Strange but True (16 page)

Melissa pulls away and punches him as hard as she can in the chest. “Don't play dumb with me, you moron! You ruined our plans for tonight and this weekend!”

Ronnie stares at her, his head tilted to one side, confused.

“Do I have to spell it out for you? You told Chaz. Chaz told my sister. My evil sister who doesn't want us to go.”

Ronnie straightens his head in a way that indicates he gets what she is talking about. His tongue washes over his lips, and he releases a heavy sigh. “I'm sorry, Melissa.”

“Well, why did you tell him? You promised. You know he has a big mouth. This whole trip was supposed to be a secret. Our secret.”

“I know. But Chaz told me he wouldn't say anything. Then he slipped in front of Stacy tonight. It was an honest mistake on his part. He didn't mean to.”

“Well, I still don't understand why you told him in the first place.”

Ronnie reminds her of the sports awards banquet this Saturday night, the one he and Melissa agreed he would miss to go to Rehoboth instead. “Chaz kept bugging me about driving there together, and he wanted to hang out afterward. There's a kegger at somebody's house, and he wanted us to go. He was like a nagging old lady about it, Miss. Finally, I had to tell him I wasn't going to be around just to get him off my back. Come on, Missy. Don't be pissed. I didn't mean to mess up our plans.”

Melissa doesn't want to forgive him so easily. She doesn't want to admit that she understands. Knowing Chaz, though, the story makes sense. “But why did you have to tell him the name of the inn?”

Ronnie shrugs. “I don't know. He thought what we were doing was pretty cool. So I guess I was kind of bragging about it, telling him how nice everything was going to be. I felt like I had something over him. It was the first thing in a long time that shut him up about his shot put record.”

Melissa doesn't know what else to say. She reaches over to grab one of those Executive Choice toilet paper rolls so she can dry her eyes. When Ronnie sees what she is doing, he tells her to wait, then he puts his hand in the front pocket of his tuxedo and pulls out a white handkerchief with the initials
RC
. “Normally, I'd only be able to offer you a scrap of notebook paper from my pocket. But my dad gave this to me tonight to complete my look. It's one of his. Luckily, we have the same initials.” Ronnie holds the silk cloth up to Melissa's face and gently presses it to her cheeks. “Don't worry,” he tells her. “I haven't blown my nose in it or anything. It's clean.”

“Thank God for one good thing tonight,” she says, then asks if her mascara ran.

“A little. But it's gone now.”

“You know, Ronnie, we can't go anymore. Chaz ended up telling my sister the name of the inn and everything. Now she is threatening to tell my parents where we're staying.”

Neither of them speak for a moment as Melissa reaches down and scratches her wrist, adjusting the lace band of her corsage. Through the wall, she hears the muffled words to a Mariah Carey song start up as the drumbeat slows down. Finally Melissa says, “Maybe we can go somewhere else. Another beach. Another hotel. It's not like the Archer Inn is the only place in the world.”

Ronnie licks his lips again and sighs. “Missy, there's another problem.”

What more could possibly go wrong? she thinks. “What now?”

“I asked my dad to give me my credit card back, and he refused. I asked him for some cash instead, and he said no to that as well. My parents are still punishing me for the Mercedes. So I'm broke. When we stopped at the house tonight, I even asked Philip if I could use his card.”

“And what did he say?”

“You'd have to know my brother to really understand. He got all snippy the way he usually does. He told me if I quit wasting my time playing sports and got a job, then I'd have money in my pocket. Like I want to waste my life working at the Olive Garden like him.”

“Fine,” Melissa says. “Then it's official: our trip is canceled.”

Ronnie gets off the tub and kneels on the cracked linoleum floor before her. He takes Melissa's hands in his and kisses both of them on the knuckles, then reaches up and strokes her hair. “I'm sorry,” he tells her. “I'm so, so sorry.”

As disappointed as Melissa feels, she has to admit that it comes with a growing sense of relief. She would never confess as much to Stacy, but her sister was right about one thing: their parents would have made both their lives miserable. Still, even though Melissa won't have to suffer through the entire summer, she can't help but think of those photographs in the Archer Inn brochure that Ronnie sent away for. All the rooms have a perfect view of the ocean. Each one is named after the color of the walls inside. There is a blue room, a green room, a yellow room, a peach room. She and Ronnie reserved the yellow room, because they liked the look of the king-size canopy bed covered with pillows. Now Melissa imagines that bed staying empty all weekend, or worse, being given to some random, boring couple who might show up without a reservation. She thinks of the boardwalk they wanted to stroll, a restaurant called Ashby's Oyster House where they wanted to eat, a little bookstore called Browseabout Books that they might have stopped in. “I just wanted everything to be perfect,” she says under her breath.

“It is perfect,” Ronnie tells her, stroking her hair some more. “I don't care if we're sitting in this closet together. I just like being with you.”

Melissa looks at him, kneeling before her still. His bow tie has gone crooked, so she straightens it. “Where did you hear that cornball line?”

“I mean it, Melissa. I think this last year together has proven how I feel about you. It's not exactly like we've been able to go on normal dates with all your parents' rules. It would have been a hell of a lot easier for me to date someone else. But I want to be with you.”

Melissa doesn't know what to say, so she tells him, “I want to be with you too.”

“In a few more months, everything will be different. We'll be living at college. We'll be right across campus from each other.”

“Yeah. Except I'll be slaving away in the cafeteria or whatever crappy work-study position the financial aid office assigns me just so I can afford to be there.”

Ronnie brushes back a strand of hair that has slipped out of her bobby pins. He presses his soft, full lips to the very center of her forehead and tells her in a low voice, “Well, if you're on dish duty, I'll help you scrub.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It's a promise.”

Ronnie moves down to kiss her lips as his hand slides around the back of her neck. His fingers do a little dance there, tracing their way from ear to ear, then to the top knob of her spine. Ronnie's kisses always start off as nothing more than tender brushes against her mouth. Soon he begins pressing into her, parting his lips, so they become wetter, hotter. As his tongue pushes inside of her, filling Melissa's mouth, she closes her eyes and leans her head back. Ronnie moves his body closer, then pulls his lips away from hers and presses them to the nape of her neck. His breath feels warm and moist against her skin as he moves closer to her ear. Melissa rubs her hands over the bulky mass of his shoulders and down his back. Something about the motion makes him breathe even harder. And when he reaches her ear, she thinks he is whispering something to her. She listens closer, though, and realizes that there are no words. It is simply the rush of his breath. Finally, he slips his head down near her breasts and buries his face into the lace of her dress. “I feel like I'm kissing a tablecloth,” he says, laughing.

Melissa stares at the messy part in his blond hair. “I thought you told me I looked beautiful in this dress.”

Ronnie gazes up at her with those blue eyes she loves so much. She feels a stab of regret and sadness that she'll have to wait to find out what it's like to sleep beside him, breathing in the smell of his skin, waking up and seeing his face in the morning. “You do look beautiful in it,” he tells her. “But I bet you'd look even more beautiful out of it.”

“Too bad you lost your chance tonight,” Melissa says.

He plants a kiss between her breasts then slips one hand down to her ankle and beneath the dress. In slow, circling motions, he moves upward along her ankle, her calf, her knee, the inside of her thigh, and higher still. When his fingers reach her panties, the material is already wet just from the touch of him. As he strokes along the seam, gently at first, then pressing harder into her so that Melissa's breath quickens, Ronnie asks, “Says who?”

“Says me,” Melissa tells him, forcing herself to push his hand away and bring her knees together. “Ronnie, we can't do this here.”

“Why not?”

“We have to go back to the prom.”

“Fuck the prom. You think I care about anyone out there? I only care about you.”

“But I told you a million times. I want our first time to be special.”

“And I told you, it is special. Wherever we are.”

Melissa stares at him a long while, thinking of all the turns this evening took before she ended up sitting with Ronnie in this storage room. Practically everyone they know is dancing on the other side of the wall, and he wants to have sex with her. Here. Now. She considers those other girls her age—Seneca Lawson, Laura Mills, Eva Talbot, and even her very own sister, Stacy Moody. Compared to what she learned about them tonight, being in this closet with Ronnie seems perfectly normal. “Want to see something?” she asks Ronnie.

He nods, and Melissa tells him to grab her purse on the floor. When he hands it to her, she unclasps the top and pulls out that tight bundle of clothing. Slowly, carefully, she unrolls the pants and T-shirt, as though performing a kind of surgery, until extracting the glass heart of that red bulb.

“Were you planning on developing pictures while we were in Rehoboth?” Ronnie asks.

“No. I was going to put it into the lamp by the bed in our room. A little surprise to make us feel more at home.”

“I have a better idea.” He takes it from her and stands, then puts his hand to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It's so hot that he has to grab a dishrag from the shelf. After he unscrews it, there is nothing but the blue light of the parking lot to see by until Ronnie puts in the red bulb.
“Voilà!”
he says when the familiar crimson glow fills the room. “Instant darkroom.”

As Melissa looks up at Ronnie's square handsome face, his smile with that slight underbite, she thinks of how tired she is of waiting, how tired she is of saying no. Finally, she stands and locks the door. She pushes a few of those heavy tubs in front of it just in case, then pulls the tattered blue curtains shut. This is not how she wanted the first time to be. It is not how she wanted it at all. But Melissa decides that Ronnie is right. As long as they are together, it doesn't matter where. So at long last, she surrenders to the moment, letting go of the plan, but salvaging this much at least—the part that matters most. Ronnie pulls off his tuxedo jacket and lays it on the peeling linoleum floor beside him. He pats it with his hand and says, “Care to join me?”

Melissa lies down next to him and buries her face into the tender warmth of his chest as his fingers move down her back, slowly, clumsily undoing the buttons of her lacy white dress.

“You know I love you,” Ronnie whispers in her ear. “Right?”

“I know,” Melissa whispers back. “And I love you too.”

ON THE SNOW-COVERED LAWN IN FRONT OF THE RADNOR MEMORIAL
Library sits the crumpled, charred-black shell of a BMW, its doors punched in, its hood ripped off, its windows long since shattered. The giant block letters on the sign draped across one side read
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK AND DRIVE.
The car—or rather, what used to be the car—is on display as part of a public service campaign that uses actual wrecks from alcohol-related accidents in order to bring home the point. Charlene remembers reading in the town paper that this particular wreck had been brought here from a deadly pileup at a Pittsburgh tollbooth this past New Year's Eve. Every time she sees its buckled frame and crushed roof, Charlene has the same thought: don't we have enough tragedies around this place without having to drag someone else's leftovers into town? One look at it makes most people slow down, but Charlene steps on the gas and speeds up to get past it on her way into the library parking lot.

When she finds a vacant spot and turns off the engine, a fluttery, first-day-of-school feeling fills her stomach. It has been almost five years since she has stepped inside this place, almost five years since that wretched Pilia used Charlene's tragedy as an opportunity to pole-vault into the position of head librarian. Since she cannot bring herself to go inside just yet and let Pilia and the other librarians see what has become of her, Charlene reaches over for the plastic Genuardi's bag on the passenger seat and pulls out the loaf of Wonder Bread she bought on the way here. Ever since she hung up the phone with Richard a few hours before, two things have happened. First, she has become convinced that he is hiding something. No matter how much Richard denied it, Charlene knows—the way a woman who was married to a man for almost thirty years knows—that his cagey, fumbling response to her questions can only mean one thing: he is keeping a secret from her. The second thing to happen is that Charlene has been seized by an inexplicable craving for a taste of the plain white bread she used to make sandwiches with back when Philip and Ronnie were in elementary school.

As she sits in the dusty, overheated interior of her green Lexus, trying to muster up the courage to go inside, Charlene opens the package of bread, takes out the heel, and tosses it on the floor. Next, she pulls out a regular slice and peels off the crust the way Ronnie and Philip used to ask her to do. When there is nothing in her hand but a floppy, crooked white square, Charlene folds it in half and shoves the bread into her mouth. There is something about the spongy texture and tasteless flavor that works wonders to soothe her.