’re lying.”
“Of course I’m lying. You told me to, so I did.” Carla raised her eyebrows while simultaneously biting her lower lip. “That’s what he called you when he stopped by my classroom yesterday asking about you. It must have stuck in my head. Kind of catchy. I like it. Jules. Jules. Can I call you that, too?”
She’d been had. Big-time. “You mean you came here knowing the whole story?”
“Not at all.” Carla kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the coffee table, sliding the yearbook to one side to make room. “Nate didn’t say anything. He noticed you weren’t at school and asked if I knew about it and if I knew why. That’s all. Well, that and the part about having feelings for you and coming to me, as your best friend on whose shoulders you wouldn’t bother crying, looking for advice on what you’re thinking and what he should do about it.
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m kidding.” She raised both palms. “No, I know, you told me to say it; I’m not kidding. Come on, that’s what we do, or used to do when we were young and stupid and in love. When in doubt, ask the best friend and swear them to secrecy that you asked.”
“But you’re telling me now, so you’re not keeping the secret.”
“Yeah, I’ve always been bad about that, huh? At least he noticed you were gone. For the record, Jules, your fiancé, who should, didn’t. At the football game? He was surprised you weren’t there, and wasn’t even aware you had taken the day off. Speaking of, where is he today?”
“He’ll be here any minute. They had a softball game this morning, but I wasn’t up to going.”
“Avoiding him, too?”
“No.” Maybe a little, she thought.
Carla had been toeing the yearbook on the table. She bolted and leaned forward. “Whoa. What’s this?” She flipped it open with a smirk that was somewhere between a tsk and you’ve got to be kidding me. She said, “I suppose this is a little more of that Prozac you were talking about.”
She moved next to Carla as she thumbed the pages straight to the back, where the class pictures were.
“Oh. My. God. Is this really you? What was that, a pixie cut? Your hair was so short.”
Julie hated that picture with the short, short cut that seemed like a good idea at the time. It was an act of rebellion, she said. Her father hated it and she had cut it after he grounded her for getting a C in science. Everyone tagged Julie as one of the smart girls in school, most likely to succeed and least likely to have a steady boyfriend. Marked for life, why fight it? At the time, she thought it made her stand out as smart and, she hoped, sassy.
Carla pointed to another girl. Naturally it was the girl voted most popular in the class, big hair, movie star smile and all. “We called that Texas hair when I was growing up down there.”
“You grew up in Idaho.”
“Yeah, but the longest summer of my life was the week I spent with my grandparents in Dallas.”
Carla pointed to a face on the opposite page. “Now this. This is the real giggle. Nate had twice as much hair as you did. Look at that. First chance I get, I’m going to scan that picture and make up a most-wanted poster for the office.”
“He was kind of cute, wasn’t he?” Julie observed.
&nb
sp; “Still is. But who asked me?”
Julie took the yearbook and thumbed a few more pages. “Look at this one. Go ahead and laugh all you want.” She turned it around for Carla and poked at a picture that took up a full quarter of the page.
“Is that really you? Wow. What ever happened to that girl?” Carla asked.
“Me?” First Nate and then Carla. Then Nate again. Was something so out of sorts that everyone kept asking that question?
“That’s you in the psychedelic angel outfit, right?”
Carla spun the yearbook back to Julie and pointed at Julie, wearing wings and a tie-dyed caftan, dancing through one of the numbers from the spring play with Gina Fernandez and Wendy Davis. All the pestering lately had Julie wondering what had become of that girl, too. “It was the spring play. Nate and I played opposite each other as a pair of angels.”
“Aw. That’s cute.”
Her own sixteen-year-old face smiled up at her from the page, and she felt a warm blush. “We even had a kissing scene.” That was when Julie practically, no, actually, threw herself at him. Like the rest of their relationship, it derailed before they got up to speed. Nate had said he had a thousand different points in their lives that he would gladly go back and relive. Looking at that picture now, she understood. This would be one of hers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Almost Heaven
It was in March of their senior year, rehearsing for the spring play, that they reached “almost heaven,” as Nate teased her afterwards. It was awkward but thrilling at the time, and laughable once Julie got older, wiser and sex was no longer a mystery.
Mr. Thatcher wrote a play that combined elements of the movies Heaven Can Wait, It’s a Wonderful Life and Jaws. The gist being that two angels, played by Nate Evans and Julie Cooper, were sent down to earth to redeem the life of a morally bankrupt fisherman before he got chomped by a great white shark.
The Saturday two weeks before the performance, Nate rode his bike to her house to rehearse. The angels, Roy and Rita, spent most of the play bickering like an old married couple over how best to accomplish their mission. It was Nate who convinced Mr. Thatcher to rewrite the end of the play so that when the feuding angels kissed and made up, they shared a real kiss. Not a big deal on stage, but in Julie’s living room that Saturday, with her father off on a weekend motorcycle ride with the doctors and lawyers that made up his “biker gang,” her mother doing volunteer work at O’Connor Hospital, and the house to themselves, it became something much more for a couple of teenagers inebriated by raging hormones. They worked comfortably through the first three acts; it was that final scene, the one that ended with the kiss, where they both pulled back on the first try as if doused with a bucket of cold bashfulness.
