I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “It was amazing,” I said.

  Newspaper office. Third period. I was writing about how First Lady Hillary Clinton’s failed health care reforms actually would have been great for the country when I looked up to find Lucas’s eyes on me. I didn’t know how long he had been watching me, but there he was, leaning against the doorframe, waiting for me to notice. I smiled and he swaggered into the room. A bunch of kids working at computer terminals raised their heads. I wondered if they thought he’d come to beat them up. The newspaper room belonged to kids who tunneled from honors classes to debate to newspaper to chess, and I could tell Lucas knew that from the way he lifted and rolled each shoulder as he walked. Hockey players never tunnel.

  He laid his hands on the table where I was working and leaned forward onto his arms, his elbows locked. His piney, soapy smell again. “Hey,” he said in a low voice befitting a library patron, or maybe he was just expressing his desire to talk only to me and not to anyone else in the room. “So this is where a smart kid like you hangs out.”

  “Hey,” I think I said. He lowered himself into the seat next to me. Where his arm brushed against mine, my skin felt warm.

  “Did I freak you out yesterday?” he asked. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m a little freaked out,” he said.

  “You are?”

  “I had this dream.”

  “What was it about?”

  We were whispering, but still, Lucas looked over his shoulder at the kids sitting at the terminals. “I’ll tell you later. What are you doing after school?”

  “Debate,” I said. I looked at him to gauge his reaction. Would he tease me about debate? All he said was “I’ll meet you at the circle afterward, smarty-pants.” Then he was gone.

  Debate practice. I was pretending to take notes on the topic “Is Global Warming Real?” but really I was staring out the window, watching the hockey players emerge from the gym, freshly showered and back in their school clothes.

  Lucas was with a group of guys with backpacks slung casually over their shoulders, feet shuffling heavily in untied shoes, slamming each other sideways into lampposts and walls. One had a tennis ball that he was throwing onto the parking lot pavement ahead of him, letting it ricochet off the bumpers of unsuspecting cars. Sometimes another guy would step out in front of him and catch it.

  Dog tags. The marines. I thought of what Lucas had told me about his father and grandfather, his uncles and great-uncles and cousins. Every war. He talked about enlisting as if he’d never thought twice about it. The decision had been made before he was even born.

  Watching Lucas now, I wondered if he’d look up at the windows to where I was. Could he find Mr. Mildred’s windows? Was he even thinking about me? Waiting for me? Counting the minutes until we met up the way I was?

  No. Lucas was piling into a car with the other guys. Even though he’d said he’d meet me, the car was leaving the parking lot. Lucas was gone.

  He was gone, and all that was left for me to notice was a single tree that had turned bright orange in the still-green woods at the edge of the parking lot.

  “Juliet?” It was Mr. Mildred. Everyone had been called up and was gathering around his desk. He was pinning our index cards to a bulletin board so we could all see the evidence we’d amassed. “Care to join us?”

  “Okay.” I was scrambling to assess what I’d written on my cards.

  But Mr. Mildred has a way of quickly grabbing a stack of cards off your desk even if you’re not done, and he did that now.

  I’ve always loved Mr. Mildred. He was a champion debater in high school and college, and it’s amazing how fast he can talk and how quickly his brain works.

  I joined the others as he pinned up our cards and talked about what makes a good piece of evidence. Shaking a fistful of pushpins gingerly in his palm, he highlighted some of the cards with star stickers, moved others around, and ended up with a neat, coherent package of evidentiary spin. Until, that is, he got to mine.

  He slapped my first card onto the board, nailed it with a pushpin, then slapped on the next before realizing it was blank. He flipped through the pile, looking for any other cards with writing on them. There weren’t any.

  Everyone on the team had been responsible for a different talking point, and now no one was going to have anything substantial to say when the subject of global warming arose. “Juliet,” he said. “Is this all you have?”

  “I was …,” I began. But there was nothing I could say.

  “Perhaps you were so overwhelmed by the enormity of the issue you—like many of our elected leaders—were struck mute?” Everyone laughed as Mr. Mildred cocked his head like a dog listening for a whistle being carried on the wind.

  “Next time, more?” I nodded, feeling stupid. He looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s wrap up these evidentiary outlines and get to work spinning facts”—he made a knitting motion with his hands—“into gold.”

  As I packed up, he stopped by my desk. “You okay, Juliet?”

  I wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to tell Mr. Mildred why. I didn’t even like admitting to myself how naïve I’d been. How had I let Lucas get under my skin?

  Then I stepped out of the classroom, and there he was.

  “I—I thought—” I sputtered. “I saw—”

  Lucas pushed himself up from a slouching position by the lockers, and his smirk widened into a grin. Slowly, like he was moving underwater, he held out a hand as if to take mine, then, looking from one side to the other, he dropped it.

  “You thought what?”

  “I thought you’d gone off with your friends. I saw you. In the parking lot.”

  He shrugged. “Dex was playing ‘We Will Rock You.’ It’s kind of a team thing. I made them drop me off right after.”

  “It would have been okay if you’d gone with them,” I lied.

  He took my hand for real this time. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  And I think that’s what I would miss most later. Lucas’s certainty. Looking into his eyes and seeing all of him there, the way I could then.

  “So let me tell you about this dream,” Lucas said. We were in the deserted stairwell now and could talk in private. He took my hand again, and this time, he held on to it. “You want a ride?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was thinking about how naturally his fingers wrapped themselves around mine, how soft his skin felt. I was thinking that I wanted him to kiss me. What if I pulled him into a classroom or behind a door, or pushed him back up against a locker?

  “I dreamed I was a soldier in a war,” he said.

  “A war?”

  “I wasn’t in combat or anything. But I know there was a war going on.”

  “Which war?” I don’t know why, but I had a sudden flash of the Nazi-tanks-arriving-in-Paris scenes from Casablanca, a movie my mom and I watch together every time it comes on TV. “Was it World War II?”

  “No, nothing like that. We were in a city,” he said. “The Middle East somewhere? Everything was the color of sand. The buildings had flat roofs, where people had hung laundry on lines. That laundry worried me. Somehow I knew there could be a sniper behind every bedsheet.”

  “It sounds like the Gulf War,” I said.

  “It wasn’t,” Lucas said. “That was an in-and-out invasion, a war fought door to door. One of the things I knew without really knowing was that this war had been going on a long time. Years.”

  “So what happened? Was there a sniper?” We were out behind the main school building now, heading for the parking lot, and when I was looking at Lucas, I had to squint against the low sun. Lucas was squinting too, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring straight ahead, like he could see something I couldn’t.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s where the dream ended. Or sort of ended. When I woke up, I didn’t feel the way you usually feel after a dream, when you’re like, Well, that was weird. I felt like it was still real. I felt like I’d really been ther
e. And my body—” He looked down as if seeing himself for the first time. “My body felt heavier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I felt … older. I felt like I knew what it would be like to have a thirty-year-old body. Like, my knees hurt when I had my pack on. And I was taller. Bigger.”

  “Dreams are weird like that. You can be six years old one minute and eighty the next.”

  “But you know how you can’t feel temperature in your dreams?” he went on. “In this dream, I did. I was hot. It was hot out, much hotter than it ever gets here.”

  We were walking past the gym now, down the hill toward the mostly empty parking lot. I could see the tree I’d been looking at from Mr. Mildred’s classroom window, the one that had already turned fall colors.

  “Juliet,” Lucas said when we got to his car. He was unlocking my door. “I’m telling you, it didn’t feel like a dream.” Holding on to the handle, he raised his eyes to mine like he was asking for help. “It felt real.” He stopped, swallowed. I wanted to help him. I could see he was in some kind of pain, admitting this. “I think that dream … the way it feels so real … I think it might be connected to the things I’ve been remembering about you.”

  “Lucas,” I said firmly. “It’s just a dream. It might feel real, but it isn’t.” I didn’t look him in the eye as I spoke. At the time, I told myself it was to save him from being embarrassed.

  Lucas stood for a second with the door cracked. Then he closed it and laid his hand on the roof, bracing himself. “I feel like I’m going crazy. I can’t believe I’m telling you any of this. I thought it might help. To tell you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said lamely.

  “Let’s just forget it.” For the first time he sounded angry. He pulled open my door. “Could you just get in the car?” I did.

  After dinner, my mom was scrubbing a stain on the counter, her white-blond hair bobbing, the wristwatch she wears on a loose chain striking the counter with a clicking sound I’d been hearing my whole life.

  “Are you going to start your homework?” she asked. I was leaning against the doorframe, my hands behind my back as if I was hiding something from her.

  “I guess,” I answered. I certainly had plenty to do. Any second, I’d make my way upstairs, spread my books out around me on the floor, start reviewing subjunctive verbs for French. I had to finish a physics problem set. I had three chapters of Moll Flanders to read for English, vocabulary from the Constitution to memorize for history, a few more paragraphs of my newspaper article to write, and if I ran through all of that, I could start, as Mr. Mildred liked to say, “arming myself with facts” about global warming. But I didn’t arm myself with anything.

  I just stood there watching my mom clean until the phone rang.

  It was Lucas. He started speaking without saying hello. “Friday,” he said. “How about we go see a movie? I promise: no more weird memories. No more dreams.”

  “Cool,” I said. I didn’t know what to say next. There was a part of me that would have gone with him to the movies or Friendly’s again or anywhere else, just for the chance to kiss him one more time. And then there was another part that didn’t want to go anywhere with him.

  In the end, he said, “See you in school,” and hung up before there was a chance for more.

  On Friday night, when Lucas picked me up, my mom was home, so he came inside and shook her hand. He was wearing a clean sweatshirt and jeans. His sneakers were tied. And all of a sudden I got nervous.

  I hadn’t been expecting this to feel so datelike.

  My mom craned her neck to look past Lucas out to the curb. “Is that your car?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lucas answered. “A Mustang.”

  Ma’am?

  “How old is it?”

  “It’s an ’80.”

  “Good Lord,” my mom said. “That’s almost fifteen years old.”

  “The engine’s solid,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what the guy who sold it to me said. You only have to hit it a couple of times with a wrench to get it going.” It took Mom a minute to realize Lucas was joking.

  She looked like she was warming up to lecture him about how the car wasn’t safe, so I took Lucas by the arm and pushed him out the door before she could speak. But when we were on the sidewalk, she came running down the front path. “Do me a favor?” she said, putting a quarter into my hand for the pay phone. “Check in around nine o’clock, when the movie’s over, just so I know not to worry.” I slipped the quarter into my pocket, and my mom jogged back inside.

  In the car, Lucas gave me a choice of three movies, all playing at an art house. I was surprised that he wanted to see any of them—I would have pegged him as a specialeffects and car-chase kind of guy. Was this what he thought I liked?

  “Are you hungry?” he said. “I was thinking we could get a pizza after the movie?”

  “That’s fine,” I agreed, and from his list, I picked Flores de Dolor, because it was the only one not based on an English novel. Of all the foreign films my mom and Valerie take me to, I know those tend to be the slowest.

  But Flores de Dolor, which was in Spanish with subtitles, turned out to be a quasi-terrifying story about a little girl trapped in a mountain cabin. There were lots of long, boring shots of her arranging dead flowers around a family of dolls. At the end, she ran through the woods while a crazed maniac with a crowbar followed her.

  Lucas paid for my ticket. He sat straight up in his seat next to me. He didn’t reach over and hold my hand. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t laugh at the funny parts—not that there were any.

  Afterward, on the way back to the car, when I asked him what he thought of the movie, he said, “It was great.” But he didn’t sound like he thought it was great. He sounded like someone trying to be brave before he gets a shot.

  “Well, I hated it,” I said, because someone needed to. “It was boring and stupid and pretentious.”

  “Wow,” Lucas said, really looking at me for the first time all night.

  “I don’t only like art movies,” I said. “And I’m not freaked out by your dreams or your memories or whatever. Maybe you’re a psychic. Or maybe you have a concussion. Or maybe you’re—”

  “Crazy?” he offered.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’d rather talk to you about all that than have you take me to movies that you think I’m going to like but are actually really stupid.”

  “I—” Lucas started. I saw something pass across his eyes, almost like I was seeing a shark swimming in the back of a shadowy aquarium.

  “Just tell me,” I said. “I can handle it.”

  But he didn’t tell me. We were standing in the parking lot next to his car. It was not quite raining, but a fog was leaving a mist on our skin and clothes. Lucas took me by my wrists and backed me up against the car door, then moved his hands to my jawline, looking at all the different parts of my face.

  “I’m so glad you hated that movie,” he said, and then he kissed me, hard, and I felt like I was finally addressing the sensation I’d had all week, the feeling of floating, like I couldn’t feel the connection between my feet and the ground. All that time I’d just wanted this, to be pressed up against him, kissing in the dark parking lot, my hair dampening in the mist, Lucas’s hands moving down my back and coming to rest around my waist.

  When I remembered to call my mom, it was almost nine-thirty. She was cool, though—and she told me Rosemary had called a few minutes before, sounding upset. She’d left a number.

  “He just left me here, the dweeb-breath mouth-farting douche bag!” This was Rosemary screaming into the phone when I called her back. She had picked up on the first ring.

  “How did you know it was going to be me?”

  She started using language that I can’t write down here.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “I don’t know! Jason’s parents’ country place, but I don’t even know what town it’s in. He drives. I don’t pay attentio
n. It’s in the middle of the woods somewhere, next to a random lake. I’m going to have to call my mom or dad to come get me. I am going to be so screwed.”

  She was talking loud enough that Lucas could hear everything she was saying through the phone. I looked at him. He smiled. I shrugged.

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece to ask him a question, but I didn’t even need to. He nodded, knowing right away what I had been about to say.

  “I’m with Lucas,” I said to Rosemary. “We’ll come get you. Just calm down and figure out where you are.”

  But Rosemary wasn’t ready for that. “I thought I was being respectful,” she was saying, “breaking up with him in person. I knew he was really into me, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but you know what? Screw his feelings. He started screaming at me.”

  “Mail,” Lucas whispered. “Tell her to look for a piece of mail. A magazine label or something with an address on it.”

  “He threw a book across the room. He started asking me if there was someone else. I was like, ‘Yeah, how about anyone else? That would be better than you.’ Jesus, Juliet, how am I going to get home?”

  “Rose?” I said. “Are you aware that Lucas can hear every word you’re saying?”

  Rosemary found a piece of mail.

  It took nearly forty-five minutes to get to the town where Jason’s country house was, and then we still made a few wrong turns. We eventually had to stop at a gas station for directions.

  Finally, a mile down a side road, we found the house. Rosemary had turned on every light and was standing in the doorway. As soon as she saw our headlights, she started running, the lights blazing behind her. “Shouldn’t you shut the front door?” I said. “Is it okay to leave the lights on like that?”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t trash the place,” Rosemary said. “Do you realize that I could never have explained to my dad what I was doing out here?”

  “We can TP the house if you want,” Lucas suggested.