Over the End Line (6 page)

I took off my jeans and shirt. In my closet, I swept aside a dozen hangers of shirts and pants, and stepped through. I bent down to move away a wooden chest. My fingers reached along the wall for a seam, then followed that seam to a latch. I unhooked the latch and pushed open a small door. I then closed it behind me.

Inside the attic, I stood up. Heat and humidity, trapped under the roof all day, swallowed me. The space was pitch-black and insulated, and the pungent smell of mothballs and bare floorboards filled my head. I took in a deep breath, filling my lungs with the sweltering, musty air. Prickly sensations raced up and down my body.

Soon, sweat started to rise on my forehead.

And my arms.

Across my back.

And along my stomach.

This was my place to be alone. To let my thoughts run wild. To feel whatever I wanted to feel. In solitude. But more than just solitude. In a kind of cocoon, closed off from the world outside.

***

In the attic, I liked to remember her.

Ruby Luvelle.

I met Ruby last summer on a teen tour through Cleveland, Chicago, and Sioux City, eventually stopping in Vail at a ski resort turned quiet for the summer. She wore her frizzy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, listened to the Divinyls all the time, and had a half-dozen piercings on her ears.

"Where're you from?" I asked.

"Nowhere," she said with a shrug. "And everywhere."

Ruby actually came from a town near Worcester, Massachusetts, and was a thousand times better looking than I deserved. But she chose me when she could've picked any of the other guys on the tour. With Ruby I had a clean slate. No ladder. No circle. No crowd. No one pulling her aside to ask what she was doing with faggy Fehey.

We spent days sitting next to each other on the bus and hanging out on our own at tour stops. I told her how I was the star of my high school soccer team, planning on going to UVA on a full athletic scholarship. About pinpoint passes that I never made, shots I never took, spectacular goals I never scored. Ruby never questioned anything I said. She'd look at me with her marble brown eyes and whisper, as if inside my head, "Jonathan, it'd be wicked cool to watch you play."

On our last night, while everyone else went to the movies, Ruby and I snuck into another hotel and made our way to the rooftop pool. We sat alone in the Jacuzzi, chlorine foam bubbling on the water's surface, our hands exploring below. We talked about silly stuff, but everything that mattered. Ruby wanted me to visit her before soccer season started. She said we shared something. Simpatico, she called it.

Later, we buried ourselves under a pile of towels on a chaise longue, staring up at a black sky dusted with a zillion stars, sharing a bottle of cheap wine. Ruby told me about the summer house that her family had on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire and how, two years ago, her friend drowned one night swimming alone. "He was wicked drunk," she said. "He just got tired." That's why she didn't swim in lakes or ponds or oceans anymore. She didn't like going near any of them, either.

I was going to tell her about my favorite place—the edge of the dock on South Pond with the afternoon sun beating down, dragonflies buzzing, the water's surface glimmering—but I didn't think I should. Sometimes you can't be honest with someone even when you want to be dead-on honest. But I did tell Ruby, when she asked, that remembering things about my dad was like "trying to catch a leaf in a wind storm." The words just sort of came to me. She thought I was lyrical.

"What about your mom?" she asked.

"She's pretty cool," I said. "It's only me and her, though. It's been that way a long time."

"So what happened to your dad?" she asked. But before I could say anything, she said, "No, you don't have to tell me. That's just me being super nosy. Know where my mom is? In Houston, on business. Dad's in San Fran. I'll see them both on Friday in Taos. It'll be the first time in, like, months." She rolled her eyes. "They wanna fly home as a
family.
"

I didn't have to say a word; Ruby just kept talking. She was good at that. "That's why I'm on this damn trip. They send me every summer to some place or another." She reached her hand out to me. "Oh, I didn't mean it that way. This trip's been wicked great. Really, I swear. I just don't know why they bother playing games. They hate each other—I mean hate, with a capital H. I know it. Our family knows it. Their friends know it. Even
my
friends know it. Supposedly they named me after that Stones song when they were young and blissfully in love. Now? They make such a big deal of trying to put up a good front. Guess I shouldn't let it bother me, but they're either up my ass trying to know everything about my life, or they don't give a damn because they're all caught up in their own shit. I can't deal with it sometimes, know what I mean?"

Ruby stopped, as if she was done spilling her frustration. Then she said something that blew me away. "Jonathan, let's do it."

"Do what?" I said.

"Knock boots, mess around—whatever you wanna call it." She grinned. "Come on, I wanna
be
with you."

I stared at her. Blankly, I'm sure. I wondered if this was a genuine moment of outrageous fortune, or had my ears deceived me in a colossally cruel way.

"Okay, how about this?" she said. "I request the opportunity to make love to the hot soccer stud, Jonathan Fehey. That sound better?"

I looked around. But before I could answer, Ruby's legs were straddling me. She touched her forehead to mine and let her hair cascade down around us, blocking out the little bit of light there was on the rooftop. It felt like our minds were in a warm, tight space. My body tingled from the heat of her skin. I breathed in her scent deeply so that I'd never forget it.

"Relax, Jonathan," she said, her fingernails slow dancing down my chest ... Then my stomach. "You're gonna have a wicked good time."

Something inside me was certain—absolutely certain—that it wasn't luck, but my destiny to be with Ruby, alone, poolside, on top of this hotel, feeling her body on top of my chest, then melting over me. Her mouth found mine and we didn't stop kissing until later, though I couldn't remember the time, or how much of it had passed, or anything else in the world.

***

I was sweating, really sweating, perspiration not even beading on my skin but simply rising from the pores and spreading. Down my forehead. My back. Down my stomach. And my thighs. I lowered my arms, and the tracks of sweat went
drip, drip, drip
on the stained attic floorboards beneath me.

***

"I wanna go to Wellesley," Ruby said. "I'll live in a residence hall for my first couple of years, then get a place in Cambridge. I take the T to Back Bay almost every weekend during school anyway. There's so much I can show you. And my friends, Marcie and Donna, are the best. You'll like them. They'll think you're adorable, like I do."

It was late and I was tired. But it was a soft tired, a comforting tired—nothing like being tired from running the snake or listening to Pennyweather or fighting Kyle for a loose ball. It was the kind of tired the luckiest guy in the world would enjoy. I slept well that night, long and heavy.

From the moment I woke up the next morning, all I could think about was Ruby and what we had done. It wasn't that it was wrong—far from it—it just seemed that I had crossed a kind of threshold. Something was different. Like I was suddenly grown up, but at the same time kind of embarrassed, too. Yet whatever uncertainty spun in my head, it all disappeared the moment Ruby climbed the stairs of the tour bus.

"What's up, Jonathan?" she said before kissing me on the lips.

I remember wishing that we had been in the middle of the high school cafeteria at noon, when people from every grade were there eating. On the tour bus, I heard the surprised whispers and felt the envious stares, but Ruby was so sure of herself. She touched her hand to mine. She told me how wicked cool last night was, and while a part of me wasn't sure whether to believe her totally, the rest of me was ready to combust.

"You'll write?" Ruby asked, as the bus headed to Denver. "Because I really like to write letters. Long letters. Long letters that go on and on and on telling you what I'm thinking and doing and wondering." She tilted her head and said, "I like to get them, too, Jonathan."

I told her I liked to write letters, even though I didn't really. (Again, you can't always be honest.) We exchanged addresses. Ruby encircled hers in a heart. She made me promise to write every week. Then she looked at my address and her expression turned curious.

"You're from Short Hills?" she said. "In Jersey?"

I nodded.

"No way," she said. "My cousin lives there. On my mom's side. You might know her. Sloan Ruehl."

My heart sank. As a freshman and sophomore—even before the creation of the ladder—Sloan Ruehl had been firmly entrenched in the hierarchy of our grade. She enjoyed making life miserable for anyone she thought wasn't in her realm of greatness. I told Ruby about her cousin and all the people at school she left in her wake. It didn't surprise Ruby.

"Sloan always was kind of bitchy," she said. "I love her, though. Know what? I'm gonna call her and say you and I did it, like, ten times. That'll give you a good rep."

"But we didn't," I said.

Ruby smiled. "Then we'll have to when you visit. Or," she said, "when I visit Sloan for fall break."

Was Ruby going to lift me from obscurity at Millburn and make me someone no one thought I was? Was she going to confer on me a kind of seal of approval by telling Sloan and, in effect, the entire school, that we had
been
together? Was my existence at Millburn going to suddenly change, so that I was on par with the very crowd I envied so much?

I wanted to be popular—who didn't? But I wasn't a star athlete. I was smart, but just one in a class of smart people. My mom wasn't rich. My dad wasn't around. Whatever my looks were, it didn't matter. The ladder had ensured that the prospects for my junior and senior year would be dim. Was I suddenly going to grow taller? Doubtful. Or become a soccer stud? Unlikely. Junior and senior years lay ahead of me—two long years of frustration. Maybe I could convince my mom to move. She had been thinking about it. Maybe to Mendham or Mountain Lakes or Flemington. That was my best chance for escape.

Until Ruby.

She was going to change my life—after she had
already
changed my life—so that I could walk the school hallway, looking at those less worthy as those in the crowd had looked at me.

It made for an impossibly long flight home from Denver. In the margins of a magazine I made a list of how things would be different, what parties would be like at the circle. A new life opened up. A magnificent one, one made up of dreams busting from my mind. Nothing was going to stop me from claiming my rightful place at Millburn.

And it all came back to Ruby, the girl from Worcester who was all I wished to be. I knew we were together only a week or so and that we shared each other just one night, but did you need more than that to fall in love? Did you need a certain amount of time to know that person is someone you envied, but wished to be like even more? I didn't think so. Ruby was that opportunity that comes only when God is shining down on you, a rare occurrence that had to be taken for all it was worth.

Thirty thousand feet above Michigan ... Lake Erie ... Pennsylvania ... and eventually northern Jersey, I dreamed of my upcoming junior year. I figured the letters from Ruby might come early and often. Then slow. Then eventually stop. But she would have done all that was needed. I'd have status, I'd
be
someone. I don't remember my mom picking me up from Newark Airport or the ride home, but I remember being so sure about how things were going to change.

But Ruby never made it to Taos.

Thirty miles into New Mexico, on Route 285 South, the bus driver momentarily lost control on the rain-slick highway, and the Greyhound skidded sideways before righting itself and slamming into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. Seven of the forty-two passengers had injuries that put them in the hospital. One didn't make it.

It was a quirky thing. One in a million. The impact came as Ruby was reaching for her backpack above her seat, sending her into the aisle backwards. She hit the base of the dashboard. Fatal head and neck trauma.

And that was that.

I was told about the accident a few days later when I called Ruby's home number. Through tears, her mother explained what had happened. "I'm sorry," I said. It was all I could manage. Her mother thanked me, and we hung up.

At school, I wanted to say something to Sloan. One afternoon, early last fall, she and I were in algebra class alone, both of us finding ways to occupy time before the others arrived instead of having to acknowledge each other's presence. It was the kind of moment that, in years past, Sloan wouldn't have let go by without saying whatever nasty thing came into her mind. But not that day. She checked her notebook once.

Twice.

Three times.

Glanced at the clock.

Then out the classroom window.

I wanted to tell Sloan that I knew her cousin and that she was the most incredible girl I had ever met, that I would ever meet. I wanted to tell her that her cousin really liked me. I wanted to tell her that I had been inside her cousin one night, but she would be inside me forever. I wanted to say that she should bring me into the crowd, because her cousin Ruby would've said so.

I wanted to say a lot of things, but I didn't.

***

I felt lightheaded, and spat into the dark of the attic. What was the point of remembering? When I remembered Ruby it tore me up inside, knowing I'd never be able to relive that week with her again. And as the memories ran through my mind, they only reinforced that the past was over. Gone. I was left feeling hollow, wondering if that week had even been worth living in the first place.

I didn't want to face this. I just wanted to come down slowly; I didn't want to crash. But things couldn't be that simple. I felt trapped in the attic, just as I felt trapped at Millburn High. Both were oppressive. But I could leave the attic. I could step in and out when I wanted. It didn't have a hold on me, other than the one I allowed. And so, it was a way for me to escape my reality and be who I wanted, and go where I wanted, and do all I could imagine. The ladder, on the other hand, was the ball and chain that kept me in my place with the people at school. It was out of my control. I never asked to be on the rung I was. But I was hung there nonetheless.