Uh-oh, I thought. Rosemary loves my mom. She glamorizes her independence. She thinks of her as that camp counselor you never lie to because she’s just that cool.
“You lie to your mother all the time,” I said. “It’s practically a religion for you.”
“But that’s my mom. She wants me to lie to her.”
I pshawed.
“If I tried to tell my mom the truth, she couldn’t take it. It would be like when those opera singers hit that note that makes everyone’s wineglasses shatter.”
“Your mom’s nice.”
“My mom acts like it’s the 1950s. All she did in high school was take flower-arranging classes and ride horses. She was obsessed with horses. Which is how I know she was a virgin, by the way. Horses are proof positive.”
Rosemary is full of theories like this. I put them in the same category with her knowing when celebrities get arrested or divorced and which teachers are having affairs and who is gay. She called it “gaydar,” a word I didn’t even know existed until she tried to convince me that my mom and Val were “obviously” an old married couple who kept their true relationship under wraps for my sake and for the sake of their careers. (“Shut up!” I had said. That was crossing a line.)
“But your mom talks to you,” Rosemary was saying now. “You could tell her about stuff. Like guys. Like Lucas.”
“I don’t want to,” I confessed. Rosemary shot me a look. Maybe she was connecting what I was saying about my mom to my reluctance to discuss Lucas with her too? I wouldn’t have been surprised. Every conversation we’d had lately seemed to end with one of us stopping abruptly because to say one sentence more would mean we were in a fight.
Take Dexter, Lucas’s friend who was on his way to meet us at that very moment. Rosemary had been torturing him for weeks, and as I’d watched her draw him in, I’d found myself thinking, What is she doing? I mean, the poor guy. He wasn’t in Rosemary’s league. He never would be.
Dex was … well, he was Dex. Lucas’s best friend. A good kid in general, but no rocket scientist. He had shiny black hair that fell into his eyes, and he wore impossibly baggy pants. I’d never heard him speak more than five words in a row. The hockey team—playing, lifting weights with the guys, driving around and partying together—seemed to be his life.
And yet here we were, meeting up in the park and then driving over to Dex’s house on a Sunday night because Rosemary said she wanted to see where he lived.
“It’s nothing special,” Dex said, embarrassed and flattered by her interest at the same time.
Dex’s house was the kind half the kids in our town lived in—a picture window in the living room, a minivan in the driveway, a basketball hoop over the garage, a wreath of dried flowers on the front door, one backyard spilling into the next. I was expecting the inside to be all about family, with lots of kids, muddy shoes, and sports equipment, a dad cooking pancakes or hot dogs, a mom running school committees.
But when we got inside, the hall was dark. The wallpaper in the half-lit living room was faded. Dex’s white-haired mom was sitting at the kitchen table alone, under a single light, clipping coupons and drinking a cup of tea, a pale blue cardigan draped over her shoulders like she was afraid of drafts. His dad was watching golf in the den, smoking a cigar, which gave the house a rich, foreign smell that reminded me of the incense in Rosemary’s church. “Hullo!” Dex’s dad said affably, but he looked a bit disoriented, like someone just woken from a nap.
“Sorry my parents are so old,” Dex said once we were in the basement.
“They’re not old.” Rosemary slapped Dex gently on the shoulder like he had just said something funny. “They’re nice.”
“They’re old,” Dex sighed.
“Your mom gave us snacks.” Rose held up the crinkly package of weird Stella D’oro cookies his mom had foisted on her.
“She gave us grape soda,” Dex said, matching her cookies with a plastic liter bottle. “Who drinks that anymore? What are we, twelve?”
“I love grape soda,” Rosemary countered, but she couldn’t keep the laughter out of her voice. She ran a finger through the dust on the bottle’s topmost curve and ended up snorting. “I’ve been craving a nice ancient bottle of flat grape soda for weeks.”
Now Dex was laughing too, but a little uncertainly, like he wasn’t sure he was in on the joke.
Rose extended an open palm. “Cookie me, please,” and Dex fumbled bravely with the bag. After he’d finally managed to get the cookie into her hand, Rose sat down on the couch next to me, crossed her legs, and smiled like a cat settling into a sunny spot on a windowsill.
Her cookie sat untouched on her knee.
Dex walked over to the TV, which was part of this wood-paneled, stereo-television console from the 1970s. He flipped on a Celtics game.
“How old are your parents, anyway?” Rosemary asked.
Dex shrugged.
“You don’t know?” Rose narrowed her eyes, as if she were looking at a rare specimen of tree frog flown in from the Amazon rain forest to satisfy our scientific curiosity. “You’re kidding, right?”
“My sister, Jessie, is the oldest, and she’s thirty-five or something, so mid-fifties? Older?” Dex shrugged again. “I didn’t know there was going to be math on the test.”
“I’ll give you math,” Rosemary said. “Your sister’s thirty-five—that makes you a love child!”
Dex blushed. “Oh, come on.”
“You mean an accident.” Lucas was fiddling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV to adjust the reception.
Dex shoved him. A playful shove. They were like this together; all the hockey guys were. “How old is your mom?” he said.
“You don’t want to go there.” Lucas held up his hands in a gesture of “I surrender.”
Rosemary cleared her throat dramatically. “Are you two done?”
Dex snapped to attention, brushing his hair out of his face. Grabbing a Ping-Pong paddle, he said, “We could—you know …” The rubber was peeling off the paddle on one side. “No one uses it anymore.”
Rose popped the cookie in her mouth, uncrossed her skinny legs, extracted herself from the sofa, and, holding Dex’s wrist to keep the paddle steady, ripped off the rubber like she was removing a Band-Aid. “Great idea.” She turned to me. “You playing?”
“No, she’s not,” Lucas answered for me, grabbing my hand and somehow making it look like I was pulling him violently down onto the sofa, even though he was basically diving on top of me. “We’ll watch,” he announced.
Rosemary rolled her eyes and then turned her attention to the table, running her hands over the surface to determine where it was warped, laying out the ground rules for the game.
Rosemary is an amazing tennis player, and she’s also got a mean Ping-Pong game, but what she was demonstrating that night wasn’t her control over the ball. It was her control over Dex. She flipped her hair. She giggled. She bumped his hip with hers. When he aced a serve, she said, “Dex, Dex, Dex, what am I going to do with you?” and he actually apologized, somehow forgetting that she’d aced him three times when she had served. She treated him like they were old friends, instead of people who two weeks before would have passed each other in the halls without speaking. Like Dex was someone she thought about. A lot.
But he wasn’t. I’d seen her roll her eyes when he called her, pumping him for dirt on who liked who in the senior class and which seniors were in a fight while she drew pictures of octopuses on her math homework.
The only thing that made what she was doing not incredibly cruel—at least, Ping-Pong-wise—was the fact that Dex played with the same kind of aggressive intensity as Rose did. In fact, he beat her. Then she beat him. Then they played a game where the points lasted so long Dex’s old-man dad poked his head down the stairs and informed us that “Mom says it’s getting a little late for guests.” It was nine.
“Want to rent a movie?” Dex said. “Video Galaxy’s open for another hour.”
�
�Nah.” Lucas smiled ruefully. “My head is killing me.” We all knew why—preseason training had started, and he’d been sprinting at practice all afternoon. He stood up from the couch stiffly, offered me a hand. “Want a ride home?”
I looked at Rose. She put her hands in the front pockets of her jeans, somehow making her legs appear even longer than they were. She was looking at me but talking to Dex. “Ever seen any Audrey Hepburn movies?”
“Who?” said Dex.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I guess Juliet and I are the only non-Neanderthals in the room.”
“Come on,” I said to her. The only reason Rosemary knew about Audrey Hepburn was because my mom had introduced her movies to both of us.
Rosemary shrugged. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. I think she was deciding that I had failed her. I think her treatment of Dex was supposed to demonstrate how not to let a guy into your inner sanctum. Guys are to be played with and teased, not trusted. See? I interpreted her as saying. This is how we leave them behind.
But I didn’t want to follow her instructions. I didn’t want to leave Lucas behind.
“Poor Dex!” I said to Lucas when we got in his car.
He didn’t answer, just reached across me to open the glove compartment, where he kept an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen. He shook three pills into his hand and swallowed them without water.
“Aren’t you only supposed to take two?”
He shrugged. “Three work better.” He kissed me. “And frankly,” he said, kissing me longer this time and harder, until we both lost interest in the conversation. “Frankly, those two are starting to get on my nerves.”
It must have been just after Halloween when Dex wrote Rosemary a note on the back of a history quiz he’d gotten a C on. The note read: “If you want to go to the Fall Ball we can go together.—DEX.” The corners where he’d folded it were grimy, as if he’d been carrying it at the bottom of a bag.
Rosemary scrawled “K, sure,” corrected all Dex’s wrong answers, and passed the quiz back.
“You’re going to the dance?” I asked. Back when it was announced, we’d decided we thought the whole Fall Ball concept was lame. And then: “You’re going with Dexter?”
Rosemary shrugged.
“Do you remember that your last boyfriend was the kind of guy who took you to fancy restaurants where he’d ask to speak with the sommelier?”
Rosemary shrugged again.
In the weeks leading up to the dance, Dexter and Rosemary spent a lot of time together, but always with Lucas and me. We went to the movies, hung out at a deserted elementary school playground, rode the carousel at the mall, played foosball at parties, and ran outside in the first snowfall in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, sticking out our tongues.
During this time, Lucas’s headaches were increasing. He got fidgety. He picked stupid fights with Dex. He stopped conversations abruptly.
One time, we were in the library, and I had looked up from some notes I was taking, thinking about the evidence coming together for an argument, when Lucas reached across the table and took my arm.
“Where were you just now?” he asked. “It was like you weren’t here.”
“I was thinking about Desert Storm and coal miners and the CIA,” I explained.
“Okay …,” he said in that voice he got when something made him feel dumb. He laughed.
“They’re connected!” I insisted. “Look.” And I explained what I was learning about global warming. That we burn too much gas. That we’re running out of cheap energy sources. That the oil we burn now comes from Russia and the Middle East—dangerous places. “You know those guys last spring, how there was that van with a bomb in the parking garage of the Twin Towers?”
Lucas winced as if in pain. Chewing on the end of a pen he was using to draw mustaches on women in a magazine ad for laundry detergent, he shrugged and shook his head. “Why would you want to even think about that stuff?” he asked, like he was angry. “Why can’t you just enjoy the here and now?”
I stared at him. He closed the magazine in a rush and slapped it on the table. I half expected him to get up and leave me there, but he didn’t; he just looked at me. “I’m sick of being in the library all the time,” he said. “Can we go?” He laughed, but I didn’t know what was funny. There was something he wasn’t saying. I knew it was there, but I ignored it. I willed it to go away.
“It’s kind of amazing,” Lucas said another time, at a hockey party, where he’d dragged me away from the guys soaking tennis balls in gasoline and lighting them on fire in the backyard. “To think these guys will grow up, most of them, to have families and houses and jobs.”
I laughed. “Who are you, Father Time?” And then he did an imitation of Father Time, if Father Time was a zombie who stalked you with raised arms and then grabbed you and threw you down onto the grass while you screamed and laughed.
“Me. Father. Time,” he growled. “Me see back and forward in time. Me know the ending to all stories. Me eat pretty girls.”
I look back and wonder how, given what Lucas had told me about dreams and memories, this kind of thing didn’t set off alarm bells for me. I guess I was happy. And blind. I didn’t want to see. I wanted everything to stay just as it was.
It was Rosemary and Dexter who made our plans for the Fall Ball, deciding that we’d meet at a restaurant Dex had picked, deciding we’d go in separate cars.
Up until the very minute Lucas picked me up, I’d continued to think the Fall Ball was an exercise in stupidity led by Robin Sipe and the student council, kids with nothing better to do than try to make us all feel like we were experiencing high school the way it was in movies.
But then there Lucas was—his hair still damp from a shower, his dad’s tie too long, the sleeves of his sports coat too short, like he’d grown three inches since the last time he’d put it on, and I found myself thinking, This is a moment I never want to forget.
Suddenly I wished I’d gone shopping for something special to wear, spent hours at the mall fantasizing about how great it was going to be, like someone who’d been waiting for this to happen all her life.
Lucas’s hands shook as he handed me a clear plastic box containing three roses, a fern frond, and some baby’s breath. He was watching me intently, as if he was worried I wouldn’t like it.
Was he nervous? About a corsage?
Then, on second glance, I started to wonder if the intense expression in his eyes went beyond “Will she like the corsage?” to something more serious. On the phone that morning, he’d mentioned that he’d gotten another headache playing hoops with Tommy and Wendell. He’d also woken up at five for practice, so he could have just been tired, but he’d had a headache the night before, and the day before that as well.
I lost track of my concern when he took my hand. “That’s a nice dress,” he whispered. “You look really pretty.” As he slid the corsage onto my wrist, I could smell the damp wool of his jacket mixed with shampoo, toothpaste, and his own musky scent.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling myself blush. I liked the roughness of his sleeve against my bare arm, the pressure of his palm on my lower back while we posed for my mom’s camera.
It was drizzling and just dark when we got in the car. He leaned over to kiss me once the doors were closed, and the damp of the air mixed with the damp of his jacket, the softness of his lips—I wanted to stay there forever, just kissing him, and I guess he was feeling the same way. He pulled me closer. It was getting to the point now where all Lucas had to do was look at me and I could feel my breath straining against my rib cage. Just the sound of his voice could make me feel like something delicious—something magical—was happening to me.
“My mom’s watching,” I said against his lips.
“It’s dark,” he answered. “She can’t see in the windows.”
“She’s waiting for the car to start moving.”
“We never have enough time,” he said. “I never get enough of you.”
I
wanted to say that I never got enough of him either, but I didn’t. I was aware of my mom, waiting under the porch light. I pulled back. Lucas gripped the wheel to stop his hands from shaking and took a breath before he turned the key.
“Sorry,” he said, without saying what he was apologizing for. There was an edge to his voice. Was he … angry? At me? Why were his hands still shaking? Why did his eyes seem to bulge?
“Are you okay?”
“Pass me the ibuprofen, will you?” was all he said in reply.
We met up with Rosemary and Dex at the Golf Club. It wasn’t an actual golf club like the one Rosemary’s family belonged to. It was more of a restaurant attached to nine holes and a shooting range. There were neon Coors Light signs in the windows.
Rosemary grabbed my arm just above the elbow as we got to the table, faux-whispering, “Look! Crayons on the table!” Then mock-complimenting, “Dex, you really did think of everything!”
She was wearing a navy-blue sheath minidress that showed off her square shoulders and long legs. Her only jewelry was the necklace from Jason. The thin gold chain sparkled against her dark skin. The diamond nestled in the hollow of her throat.
Dexter was wearing chinos that were too big for him, a Boston Bruins necktie, and a shirt that could have used some time under an iron. He jiggled a foot under the table, like a little kid who has to go to the bathroom.
We made fun of stuff as we sat there. We made fun of the oversized menus, the oversized sodas. Lucas pretended the oversized napkin was a blanket and pulled it to his chin like he was snuggling up to go to sleep. I remember laughing a lot. But I also remember that Lucas was laughing more than the rest of us. And that he drank four Cokes. And that at one point he was laughing so hard he started to tear up.
“Sorry,” he said, collecting himself.
Dex held the fifth Coke Lucas had ordered up to the light. “What’s in here, buddy?” At that, we were all laughing again.
I remember the potato skins were good.
Then the dance: I have to say, the gym looked amazing. It was decorated with hay bales and cornstalks and disco lights—a weird combination, but it worked. A kid from the senior class was DJ’ing, and all we heard for the first hour was angry, undanceable punk rock. Which shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, considering his T-shirt said DROP DEAD IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE SEX PISTOLS.
I Remember You Page 7
