I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  Finally, Robin Sipe begged him to change the music, at which point he put on “Celebration,” and to be sure his gesture of disdain registered properly, he proceeded to replay it every three songs, standing behind his turntables with his arms crossed over his chest.

  It didn’t matter. Each time “Celebration” came on, there’d be all this cheering, which was our school’s ironic form of booing. It was awesome.

  The hockey team must have had a stash of alcohol somewhere, because they kept leaving, and when they came back, they danced like they were insane, lifting their girlfriends high into the air and spinning them around like the sticks they wave in victory after they win a game. Lucas stayed close to me, but Dexter took off with the team a few times, dragging Rosemary along with him. Lucas asked me if I wanted to dance.

  There’s no other way for me to say this: Lucas was a terrible dancer. I was of the sway-side-to-side school, but Lucas—well, Lucas looked like he had entered his own universe. He would nod and play air guitar and then do this thing with his feet that was a little bit spastic, like he was dancing to futuristic techno music no one else could hear.

  Then he’d look up from his private hyperdancing movement, take my hand, and stare at me in a way that was sad and scary at the same time. I didn’t know whether to kiss him, smile at him, or ask him if I should call 911.

  Lucas took both my hands in his and moved them in time with the beat. He lifted my left arm and spun me under it, then wrapped his hand around my back like we were swing dancing. He pushed me out again jitterbugstyle, holding my hands, our two different approaches to dancing—his mania, my respectable swaying—united in a movement that felt kind of okay.

  By the end of the song, Dexter and Rosemary were out on the dance floor with us again. Dex threw a heavy arm over Lucas’s shoulder and looked at me. “You ever been up on the roof of the gym?” he asked, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

  And at that one simple question, everything changed.

  “What are you talking about?” Lucas shouted over the music. He’d stopped dancing. “What the hell are you trying to pull?”

  “The roof, man, you’ve got to check it out,” Dex said, laughing.

  And out of nowhere, Lucas pushed him. Hard.

  Dex stared. For a second, the two of them looked like they were about to get into a fight. A real fight, not the play punching and shoving I was used to. Lucas half raised an arm. Dex’s shoulder twitched.

  Then Lucas seemed to shake off the mood. He shuddered, as if he had just remembered something, and took my hand. “I—” he started to say.

  He had all our attention. He looked from Dex to me and ended up with his eyes on Rose. “Sorry,” he said, although she wasn’t the one he needed to apologize to. “Turns out I’m not a big fan of roofs.” And then, as if a decision had just been made, he nodded to himself and pulled me away from Dex and Rose. “Come on,” he said impatiently.

  Maybe he didn’t hear me ask, “Where are we going?” He certainly didn’t reply. As I followed him toward the door, I turned to see Dex staring after us, his mouth hanging open. Rosemary half waved, a “What the heck?” in her gaze.

  “We need to talk,” Lucas said tersely.

  “About what?” I tried. Again, Lucas acted like he hadn’t heard.

  He pulled me through the trophy room, out of the building, and a little ways down the asphalt path that led to the main school building.

  It was still raining lightly. I was hot from dancing, so the moisture on my bare arms felt good. I noticed a mist gathering on the top of Lucas’s hair, creating a halo effect around his face.

  He took a step closer to me—a group of freshmen was gathered nearby. “Here’s the thing,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at a point in space about three inches above my hairline. “We can’t be together anymore.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he were answering a question we’d been discussing, as if what he was about to say weren’t going to take me by surprise. Weren’t, in fact, going to destroy me. “I think it would be best for us to try to just be friends.”

  I made a noise like I’d been punched in the gut hard enough to force up air.

  Lucas turned on his heel and began to walk away.

  As Lucas made his way back toward the gym, the only thought that managed to anchor itself in my consciousness was this: If I let him leave, I will never recover. Living with my mom—growing up in the shadow of the divorce she’s never bounced back from—must have played a role in my thinking.

  But honestly, I wasn’t thinking. I was acting on instinct. I was acting in the manner of a person hanging from a cliff by their fingernails. It wasn’t a calculation I made as I decided to run after him so much as it was the illustration of a fact. I couldn’t let go.

  “Get back here!” I shouted, running after him. “What is wrong with you!” I grabbed him by the arm. “What the hell?”

  He stopped. He turned and gave me a look that said “I am way too bored to answer your question.” Like he was a rock star and I was a ten-year-old begging for an autograph. Later, I realized his head must have been pounding. I don’t think I ever fully comprehended how consistently his head was hurting at that time.

  He sighed. “We’re not good for each other.” He sounded like he was reading from a manual. “It’s not good for us to be so intense about each other. It’s high school. We’re too young for this kind of relationship.”

  Only certain words penetrated my thinking. Had he said “good”? “Intense”? “Young”? I didn’t understand how those were bad things. My skin felt dead, the initial pain in my gut transforming into numbness as it spread down to my toes and then made its way up to my face.

  Lucas was looking at the sky now, as if he were taking orders from the low clouds, which looked pink in the ambient light from the streetlamps. His jaw was tight, his eyes squinting.

  And I was getting dizzy. I was starting to sway. I was going to have to sit down, I knew that, but I also knew I couldn’t move. As long as I stayed right where I was, the verdict on this conversation was still out. There was still a chance I could get Lucas to explain himself, to change his mind. To get him to admit this was only an incredibly cruel joke.

  “But—” I struggled to remember his words, and when I couldn’t, I just said simply, “I like the way I feel with you. I thought you liked it too.” My eyes had started to sting. To fill with water. There was a bitter taste in my mouth.

  Lucas looked at me, grimaced, and looked away. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand.

  “What was that?” I asked. I might have been shouting. I guess I was acting angry, though inside I was drowning from feelings it was hard to name. I noticed the freshmen looking over at us. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “It’s not a joke,” Lucas said.

  I tried again to breathe and found I couldn’t. “This—Lucas—this hurts. I can’t believe you’d hurt me like this.”

  “You need to believe it. I thought maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  “No. Maybe nothing. Maybes are over. I just need to walk away from you.” He turned back toward the parking lot. “You need to be alone, to have me not be with you.”

  “No,” I said. I was cold now, and I crossed my arms, my corsage brushing the inside of my right elbow, a reminder of how recently things had been good.

  “Trust me,” he said, and he laughed a little bit.

  “Trust?” I repeated. “You’re laughing?” The combination struck me as so absurd I felt a full rush of anger, which this time, thankfully, I knew for what it was. I couldn’t believe it, but my mom was right. Rosemary too. How could I possibly have given over so much of myself—my happiness—to someone who didn’t even want it?

  “Were you thinking about breaking up with me when you picked this out?” I shouted. I ripped the corsage off my wrist, and when Lucas turned, I held it above my head, like a challenge. I cringed to realize that beneath my anger I was still h
oping he’d come back to get the flowers, to get me.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he held up both hands, like he was surrendering, showing me he wouldn’t take the corsage back.

  So I threw it. I threw it as hard as I could and I stormed past him, back into the dance.

  I was crying by the time I reached the gym. I brushed the tears away and skidded across some loose straw, nearly falling. Through the pulsing lights, I scanned each clump of bad dancers for Rose and found her nowhere. I didn’t see Dex either. They weren’t by the snack table, or the registration table, or the DJ, or the bleachers.

  And then there Rosemary was in the hall, on her way back from the bathroom. “Rose!” I shouted, tears streaming down my cheeks. I was choking. Snotting. Seeing me, she pulled me right back into the girls’ room with her.

  I never wear makeup, and once I was in a brightly lit space with a mirror, I could see that the mascara my mom had helped me put on had run, leaving raccoon-like half-moons under my eyes. Rose grabbed some tissue from one of the stalls and started wiping my face. Her diamond glistened under the fluorescent lights. “What,” she said. “Happened.” This was a command.

  I only got as far as saying “Lucas” before my eyes began to well up again.

  “Lucas what?” she said. “Did you guys get in a fight?”

  “No,” I said. I sniffled. I blew my nose. “That’s just it. It came out of nowhere.”

  “You’re crying like he broke up with you,” Rosemary said. “Oh, good Lord, did he?”

  I cried harder. Rosemary ducked into a stall to grab more tissue. “That’s impossible. He’s so into you. He’s annoyingly into you.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “No,” Rosemary said. “You misunderstood.”

  “There’s no question,” I said. “He couldn’t have been more clear. I threw my corsage at him.”

  “Oh, boy,” Rosemary said, sighing deeply in a way that let me know she understood how grave that was and also that, given the circumstances, she would have done the same exact thing. Good old Rose.

  Or at least, I thought she was good old Rose until she said, “You’ve got to go talk to him.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You can’t just let him walk out on you at a dance like this. You’ve got to make sure you understand what’s really going on, and not just whatever line he fed you.”

  “Later,” I said. “I can’t do it now.”

  “Later,” she countered, “he’ll have his story all set. If you want to know the truth, this is your moment.”

  “You think he’s still even here?”

  “Maybe he’s with Dex.”

  “Where is Dex?” I said.

  “He’s on the roof. Everyone’s up there.”

  And then suddenly, I understood.

  “Oh, wow,” I said.

  “Wow?” said Rose.

  The roof.

  With Rosemary a step behind me, I threw open the door, jogged down the hall from the bathrooms, and careened around the corner into the lobby, where, without even checking to make sure a chaperone wasn’t watching, I opened the door to the stairs leading to the roof that Lucas had shown me so long ago and started to climb.

  The roof. It was all about the roof. It had been all about the roof all night.

  The stairwell—a painted railing, cinder-block walls, dim lighting—and then there I was, big sky above and pebbles under my feet, the feeling of open space a surprise, even in the half dark.

  The hockey team: I saw a cluster of them off to the left, faces and bodies grouped around something. I couldn’t see what it was because the only light came from the orange glow of the parking lot, and anything below the line of the parapet was cast in shadow.

  I could guess, though. This was the bar.

  As Rosemary and I got closer, I saw what they were drinking: Capri Suns, those juices that came in shiny pouches. The student council was selling them downstairs for a dollar each, and up here this kid Nunchuck was using a syringe to inject shots of vodka into them, collecting a dollar as well, though I guessed the guys on the team drank free, because all the beefy, shaved-head hockey players were sucking down juice pouches like preschoolers in the back of their moms’ cars.

  Just outside the group, Lucas was perched on the edge of the parapet, a Capri Sun balanced listlessly in his palm, his expression neutral, as if nothing upsetting had just happened. He was looking down toward the parking lot.

  “He’s looking for you,” Rosemary said. “He wants to see if you’re leaving.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving.” Seeing the slump to his shoulders, the blank expression on his face, I knew I’d been right in my guess. I knew why Lucas had wanted to run away from me. I knew why I had to catch him. I wasn’t angry anymore. I wasn’t scared either.

  “Juliet?” Rosemary said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t let him hurt you. If he starts to say things that are going to eat away at you later, just walk away.”

  I didn’t tell her that everything Lucas would say to me would eat away at me later. I left Rose with the others and headed toward Lucas, alone, calling his name as I got close. He turned, and when I stopped in front of him, my feet planted firmly, my hands on my hips, he lowered his juice to the ground.

  I pointed to the skirt of my dress. “Look what I’m wearing,” I said. “A dress.” He nodded. “We’re on the roof. It’s nighttime. All those things that you told me you remembered before, when I barely knew you. You tried to tell me about this memory you had, and I stopped you. But I’m ready now. You don’t have to push me away or protect me. I want to know what’s happening.” I didn’t know what else I should say. Or could say. “Lucas. Please.”

  He put his head in his hands, and I wondered for a second if I’d made a mistake.

  But then he looked up and I could see that he didn’t have the strength to lie to me again. His face was twisted in pain as he stood. “Come with me,” he said, and led me to the back of the bulkhead, our shoes crunching on the pebbly surface. He squinted at the bulkhead’s brick wall like there was a sign on it he was trying to read. Finally, he said, “Stand here, facing the wall, okay?”

  He slid between me and the bricks, leaning against them, putting his hands on my waist. He checked the view to either side, and then he pulled me toward him. “This is it,” he said. “This is what I remembered.”

  “You remembered,” I whispered.

  “Back in September, I tried to tell you about it. About how I kissed you up here. But you didn’t believe me.”

  “I—” I started.

  “You couldn’t have believed me. I don’t blame you. I didn’t even believe me. But still, I know my memory was real.” I shook my head slowly, wishing he didn’t sound so crazy. “It was our first kiss,” he went on.

  “But our first kiss was months ago,” I protested. “In the park near my house.”

  “That was this time,” he said, giving me a moment to absorb his meaning. “I’m talking about a time before.”

  “You mean—” I couldn’t even find the words to explain what I thought he was trying to say. You think “there was a time—for us—before this one?”

  He nodded, and I made a move to step out of his embrace. But he held me tight. “Stay,” he said. “Please.”

  I stayed.

  And he began to tell me a story that came out like a confession. I think it was a relief to him to finally say it all out loud. How long had this been eating away at him?

  “Like I said, in that time before, tonight was our first kiss,” he began. “Things didn’t happen as fast for us then. I’d had a crush on you since the day you walked into physics, since you’d smiled at me when I was mowing your neighbor’s yard. But I didn’t think there was a chance you’d ever like me. You were so smart. You worked so hard in school.”

  I shivered, and without asking, he shrugged his arms out of his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. He pushed the hair off my templ
es. “I started going to the library, just to be near you. And we’d talk. We got to be friends. I’d tell you these things I’d never told anyone. I told you about my mom and dad. I told you stuff about Tommy and Wendell, stuff I wouldn’t generally tell my other friends. You told me about your mom and dad. One time, you got really mad about some current events thing. It blew my mind how much you cared about the stuff I thought of as ‘the news,’ just endless static.

  “You made this big deal about how I shouldn’t join the marines, and it was annoying but also kind of nice that you cared. I always felt like you saw the best parts of me. You waited for them to float to the surface, I guess. You trusted that they were there. Even when I was being kind of a dick.”

  “You were a dick?”

  He laughed. I laughed. And then out of nowhere I felt myself tearing up. How could I feel so close to him when what he was telling me ought to be pushing me away?

  I swiped at what I knew was my mascara running some more, and he said, “Don’t bother.” When I kept bothering anyway, he said, “You’re cute.”

  “And you’re amazing,” I gushed without thinking.

  “No, you are,” he said. “Back when I didn’t know if you liked me,” he went on, “back in that other time, you tossed off this thing once. You said you liked how different I was from everyone else you knew. And I held on to that comment. I held on to it tight. It gave me the courage to ask you to the dance, to kiss you up here in the dark.”

  He was looking straight at me now, and before I could raise the questions that felt like they belonged in books or movies instead of my real life—the crazy details—Lucas kissed me.

  I asked myself, Do I remember this? Has this happened before? And then it didn’t matter if I believed him because I was there on the roof of the gym, with Lucas holding my face in his hands, tears streaming down his cheeks, saying, “I want this to be real. This is what I want to be real.”