I'll Be Here

by Autumn Doughton

  That’s the story of how Uncle Danny met Aunt Tilly.

  They got divorced ten years later but Uncle Danny keeps telling the story. He says that fate brought him and Tilly together and then fate broke them apart. If it wasn’t for his divorce he never would have left Topeka, which means that he never would have moved to Key West, which means that he never would have started his own business. Uncle Danny makes beach towels and t-shirts for tourists. He’s happy. Plus, he says that the brisket at that diner was the best brisket he’d ever eaten.

  I guess it’s all about perspective.

  My mom says it’s about going with the flow. Historically, I’m not particularly good at that.

  The best part about the week is eating lunch with Laney and her friends on Thursday and Friday. For forty minutes I zone out and listen to them talk about concerts that they’ve seen, places they’re going to visit on a road trip this summer, classes and classmates that they can’t wait to leave behind. No one gives me a funny look or blatantly ignores me or asks how I’m doing. I guess they all assume I would answer honestly—that I’m sort of a mess.

  How does it feel when I see my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend (yes, they are official) walking down the hallway her hand knitted in the crook of his arm?

  It’s like being sucker-punched. That’s how it feels. I’ll be standing in front of my locker, switching out my heavy morning textbooks for my slimmer Spanish notebook and I’ll be feeling okay, and then Taylor’s face will rise up in front of me like a phoenix and Dustin’s hand will be resting on her lower back. Ugh. Or maybe they’re laughing with their heads tucked together thick as thieves. Or maybe he’s toying absentmindedly with the ends of her fingers the way he used to do with mine.

  It knocks the wind out of me.

  It’s acute. It’s painful. It’s all mine.

  “At least,” Nate points out to me when we pair up again in Sociology, “the mob seems to have died down.”

  He’s right. I haven’t had to deal with much crap since my lockerside confrontation with Taylor. There aren’t as many blatant stares and no one’s tripped me.

  “Woop-di-doo!” I swirl my finger by my head in mock excitement.

  Nate is packing his things. He drops our answers at our teacher’s desk and we step out of the classroom together.

  “I hope that you realize that Taylor orchestrated all that because she was insecure about what went down and she wanted to make sure that you stayed in your place.”

  I give him a wry look. “Taylor—insecure? You, my friend, are thinking of the wrong girl.”

  “Hot body, blonde hair, about yay high,” he holds his hand up to his shoulder, “popcorn for brains?”

  That makes me laugh. “Okay, maybe we’re thinking of the same person.”

  We stop in the courtyard in front of the main office. We both have our next class in the same building but our tentative friendship doesn’t seem to extend beyond the corridor where our Sociology class is located.

  “But, Taylor doesn’t worry about me being in my place. There’s no need. I’m like the sludge she cleans from the bottom of her shoes.”

  “Willow, I’m going to give you a tip. I wouldn’t be so sure that you know everything about Taylor Irwin. She’s Queen Bee around here but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel threatened.”

  “You’re a cute, awesome girl with a lot more class than most of the chicks in this place and just because Dustin and a few of Taylor’s groupies have forgotten that for a nanosecond doesn’t mean that everyone else has.”

  Have I mentioned how much I like Nate?

  ***

  Later that night Laney picks me up in her Dad’s old Nissan SUV. I get into the backseat because her friend Lance has already claimed shotgun. Lance is the group’s token gay friend but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him. He’s all muscle and meat and dark sexy eyes.

  Girls and boys for that matter, if Lance Snyder can’t get your pulse racing then you might as well hang your hat because you’re done. Seriously. I was all clumsy tongue and wide eyes yesterday when Laney first introduced us. According to Laney, he has that effect on most people. She says it’s a common phenomenon known as a Lance Attack.

  We park and pass a group of clucking girls in short skirts on our way into the club. One girl has streaks of bright purple running through her hair and all three of them are wearing lace-up black combat boots. I look down at my jeans and my classic button down and feel incredibly self-conscious, but Laney tugs my hand and we surge forward in and out of the swaying bodies to get to the front of the crowd.

  Lance is much less intimidating tonight ever since he began his hilarious and bitingly accurate running commentary on each and every person that passes by us.

  When he takes my hand and pulls me to the dance floor I am momentarily dazed. But then I decide to just let go because I know that dancing with Lance is just dancing and pretty soon I’m coated in a thin sheen of sweat and our bodies are a tangle of pumping limbs and skin. A tall guy with dark hair and wispy facial hair leans in towards us and whispers something in Lance’s ear. Lance cuts his eyes to me and then tips his head back and laughs out loud.

  “What?” I ask. My stomach tightens. Somehow I know that whatever the guy said is about me.

  Lance turns me into his chest. “That guy just asked me how I got with the most beautiful girl in here.”

  I look around confused and Lance’s smile broadens. “You Willow! He means you.”

  I just shake my head in embarrassment.

  Laney’s dancing next to us with a guy she knows from her job at the music store. Lance leans over and talks into her ear with his hand cupped over his mouth.

  She spins and smiles broadly. “Did you tell him that you score chicks easily because of your manly physique and your in-depth knowledge of silkworm reproductive habits?”

  Lance laughs again.

  I look over Lance’s shoulder but the dancing crowd has sucked my admirer away. “That guy needs to get his eyes checked.”

  Lance’s eyebrows lift. “And you need to look in a mirror girlfriend.”

  I roll my eyes but my cheeks flush with warmth from the compliment.

  Halfway through the first band’s set, Lance gets pulled away from us by a cute boy with longish hair and sleepy eyes.

  Laney and I twist our way through the crowd to order two sodas from the bar. Laney makes me laugh just like she did when we were kids. Around ten o’clock her friend gets on the stage and she’s as good as Laney said she would be. At one point she breaks out a harmonica and does slow version of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK.” It’s bizarre, but it completely works.

  We pull up to my driveway just after midnight. Lance found another way home so I am in the front seat now. The light from the front porch shines through the windshield and creates an eerie line of shadows on our bodies. The whole drive home, we’ve had the music from the car stereo turned up to ear-splitting loud, and now my throat is dry and scratchy from singing and laughing.

  Laney reaches forward and turns the volume knob down so that we are engulfed in a new quiet. Her dark head is resting back against the headrest. “I had fun tonight.”

  It’s a bit of a surprise when I expected to be in mourning, but the truth is that I had fun also.

  “Me too,” I say.

  She fingers her earlobe and turns her head so that she’s looking at me. “You know, I never should have let you not be my friend. It’s not healthy for either of us.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Laney, I don’t think that I exactly gave you a choice. I know that I made it difficult.”

  A wave of seriousness takes over. This part is harder to say and I have to clear my throat twice before continuing. “I d—don’t think that I was really myself back then and I know that I apologized the other day, but I want to make sure you know that even though I acted like a bitch, I missed you. I really did.”

  “I missed you too.” She sighs heavily and thread
s her fingers back through the steering wheel. “And the thing is that I knew that you weren’t being yourself. Willow, your mom…”

  “I can’t blame everything on the stuff with my mom. It’s not really fair.”

  “God. Your mom had cancer. You were afraid that she was going to die.”

  I cringe. Even now, with radiation and chemo long behind us, I hate hearing the word “cancer.” It makes me want to scream and pull on my hair.

  Mom has a clean bill of heath now. Remission. And all the bad stuff is over so I know that I should be able to get my emotions under control, but I can’t seem to figure out how. I keep my head down so that Laney can’t see that I’m tearing up while she continues to talk.

  “I get why things changed and yeah, okay, you should have been a better friend, but I should have too. I should have tried to understand what you were going through. I should have stuck by you even when you were so wrapped up in Dustin that you pushed me away.”

  Ignoring the lump in my throat, I swallow and exhale my breath slowly. Unsure of what to say, I settle on “Thanks.”

  We’re quiet for a bit and I know that I should get out of the car but it’s one of those comfortable quiets that no one wants to break.

  “Do you miss him?”

  I shift in my seat. “Miss isn’t really the right word. It’s like there’s been this huge hole inside of me since we broke up.”

  Laney nods like she gets it. “When Mark and I broke up last year, I felt like I’d been run over by four thousand bicycles.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Bicycles?”

  She shakes her head and this slow smile spreads across her face. “Well, yeah. Or trucks, or steamrollers… or whatever. Pick your mode of transportation.”

  “But I thought that I heard that you broke up with him, not the other way around.”

  “You heard right. But, it doesn’t really matter who technically broke up with who. I still felt like crap.” She clicks her tongue. “He cheated on me.”

  This is news to me.

  “Twice.”

  I wince. “I’m sorry Laney. I had no idea. You two looked so happy.”

  “Yeah well, that’s the way things usually look from a distance.” She is staring at herself in the rearview mirror, wiping away the mascara buildup underneath her eyes.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking…” Her voice is low and strangely resolute. “You should get revenge.”

  “On who? Dustin?”

  “Who else?” She cocks her head to one side and looks at me. Then she sits more upright and raises her finger dramatically. “He will rue the day that he broke your heart.”

  I giggle at her.

  “But I don’t want revenge or even for him to rue the day, I just want things to go back to how they were—how they’re supposed to be.” It’s the first time that I’ve said out loud to another person that I want Dustin back. I’m sure that it’s obvious and all but saying it out loud makes it real and I’ve been scared of that feeling. It seems too sad.

  It’s bad enough to be that depressed girl trying to recover from a crushed heart. Being a depressed girl still struggling to put the pieces of a destroyed and broken thing back together is just plain pathetic.

  Laney studies me in the mixed shadows. “Maybe this is the way things are supposed to be,” she offers.

  I think about that for a minute. Then, out of the nowhere, it pops out of my mouth. “I saw Alex a few days ago. He came into my work to drop some papers off for my boss.”

  I haven’t really let myself think about Alex at all this week and my heart speeds up at the sound of his name coming off my tongue.

  “I guess you could say that it was a little weird since I haven’t seen him in so long.”

  Her eyes bulge. “Willow, are we talking about Alex Faber?”

  “Yep. And he was… He was…” I don’t even have the right words.

  Laney’s staring out the windshield. Her hand finds mine in the dark car and she gives it a little squeeze.

  “Like I said, maybe this is the way things are supposed to be.”

  There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

  ~Nick Hornby

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jake and my mom began dating when I was in the fourth grade. She’d known him for years. He was one of the regulars at the gym where she worked. Back then she was a yoga instructor, not the manager, and Jake took one of her classes almost every day.

  She was impressed with his diligence towards achieving physical and mental discipline and one day she told him this after class. He looked right at her and said, “Impressing you is the whole point of this so I guess I’m doing something right.”

  Then he bowed his head sheepishly and asked the question he’d wanted to ask for months, “Please go out with me?”

  They were married less than a year later.

  In the beginning Jake moved in with us and the three of us lived in our cramped loft apartment down by the beach that had two bedrooms and one very small bathroom. Jake would bring home real estate brochures and leave them in strategic spots—inside the lid of the kettle that my mom used to make her tea, tucked under the cover of the book that she was reading. Mom smiled but stayed firm—she said the view of the bay made up for the small space and that she liked to be cozy with her new family.

  Then, I accidentally walked in on Jake while he was taking a shower. I got an unwanted visual of the male anatomy and a red-faced Jake decided that enough was enough and we needed a bigger place, no more excuses.

  Brooke Faber was our realtor.

  She and mom hit it off right away. It turned out that she was from a small town in Georgia about thirty miles away from where Mom grew up and they even knew some of the same people and places. And she had a son just about my age.

  “What a coincidence!” Mom exclaimed as Brooke opened the door of a three-two with a wooded lot and a hot tub. “We’ll have to get the kids together.”

  Oh my…

  I knew Alex Faber from school.

  He was two grades above me and therefore completely off-limits socially, but that didn’t keep me from looking at him. I’d noticed him way back on the very first day of sixth grade. Somehow my schedule had been messed up and I’d been placed in the wrong math so the teacher sent me down to the office to get it worked out. Alex was leaning against the receptionist’s counter and when I walked in he turned around.

  He grinned at me.

  Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat

  My heart swelled.

  And so did the world.

  He was tall (which I could relate to) and the type of thin and gawky that accompanies adolescents whose bodies grow too tall too fast. His complexion was pale and marked with a few reddened pimples and his electric blue eyes loomed out from his face like two giant blinking moons.

  He was wearing loosely tied sneakers and pinstripe shorts and he had a black leather cord tied around his neck. It held a small stone but I was too far away to be able to see what kind it was.

  He was filling out a form and when he turned back to it to finish, I stared at the back of his head. I decided that it was a nicely shaped head. A perfect head actually. An older boy’s head. He wore his dark hair spiky, sticking out in every direction. I could tell that he used hair gel and to my eleven year old self, that seemed quite sophisticated.

  Alex left the office and I got my class switched and that was pretty much the extent of the interaction. Alex Faber was older and exceptional and I knew that every thought in his head would be profound. What could he possibly say to me?

  What he finally said was: “Try this.” He placed a bright yellow ball in my hands.

  I swallowed.

  “You’re left-handed?”

  I just nodded completely flabbergasted and overwhelmed by his nearness and the fact that he was practically touching me. It was my first time in a bowling alley. The place smelled like
rubber and popcorn and among the florescent lighting and smacking sounds of balls against pins, I felt distinctly out of place.

  His father was behind him with a similar quirky smile. A thin mustache lined his upper lip. “Call me Pete,” he told me with a firm handshake. “Mr. Faber is my father.”

  I didn’t normally like mustachioed men (mustaches are just cheesy, right?), but I liked Pete. I learned that he drew comics for a living. How cool is that?

  Alex and Pete were shocked when I explained that I’d never bowled before. Pete chided my mom and Jake for not “rounding out my education. Alex helped me pick out a six pound lime green ball that Pete said would do me. They explained some of the basics like how I should stand and how to adjust my aim by lining up my thumb with the arrows on the floor.

  I’d always thought of bowling as a crass non-sport that was mainly played by rednecks and losers. But this was different. Alex was far from being a loser and suddenly bowling seemed a rather interesting leisure activity. I pictured Alex and me (along with our parents of course) forming a league with matching shirts and embroidered ball bags.

  All right. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself.

  It was our family against theirs, and considering that a third of our team was me, and the last time that mom and Jake had bowled Kurt Cobain had been alive, we didn’t put up a very competitive fight.

  In between turns, Alex and his father gave me tips on how to become a better bowler.

  “Tilt your torso.”

  “Cross your leg like this.”

  “Put your weight into it.”

  Stuff like that.

  And once our parents were on to their second pitcher of beer, Alex and I were comfortable enough to talk about school—about teachers that we’d both had and the assembly three months earlier when Noah Watkins had gotten up and mooned the teachers. He and Noah were friends and he said that Noah had gotten a three-day suspension and a month of after-school clean-up for the stunt.