Lisa and Pickford had been going pretty hot and heavy all through the fall. Part of the reason I had so much free time to spend with Trip was because Lisa was spending most of her free time with her new boyfriend. I knew it was only a matter of time before her virginity status became a thing of the past. I’d started to feel like she and I had been travelling toward the same destination, but that she had found a short cut. Truth be told, I envied her for that.
We’d still drive to school together every day, but we weren’t hanging out as much as we usually did. Even when we’d hit a party together, she’d spend the whole night wrapped up with Pickford. More often than not, I’d bypass the ride as third wheel in the backseat and just find someone else to drive me home.
A lot of times, that “someone else” was Trip. It was purely innocent-most of the time we’d do nothing more scandalous than hit the King Neptune Diner before he dropped me off-but people did start to talk. Well, Lisa did, anyway.
*
We were scheduled to give our Big Report on the day before Thanksgiving. Trip had been an absolute nervous wreck leading up to it, spending the last days beforehand adjusting the color and sound obsessively and reediting parts that I thought we’d already finalized. We stayed up late on that last Tuesday “fixing” our film, finally wrapping it up at midnight in order to get some sleep for the next day’s presentation. I didn’t know why he was making himself-and let’s face it, me- so crazy about the thing. It was just an English report. Because we were last on the schedule, we’d seen all of the other presentations in the class already and knew we were the only ones to have made a film. That right there would have insured us a good grade, if for no other reason than that we’d shown some originality. Creativity went a long way in Mason’s class.
I walked into the classroom that Wednesday to find Trip already sitting at his desk, chewing on a thumbnail and bouncing his knees. He looked like a heroin addict and I told him as much.
“How the hell can you be so calm about this?” he asked.
I shrugged and answered, “I’m not, really. I don’t want anyone to laugh at us for our terrible acting, but other than that, I know we’ll get a good grade. Mason’ll see how hard we-”
“Who cares about the grade, Layla? What if everyone thinks it sucks? What if we put ourselves out there and it turns out to be absolute shit? What if-”
“Trip! Chill. It’s not going to suck. You made sure of that. I would have been happy enough just to turn in something passable. You’re the one that treated it like Citizen Kane for godsakes. It’s gonna be great, you’ll see.”
He took a deep breath, gave me a high five and said, “Okay, okay. You’re right. Where the hell is Vreeland with the damned TV?”
Soon enough, Roger showed up with the Audio-visual cart and I popped the tape into the VCR.
...And that’s how only a handful of people know that Trip’s first film was actually an amateur adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, opening to mixed reviews in the fall of 1990 during Mrs. Mason’s fifth period English Lit class at St. Nicetius Parochial High School in Norman, New Jersey.
Chapter 14
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
Thanksgiving was at my Aunt Eleanor’s, as usual. I always had a good time with my cousins, even though all four of them were way older (like, in their twenties) and all of them were boys. Lisa always had the worst crush on my cousin Sean, but then again, so did a lot of girls. My aunt must have had the patience of a saint, dealing with the constant stream of girls coming and going through her sons’ lives.
Aunt Eleanor was my mother’s sister, but the two of them were complete opposites in practically every way; from their hair color to their personalities to their commitment to their family.
Needless to say, I thought the world of Aunt Eleanor.
I always thought it was pretty spectacular that my father had been able to maintain a relationship with her after my mother had left. I can’t imagine it was easy for either of them to have to face one another; their one, big, shared grief hanging over them like a cloud. It’s not like we all got together every day or anything, but we’d always try to celebrate the big holidays in one way or another, and we’d manage to see each other a few additional, random times throughout the year.
After dinner, I sacked out on the couch with my cousin Jack, the two of us groaning about how much we’d overeaten. I thanked God that I didn’t have to go to work that night, grateful that the store had been closed for the holiday.
The next night, however, was my Friday shift with Trip.
We were almost through with our night, breaking down boxes in the freezing storeroom, when he pulled out a miniature bottle of champagne from his jacket pocket. He’d swiped it from his parents’ liquor cabinet, assuming they wouldn’t miss the party favor from “Bebe and Eric’s Wedding Extravaganza”, the gold and white label informing us of the bottle’s origins.
I grabbed a couple Dixie cups from the sink in the breakroom, we did a quick perimeter check for Martin, and Trip unscrewed the bottle.
I laughed, “You know champagne is good when there’s a screwtop.”