Still, I had to make sure. “You didn’t see me fall in the mud when I ran?”
James seemed to search his memory, his eyes going up in the air and everything. But all he came back with was “I wasn’t a saint in high school. Our parents were out of town and I was already drinking with a few of my teammates before people started showing up. I was probably too drunk to notice. I’m sorry.”
“Wow,” I said.
He shook his head, his eyes staying on mine. “I feel like shit. I can’t believe that I don’t remember you. And I’m really having a hard time with what my sisters did to you in high school. I called Tammy, too. And she said you ran away after . . .” He trailed off.
But I was still stuck on the Note Incident. “You seriously don’t remember me giving you a note after you got kicked out of that football game?”
“No.”
Well then. I shook my head, but I had to give it to James. At least he was always straight up with me, even when I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be straight up with him.
“I’m glad you don’t remember,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to remember me like that. So it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay.” His face was more grim than I had ever seen it before. Even more grim than the first time he told me that he loved me.
I felt like a little girl, but I had to ask anyway. “You’re not mad at me?”
His eyebrows raised. “I’m surprised you ran like that. But no, I’m not mad at you.” He took a step closer to me. “Actually, this explains a lot.”
To my surprise, I felt a laugh wanting to come up from beneath my scared heart. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
He bent his head in the way that tall men do when they want to talk intimately with you. “Are you mad at me?”
“Yes,” I admitted, even though I knew I was reversing my earlier “it’s okay” line. “A little. I don’t want you to remember me that way, but I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around you actually talking to me, then just forgetting me.”
“I was a kid,” he said. “Just a stupid kid,”
. . .
I think of all the nights James and I spent together, that one was my favorite because it was the first time Davie and the guy she had a crush on in high school made love, which meant when James was inside me, he looked at me, and knew me for me.
Afterward I was more forthcoming about the crush. In fact I told him it was more than a crush. “I stalked the hell out of you,” I confessed. “And you didn’t even know I was alive.”
“It was high school,” he said, nesting his hand in my hair, as if that explained everything. Like most high schoolers went through almost an entire school year totally oblivious to the least popular and most made-fun-of girl in school.
We stayed up all night, alternating between talking about high school and making love. That’s when I began to suspect that Veronica hadn’t quite told James everything.
Though she had laid out my crush in excruciating and embarrassing detail, she had not said word one about his father and my mother.
I could just imagine her trying to explain to James, without bringing our parents into it, what an ugly waste of space I had been in high school and him totally not understanding. I could see now that he did not get the high school caste system in the way that only someone who had always effortlessly been at the very top of it could possibly not get it.
And I knew Veronica would have found his insistence on staying attracted to me baffling, if not full-on upsetting.
However, I hadn’t guessed that it would bring her down to the club the next day.
. . .