“Hey,” I said back. Everything about him was moving like the parts in an antique clock, gears winding and rolling to produce a chime.
“You look nice.”
Robin Sipe half turned to stare, then swiveled back around in her seat.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m probably not supposed to say that, but you do.”
“Um … thanks,” I said. Was he teasing me?
And then, out of the blue, like this statement would come as no surprise, he added, “I want to take you somewhere.”
I didn’t answer him. I think I was in shock. Was he asking me out?
“Juliet?” he said.
“Yes?” I hadn’t realized he knew my name.
“Yes what?”
But I didn’t know what. And Mr. Hannihan was starting the class, deliberately staring at Lucas, so I turned to face the front of the room.
Mr. Hannihan was a new teacher that year. He’d quit his old job three years before so he could sail around the world, but had instead spent the time and money he’d allotted for the adventure making repairs to his boat. All you had to do now to get him off the subject of physics was ask the smallest question about sailing. The boat and the trip he never got to take were the great unrequited loves of his life, and he could not leave them alone.
When the bell finally rang, Lucas was standing at my side. “I’ll meet you at your locker after seventh period,” he said. I didn’t have a chance to reply before he was gone. What was he doing? What did he want? What would I tell Rosemary? Did he even know where my locker was?
Lucas did know where my locker was. When the last bell rang, he was waiting there for me. He looked nervous, opening and closing his right hand as if his fingers had fallen asleep. I was nervous too. I kept passing the numbers on my combination lock.
“I—” I started.
He interrupted, “I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know you have debate in half an hour.” I did. “I just want to take you somewhere before that.”
“Close by?”
“It’s in the gym.” He smiled a cocky, I’m-on-the-hockey-team smile. “You can’t say no to the gym, can you?”
He was wrong, though. I could say no. Only I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it as I headed out of the main school building and toward the gym.
We entered the gym through the trophy room as usual, but instead of continuing to the locker rooms and the basketball court, Lucas pointed to a door marked EXIT: ALARM WILL SOUND. I opened the door (no alarm sounded) to find a set of stairs. As we started to climb in the semidarkness, Lucas took my hand. I felt a charge pass into my palm. I didn’t know if I liked the feeling of his hand holding mine or if it terrified me. Maybe both. I was aware of Lucas’s clean, soapy smell and something else too, something musky underneath that.
The stairs terminated at another mysterious door, which opened onto …
The roof!
Pebble-topped and wide as a beach. So much sky. I felt like one of those people in an Old West wagon train who emerge from a mountain pass to find prairie stretching endlessly before them.
“I can’t believe this,” I said, meaning I couldn’t believe that the doors weren’t locked, the alarms weren’t ringing, no one had stopped us. And also? The whole open-space concept was making me feel the urge to do cartwheels.
“I know,” Lucas said, his thin lips spreading into something approaching a smile. He knew what? About the cartwheels? About how I was feeling just then? How could he?
He scratched a cheek absentmindedly, and I caught myself thinking that his cheekbone was really lovely, the way it jutted out in just the right way. Had I ever thought Lucas was good-looking before, or was it just coming to me?
I moved away from him, walking to the edge of the roof, which was surrounded by a wall about three feet high. Lucas tugged on my hand, and I knelt in case someone happened to look up. It was just after dismissal. There were buses lined up at the main building, and kids were streaming into them. Other kids and the few teachers who weren’t staying after were pulling their cars out of the lot. The kids with sports commitments were meandering toward the gym. “There’s Rosemary,” I said.
Even seen from two stories above, Rosemary was Rosemary. Her stride long and assured, she was checking her nails, and it suddenly occurred to me that if Rosemary had been taken up to the roof by a guy she barely knew, she would find out why. She would ask a direct question.
“So,” I said. “What are we doing up here?”
Lucas’s smile widened, as if he’d expected me to ask. As if the question were part of a game. “You don’t remember?” he said.
“No?” I said. “Am I supposed to?”
“You don’t remember being up here with me before?”
“No.” I didn’t like the question. “Why, should I?”
He didn’t say anything, just continued to smile at me, like he was waiting for my brain to work its way around to a different answer. “I just hoped you would,” he said at last. “That’s all.”
I was completely at a loss. “Do you remember?”
“Yeah,” he said. He took a step toward me. “I do, and it’s not a memory I’m likely to soon forget.”
I was aware of everything I was starting to like about him. The outline of his shoulders beneath his shirt. The look in his eyes that told me he cared about what I thought.
But I didn’t like that step he’d just taken toward me. It made me think about how I was alone up here with him. How no one knew where we were. How no one could see us.
“Lucas,” I said. “You’re starting to freak me out.”
I’d hoped that admitting it out loud would dispel the feeling. It didn’t. I shivered. A wave of fear rolled over me, the kind that makes you run up the stairs at a sprint when you’re home alone in case a strange man is out on your lawn. Knowing the fear is irrational does nothing to diminish its intensity.
“You don’t remember,” Lucas said, confirming now, giving me one more chance to change my mind. Was this a game? Was this some kind of a joke at my expense?
He took another step in my direction.
“I have to go,” I said. I did this weird thing where I raised my hands to my sides, as if I couldn’t decide between waving goodbye and assuming a defensive position. I think I ended up looking like a flightless bird, flapping ineffectual wings.
I started walking to the bulkhead. Fast. Lucas caught up to me in time to open the door. We went down the stairs together, through the trophy room, and back outside without speaking. He didn’t take my hand, and I didn’t want him to. But as we moved back into the stream of kids, there was something about the way he lifted his chin that made me wonder if he was sad. Had I done something to hurt him?
He reached out a hand then and patted me on the shoulder. I couldn’t tell if it was condescending or an effort to comfort me. “I gotta go,” I said, but it was Lucas who turned away first.
That night, my mom set out the special dishes we used for take-out sushi—ceramic painted to look like bamboo. On sushi nights, we always got the same things—the maki platter, tuna sashimi, and a seaweed salad. We shared all three and split a spicy ginger ale, which we watered down with seltzer.
Sometime recently I’d started to worry that my mom and I were too compatible. I worried I was going to end up living at home forever, watching Lifetime movies and playing cards with her and her best friend, Valerie. Whenever I told Rosemary this, she gave me a look like I was an idiot and said, “You don’t do either of those things now.”
Which was true. And neither did my mom. But she might as well have. She and Valerie went to plays and concerts and out to dinner. On weeknights, my mom sat on her pretty white couch knitting and watching TV, or drinking a glass of wine and flipping through the New Yorker or Architectural Digest, while I trundled up to my room to spread out with my homework. We both wore slippers.
But up on the roof with Lucas, there had been no room for cozy slipp
ers and known routines. He’d scared me. He wanted something from me, and I didn’t know what. I didn’t know if he knew either.
“What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?” I asked Mom.
“Dangerous, my goodness,” she said, chuckling as she licked a grain of rice off the end of her chopstick. My mom started dyeing her hair at the first sign of gray, and she has gone increasingly lighter—it’s now so blond it’s almost white. To keep from looking too washed out, she wears a good amount of mascara and eyeliner, and she looks great, especially when she purses her lips and you can see the light of a joke in her eye.
“Seriously,” I said. The demand came out too strong. My mom’s tiny, like a bird—I get my height and my thick hair from my dad—and sometimes I felt like a giant, stomping around in a house built for dolls, demanding she be serious and decide things.
“Okay,” she said. “Danger.” Then she laughed again. “I’m sorry, Juliet. I hope you won’t be disappointed that I haven’t led a very dangerous life.”
“There must have been something.” In my head, I was flashing through images of the way Lucas had half smiled at me, the sad slump of his shoulders as we left the roof. “Didn’t you ride in a car without a seat belt at least once?” I pushed. “What about when you were traveling?” Right after college, my mom traveled a lot. She was going to get a PhD in art history, but she met my dad and had me, and then they got divorced and he moved to California, so she got a job at a museum doing fund-raising. “There must have been something.”
“I was stopped by border patrol going into Pakistan,” she said. “If you want to count that.”
“Border patrol?” I squawked. “Pakistan?” I knew my mom had traveled in the Middle East with her college boyfriend after graduation, but I hadn’t heard about this part of the trip. “I think that counts.”
“It sounds more dangerous than it was, I can tell you. Really, it was a formality.”
“Were you driving?”
“No!” she said, shocked, as if she’d only have gone on a tour bus with representatives of the US embassy on board. “Jody was driving.”
One of the things that might be unique to having a single mom is knowing the names of all her ex-boyfriends. Even though I don’t think she’d had a boyfriend since she and my dad split up, her old boyfriends came up with some frequency, just like the dogs she had when she was a kid. (We never had dogs—too messy.) “Were there soldiers?”
“Of course,” my mom said, as if I’d asked if there was going to be seaweed salad in our sushi order. “One of the things you see when you travel anywhere outside the US is guns in the hands of soldiers and guards. Even in Italy, it’s kind of shocking how you’ll be walking into the Vatican and you’ll pass some twenty-year-old in a ridiculous uniform carrying an AK-47.”
“And in Pakistan? What happened?”
“Well, Juliet, it’s hard to remember all the details.”
“Come on!”
“Okay, the soldiers had machine guns, and they probably weren’t much older than you.”
We both paused to digest that information. I thought about Lucas’s dog tags.
“They made Jody get out of the car, but I stayed inside. I think they were afraid of me, even though I was dressed very modestly. Women in Pakistan at the time were generally not supposed to show any skin.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Jody gave them some money. It was my idea, actually. I leaned out the car window and passed him the cash Grandma Kay had instructed me to carry in my shoe. The soldiers laughed at Jody—I guess a man who lets a woman bail him out is pretty unusual. But they let us go on our way.”
“That was it?”
“That was it.”
My mom always tells stories about her past the same way—as if there were no hard parts, nothing scary, no danger. Your father and I decided to part ways and now he lives in California and you see him only once a year—tra-la! It’s been my dream in life to get a PhD in art history, but because of the timing of your birth and the divorce, I raise money so other people can do the work I always wanted to do—zippee-doo! I got held at gunpoint at a border crossing in Pakistan, where I could easily have been shot—aw, fiddlesticks!
“But what did it feel like?” I pressed. I was thinking about the moment when Lucas said You don’t remember being up here with me before? He’d asked the question like it was a code, our secret password, like we were spies, and it was my turn to reveal the answer. But I hadn’t been to the roof with him before. And why did he look at me all the time like he was in on a secret and he half suspected I was in on it too?
“Was the danger—I don’t know … kind of bonding?” I asked. “Did you feel closer to Jody after?” My mom was looking at me quizzically now. “Wasn’t it at least a little bit exciting?”
I guess I wanted her to say “Yes, danger is exciting.” I wanted her to explain to me why, after nearly running from Lucas on the roof, all I could think about now was going back.
Mom delicately dipped her tuna in soy sauce. “What can I tell you?” she said. “As soon as we had rounded the next bend, Jody got out of the car and threw up on the side of the road. I was okay, but he was really spooked. We cut the trip short.”
“He was really that scared?”
“They made him kneel down in the dirt while they went through his papers. He thought he was about to get shot.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. That’s different.”
“Yes,” said my mom, neatly popping the tuna into her mouth. “Danger—real danger—isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’m sorry I freaked you out.”
Lucas was leaning across the desk again, smiling in a way that brought back the cartwheel feeling I’d had on the roof and chalked up to wide-open space.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Really?” His clear blue eyes projected a look of such innocence I felt myself wondering how I’d ever thought it possible to be afraid with him. He jiggled his pen, then spun it around a few times for good measure. Then the pen stopped moving. His Adam’s apple jogged up and down one time. His eyes, looking at me, were still.
“Why did you say those things?” I asked. “We’ve never been up on the roof together before.”
Robin Sipe, intrepid girl reporter, shifted in her seat, so I knew she was listening. I must have turned in response to her, a gesture Lucas recognized. Without moving his head, he shifted his eyes to Robin’s back, then to me again. He held up a finger, jotted down a note, and passed it to me just as Mr. Hannihan was starting the class.
That was the first time I saw Lucas’s handwriting. It was horrendous, barely legible—all tiny, sharp angles and letters so squeezed you could barely tell the series of scratches formed words. The note read:
Is your mom out tonight? Can I come talk to you?
My mom was always out on Tuesdays. Tuesday was her take-a-donor-to-dinner night. But how did Lucas know that? Okay, I guess everyone has a mom, and everyone’s mom goes out from time to time. But how come he didn’t ask if my parents were out?
I wrote back to him:
Do you even know where I live?
And he wrote:
Lawn mowing. Do you remember?
It took me a second, and then I did.
After school, I got home early to work on an article for the paper. I set myself up the way I liked to for writing—at the desk by the window in my room—and pretended I was actually able to concentrate enough to get anything done.
I hadn’t been able to decide whether I should tell my mom Lucas was coming over. I hadn’t told anyone about going up to the roof with him. Rosemary had shrugged when I’d asked her opinion about letting my mom know he was coming to the house. “It’s up to you,” she’d said. “But I wouldn’t mention it to my parents.”
I’d decided I wouldn’t mention it either, but then, five minutes after getting home, I found myself dialing Mom’s work number.
My mom trusted me. She h
ad every reason to. I wasn’t into the whole high-school-rebel scene. But still … a boy. Alone. In the house. She didn’t exactly freak, but the upshot was that I could see him, just not alone in the house. I wasn’t even mad at her for laying down the law. I was kind of relieved.
So when Lucas pulled his car into the driveway, I was waiting for him on the front porch. The hockey team didn’t have skate practice in the fall, but they had workouts, so Lucas stepped out of his hulking, rusting red car, his hair dark where it was still wet from the shower, the tips drying to blond.
“Hey,” he said, holding up a hand halfway as if he wasn’t sure I would return the wave. There was something about his hesitation—I felt a lightening of my whole body, the way you feel after you hold your breath.
“My mom doesn’t want me to have you in the house,” I blurted out before he even got all the way up the path across the front lawn. “Sorry.”
Lucas shrugged and squeezed in next to me on the stoop. His leg was pressed up against mine. It was close quarters, but I was pretty sure he’d sat even closer to me than he needed to.
“It would be okay to take a walk,” I said. “She said we could get food or something in the Center.” I pointed toward our tiny downtown—besides the library, the town hall, and the post office, there were a few fancy stores that no one I knew shopped at, a café that served lunch, and another for upscale Chinese.
“Great,” Lucas said, putting his hands on his knees and standing. I ran inside and got some money out of my desk drawer.
I’d left the front door open, and coming down from upstairs, I could see Lucas through the window in the storm door. He was waiting right where I’d left him, but his smile had been replaced by a look of intense concentration, as if the two pillars that tried to make our stoop into a bona fide porch might be holding a secret.
When he saw me, the look disappeared. “You ready?” he said.
I Remember You Page 2
