If I Could Turn Back Time (16 page)

In retrospect, no great shakes had come along. There are a lot of clich
é
s and adages about every relationship and event in our lives somehow enriching us and making us stronger, better, smarter, you name it. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve had a lot of experiences, and memories, in my life that I could have done very well without.

Most of them had to do with dating.

So, yeah, we’ll skip the platitudes here. What I really wanted, and had a renewed determination to do, was to figure out exactly what I needed to have a do-over here, and how it would change my life in the future. Whether it was related to Brendan, my parents, my career, or a stray cat I should have rescued, I needed to figure out what had gone so wrong in my life that evidently I had to come back and fix it.

My gut told me that it was Brendan.

But, on more than one occasion, my gut had been a big fat liar.

“Let’s go,” Tanya said. “I want to go to the mall and get something awesome to wear tomorrow night. I have got to look hot for Kenny. Tomorrow night,” she said knowingly, “is the night. Whether
you
think so or not.”

I, on the other hand, knew tomorrow
wasn’t
the night. Because
no
night ever ended up being the night. Within two years she would have all but forgotten him, but there was obviously no way to convince her of that right now.

Funny how fickle fate could be for teenage girls.

Oh, well, it was always fun to have a crush, to have someone to dress up for, whom you hoped would notice and appreciate it.

It had been a long time since I’d felt that way.

Come to think of it, I was in the rare position of knowing about
tomorrow
night. Brendan would be picking me up and I had the chance to, for once in my high school life, wear something flattering, and do my hair and makeup in a more subtle, and attractive, way.

“You know
everyone’s
going to be there, right?” she questioned. “I mean, even kids from Wootton. This is going to be huge. We might both hook up with our future husbands there!”

Nope.

I was going to get mad at Brendan and eventually break up with him if I didn’t get to stay long enough to stop that.

The party was
important
.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt like tomorrow night would be the end of this ordeal. That I could, maybe, undo what might have been the biggest mistake of my life.

“One more thing, Tanya,” I said, measuring my words really carefully. “In that dream?” Surely this small detail wouldn’t hurt. Especially since I knew she was going to go through some struggles before she got to feel contentment.

“Uh-huh?”

“You had a very happy life. There is a lot of good stuff coming that you can’t even believe right now,” I said, hoping these words would sink in and comfort her deeply—though perhaps without a remembered source—“you had daughters in particular.” Maybe going that specific, without going further, would even knock that jerk Kenny, and the three boys she thought she was going to have with him if he ever noticed her, right on out of her head. “All you have to do to get there is follow your heart.”

*   *   *

THE NEXT DAY
would be the last—the day we took the rest of our books back and had our teachers sign off on everything—and I was acutely aware that it would be my last chance to experience high school.

Even writing that now it sounds silly. It was well
past
my last chance to experience high school, but somehow I’d ended up in this place of repeats and I didn’t know how many days, hours, or minutes I was going to get to relive.

However, when I woke up the next morning in my old room, I knew the dream, or whatever, wasn’t over yet.

I decided to walk in to school. It was just a few blocks; I don’t know why we had been all about driving it anyway. But since graduating, it was a walk I’d taken many times, with my mom and her dog, and I was eager to take another look at the area as it
was,
rather than as it is now.

Potomac has a reputation for being very posh and wealthy. Even when I was in high school it had held that distinction, but for me it had been a very average suburban place. The set for just about any nineties family sitcom you could name.

There had always been
nicer
areas, of course, but it was undaunting, back then, to live near them. When I’d checked Ted Koppel in for a court at the Potomac Tennis Club, I’d thought of him as a “local anchor,” not fully taking in his national reach at the time. There were a handful of other very prominent anchors and actors there, too, though I was always more wowed that the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard lived a mile from me, than by the fact that the actress who played Wonder Woman was also a stone’s throw away.

There was even a rumor that the creator of
Beverly Hills, 90210
had gone to my high school and based that show on it, and when you took “Beverly Hills” out of it, I could see how that might be true. Back then.

Now the wealth was much more evident. And, to be honest, I was a bit sad for it. Yards that I could remember playing Ghost in the Graveyard in on summer nights were now expensively manicured and cordoned off. Houses that used to welcome trick-or-treaters with hot cider and candy on brisk Halloween nights now turned off their lights and turned on their alarms.

So it was really nice to be able to walk up the old, familiar road to school one more time, and pass the houses as they once were: garage doors were open, weed whackers and rakes hung on the walls, lawn mowers rested, covered in green specks, with the scent of gasoline rising off of them and mingling with the sweet fresh grass scent, to make that perfect perfume of late spring.

The cars in the driveways were humbler too: dented Chevettes, a couple old muscle cars, and the fanciest of the lot were BMW 320i’s and the odd Mercedes here and there.

In short, this was my childhood neighborhood like I’d never see it again. It was beautiful.

The school was different then too. Very ordinary, big flat brick building. There was a marquee-style sign out front with its name and relevant dates, including, right now,
LAST DAY OF SCHOOL
. Later, the entire thing would be rebuilt, the name emblazoned on the brick, the building carrying off the look of a very fancy theater.

And it was, basically. What was high school, but theater, drama, role-playing?

I was doing it right now. Only I was getting ready to go in and play myself again. Someone I hadn’t been in a long, long time.

We had A days and B days back then. Yesterday had been an A day, and that had covered half my classes, though I’d seen virtually everyone there was to see and remember. Now I’d just see them again. And maybe it would be less alarming. I hoped so.

But the minute I walked onto the campus, I knew that wasn’t to be. There, right inside the front door, effectively blocking the hall from anyone who might want to slip past, was Anna Farrior and her group of bitchy, hair-sprayed, made-up (and made up pretty well, I hated to admit) friends. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth, tiny waists, narrow shoulders—they were a breed unto themselves and I had never matched them, not even when I was nine.

For some reason, Anna had had it in for me since tenth grade.

“Oh, look, it’s
Ramie
,” one of her friends said as I walked through the door. I hadn’t even had the chance to
notice
them yet, but leave it to one of those bitches to call attention to me.

Anna looked up, the leader called to attention. She raked her gaze across me like she was looking at vomit on the ground outside Nordstrom’s automatic doors. “And she still hasn’t got that makeup thing down.” She shook her head. “What an infant.”

I remembered her saying this kind of thing to me. Making fun of me because of my makeup and because I occasionally had a breakout, which she found so repulsive that it was apparently a disservice to the entire school community that I didn’t cover it up properly.

Her razzing used to bug me a lot. It was humiliating. I could literally remember hurrying past and fighting tears when this stuff had begun.

But now, of course … now it just sounded stupid. It
was
stupid.

Best ignored, as any grown person would say.

Unfortunately, that was what my mother had said, and so Anna was used to counter-striking when I ignored her.

“Oh, don’t be
embarrassed
, Ramie,” she said, so loudly that it would have been impossible for
anyone
who was the object of her derision to
not
be embarrassed. “No one notices you anyway.”

I stopped. Normally I would have scurried along and hoped this kind of crap would be long past when I got to college, but this stopped me cold. I wondered why it never had before.

I turned and took a few steps back toward her.

Predictably, her stupid friends made a small collective
oooh
sound and opened ranks so she was facing me. Honestly, it was just like a movie about high school. I guess clich
é
s really
do
exist for a reason.

“Looks like
you
did,” I commented.

Anna raised her chin. “Looks like I did what?”

“Noticed me.”

Uncertainty crossed her eyes. “Well—”

“I mean”—I gave a laugh—“you
just
said ‘no one notices you anyway’ to me,
proving
that you did the very thing you were claiming
no one
does. Which begs the question, Anna, why are you so jealous of me?”

Her face
flamed
red. “Me? Jealous of
you
? Ha!” She made a point of false laughter and looked to her sycophants to back her up, which they did, albeit somewhat limply and with an overall sense of confusion.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s pretty obvious, don’t you think? I can’t walk anywhere near you without you making some comment about me.
To
me. Though you pretend it’s to all of them.” I swept an arm, indicating her friends. “But don’t you think they’re on to you too? I mean, no one pays so much attention to one person, right down to criticizing their makeup, unless they feel threatened. Obviously.” I caught the eye of Dawn Jacowski, who was still something of an outside member of Anna’s group and who had been in my psychology class last semester. “Right?” I said to her, urging a nod.

She gave one too. A very vague one, followed by a quick, shamed look back at Anna.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’d think you’d be
delighted
I never got ‘that makeup thing down,’ because that leaves the stores nice and full for
you
to go stock up. Which, from the looks of things, you must do pretty frequently.” I could have been meaner. Part of me
longed
to be meaner. But since I really didn’t understand what we had against each other, I didn’t have it in me to try and
wound
her. Only to try and defend the part of me that had managed to be hurt by her bullshit for two and a half years.

I turned and walked away, fully expecting some sort of retort, but, to my amazement and great relief, she said nothing.

It was funny; Anna Farrior had been a recurring and annoying thorn in my side during those years of high school. Sometimes she was a major character in my memories—to this day I mentally rolled my eyes every time Facebook suggested maybe we knew each other because we had so many common high school connections.

But, for the most part, she was not part of my day-to-day memories of life.

I think the thing that gave her any power at all was the fact that she loomed large in one very important memory: my breakup with Brendan.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My science teacher, Mr. Giuliani, was my favorite ever. Of all the people from high school, students
or
teachers, he was probably the one I wondered about the most. He had taught us about the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty
way
before
Breaking Bad
had come along on TV, and he had tried like hell to be engaging and get us enthusiastic about science. And he probably did ratchet up the interest of those who were already inclined. But most of his students didn’t get, or care about, his brilliance.

To be honest, my worst grades had been in his class, because I just felt like I couldn’t
get it
. It was the only time in my life I’d felt downright
stupid
. But he had been the teacher who I thought cared the most. Proven, perhaps, by the fact that he was my favorite even though I’d barely scraped by in the end with a
D
(and that was thanks to extra-credit work he’d given me).

Eventually, though, what he’d taught had begun to make sense to me. This, after college classes and twenty years of just plain
living
, and I’d often wished I could find him and thank him for his patience. Tell him it hadn’t been all for naught.

He had reserved our last day of class for us to ask any lingering questions we had, just for the sake of
learning
, since our grades were already turned in. That’s how passionate he was about his subject; he just wanted us to
learn
, to be as enthusiastic about the possibilities as he was.

I remembered that last day and the disappointment on his face when no one had raised a hand to ask anything even remotely interesting. There had been a lot of fidgeting, eagerness to leave for the last time, the quiet scratch of some surreptitious yearbook-signing. But no interest in our topic, or our instructor, now that he no longer had an impact on our futures.

I remember frantically trying to come up with an interesting or relevant question that day, just to make him know that his efforts hadn’t been in vain, but I’d done too poorly to have retained anything.

Now, however, that was no longer the case.

I raised my hand.

To his credit, he didn’t show any impatience or lack of faith in what I was going to ask, though he was probably ready to bet money I was going to ask for a hall pass to go to the bathroom. “Ramie!” he said, as if he were delighted to entertain anything I might say. “Question?”