19
After
I’ve got a midterm to take in the Modern American Novel, a class I was sort of excited about when it turned up in the Broward College course catalog last semester, which just goes to show how delusional I really am. For some reason I was picturing lively, sophisticated conversations about the great writers of the last few generations; instead the lecture is delivered by a fleshy middle-aged professor who’s not so much boring as blatantly bored, who eyes us with vague pity through an owly pair of glasses and periodically administers multiple-choice quizzes I’m fairly certain he’s printing off the Internet. “You are my penance for a misspent life,” he announced on the first day of class, before assigning The Things They Carried and two books by John Updike and pretty much washing his hands of us entirely. I like to imagine that one of these days I’ll be able to walk into a class at Broward without thinking of Ms. Bowen and how disappointed she’d be, but to be honest it hasn’t happened yet.
This morning I park my car and head down the chilly hallway toward the classroom, past the bulletin board with flyers for intramural flag football games and two-for-one happy hour at a bar near campus. Par for the course, I don’t have a hell of a lot in common with my classmates, although I feel like at this point that’s absolutely more my fault than theirs. I’ve been to coffee a couple of times with some girls from my accounting class, but for the most part my time at BC has not been the social bonanza Shelby hoped it might be. Basically it feels a lot like high school, only without gym.
I sit down at one of the long tables and tick the appropriate boxes with my number 2 pencil, then hand in my test at the front of the room where good old Professor Orrin is reading the Atlantic on his phone. He nods at me distractedly before returning his attention to the screen. I hurry down the stairs into the parking lot, cross the shimmering black-top to where my car sits waiting. There’s more than fiction on my mind today.
Allie’s old house has been empty for ages: Her parents moved to Tampa not long after the accident, and the new owners foreclosed inside a year. It just sits there in the swooping curve of the cul-de-sac now, gap-toothed and vaguely haunted-looking, waiting for whatever’s coming next.
Allie’s buried at Forest Lawn, but I’ve never been much for cemeteries, and anyway, whoever’s beneath that headstone—beloved angel, darling girl—that’s not the Allie I knew. And maybe the girl I fought with all those nights ago in the unforgiving glare of the patio light wasn’t the Allie I knew, either, but sometimes I can still find her here in her old backyard. I come by to look every now and again, if it’s summer or I’m lonely or afraid.
This afternoon, though—half a week since our date at the playground, who knows how long since my father looked me in the eye—I’m not the only one hanging around the Ballards’ old development. Sawyer’s rusty Jeep is parked in the driveway, unmistakable. I shake my head, disbelieving, as if there’s some invisible string that kept us tethered the entire time he was away and that’s tightening now, a slip-knot hooked around my wrist.
“You’re trespassing, you know,” I call, wandering across the scruffy expanse of dry, brown grass, Allie’s dad’s beloved lawn gone wild and weedy. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that things change whether you’re around to notice them or not.
“I know,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” I sit down on the swing next to him just like we sat all those nights ago outside the party, rubber burning the backs of my thighs. “What are you doing here?”
Sawyer shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood. I don’t know. I feel like I never really …” He trails off, going quiet, one sneaker toeing the ground. “I think about her sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, which is an understatement. “I do.”
“I thought about her a lot while I was gone.” He raises his head to look at me, like a challenge. “Thought about you, too.”
I ignore that last part, shaking my head a little as I gaze across the yard at the empty patio, the darkened windows filmed with grime. I grew up in this yard—Allie and I slept out here every summer, the two of us in a pup tent with a Coleman camping lantern and a radio, listening to the Top 40 countdown. In second grade I tumbled off these monkey bars and fractured both my wrists. “She’d be in college,” I tell him. “If she hadn’t … if she’d lived. We both would be, maybe.”
Sawyer nods slowly. “Maybe,” he agrees, eyes narrowing the slightest bit, like he’s trying to figure out how much of it I blame him for. I don’t know if it’s more or less than he thinks.
“She was gonna go to Barnard,” I continue. It feels a little bit like finding my voice to say it after all this time. “And I was going to come to New York after college, and we were going to get some fancy apartment by Central Park and dress up for regular life. She always said that, when we were younger—that we’d dress up for regular life.” I gaze down at my shorts and T-shirt, a loose-fitting Red Sox ringer Shelby brought back from school for me. “As you can see, I’ve really taken that sentiment to heart.”
Sawyer smiles. “For what it’s worth,” he says, dark eyebrows arcing, “I think you look arty.”
He bumps at my ankle, careful. After a moment I bump at his in return.