Luz, Rebound

by Jeania Kimbrough

  “Hey.” I felt the warmth of Kelli’s hand cover my own. “I’m sorry if I sound too oversensitive—I know Christie’s upset you’re back, that’s all.”

  I glanced down at her hand over mine, feeling something catch in my throat, and let the question in my eyes move back up to meet hers. She had the corner of her lower lip between her teeth.

  “Last week at practice she was off on half the routine, and when I talked to her about it she broke down crying. She told me she and Ryan had an argument about your return to school this week. I felt so sorry for her. I know she feels really insecure. And since you say you no longer have those kinds of feelings for him, what would be the point in making her feel bad, you know? I just want our team to be okay. We have competitions next week.”

  I rolled my eyes now and shook my head, incredulous at the idea she might even think I wanted Ryan back. “I didn’t do—say—anything—but hello. I’m not into him that way anymore.”

  “I know.” She squeezed my hand, and four years of being best friends with Kelli surged through me with a certainty that her defense of Christie wasn’t meant as an affront. “But she’s crazy about him. And I’m glad you’re not, because she’s really in love.”

  Chapter 3

  Heart of Darkness

  She’s really in love.

  Kelli’s words played in my head that afternoon, making me think all the more about Ryan and Christie. I couldn’t help but wonder how Ryan now felt.

  One on hand, I supposed it could have happened. Just as I had fallen in love with Ben while I was away, Ryan could have truly fallen in love with Christie. On the other hand, for most of my life at Trinity I felt confident Ryan would only ever love me. And he made me feel that way.

  He had loved me, he used to say, since the first week of high school when he told me he spotted me in morning chapel and literally made a spectacle of himself crawling across other classmates between us to ask me to the zoo the next Sunday. And even though I had dated other guys the first two and a half years of high school (namely older ones with cars they drove to school when all that status stuff seemed important to me), he had never been so distant before. Ryan had always been someone I could count on to make me laugh, or to make me think. We understood each other, I thought. And I hadn’t stopped loving him when I fell for Ben—at least, not as a cherished friend. I knew I felt this way towards him because although Christie seemed way too possessive and wrong for him, I wanted him to be happy. But I also wanted him in my life. So, what had happened to his feelings toward me? Did they still exist, or did they all just evaporate?

  My stomach clenched. If feelings could just disappear, Ben could forget me soon, too. Maybe he already had, and like Ryan, had moved on to some other person by now. I swallowed down the lump growing in my throat, annoyed with myself over the direction of my thoughts. If I could get Ryan to speak to me, maybe it would help clarify some things, but so far that wasn’t looking promising. Despite the brief hello in chapel, he had ignored me the rest of the day when we passed in the halls and at lunch. I thought in chapel maybe it was because I had hurt him when I left, but if he and Christie had fought about me, it could be that he was just trying to please her…or that he didn’t care how he treated me anymore, and this was how it was going to be until we graduated. The last scenario bothered me more than the first. It put his new relationship with Christie above our years together that had come before. I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with that annoying possibility, if it were the truth. It didn’t sit well with me.

  I sighed, knowing I had to leave all this alone for now until I got a better reading on where Ryan’s head really was, and slid into my seat in English, surveying the room until I found the back of his plaid shirt. Of course he was here, too. We’d always been in English class together. I opened my notebook.

  “Let’s put the chairs in a circle facing each other,” Mrs. Sandvig said. “I’d like the atmosphere to have more of a seminar feel this semester. Most of you will be in college soon, and this is how some classrooms are set up to encourage interaction with both your teacher and your classmates. I’d like you all to feel comfortable in that setting when you finally get there.”

  I got up and helped move some chairs, as other students pushed those to the back we didn’t need. There weren’t that many of us. Thirteen, I counted quickly. It made doing something like a circle easier, and felt more intimate.

  When we settled into our chairs again I took a sweeping glance at my classmates and our new seating configuration. Ryan was off slightly to my right, and when my eyes traveled in his direction our glances collided. I paused for a moment. This was the second time today he had looked at me and the second time he’d looked since I’d been back, and I felt myself starting to hesitantly smile. But he wouldn’t. He lowered his eyes toward my legs and feet.

  I crossed my legs. I had received lots of compliments on the jeans I was wearing today. They were different than what anyone else had. I’d bought them in the fashion district in Sydney before I left. I loved the moleskin going down the inner thigh and knee that reminded me of riding pants, except these were definitely more for fashion’s sake. They made me look good. Without really considering what I was doing until I’d done it again, I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, remembering how Ryan had told me on more than one occasion he thought they were sexy. Ben said he liked them too on a day he came through Sydney and took me out for dinner.

  We’d fought that day. And I’d felt so restrained because my host parents wouldn’t let me stay out with him past 10:00 p.m. It was frustrating for both of us.

  “Why are you wearing such a short skirt?” he had asked.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I’ve never seen you wear one before. Your host parents don’t trust me. So now you have curfews. Big difference from Tassie, huh?”

  He was referring to all the time we had together without curfew or supervision in Tasmania during the first part of my exchange before I was transferred eight hundred miles away to a family in Sydney. Tasmania was where we met and fell in love. But nobody supported our relationship there, and people surrounding me in Sydney were wary of it. They thought he was too old for me, and maybe some people even thought he had taken advantage of a situation.

  “It was always too cold in Hobart to wear this skirt. It’s finally hot like home here today. Let’s do something fun. Take me away somewhere and let’s forget about them…What if we just run away for the weekend?” I’d teased him, just for an instant, until I watched his face grow sulky, because reality reminded him of all that wasn’t possible between us anymore.

  Shaking off that memory, I turned toward my left, hearing Kelli stir beside me. She was pushing back raw and angry-looking cuticles with the fingernails of her other hand. I didn’t remember her nails ever being so messy before. They had always been painted and perfectly manicured in the past, never bare and ragged. She blinked up at me and smiled absently.

  “What happened to your nails?”

  “Oh, geez! I didn’t even realize I was doing that. I need to paint them.” She separated her hands and put them on her lap.

  I frowned at her, noticing she didn’t answer the question, but Mrs. Sandvig was passing out slim paperbacks around our circle and speaking again.

  “This next novel—well, novella—I want to read in class can be difficult, but it’s powerful. I want you to look for the metaphors and symbols in the work, and we can start with the title. It’s Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Has anyone read it?”

  No one spoke to say they had. I looked at the cover of the thin volume, passing a few to my left until I received my own. It was dark and lighter shades of blue with a drawing of men struggling to work the rigging on an old-fashioned sailing vessel. It made me think of the boats I had been exposed to during the past year. They were always in the harbor in both Sydney and Hobart, but I’d
only been on any of them just for fun. The experience of an explorer or fisherman still seemed as tricky and mysterious as the waters upon which they lived.

  “Before you open up the book, let’s talk about the title.” Mrs. Sandvig was at the board now. “What does it, and perhaps the cover, make you think of?”

  “Evil,” Lily, who I remembered used to have braces, said. She was sitting across from me. “The heart is dark.”

  “Heart can also mean the middle,” said Matt to my left.

  “Then what is the darkness if the heart is the middle?” Mrs. Sandvig pressed.

  “The water, the place where they are.” Lily spoke up again. Her mouth looked a lot cleaner without all that silver.

  “And where are they, where is this water?”

  “The jungle, the Congo River.” Cooper spoke up and I realized I had been so absorbed in my thoughts of Ryan that I hadn’t even noticed he was in our class, too, until now. He had already glanced at the blurb on the back.

  “Yes, that is where most of the story is set,” Mrs. Sandvig said. “Anyone else have other ideas? Could the title be symbolic of anything else?”

  “Maybe a loss of hope or trust?” Ryan asked.

  “Good, Ryan.” Mrs. Sandvig turned her head toward me. “What about you, Kara? You’ve just recently returned from overseas. Any other symbols you can draw from the imagery contained in the title or picture?”

  The blue palette of the focal image enhanced the cool surface of the cover under my fingertips. No one was standing straight on the ship. The waters were raging; the bodies were straining against gravity. Everyone had one hand on some part of the vessel, holding on for balance. “Maybe just being in the middle of uncertain circumstances or a place you don’t quite yet understand, but have to deal with anyway.”

  I sensed Ryan glancing at me, but when I cut my eyes over to him he had his notebook open and was writing something.

  “That’s interesting Kara. Let’s open the novel and read the first chapter together, shall we?” Mrs. Sandvig suggested.

  Chapter 4

  Friends

  “I sent you this, didn’t I?” My hand reached out to touch the postcard of ships in a harbor tacked onto Kelli’s bulletin board.

  “Yeah, one of the only ones. We missed hearing from you, you know,” she said. “But I guess we weren’t the greatest correspondents, either.”

  “I know.” I shrugged off a low-key apology. “I didn’t keep in touch with anyone like I meant to.” I released the tack and flipped over the card to skim through the lines I’d written seven months ago.

  Having a great time. Everything is going much better. I think I’m in love. His name is Ben. He’s gorgeous. Older. I’ll tell you in a letter later. Hope spring semester went well for you. It’s cold and rainy here. Miss you.

  I took a controlled breath, glad my back was to both her and Nic while they prepared us some tea after study hall. The thought of Ben drew me into another place and time. I was so in love with him when I wrote those lines, right before I had to leave him.

  “You never told us much about Ben,” Nic said.

  Again I shrugged, putting the card back in its place. “I fell hard for him.” I turned around to take my mug from her and sat down in front of an armchair Kelli had scrounged from home. Their room was larger and more comfortable than mine with these pieces of home that had been accumulating since the fall semester. My living space felt barren and ascetic in comparison, but coming back midyear I was stuck with the only thing available: a closet of a room, close to our dorm parent’s quarters. “I moved to Sydney like a month after I wrote that card though and didn’t see him much again.”

  “That sounds harsh,” Kelli said.

  I met her eyes for a moment and looked away. We used to share so many secrets about guys. Before I left I was pretty serious about Ryan. She had been dating David, a senior who classmates said resembled the actor Emilio Estevez, and like him was funny and confident in an understated way. He’d graduated while I was gone, and went out of state for college, but came to see her during breaks now. They seemed to be holding it together okay for a long-distance relationship, but not having him around had changed her a little; I sensed she held back more. I empathized, and yet I didn’t know how to talk about it. At least when David came back to visit Kelli, they could be together, emotionally and physically. People supported their relationship. When Ben came a couple of times to visit me, people didn’t welcome him like I wanted them to, because they worried he would cause me to think too much of the previous seven months in Tasmania and prevent me from adjusting to my new home in Sydney. Or so they said. Deep down I felt they just wanted to keep us apart because they thought he was a bad influence on me and I was to love-blind to see it. That part was difficult to explain to my girlfriends. People involved in my exchange program didn’t approve of the rebellious rough patch I had gone through in Tasmania with him as my closest confidant, even though being around him helped me out of some deep depression I’d suffered in my first few months away from home. I had learned it was easier not to talk about him than to try and defend the way I believed we felt for each other, which was complicated anyway.

  “It was kinda harsh, but I got over it,” I said. Though I hadn’t exactly. “But let’s not talk about him.” I still loved Ben, and he was a part of my past that was intertwined with regret. I took my first sip of tea. “Mandarin Orange Spice. Now that tastes like old times! And it’s a flavor I never had in Australia.” I raised my cup to them in honor of our little tea ritual. We had learned to like tea early on in boarding school, because our dorm kitchen never had anything else hot to drink for long. Other girls always took and hoarded the packs of hot chocolate and spiced cider that were stocked weekly, along with tea, before we had much of a chance to get any. Mandarin Orange Spice tea had sounded weird at first, but then it became a favorite once we tried it. “Anyway, the next guy I dated was pretty cool, too. We met at surf camp.”

  Our conversation turned, just as I hoped it would. The surfer I dated was nothing compared with Ben. I hadn’t even mentioned him to them before, but he was a convenient diversion, then and now.

  “I want a surfer,” Nic said after I described Ian’s sun-bleached mullet, imitated his Australian use of the word “beaut” for so many things around him, and told them about the beach off the city rail line where we used to hang out with a bunch of friends all weekend.

  “He wasn’t a great kisser, though.” Nobody would have been with my head wrapped up in Ben at the time. “I guess that’s why we ended up just being friends. But it was beaut while it lasted.” They laughed.

  “Hey, at least you got a chance. I feel like now that we are seniors all the guys our age are too good of friends,” Nic said. “I mean, we’ve grown up with them all these years. Our school’s too small. There’s no one I can see dating in our class. There are only a handful of senior couples together in our school, and only one who seem like they are in it for keeps.” She bit her lip. “Ugh. Sorry, Kara.”

  After an awkward silence, I said, “Don’t worry about it. Although Ryan and I were always good friends before, and when we dated, too.”

  The annoyance in my voice made for another short, uncomfortable pause. “Well, whatever. Apparently he doesn’t feel that way now. I’m happy for him if he found someone. I just don’t understand why he doesn’t talk to me.” I felt like I needed to be careful regarding what I said about Ryan, even to them. I didn’t want him back, but some people, including Christie, seemed to be worried I did.

  “I think he’ll speak soon. Just be patient. Maybe he’s being careful, or she’s being insecure, but once he gets used to having you back, it’ll happen naturally.”

  “Thanks, Kelli. Anyway, enough about my past love life. Catch me up with yours. I know Kelli is still dating David, so Nic, it’s your turn. Crushing on anyone this year
?”

  I leaned in toward Nic, who turned a little pink. Unlike Kelli and I, she’d never had a serious, long-term boyfriend in high school, even though she was attractive. Guys just didn’t see her that way from the time we were freshmen. Maybe she was too straight-up, too studious, or too cute. She was the girl next door, the kind most guys see as more sisterly than sexy. But I sensed the time had come she wanted to break out of that role. She’d gotten rid of her thick glasses during the past year and grown out her hair. Nic was a beauty who had only just begun to flower, but in our class she seemed to be surrounded by guys who only saw her in a platonic way.

  “Not really. Some of the juniors are cute.” Her impossibly thick lashes batted at the ground as she spoke, and Kelli and I exchanged a quick glance. Nic had just voiced a novel perspective for the two of us, who had only dated guys who were older or the same age.

  “Juniors?” Kelli repeated with curiosity. “Which ones?”

  “Well, Luis, and that new guy this year, John.” Her mouth puckered a little as she spoke, her eyes quickly shifting between us, then down to her lap. “Even Christie’s little brother is cute.”

  “Hmm.” Kelli made her thoughtful, lilting response, which I’d always taken as encouraging.

  “Which one is he again?” Even though I barely noticed Christie or her brother before I left last year, she had fast become such a constant mention in my world. I had some catching up to do.

  Nic grew more animated as she went through the attributes of each of the boys she had named, looking more comfortable with her observations. I was excited for her, really I was, but felt disinterest in the prospect of hooking up with anyone anymore. I dated in Sydney because I wanted people around me to believe I was over Ben. Hanging out with other people, guys included, made the exchange year pass more quickly and easily. Now back at Trinity, I didn’t have to focus on trying to interact with new people. All the people I really cared about here, like Nic and Kelli, already knew me. And soon enough we would graduate anyway. I saw no point in considering dating anyone else if I was just going to leave this place for good in a few months’ time.