34.
I did not see Lindy Simpson again until 2007, nearly sixteen years after that night, outside of an LSU football game. We were both settling into our thirties at that point, only memories to each other now, and we had our own separate lives. To tell you anything more romantic would be dishonest. Not that I didn’t try to stay in touch. After the insanity of that debacle on Piney Creek Road was sorted out (the fires extinguished, Jason caught and arrested, Mr. Landry permanently stripped of his medical license and arrested, my name cleared of all charges at the request of Louise Landry), I made several attempts to call and apologize to Lindy. I wanted desperately to see her, to tell her that I knew there were many ways in which she was right about me, and that I was sorry, but she was gone. Whenever her father answered the telephone, he always sounded grateful that I had called, but then told me that she and her mother had still not returned from Shreveport, where they were visiting an aunt. I am not sure if he knew, then, that they would never come back.
I found this out a few weeks later when I learned that Lindy, like scores of other kids, had transferred out of the Perkins School after the fire. Since the damage to the main school building was so extensive, and our semester pushed back and abbreviated, other places had opened their doors to us, extended their generosity, and a number of parents accepted. Randy Stiller, for instance, spent his last two years at Parkview Baptist, where he became a football star. (On the day after I was arrested, by the way, Randy came over to my house. He’d stayed that previous night at a friend’s whom I didn’t even know and therefore missed all the action. Yet when he entered my room to see if I was okay, we hugged and laughed as if we were best friends again and to this day there is not anything I wouldn’t do for him.) But not everybody transferred out of Perkins.
Artsy Julie and I, for example, we stayed. This was a good thing.
We spent that next year walking to school together, where we would shuffle through plywood corridors to find our new lockers made of plastic milk crates with our pictures taped to them. We made up funny nicknames for the men who walked around in asbestos-proof space suits behind the orange caution tape and we practiced our Spanish with the carpenters who showed up by the truckload. We sat through half-empty classes in double-wide trailers, where it was impossible to hear the teacher over the sound of the hammers and saws being used to create a much bigger, much better Perkins School for the future. But we didn’t care. For once, we enjoyed the present. We ate lunch out of brown paper sacks in the gymnasium and I found out the soccer team was low on athletes. She heard the pep squad was low on dancers. So, we both said what the hell and joined up and therefore became successful and popular deals in this alternate and burned-down universe. We never forgot how good that felt.
The year 2007, as we later grew to know it, also felt good, and when I ran across Lindy Simpson it was almost midnight on the Parade Grounds of the LSU campus. The date was October 6, and LSU had just defeated the hated Florida Gators in a dramatic and improbable fashion that included five successful fourth-down conversions. That type of thing, if you don’t know, just does not happen. This win would vault us into first place in the national rankings and so fans of all ages walked around the campus as if hallucinating. Occasions like this surpass the Rapture where I’m from and I would not be surprised if every living person I knew was in attendance.
But even in a crowd that size, after all those years without her, Lindy was easy to see.
She was dancing in the bed of a pickup truck, at the edge of a large group of people our age. Around her, beer and champagne shot off like fireworks. In the middle of the Parade Grounds, a band had set up a stage and played funk music at full blast and the only lyrics were celebratory chants so earnest that you couldn’t believe the game could have ever turned out differently. Lindy’s hair on that night was red and stylish, and she wore a purple shirt and fitted blue jeans. She was, as she had always been, gorgeous, and I was thrilled at the sight of her. When she spun around in her dance and saw me standing there, she doubled over and put her hands on her mouth. She jumped out of the truck and ran toward me.
I suppose I should have been terrified at what she might say to me, but I could see in her face, already, that time had been good to us.
“Oh my God,” she said, and hugged me around the neck in the same drunken way she had those years before. Her breath, too, was as sweet and smoky as I remembered it, but she was not out of control. She looked happy and fit, and I hugged her back with both arms.
“Can you believe it?” she yelled. “Can you believe that we won?”
“I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. It’s wonderful.”
It was so loud and chaotic around us that it was difficult to hear and so we just stood there smiling until Lindy pulled me over behind a screen of trees to talk. “It’s good to see you,” she said. “Jesus, it’s been so long. Do you still live here?”
“I do,” I said.
“That’s great,” she said. “What are you doing these days? I mean, like, for a living.”
It was a strange thing but, on that occasion, I felt none of the anxiety around her that I did as a boy. I felt no need to impress her. I had no agenda. Instead I felt as simple and clear as the evening itself because Lindy and I were, perhaps for the first time in our lives, exactly what we looked like: just two people among many, glad to see each other.
“I’m a botanist,” I told her. “I study plants and trees and stuff.”
Lindy seemed to find this hilarious. “A botanist?” she asked. She looked around. She pointed up. “Okay,” she said. “Prove it. What kind of trees are these?”
“Those are crepe myrtles,” I said. “Lagerstroemia indica.”
“What is that, Latin?” she asked, and I nodded. “My God,” she said. “Do you remember taking Latin with Ms. Abbott? What a windbag. All I remember is veni vidi vici. Veni vidi vici. I think we spent an entire year just saying veni vidi vici and watching shit like Ben-Hur.”
I smiled. She was right.
It was good to see her.
“What about you?” I asked. “What are you doing these days?”
“I’m a stylist,” she said, and dramatically primped her hair. “You know, I study hair and stuff.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”
“Well,” she said. “It lets me play with scissors.”