If I Could Turn Back Time (14 page)

“No.” But I was curious. “How much?”

“
Twelve
bucks.”

“
Really?
” I couldn’t remember when filling a big car like his had only cost twelve dollars. Even my small hybrid SUV could make it into the fifty- or sixty-dollar range.

“Really,” he said, nodding like he had just solidly landed his point. “It’s all that driving around looking for alternatives to a hotel.”

“So we should move into a hotel.”

He flashed that sly grin. “Yes. I think it would be more economical.” He kissed me again. And I let him again. In fact, I was ready to just take him by the hand and leave, school be damned. It had been a long time since I’d had to worry about anyone having a stake in where I went or when I did it.

It would have been so nice to just jump into Brendan’s car and drive until we were someplace nice and private, where I’d let him do whatever his eighteen-year-old heart and body desired.

Yet in my mind I knew, or felt, I was thirty-eight, and though I knew plenty of women who would have lauded me for that trophy, it wasn’t one I was completely comfortable with.

Though there was this place in my mind that kept pointing out I was young; I was even having trouble holding on to my thirty-eight-year-old logic and maturity. Slipping into the life had, in a sense, made me slip back into the mentality. I was easing into it more quickly than I could have imagined, even relaxing about the work I might or might not have been missing back in the “present” … whenever that actually was.

So why was it that the judgment and condemnation of my own decisions were the things that held on with the most tenacity?

I was back in time to figure out something, at least one thing, in a maze of life choices. I couldn’t dismiss
any
of them as “inappropriate” from the vantage of a thirty-eight-year-old, because I was eighteen again. There had to be a reason for that.

Didn’t there?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The afternoon passed fairly uneventfully, by which I mean it was like watching a fascinating movie that I’d never forget—the characters on the screen had never registered me at all, much less remembered me.

Actually, it was a bit humbling to see how essentially unnoticed I went in high school. Meanwhile, the really popular kids were, for the most part, the ones you never heard about doing anything worthwhile once they got into the real world.

It was an emotional roller coaster, nevertheless. All those people I knew the sad fate of, or, perhaps weirdest of all, had literally never thought of again … It was strange to think you could spend years side by side with someone in the same neighborhood and same school and yet have such totally different experiences of the same that you never connected at all.

Vito Vecchio—where was he now? I was absolutely positive he was fine; he’d never shown up on any of the Facebook “In Memoriam” pages for our neighborhood or school, so he was just a guy I saw every day for years and then forgot completely until “time-traveling” twenty years later, only to realize I knew every freckle on his face, the space of the gap in his teeth, and even the very faded lunch stains on his green-and-white-striped rugby shirt.

There were no Tide sticks back then.

How did someone who was in your periphery for so long just blow away like they’d never existed? Honestly, if I’d been on
Jeopardy!
and the Final Jeopardy question was “Ramie Phillips’s eighth-grade lunch companions,” I would have bet all but a dollar and lost because of Vito Vecchio. Seriously, it made me long for Google more than almost anything else I’d encountered so far.

What ever happened to him?

By the time school was over, my mind was racing. There was too much to comprehend and absolutely no one who might understand. Even if I’d gone to some sort of shrink, who’d be expected to be objective and understanding, the notes he would take would say things like
psychotic
,
delusional
, and I don’t even know what else, because it would all sound, in layman’s terms, batshit-crazy.

I wandered into the front courtyard in something of a daze when the final school bell rang for the day. A lot of kids had tears in their eyes, mostly the girls, because they were feeling the
lastness
of it all. And they were right, that was the thing. I’d already been here and gone. Even now I was aware of being in its echo, not living it for the first (and, usually, only) time. Those days of youth, as much as we scramble to age past them and into adulthood, cast long, cold shadows into the future.

“Want to go to Bambino’s?” Tanya asked, suddenly at my elbow and smiling like the Cheshire cat.

I started.

“Whoa!” She laughed and slapped her hand down on my shoulder, startling me yet again. “I’d ask if you had too much coffee this morning if I didn’t know I’d woken your ass up and you didn’t have time to pee, much less make a coffee.”

“I’m a little jumpy,” I conceded. Understatement.

“Why?”

I hesitated. I knew it would sound crazy and I shouldn’t tell her, but I also knew I was going to. I had to
try
. If anyone would believe me, it would be Tanya.

Not that anyone would believe me.

“It’s complicated.…”

“I’ve known you forever. How complicated can you be? If I don’t understand, no one will.”

Yup. There it was. No one could understand this. “What do you think about getting some beer and going to the lake?” I asked suddenly. That would be the perfect place to have a quiet talk.

She eyed me suspiciously. “What on earth is going on?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Is this bad?” she asked, stopping and taking hold of my arm. “I don’t want to sit in the car all this time wondering what’s going on, only so you can tell me you’re dying or something. If you have bad news, spit it out right now.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like
that
.”

She was about to say something and I interrupted, “I’m not pregnant either.”

She sighed and I watched her posture relax.

Normally I would have made a joke about her not having much faith in me, but since I was about to make her think I was clinically insane, I thought it would be best to just keep it straight for now.

We walked to her car. I opened the door and it creaked in a way that hadn’t registered with me this morning. The smell, too, was the stuff of memories: part old leather, part gasoline, and a very vague whiff of the occasional Marlboro Light 100, though she didn’t want her mom to know she ever smoked, so she tried to keep it aired out.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Bambino’s.” Bambino’s Pizza, in the local shopping center, never carded back in those days. Everyone knew that and would come from miles away. I don’t know why it wasn’t a major hangout for cops. I guess they weren’t as interested in underage drinking then as they are now.

She drove and I watched the passing scenery. It was different, kind of like I was looking at life through a Hipstamatic filter. It was odd to see the cars we’d thought of as so modern back then, all looking like relics now. Literally all of them could be registered as antiques now with the Motor Vehicle Administration. But there was Brian Hall’s dad, in his driveway, washing his Mazda like it was the DeLorean from
Back to the Future
or something.

Actually, back then it might almost as well have been. I did think it was pretty hot myself back in the day.

Mr. Hall, however, was not. It was suddenly obvious to me why he’d bought a little sports car. Middle-aged, with a paunch, one of the early customers of hair plugs, so it looked as if he had a black rash on his scalp. He was back on the dating scene and he’d clearly invested in this car as his ticket to ride.

I wondered if it helped.

Tanya was singing along with Bon Jovi as she swung into the shopping center parking lot. It took my breath away. I hadn’t realized how much the place had changed—how much I’d forgotten—until now, seeing it like this. There was that quirky stationery store with all the funky gift items, a record and CD shop that was about to go out of business, a Szechuan restaurant I used to love but which was going to be replaced by a burger joint in a few years, banks whose names would be swallowed up by others, a Peoples Drug store that would soon be CVS, and a grocery store that seemingly never changed.

Jeez, the parking lot needed fixing up back then; I couldn’t believe that the place had grown—added California Tortilla, one of those ubiquitous juice places, a Popeyes Chicken, and a bookstore that only lasted a couple of years before being replaced by a Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin’ Donuts—all without ever fixing or expanding the parking lot.

That didn’t seem to do the businesses any harm, though the community constantly complained about it. Given that it was the closest place to get all the essentials, it probably didn’t ultimately matter whether or not there was comfortable parking. In and out was good enough.

Tanya parked at the curb in front of Bambino’s. “You going in?”

“Sure.” I picked up my purse and got out of the car. The hot sun bouncing off the parking lot cooked the familiar smell of tar into my consciousness. They were constantly patching this lot, so tar would forever smell like summer in my hometown to me.

“Hey, Ramie,” a girl I absolutely couldn’t identify to save my life said as I walked into the carryout side of the restaurant while she was leaving. “Have a good summer!”

“Thanks! You too!” I could swear I’d never seen her before in my life. Wouldn’t I have remembered that jutting jaw?

The guy behind the counter, on the other hand,
did
look familiar, though I couldn’t remember his name. Jimmy? Johnny? I wasn’t sure enough to try either. He was about six-foot-two and skinny as a rock star, with piercing blue eyes and a good strong chin. His skin was marred with the red spots we all battled to some degree at that age, but I could see he was going to be a good-looking man.

“Yo!” he said in greeting, then hesitated with what seemed a slight expectation.

I was stymied. What was expected of me? How could there be someone who knew me well enough to expect a response of some sort when I couldn’t recall who he was?

When I didn’t answer right away, he added, “The usual?”

“You know it.” What was the usual? I remembered getting Budweiser, Cold Duck, Blue Nun, and whatever else my budget would allow here. I decided to take the luck of his draw.

Zima.

He cited a ridiculously low price, and I opened what turned out to be a ridiculously sparse wallet and pulled out just enough to cover it, along with a fifty-cent tip. Big spender.

He didn’t appear to notice, though, just put the Zima in a handle-free bag that I’d have to carry the same as the six-pack, and handed it over. I thanked him and went back out to the car.

“What’s that guy’s name in there?” I asked Tanya when I got in.

“What guy?”

“The guy who works there. Tall, dark hair, blue eyes. Kind of cute except for the breakouts?”

“What, Jer Norton?”

Jer
. That was it. “That’s right. Man, that was going to drive me nuts.”

She was looking at me. “Are you serious?”

“What do you mean?”

“You
forgot
who Jer Norton was? Or you just want me to think you have no idea what happened?”

I looked at her blankly. “I have no idea what happened. What are
you
talking about?”

“The party last weekend?”

Party, party, party. There had been so many graduation parties. And so much beer at those graduation parties. Was it reasonable for me to say I honestly had forgotten, even though it had apparently been less than a week ago?

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t tell Brendan.
Obviously
.”

“Oh. Good.”

“But I think you should.”

“I…”

“Not about Jer, necessarily, but that you need to see other people, not tie yourself down to your high school boyfriend. If it’s meant to be, you’ll get back together.”

Holy cow, I remembered this conversation. I
remembered
it. I remembered I was thinking the same thing. Which isn’t to say I had a clue what this Jer guy had to do with it—he obviously wasn’t the reason I broke up with Brendan—but I do remember thinking that I’d never had the kind of dates they showed in chick flicks and TV shows.

In high school, it’s not like you lead an extravagant, worldly life. You go to the local joint for pizza, you drink beer from a keg at a field party and make out in the back of the car, you go out to dinners with your parents, then you go off to separate schools and meet older people and have more grown-up dates until you dump
them
and get a job and, in my case, focus all your romantic energy into your career and leave the piece of yourself that blooms in relationship behind.

Not for the first time, I wondered if it had been a mistake to leave Brendan. Especially if I could stay with him, somehow knowing what I know now. Which I did … now.

“What happened with Jer?” I asked her again. Then added, “I seriously don’t remember.”

“You made out with him at Angela MacPherson’s party. In her
room
. I found you, lucky for you, and it didn’t go too far. All of which I already told you, but I guess you were probably still hammered when you woke up. You had a
lot
to drink.”

“Ugh.”

“Not just an
ugh
amount, almost an
alcohol-poisoning
amount. You really have to be careful!”

I was now, but at least that gave me a perfect excuse to ask for details. “So we didn’t do anything more than make out?”

She shook her head. “Not unless you did it with your clothes on. Or took them off and put them back on, then continued to make out. Which I guess isn’t
impossible.…
”

“Not my style.”

She laughed. “No, you’re right.”

We drove for a few minutes in companionable silence; then another question occurred to me. “At that party last weekend,” I asked, “what was I drinking?”

“That was the worst part of it all,” she said, then gave a huge laugh. “
Zima!
”