5. Richard
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Richard
I don’t do reunions. I haven’t thought about high school in years, haven’t kept up with a single person from back then.
I’ve got a life now, a good one, better than anything I’d have called possible at seventeen.
And yet here I am at eleven at night, parked in my office chair, staring at an email like some kid with a crush.
Because she might be there.
Emily Anderson. Except it’s not Anderson anymore, is it. Last I heard, years back, somebody mentioned she’d gotten married. Penrose, I think. Emily Penrose. The name sits wrong in my mouth.
She’s not even my class. The reunion’s hers, one year under mine, and the committee padded the list with the classes on either side to fill the cabins. Some database still had my email. Lucky me.
There’s no list of who’s coming, nothing to tell me one way or the other, but it’s her whole class, her town, exactly something she’d show up to.
The odds are good. Good enough that I’ve been sitting here turning a glass of whiskey I don’t want, doing math on the chance of seeing her, feeling like a complete idiot about it.
This is pathetic. I’m twenty-seven. I’ve built something most men twice my age never manage, I’ve got people who jump when I walk into a room, and I’m not a man who loses his whole evening over a woman he hasn’t laid eyes on in eight years.
Except when it’s her. Then I am exactly that man. Always have been.
I think about the cafeteria, sophomore year.
Some senior twice the size of a scrawny freshman knocks the kid’s tray clean out of his hands.
The whole room just watches the milk and the mashed potatoes go everywhere, and nobody lifts a finger.
Then this tiny blonde girl walks over, curls everywhere, a backpack bigger than she is, and says one thing I can’t hear from across the room.
One sentence. The big guy goes red, mutters something, slinks off.
She helps the kid pick up his tray, doesn’t make a thing of it, goes back to her table like it never happened.
I decided right then she was the most interesting person in that whole building.
She never looked at me like the rest of them did, either.
No fluttering, no finding reasons to end up at my locker.
To everybody else I was the quarterback, the senior with the future already written for him.
To Emily, stuck across a folding table from me on the student council she got roped onto a year under me, I was just some guy she’d roll her eyes at when I said something dumb about the budget.
It wrecked me a little. Honestly, it still does.
And then there’s the afternoon I’ve never told a soul about.
Junior year, November, the sky open and dumping rain like it had a grudge.
Her bus got scrapped, some engine thing, and the driver came over the intercom telling everyone to find another way home.
I spotted her under the awning by the gym, no umbrella, no phone out, just standing there like the rain might quit if she waited it out polite enough.
I pulled up before my brain could talk me out of it and rolled the window down. “Need a ride?”
She looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. “You don’t even know where I live.”
“So tell me.”
She got in. Spent the first five minutes apologizing for the water on my seats, and I told her three separate times I didn’t give a damn about the seats.
Then she went quiet, watching the rain run down the glass, and somewhere around minute fifteen her eyes slid shut.
Her head tipped against the window and she was just gone. Asleep.
She’d mumbled her street at me when she first got in, before the rain and the warm car knocked her out, so I had the address.
Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty in that weather, and I’d have had her home.
Instead I took the long way. Tacked on another twenty, crawling down back roads I had no reason to be on, just so she’d keep sleeping.
She looked wrecked, even then. Like somebody who never got enough rest, who hauled around more than a girl that small should have to.
I kept glancing over at red lights, telling myself I was checking the road, knowing full well I was just looking at her.
Those blonde curls had come loose from whatever she’d tied them back with, a few sticking to her cheek, and her mouth had gone soft, none of that braced-for-a-fight set it always had when she was awake.
There was a little spray of freckles across her nose she spent the whole council year trying to powder over, and up close like that, in the gray light, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
She was the prettiest thing I’d ever had in my passenger seat, hands down, and she had no clue, which only made it worse.
The rain threw moving shadows across her face and she didn’t stir once, dead asleep, trusting some boy from school not to be a creep about it.
I wasn’t. I just drove, let her rest, and tried not to think too hard about how badly I didn’t want the drive to end.
When I finally rolled up to her house I sat there a full minute before I woke her, just watching her breathe, hating that I had to end it.
“Hey.” I kept it soft. “You’re home.”
She came awake all at once, blinking, lost, and for one second she looked at me like she had no clue who I was. Then it landed, and right behind it came the mortification. “Oh my God. I fell asleep. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. You needed it.”
She grabbed her stuff, wrestled with her backpack, stopped with her hand on the door. “Thanks. For the ride.”
“Anytime, sunshine.”
I’d been calling her that for months by then.
It started back at the council table, after she griped one afternoon about hating summer, the heat, the sun dragging her freckles out, everybody acting like you owed the world a smile just because the weather turned nice.
It lodged in my head, like every single thing about her lodged in my head, so sunshine she became.
She’d roll her eyes at me every single time across that table, while we argued about dance budgets and parking and whatever else we were supposed to be deciding.
But that rainy afternoon, watching her bolt through the downpour to her front door, was the first time the word came out of me soft instead of teasing, and I sat there in my idling car and thought, clear as anything, I am in so much trouble.
Thirty seconds of my life, and I’ve been replaying it the better part of a decade.
I shut the laptop. Open it again. The invite just sits there on the screen, daring me, and the whole time there’s only one face I’m thinking about.
I’ve dated since high school. Plenty. Beautiful women, every one of them, and every one of them about as interesting to me as an empty room.
I’d take somebody to dinner and catch myself thinking about a girl who fell asleep in my car the better part of a decade ago.
And I’d know, deep and certain like a sore tooth you can’t quit prodding, that I’d been measuring every last one of them against someone I never even got to have.
Nobody ever measured up, is the thing. And the last I heard she’s married now, settled down with some guy who gets to wake up next to her, who probably hasn’t got the first idea what he’s holding.
Heard it secondhand, a couple years back, never confirmed it.
Told myself a dozen times it might not even be true.
I hit RSVP before I can think better of it. Select attending. Submit.
It’ll hurt, probably. Watching her glow about her husband, seeing the ring, all of it. But I’ve spent eight years wondering, and I’m done wondering. I need to see her once. Just to know.
The confirmation pings back right away, all exclamation points and can’t wait to see you.
I close the laptop for real and finish the whiskey I didn’t want.
Three days. I keep turning that over. Three days in the same place, breathing the same air, and I have no plan past that, no idea what I think is going to happen.
Maybe she’s married, maybe she isn’t. The smart move is to go, get one look, get an actual answer instead of a rumor, and come home and finally let it go either way.
Best decision I’ve ever made or the dumbest. Probably a tie.
***
I pack light the next morning. Three days, one bag.
I tell myself I’m not trying to impress anybody, which is a lie, and I know it’s a lie even as I’m thinking it, because I stand in front of the closet for fifteen minutes over a couple of shirts.
Fifteen minutes. I’ve made bigger calls than this in under a minute and not blinked.
The mirror gives me what it always gives me.
The gym’s been good to me. Black hair that needs a cut, a jaw my mother always swore looked angry when I was just thinking.
People tell me I’m good-looking like it’s news.
I’ve never cared much one way or the other, never had to.
Tonight I care, and it’s all because of one woman who’ll probably take one look at me, say something dry, and go right back to ignoring me like we’re back at that council table.
I catch myself wondering if she ever thinks about that rainy drive, if it stuck with her at all like it stuck with me, and then I feel like an idiot for wondering, because the last I heard she got married.
Probably moved on years ago. Whatever I’ve been carrying around all this time, there’s no reason on earth she’s been carrying the same.
God. Listen to me.
The drive’s barely forty minutes. I play the music too loud anyway and refuse to let myself rehearse, because every version that runs through my head is a disaster.
Hi, Emily, I’ve thought about you every day for years, lovely to meet your husband, hope he’s good to you, I’ll just be over here quietly losing my mind. Yeah. That’ll land great.