by Adi Alsaid
Dave skipped the bus that morning and decided to walk to school, and to do it slowly. It was a cool morning, and Dave had not brought a sweater with him. But the cold felt good against his skin, maybe because he felt liberated. Liberated to enjoy his best friend’s company, to enjoy the rest of the school year without having to always fret about what to do with that love that had been festering for so long. Gretchen had texted him back the next morning, and they’d been talking ever since.
Before the Nevers, summer had felt like a far-off place, surrounded by swamps of boredom that he’d have to lug his way through. But now it felt more like a pleasant hike, with plenty of pretty views and maybe some hot springs along the way. Okay, it was a little early in the morning for similes, but Dave was now looking forward to the last couple months of high school. The Nevers would be fun to complete, especially if he didn’t have to worry about how things went with Julia. Who knew how things would play out with Gretchen, but there were possibilities there, more than he’d ever really had. In the fall he’d be at UCLA and Julia would be nearby in Santa Barbara and maybe by then his life would be entirely different. He’d be dating Gretchen, or would have at least experienced love firsthand. Or maybe nothing would happen with Gretchen and his life would be exactly the same, just unburdened by unrequited love. Maybe that was enough.
He arrived to homeroom almost at the same time as Julia, right before the bell went off. He accepted one of her earphones as they took a seat together and waited for her to be awake enough for conversation. When she paused the music, he told her about the idea he’d had to break the first Never on the list: Never be recognized by your lunch spot.
o o o
They met Sunday night at school, Brett driving his pickup truck straight onto the blacktop where Julia was already waiting, early for once. In the darkening light of the evening, Dave could barely see her silhouette leaning against the tree that they’d be, according to Brett, “pimping out.” Brett had brought work gloves and goggles for everyone, along with all the supplies: planks of wood, and two-by-fours, and even a generator with some work lights. He claimed to have borrowed it all with permission, which Dave found highly unlikely, although he couldn’t help but feel flattered by his brother’s efforts. Brett had even drawn up some plans after talking with Dave and Julia on Friday about how they envisioned the project. Before they started work, Brett pulled out his camera and started recording.
“Why are you filming this?”
“Because,” Brett said, “this is how you get voted onto the prom king ballot.” He got some shots of the tree where the seniors gathered for lunch, which, over the weekend, would become the tree house known as Dave and Julia’s lunch spot. He zoomed in on the plans he had drawn out, then set up a tripod on the hill by the soccer field for a time-lapse video.
“You’re being strangely helpful,” Julia said, putting on her gloves and eyeing Brett. “I didn’t know you could be...”
“A nice person?” Brett said. “I’m a little hurt by that.”
“I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything, I was actually struggling for a way to complete the thought. But, yeah, ‘nice person’ works. I thought you were just going to be critical of the plan. Like with the explosions.”
“Truth be told, I’ve been waiting for years for you guys to come out of your shells. I wanted to be around to watch it happen.”
“Shells? What shells? I’m not shy.”
“It has nothing to do with shyness. The little tortoise shell the two of you live in without letting the rest of the world in,” Brett said, turning on the generator, the whirring cutting off Julia’s chance to retort. She looked over at Dave, who could only shrug. There was probably some truth in what he’d said.
At first it didn’t seem like they were accomplishing much. Dave and Julia stacked piles of wood around the tree. Brett would hand Dave a few pencil-marked boards and tell him where to hammer in nails, which Dave would do it slowly, careful not to miss the neat little Xs. Music playing from Brett’s truck filled the night, though it was often drowned out by sawing, drilling, and Julia making fun of Brett’s taste in music.
Then, all of a sudden, there were stairs leading up the tree to where the first of the branches spread out to cast a shade that the seniors claimed as their own. The skeleton of a tree house had appeared almost as if through magic. It was nothing that Dave would dare to get into yet, but if he squinted at it he could see it coming to life, like a connect-the-dots drawing that was still a missing a few lines.
With each plank that was hammered into place, each branch sawed out of the way, a palpable sense of accomplishment built in the air, or maybe that was just happening in Dave’s head. Every now and then Julia’s arm would brush against his, bare despite the chilly night—they’d all started sweating early, and long sleeves were quickly rolled up, sweaters discarded into a small pile in the bed of the pickup truck, which early in the night held tons of supplies and now was mostly bare. It would be a lie to say he felt nothing at the touch of her skin—skin doesn’t forget so quickly—nor would it be honest to say it didn’t make him happy—hearts are even worse at learning new habits—but it didn’t feel momentous anymore. In fact, the shiver down his spine rather quickly led to thoughts of Gretchen, and it was with her face in mind that he put together the tree house.
When the sun started to bruise the sky with its approach, the three of them put their tools down and looked at the tree. Dave was sweating, and he could hear Julia and Brett breathing heavily beside him. While Brett made a run to a nearby deli for a huge thermos of coffee and a box of bagels, Julia and Dave added the finishing touches: applying a coat of varnish on the outside, sanding away the rough edges on the counter that faced out at the entire school, arranging an armory of pillows purchased at a Goodwill store and sprayed with disinfectant before being spread around the tree house floor. Everything was now ready for seniors in their last two languid months of school before freedom.
They broke it in together, spilling grains of sugar and drops of creamy coffee over their work and talking giddily, despite the accumulated exhaustion. Dave and Julia were an hour or so away from having to sit through class, but there was a sense that they’d done something lasting and meaningful.
“Hold this pen with me,” Julia said, pulling out the Nevers list from her back pocket.
“Have you seriously been carrying that with you every day?”
“Shut up and hold this pen,” she said. He wrapped his fingers around the pen and then Julia’s hand covered his own. She moved the pen across the page. “There. We have a lunch spot now.”
Brett swallowed down a bite of bagel. “Shit, I wish I would have gotten that on tape. That would have been perfect.” He wiped some cream cheese from the corner of his mouth and went to get the camera. “Say it again.”
Julia laughed and shook her head, folding the list away as if it were a treasure map. “Too late, man. It’s done.”
Brett folded up his camera, then turned on his stool to admire the work. “Not too shabby.”
They joined him, identical threefold smiles on their faces. “Thanks for doing this, Brett. This was really cool of you.”
Brett nodded, took a sip from his coffee. After a moment or two, he stood up, folding his gloves into his back pocket. “It was fun hanging out with you guys,” he said, and he extended his hand for Dave to shake, which he did. It struck him that Brett might have been one more person he’d mistakenly assumed he knew all about. He wondered how much he missed their mom, whether he, too, wished his dad were better at bringing her up. “Thanks,” he said, the word suddenly inadequate for what he was feeling.
Brett nodded, then offered his hand to Julia, who looked at it and chuckled. “A handshake? Please.” She put her coffee down on the counter and rose to give Brett a hug. “I underestimated how cool you are.”
“I think I did, too,” Brett
said, pulling away from the hug somewhat awkwardly.
“But I still don’t think you know what ‘artsy’ means.”
“Fine. I’ll call you a pyromaniac from now on.” He smiled, then disappeared down the staircase.
A few minutes after Brett’s pickup had pulled away from the blacktop, the first of the teachers started showing up, their classroom windows sliding open, their silhouetted heads looking down at their desks, most of them not even looking outside. “How many more Nevers to go?” Dave asked.
“I’m not counting Marroney or prom king yet, so three down, seven to go.”
Dave drank from his coffee, thought about the last Never. At the start of it all, he probably wouldn’t have said anything. But now that he was liberated from certain things, his curiosity got the best of him. “What about the last one? We’re not going to date each other, are we?”
Julia smirked, looping a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d actually thought about that already.” She spun around on the stool she’d taken, one of the dozen that lined the edge of the tree house. The sun was getting to ready to peek out from behind the hills, though the morning fog would probably make for an unimpressive sunrise. “We were always gonna go to prom together, right? We can just call that a date. Our one and only date.”
“Okay,” Dave said simply, finding a sort of comfort in the words being spoken out loud.
o o o
By lunchtime, Brett had sent the video through his system of friends, many of them still closely linked to current SLO High students. Everyone knew who was responsible for the tree house that had sprung up magically over the weekend, and when Dave walked into the courtyard, the assembled seniors broke into applause. Julia had gone to nap in the library, but she insisted that Dave continue his ploy to get in with the popular crowd for the sake of his campaign. He might have shied away from going alone if he hadn’t seen Gretchen climb the stairs he’d helped build.
“Dave!” Vince Staffert called to him from the corner of the tree house. “I saved a spot for you, man.” He stood and waved him over, a bag of chips in his hand. The tree house was packed, people on every stool and sprawled out on the floor, making use of the pillows. Underclassmen gazed up with wonder, peering like tourists drawn in by a crowd, wondering what they were missing out on.
As it turned out, Gretchen and Vince were friends, and when Dave took the seat that Vince had reserved for him, Gretchen was only two stools away. Vince and a few others kept talking about what a cool thing Dave and Julia had done, but Dave could barely focus on what they were saying. He and Gretchen kept exchanging looks so obviously that it was a shock no one called them out on it.
He chatted amicably with everyone around, even laughed a little with Vince, who was all the time proving himself to be nicer than Dave had ever given him credit for. That other clichéd football-player side of him that Dave assumed existed never made an appearance. But at one point he decided there was only one person he really wanted to talk to, and when the girl sitting next to Gretchen stood up, he immediately moved over.
“How was your weekend?”
“Not quite as constructive as yours,” Gretchen said, plopping a piece of papaya into her mouth with a smile.
“I see what you did there.”
“I’ve been thinking of it for, like, six whole minutes.”
Dave laughed, leaning into her shoulder with a nudge. “Come on, how was your weekend?”
Gretchen chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Not too shabby. I think some weekends feel wasted if you don’t have a ton of fun, and some feel wasted if you don’t have a ton of sleep, and I did a solid amount of both.”
“What did you do for fun?”
“I slept,” Gretchen said, picking out another piece of fruit from her Tupperware.
“You are on a roll today.”
“I think you bring it out of me,” Gretchen said with a shrug, pushing the Tupperware in his direction to offer him a piece. He reached his fingers in for a piece of pineapple, feeling a little cheesy in longing for their hands to brush against each other.
When the bell rang and lunch was over, Dave and Gretchen separated themselves from the group. It happened almost magnetically, the two of them drifting off from the rest, keeping pace only with each other.
“So,” Gretchen said, hoisting a binder to her chest the way nerdy kids in movies did, “you built a tree house.”
“I had some help.” Dave shrugged.
“Still, pretty cool. Was it your idea?”
“Inspired by a desire for us to have our own lunch spot,” he said, aware that he’d purposely avoided saying Julia’s name but not sure why. “But yes, my idea.”
“I wonder what your grandkids will feel when they read about you in history books.”
“An immense and prideful love, obviously.”
They walked down the tree house stairs slowly, in no rush to make it to class before the bell rang. Other kids gathered their belongings and prepared for that last, brutal stretch of classes before the day broke free. Some were looking in Dave’s direction, smiling, or whispering, or just staring for a moment before walking away. Dave wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to eyes turning to look at him, but it no longer felt like it had never happened before.
When they reached the building, Dave put his hand on the door to open it for Gretchen, but hesitated for a second. He met her eyes and the words simply escaped him in a way he didn’t fully understand, like the drops of rain suddenly becoming too heavy and breaking free from a cloud after staying together for so long. “Do you want to see my favorite bench in the world?”
Gretchen smiled but said nothing for a second, as if she wanted the words to soak in. Nicky Marquez passed between the two of them, looking at his phone and unaware of what he was stepping through. When he opened the door, Dave’s eyes glanced into the hallway, and he saw Julia rubbing the sleep from her eyes, walking his direction. “Let’s go, David Bro Bronofsky. Two more classes and then we’re free.”
“Friday,” Dave added quietly. “We’ll have some coffee on my favorite bench in the world.”
“Yes,” Gretchen said, nodding. “I’d like that.”
DATE
DAVE CHECKED HIS phone and slid it back in his pocket for the tenth time in the last thirty seconds or so. He was sitting on his bench at Morro Bay, trying to avoid looking around frantically for any sight of Gretchen. When she showed up, he wanted her to see him first, sitting calmly with his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands folded on his stomach, a content smile on his face that showed he saw joy in the world, even on this unusually gray day.
Though he was certainly happy, the problem was that Dave’s relaxed pose melted away almost as soon as he’d settled into it. His hands would go to his phone to see if she had canceled. He’d hunch over and look at his feet nervously, check his shirt for stains.
This was a date. Maybe. His first ever, and in a place that he associated with Julia. It was her he usually looked for from this spot, those blue eyes across the distance, her bare feet. But today Julia was on her way to a wedding with her dads, and Dave was looking for Gretchen’s blond waves and scuffed sneakers. Once that thought crossed his mind, he’d lean back into the bench, take a deep breath, put on a slight smile, only to have it quickly fall away again, his hand going to the back of his neck, or wiping at his forehead, the sweat dripping freely now that he had no hair. If anyone was watching, they’d probably think he was schizophrenic. Having dreamed all his life of romantic love did not make him any good at first dates.
She showed up a couple of minutes later, coming up from behind him and tapping him on the shoulder. He rose up quickly with a nervous “Oh, heya” that he’d be cringing about for at least several nights, if not the rest of his life. He’d wondered about adding a hug or a kiss on the cheek or a handshake, and when
it came time to do it, he did one of those weird side hugs that his socially anxious uncle always gave him.
Gretchen took it in stride, smiling when they parted. She was wearing a red shirt with white polka dots and a tan sweater over it, the buttons undone. “You look nice,” he said, because once Julia had mentioned offhand that he should always say it on a date.
“Thanks,” she said. “You do, too.” She reached out and touched the hem of his shirt, a baby-blue button-down that he’d borrowed from his dad. “I like this shirt.”
Dave rubbed the back of his neck. Shit, he hadn’t thought about what to say from there. He hadn’t ever actually said something like that directly to a girl, and he certainly never heard a looks-related compliment directed his way, except from aunts and the school librarian, who said it to everyone. They both stood by the bench, sheepishly smiling.
“So, this is it, huh? Your favorite bench in the world?”
“This is it,” Dave said, looking down at it. “I come here at least twice a week.”
“What makes it your favorite?”
“It reminds me of my mom,” he said. “We used to come here when I was little, eating ice cream and people watching.” He looked around the harbor, which wasn’t as busy as it usually was on Fridays. There were a few fishermen coming back from the pier, their iceboxes dripping pink fluid. A couple of homeless guys were on the bench across the way, drinking from paper bags. One of them was reading a newspaper, the other scratched his beard in between sips. When Dave first started hanging out at the harbor on his own, in between missing his mom and falling in love with Julia, he’d get the homeless guys cups of water and sit with them, figuring they were probably just as lonely as he was. “Plus, it’s so comfortable, I’m pretty sure it’s made from angel feathers and the love of a thousand puppies.”
