The Secret Year (9 page)

chapter 16

Nick and Paul came into Barney’s on Saturday
afternoon while I was working. They sat in my section and made fun of my table-clearing technique for a while. Then Nick said, “Did you hear about Groome?”

“What about him?”

“He tried to chase me and Denise out of Black Mountain Park the other night,” Paul said.

“He did that with me and Syd once, too. What’s his problem?”

“We thought we’d go by his house tonight.”

“And do what?”

Nick shrugged. “Whatever we feel like. You want to come?”

“Maybe.” I didn’t exactly want to start a war with the Black Mountain kids, but I did hate Groome. And I was so tense over Kirby that I wanted to do
something
. I didn’t want to sit home tonight with my little black-and-white TV. So I said, “Yeah, okay.”

“Great.” He grinned. “Pick you up around eight.”

They picked me up in Nick’s car. Nick floored it over to Black Mountain but slowed down on the winding road upward, not wanting the squealing tires to warn everyone we were coming. For a minute I wondered what the hell we were doing. I considered telling them we should turn around. But I kept my mouth shut, and Nick coasted up in front of Groome’s house with his headlights off.

You could barely see the house from the road, what with the fifty-mile driveway and all the trees out front. Nick peered out and said, “There’s maybe one light on at the house. Might not even be home.”

“Let’s go see,” Paul said, grinning.

Nick turned to me. “You wanna be lookout?”

“All right.”

He got out of the car. “Then get up here. Keep the engine running, and if you see anyone turn into the driveway, honk.”

I got into the driver’s seat while Nick and Paul crept up the driveway. I waited and waited, the Black Mountain night rustling around me. I kept the radio off so I could hear whatever happened, but all I heard was the hum of the engine and the wind in the trees. You couldn’t see any other houses from where I was, just the pillars of the driveway entrance across the street. I thought of the Melvilles’ driveway, farther up Black Mountain Road, but I let that thought skim off the surface of my mind. I couldn’t afford to think about that now.

The Vernons lived even farther up the road. I’d been in their house twice, both times when nobody else was home. The first time, Julia had snuck me in on a freezing January night. (“Thank God everyone’s away; we’d turn into Popsicles in that car,” she’d said.) She danced around the house—shutting off the alarm system, checking phone messages, and putting her coat away—while I stood in the middle of the living room, staring. Not only was this one room as big as my whole house, but it was spotless. The couch was white and the carpet was this light pink color, and it was clear nobody had ever worn their muddy boots here after walking down by the river, or cleaned a gun on the coffee table, or stuck their feet on the sofa while watching TV. The carpet looked like it had just been installed that morning.

“Hey,” Julia said, reappearing in front of me. “Welcome to the Vernon house.” She kissed me and slid her hands down my body, but for once I couldn’t respond to her. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Give me a minute.”

“We’re not used to having so much room.” She laughed. “We can go sit in the car if you’d rather.”

“I think we can manage.” It wasn’t the amount of room that bothered me, but the whole dead chill of the place. The lack of magazines lying around, or cigarette butts in the ashtray, or empty cans on the end tables—the lack of any signs of life.

“Good,” she said, pulling her shirt over her head.

“Wait,” I said.

“For what?”

The thought of getting naked in that sterile living room, on that stark white couch, was too much. “I want to see your room.”

“All right.” Smiling, she took my hand and led me down the hall.

I’d hoped this room would have more of Julia in it. And it did: her blue and green bedspread, her clothes flung on one of the chairs, her shelves full of books. But it also had pictures of her with Austin Chadwick all over the dresser.

I guessed she didn’t notice the pictures anymore since she saw them every day. She flopped down on her bed. “Come here.”

I lay down beside her.

“You know how many times I’ve wished you were here?”

“How many?” I needed her to flirt with me, to draw me in. I’d started to thaw, with her half-naked body so near, but I still felt numb.

“At least two and a half.” She smirked, batting at my arm. “Fishing for compliments.”

I rolled on top of her, picking up the cue, my blood flowing again. “So now that I’m here, what are you going to do about it?”

I cut off the memory right there, pulled myself back to the present, to the road outside Groome’s driveway. I put my head down on Nick’s steering wheel for a minute. I never should have let myself think about that night at Julia’s. What the hell good was that going to do?

I sat up again to listen, but heard nothing. I had begun to itch when finally I saw two shapes coming out of Groome’s driveway. I shifted the car into drive. Paul slid into the front and Nick into the back, laughing. “Go!” Nick said. “Get us out of here.”

We were down on the flats before Nick told me to pull over.

“What’d you do?” I asked as we changed places.

“Slashed his tires. All four of them.”

“Didn’t his alarm go off?”

“I guess it wasn’t on.”

Paul laughed. “Why should it be on? Car’s just sitting in the driveway, right outside his nice safe castle. What could go wrong?”

“I wish I could see his face tomorrow.”

Nick drove us to the Higgins Farm Bridge. There was a car parked there already, right where I used to park with Julia.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Partying!”

We got out, and I recognized the car as Fred’s mother’s. Fred and Syd came over to us while we unloaded bottles from Nick’s trunk.

Nick told us every detail of the tire slashing. He mimicked the way he’d crept around the car in the dark, and even opened his knife to show us. Every time he told the story, his gestures got bigger, his walk stealthier.

“Groome deserves it,” Fred said. “You should’ve keyed the car, too. And sugared the gas tank.”

“And smashed the windows,” Syd said. I’d never thought of her as the violent type, but now I wondered if Groome’s chasing us out of the park had bothered her more than she’d admitted. I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

I sat on the hood of Nick’s car with my bottle while the others stood around in a circle. I was far enough away from them that I didn’t have to join the conversation, but close enough to hear everything. I liked it that way sometimes, listening and not having to talk. I hadn’t gotten drunk in a long time, and tonight I wanted to. Between our revenge against Groome and the sloshing sound of the river and the comfortable loose feeling I was getting from the bottle, I figured it was a pretty good night.

Syd drifted away from the others and came to me, carrying a plastic cup of wine. She always had wine, since she hated the taste of beer and didn’t trust the stronger stuff. “Can I talk to you?” she said.

“Sure.”

She looked over her shoulder. Fred was laughing with Nick and Paul. “In here,” she said, and opened the back door of Nick’s car.

I put my bottle on the ground and slid inside with her. I had the strangest feeling, being at the bridge in the back of a car with a girl. But Nick’s car smelled of cigarettes and wet dog. And Syd wasn’t Julia.

“I need to talk to someone,” she said. “Are we still friends?”

“That’s up to you.”

She nodded. Then she said, “I screwed up.”

“Screwed up how?”

She tilted her head in Fred’s direction. “Do you know why I’m with him?”

“Because you like him?”

“Because
he
likes
me
. And I really needed someone to like me, after my dad left and you dumped me.”

It took me a minute to absorb that, to feel the sting in it. “Look, Syd, I’m sorry about what happened with us.”

“I know you are.” She took a swallow of wine. “Just like I’m sorry about what I’m going to do to him. ‘Oops, sorry, I don’t love you after all.’”

I looked out at Fred again. I was thinking that someone should probably give him a drink. And then I remembered he was driving. Too bad. He was going to wish he had a few drinks in him.

“I’ve been trying to find a way to do it all night.”

Her words rubbed against my nerves. They brought back Julia’s words, her constant vows to break up with Austin. I shifted in my seat.

“Sorry for spilling my guts like this,” Syd went on.

“No problem.” I stuffed thoughts of Julia into a dark closet in the back of my mind.

“I just wanted to talk to you again. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder. I put an arm around her.

“Fred’s going to be okay,” she said. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did Nick leave his keys in the ignition?” she asked.

“I can’t see from here. Why, you planning to steal his car?”

She laughed. “Maybe. I would love to get the hell out of here.”

“And go where?”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, that plan’s only good if you don’t have to come back.”

She closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I could fall asleep right here.”

“Fine with me.”

Someone pounded on the roof and windows then, yelling, “OO-HOO!” The car shook. We sat up. Syd’s wine splashed onto my knee and the floor. Paul had his face pressed to one window, Nick to the other. Then Nick vanished and Fred was there, yanking open the door on Syd’s side.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“They’re being idiots,” Syd said. “Colt and I were just talking.”

“Get out of the car,” he said, and ground his teeth so loudly even I could hear it.

“When I’m ready,” she said, but she climbed out. Fred leaned in toward me.

“What the fuck, Morrissey?”

“Nothing’s going on,” I said. I couldn’t help thinking of all those times I’d been here with Julia and never been caught, and now here I was caught for something I didn’t even do.

“What the
fuck
, Morrissey? You had your chance with her. It’s over. You got that?
Over
!”

Paul and Nick hung on to the car, watching and letting out the occasional hoot. I knew they didn’t believe for a minute that anything had happened between Syd and me. They obviously thought the whole thing was hilarious, including Fred’s raging fit. And Fred wouldn’t have believed it either, if half his brain had been working.

“Relax,” I said, at the same time Syd told him, “Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to relax! Get out here so I can kick your ass.”

I got out and stood over him, and he hesitated. He didn’t actually step away, but he pulled his head back a couple of inches. I locked on his eyes and said, “Nothing. Happened.”

He whirled and stomped off. Syd gave Nick a shove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

He giggled. “Why, what?”

She rolled her eyes and walked over to Fred.

“Thanks a lot, Nick,” I said.

“What, you wanted me to send Fred in there with you? Threesome?”

He was hopelessly drunk. I left him and went to get my own bottle back. Paul sat on the hood of Nick’s car. I climbed up next to him.

Nick sat beside us, chuckling. “Things are finally getting interesting.” He looked toward the shadows beneath the bridge, where Syd and Fred huddled.

“Nothing happened, and you know it.” I shoved him off the car with my foot. He lay in the mud, laughing.

Paul peered over the edge of the hood. “Well, he won’t be driving home tonight,” he said.

I walked home in the moonlight, stumbling and wandering through the weeds along the riverbank. The river gave off a moldy smell that I happened to like. Even as drunk as I was, I knew my way too well to get lost. I think I was humming. It reminded me of the nights when I used to walk home after meeting Julia at the bridge, only those times I was drunk on her.

The next day I woke up with a headache, my mouth raw and dry. It had been so long since I’d woken up this way that I’d forgotten about this side of partying. I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, and when I finally did, I lay around the house until my head stopped pounding. It drove my mother insane. She chased me from room to room, saying, “That’s all I need,
two
guys sitting around on their asses,” and, “If you’re not going to do something with yourself, at least stay the hell out of my way!”

Tom called that afternoon. He told me about his Florida vacation, about the alligators and manatees and herons he’d seen. My brother was probably the only college student in the history of spring break to spend his time at nature preserves instead of the beach. No drunken bikini watching for Tom—or in his case, Speedo watching.

“You want to talk to Mom or Dad?” I asked him before we hung up.

“Oh, Dad, yeah. I’m up for a heart-warming chat.”

“What about Mom?”

“Just tell her I said hi. I’ve got to run.”

I went to work as soon as I got off the phone. It was a good thing my job didn’t use much of my brain, because Kirby filled my head all night. Either I was going to drive myself crazy or I was going to have to call her. I did call her on my break, but I got her voice mail and didn’t feel like leaving a message, so I hung up.

chapter 17

On Monday at school, I looked for Kirby. Whenever
I saw her, my blood turned to lava. I had forgotten all those lessons I learned with Julia, about staying detached and burying heat deep underground. But then, it had been months since I’d wanted any girl this much.

At lunch I escaped outside. The yard was finally turning green, and I no longer had it all to myself, but luckily nobody I knew came out today. I didn’t want to face Michael or Fred. I would’ve liked to see Kirby, but I still hadn’t decided what to say to her. Or whether to say anything.

Syd came over that afternoon. We sat together on the back-porch steps. It was the first time she’d been at my house since Thanksgiving weekend.

“I guess you heard about me and Fred,” she said.

“Nick said you broke up.”

She picked up a dried leaf that had fallen onto the porch and twirled the stem between her fingers. “Yeah. I wish it hadn’t ended that way, fighting like that. But it had to end somehow. He was suffocating me.” She began to split the leaf along the central vein. I watched her peel it apart, then drop the two halves.

“At least you didn’t drag it out.”

“It’s weird, because even though he was getting on my nerves, and it was a mistake for me to go out with him in the first place—I still miss him.” She met my eyes, then glanced away. “It’s like, once you’ve gone out with someone, there’s a special feeling you have. Even if you never want to go out with them again.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She looked around the yard at the weeds, and the gray patches where the rusting wrecks used to lie, and my brother’s wooden tower. She sighed and said, “It’s good to be back.”

“You want to shoot? I could set up the targets.”

“Okay.”

I was glad to have her talking to me again. After all, we’d been friends since first grade. I liked her back then because she was the only girl who would climb to the top of the monkey bars. We used to sit there with the wind blowing our hair around, thinking we were up so high. To us it was Mount Everest.

On Saturday I went for a walk on the river trail. When I got to the bridge, I crossed under it and kept walking south. Kirby was there, sitting on one of the boulders. I climbed up and sat next to her. The breeze blew her hair into her mouth.

“It’s good to see you,” she said.

“You, too.”

“Where’ve you been lately? I couldn’t find you at lunch.”

Did that mean she’d been looking for me? “I’ve been eating outside.”

“Oh.”

The sun glare off the river made us squint and look away from it. And whenever we looked away, we glanced at each other, but we didn’t let our eyes meet. I stared at a dead snag, the silver skeleton of a tree, on the riverbank. It was a perfect perch for an eagle, though no eagles sat there today. Thinking about eagles kept me from thinking too much of the dream I’d had about Kirby last week. I was glad she couldn’t read my mind, but I wondered if she could sense something.

“Want to walk up to the waterfall?” she asked.

“I guess we could.”

But we didn’t move. The sun heated our faces and the rock we were sitting on. She brushed a strand of hair away from her lips. I kept staring at her mouth and wondering if she noticed. She tilted her face toward the sky and closed her eyes. That made it easier to talk to her. “I called you last weekend,” I finally said.

“Really? I didn’t get the message.”

“I didn’t leave one.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to talk to you in person.”

“What about?”

“Nothing much. I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” she said, grinning at me.

I focused on the river until it blinded me, until the sun glare left purple spots in my vision. That was good; I couldn’t see her expression when I looked back at her and said, “You’re driving me crazy.”

She said, “Well, good. Then we’re even.”

Now I
wanted
to see past the purple spots and couldn’t. “What?”

She laughed. “Don’t act so surprised, Colt. I thought it was kind of obvious, what was happening between us.” She brushed her black hair out of her face. “But I wanted to make sure you were over Julia. I don’t want to compete with a dead girl.”

“Well, I don’t want to compete with Michael.”

She waved a hand. “You know that’s over. We’re friends now.” She paused. “One reason we broke up was the way I felt about you. It wasn’t fair to Michael, to keep seeing him when I was attracted to somebody else.”

“Does he know that?”

“No. There were other reasons, too. I don’t mean to blame you.” She stared out at the river. “So you still haven’t told me you’re over Julia.”

“I am.” I had finished Julia’s notebook; I’d read Pam’s letter. There was nothing left. “Lately, all I can think about is you.”

Kirby smiled and looked back at me. I leaned forward and put my mouth on hers. Kissing her was like diving into black water.

For a week after that, I was so wrapped up in Kirby that I hardly noticed anything else. We ate lunch together at school. We talked on the phone every night when I got off work.

I did wonder how Michael was going to take it, seeing Kirby with me, but he didn’t have much of a reaction. He just nodded, as if he’d seen us together thousands of times before. As if he’d never mentioned running into a burning building for her, or asked me to help him get her back. I hoped he’d meant it when he’d called that a momentary lapse, when he’d told me he was done with her.

Syd was the other person I worried about, even though she’d told me when she broke up with Fred that things were okay between us now. The first time she saw me with Kirby, her face went blank for a few seconds, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but then she relaxed. She talked to both Kirby and me without any edge in her voice.

Kirby came over on Friday night. To get ready for her, I threw my dirty clothes into the basement and kicked some empty cans and old homework papers into the closet. I put fresh sheets on the bed. Then I lay on the mattress, smelling the clean sheets and imagining Kirby’s skin against their cool whiteness. Not that I was sure I’d get to see that, but it was nice to think about.

I looked at the water stain that had crept across my ceiling and tried to count the months since I’d last had a girl in my room. There was Syd, but we’d been friends for so long, and she’d seen my room so many times, that I’d never made any special preparations for her. And Julia had never been here at all.

After I’d been to Julia’s house, she’d hinted about coming to mine. I didn’t see how we could manage it because Tom was too unpredictable, often changing his mind at the last minute about whether he was going out or staying home. I couldn’t imagine Julia in my room anyway.

Sometimes she had driven me home from the bridge. One spring night she pulled up in front of my house and teased, “Should I come in?”

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, opening my door. But she put her hand on my arm.

“I’m just kidding. You don’t have to get so nervous. What, are you running an illegal casino in there or something?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone or we’ll have to kill you.” I gave her a quick kiss, but before I could climb out of the car, she spoke again.

“I don’t expect you to have marble floors and chandeliers in every room. I’m not stupid, you know.”

I got out and came around to her side. She rolled down the window, and I said, “Yeah, that’s why I don’t want you in my house. Because we only have chandeliers in half the rooms.”

She opened her mouth to respond, then shook her head. “See you next Friday.”

I reached in the window and grabbed her wrist. “Come in then.”

She kept her hands on the steering wheel. “No, forget it.”

“You wanted to, so come on in.” I wasn’t sure who was calling whose bluff at this point, but I could tell from the way her hands clamped on the wheel that she was not getting out of that car.

“I don’t have time tonight.”

I released her, and she drove away. She never did come inside. After that night, she never even brought it up again.

My mother was at work and my father was slumped in front of the TV when Kirby arrived. I don’t know if Dad even realized Kirby was in the house, although she said hello when she passed him. I took her right into my room.

“So this is Colt Headquarters,” she said. “This is where it all happens.”

“Yeah, if by ‘it all’ you mean sleep and homework.”

She stopped in front of my TV. “Wow, this looks like the one my grandparents have in their basement. How old is it?”

“Don’t ask.”

She wandered through the room, reading the titles of the books on my shelves, running her fingers along the edge of my desk. I sat on my bed and watched her, feeling a little like she’d peeled back my skin to touch the bones and muscles inside.

“What’s this?” She held up a seashell.

“A shell.”

She made a face that said,
Give me some credit
. “I mean, why is this shell, out of all the shells in the world, in your room?”

I leaned back and kicked off my shoes. “My grandparents once took Tom and me to the beach for a week. I was about—nine, I think. It was the only time I ever saw the ocean.” As I talked, I could hear the roar of waves against the shore, and taste the salt. I saw the immense stretch of water, more water than I’d ever imagined in my life, water that gave me my first idea of how big the world was. “Tommy piled up a whole bunch of shells. He wanted to bring them home and make things out of them. But Grandma said we should leave them, because animals needed to live in them, and other people would like to see them, too. Tom got so upset that she said we could each take one shell home.”

“That’s nice,” Kirby said, turning the shell over in her fingers. Then she set it back on the shelf.

She asked me about a trophy I had (junior high, relay race). She pulled out a few books. “Oh, I loved this!” (
The Catcher in the Rye
.) “I never got through this.” (
Catch-22
.) “Did you like this?” (
Into the Wild
.)

I took a deep breath.

“What?” she said. “It wasn’t any good?”

“No, it was good.”

“It must be sad.” She watched my face, obviously trying to figure out what was bothering me.

“Yeah . . .” I decided to just tell her. After all, I didn’t want to make a bigger deal over it than it was. “Julia gave me that.”

“Oh.” She put it back on the shelf.

“You can borrow it if you want.”

“Maybe.” She touched the spines of several other books, but didn’t ask me about them.

I watched her fingers, touching all these things that were mine, stroking the wood of my shelves and desk, tracing invisible patterns on the furniture. I got up and stood behind her. She went very still, and I put my arms around her. I wanted to kiss her neck, to move my hands up over her chest, but it seemed too soon. I just held her. She settled back into me.

“Where do you want to look next?” I whispered in her ear.

“Hmm . . . there’s the closet,” she murmured. “I haven’t seen that yet.”

“Nothing in there. Just some clothes. And some junk I cleared off the floor and crammed in there when I knew you were coming over.”

She laughed. “You cleaned up for me.”

“Yeah. I even vacuumed.”

“Wow, I feel like a queen.”

Now I did kiss her neck. She turned around and kissed me. All week, we’d been stealing kisses at school between classes, and in the few minutes between school ending and me leaving for my shift at Barney’s. This was the first time we’d been alone together without a clock ticking over our heads.

She broke away for a second to say, “I know where I want to go next.”

“I hope it’s the same place I want to go.”

She led me to the bed.

“Yep,” I said, “same place.”

We lay down together.

I didn’t know how far she’d want to go, where she would draw the lines. I didn’t want to draw any lines myself. I tried to focus on what we were doing at the moment and not worry about what was going to happen next.

After we’d made out for a while, long enough for me to lose the sense of where my mouth ended and hers began, she took off her shirt and bra. I got up to lock my door and take off my shirt. When I came back to bed, as soon as I touched her, she shivered.

“You cold?”

“No.” All the time shuddering, as I ran my hand down her bare arm.

“Do you—want to stop?”

“No.”

We never did stop.

Everything I’d felt for her the day of the snowstorm, the day I showed her the waterfall, the day I first kissed her on the rocks by the river, boiled up and boiled over. Afterward, as we lay there catching our breath, still wrapped around each other, I said, “I love you.” I hadn’t planned to say it. I just opened my mouth and it came out.

“Um, you don’t have to say that now,” she joked. “I’ve already slept with you.”

“I mean it.”

She rolled on top of me then, her long black hair sweeping over my face and neck, and she put her mouth next to my ear, and she said it. It went right into my head, her breath and the words, filling my ear and filling me up.