Falling Together (13 page)

W
ILL WAS WISHING LIKE HELL THAT HE HADN
’
T COME
. N
OT
that he hadn’t come to the reunion weekend itself because it made no sense to regret doing something that, if left undone, would have caused him to wallow in regret for the balance of his natural life. He wished he hadn’t come here, to Alumni Hall, his
REUNION CELEBRATION REGISTRATION LOCATION
! as the massive banner over its massive white doors declared it to be, but which he realized, too late, was not only a mouthful, but also a misnomer, since his actual registration had taken place at home, online, so that his schedule and map, even his name tag (which he had no plans to wear; he and Cat would know each other if they met in their nineties in a snowstorm, and Cat was the only reason he was there), were all already neatly printed out and tucked inside a folder back in his hotel room.

Will didn’t love crowds, but he didn’t mind them that much, either. Still, the prospect of seeing Cat after so long had set him so on edge that, for a long minute or two, standing just inside the doors, next to the inevitable bust of Thomas Jefferson, he felt like bolting, his pulse revving up, his palms right on the verge of sweating.

Chaos,
he thought, looking out at the crowd.
A seethe, a hatch
. He remembered a spider’s egg sac he had kept in a jar when he was a kid, how right in front of his eyes, the white ball, tidy as a planet, had erupted into a boiling mass of bodies. This was like that, he thought, but with squealing and goody bags.

Even after the initial urge to leave had subsided, he recognized that this was no place to be, the last place he would want to reunite with anyone, let alone Cat.

Still, as he turned to go and someone’s hand tugged at his shirt from behind, he felt hopefulness flash through him and spun around, ready for Cat’s face, almost already seeing it, her black eyes, the distinct shape of her smile. Instead, because he was looking downward, Cat-ward, he found himself looking directly at a tall woman’s breasts. They weren’t bare breasts, and Will wasn’t exactly looking down the woman’s shirt (although if he had, it would not, technically, have been his fault), but because they were definitely breasts and definitely there, inside a thin, blue, sleeveless sweater, and because they definitely did not belong to Cat, they were an unexpected and arresting sight all the same. For a few seconds, Will stared, immobilized.

“Will Wadsworth.” The voice wasn’t squealy like the rest of the voices piercing the air, but languid, stretching the vowels of his name out like caramel.

Will snapped his gaze upward, to the woman’s face. She was pretty, honey-skinned, blue-eyed, blades of blond bob cutting toward the corners of her glossed mouth. Pretty and vaguely familiar. Will ransacked his memory and came up with, “Kirsty?”

Her smile swung open slowly, like a bank vault. White teeth gleamed.

“You remember me.”

In the nick of time, a few details floated to the surface. Sophomore year. Two months of dating. Maybe less. Winter. It had been winter. Will flashed back on a moment of holiday awkwardness: Cat and Pen studying at Will’s apartment; Kirsty showing up with a gift wrapped in silky, heavy gold paper. Will had noticed that it was embossed with pears and was the kind of paper his mother and her friends used for one another, hostess gift paper, not college kid paper. Because Kirsty had insisted, he had unwrapped it right away, in front of all three girls: a scarf the color of pumpkin soup, obviously handmade. “To match your eyes,” Kirsty had explained, throwing her arms around his neck.

Mid-hug, over Kirsty’s cashmere-covered shoulder, he had watched Pen and Cat wrinkle their noses, their faces bunching with stifled snickering. Will shot them a “grow up” look, but they had known he wasn’t really mad. Will could stand in his living room locked in Kirsty’s arms all day, but everyone knew, with the possible exception of Kirsty who at the very least suspected, where he really stood. When Pen looked at him and mouthed, “
Orange eyes?”
Will knew before she said it exactly what she was going to say.

Will smiled. “Sure, I remember you.”

“You weren’t leaving without your goody bag, were you?” scolded Kirsty. She lifted the blue drawstring bag next to her face and set it swinging like a pendulum, and Will remembered that about her, the way she could turn the smallest act into a flirtation. “Because I think that would be a really bad idea.”

“Oh, yeah? Why?”

She leaned in, lifting her eyebrows, half-whispering, “Lanyard,” then leaned closer, “Car magnet.”

Will laughed. Had she been funny back in college? Will didn’t think so, although it was possible that he just hadn’t noticed. When he remembered college, only Cat and Pen were sharp, four-color, foregrounded. (He remembered the exact smell of Pen’s shampoo, the sweater Cat’s father sent her for her twentieth birthday.) And it wasn’t just the way he remembered things; it was the way things had been. Cat and Pen were the people with him on the train; everyone else was the blur outside the windows.

But here, in this moment, stood Kirsty, being funny and looking extremely good.
Stay in this moment, dipshit,
Will commanded himself.

“Do you have a plan for your lanyard?” asked Will.

“A lanyard plan?”

“What do people do with lanyards? What do people who aren’t high school football coaches hang on a lanyard?”

Kirsty wrinkled her forehead, thinking. “An ID card?”

“So is that your plan? Hang your driver’s license around your neck so you don’t lose it? Because I’m having trouble picturing it.”

Kirsty laughed. “You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think we should go out for a drink and discuss it.”

Will hesitated, thinking of Cat.

“Unless you’re with someone,” said Kirsty quickly. “Like a wife or someone.”

“I’m wifeless.”

“You mean, you’re wifeless here?”

“Wifeless everywhere. You?”

“Equally wifeless.” Kirsty smiled. She waggled her ringless left hand in front of his face.

“But I’m supposed to meet someone later,” said Will, then added, “A friend.” Even though this was perfectly true because Cat was certainly a friend, Will felt a twinge of guilt at saying it that he could not explain.

“At the reception?” Kirsty looked at her watch. “Because we have three hours before the reception. Three hours and eleven minutes.”

Kirsty raised her arm to show him the time. Her watch was bracelet-thin and as expensive looking as the rest of Kirsty, gold against the darker gold of her skin. He looked at her fine-boned wrist, but, without wanting to, what he saw was Pen’s wrist, her long hand. He had to keep himself from circling the wrist with his fingers, turning it over to see the paler underside, and it startled him, this sudden emergence of Pen.
Get a grip,
he told himself. Here was a flesh-and-blood woman, asking him to have a drink.

“Sure,” he said, meeting Kirsty’s arch blue gaze. “Let’s do it.”

“Kirsty!”

Kirsty turned around to see another blond, tan woman across the room. The woman smiled a gargantuan smile and waved with her skinny brown arm shot straight up in the air, in the manner of a first-grader frantic to be called on.

Kirsty waved back and, sideways, through the closed teeth of her bright smile, said to Will, “Oh, God, it’s Sissy.”

“Sissy is very, very happy to see you.”

“I fooled around with her boyfriend, senior year. She never knew. I can’t not say hi to her.”

Will didn’t question the logic of this. Feeling equal parts disappointment and relief, he said, “Hey, we’ll do the drink another time. No problem.”

Kirsty swiveled on her heel. “Oh, no you don’t.” She poked his chest with a pink-nailed finger. It wasn’t a light poke. “You wait right here.”

As Will watched Kirsty walk across the room like a woman who knows a man is watching her walk across the room, thoughts tumbled toward him, one after the next. He thought about Cat, small, bright, and in trouble, waiting for him somewhere out there in their old college world, thought about how little he needed the complication of a Kirsty this weekend, then followed up that thought by thinking that thinking of her as “a Kirsty” was a reprehensibly asshole thing to think, and the fact that he’d thought it reflexively (without thinking) did not make it less reprehensible. Then he cursed himself for overthinking, reminding himself that, whatever had brought him to the reunion (not only Cat, but the possibility of Pen, a possibility that leaned, slender as a birch tree, in a far corner of his mind, casting a shadow he tried to ignore), he was still a wifeless guy at a reunion and was therefore practically obligated to have drinks with a blond blast from the past. Across the room, Kirsty and Sissy shrieked and fell into each other’s arms.

Will averted his gaze from the two women and found himself looking straight into the marble eyes of Thomas Jefferson. The eyes seemed disapproving, accusatory, and cold, and not just because they were carved out of stone.

This is not a big deal,
Will told Jefferson silently. But Will had the uneasy sense that going for drinks with Kirsty was some kind of betrayal, although he wasn’t sure what he might be betraying, or who.

You owned slaves,
he told the statue.
Remember that?

Then Kirsty was back, slipping her hand into the crook of his arm, saying, “Ready?” And even though he wasn’t, even though he thought he should just go back to his hotel room until the reception or maybe jump on the bike he’d stuck on top of his car at the last minute—actually pulling out of his driveway, then pulling back in and stomping impatiently into the garage to get the bike—and ride for a couple of hours, maybe do the hilly ride past the old church that he used to do with Pen, Will didn’t know how to say any of this to Kirsty, so he just said, “Why not?”

T
HEY CALLED IT A
“
RUMP SLAP
.” A
CTUALLY, THEY CALLED IT NOTHING
for a long time, didn’t even acknowledge that such a thing existed between them, even though they all knew that it did. Then one day, Cat said something about a soccer player Pen had a date with that night, and Pen jumped up out of the hideous armchair Cat had bought at a fire sale (“lung-pink” Pen had declared when she’d seen it), pointed at Cat, and shouted, “Rump slap!”

Later, Pen would say that it hadn’t been the soccer player but the Tri Delt who had asked Will to her spring formal that had provoked the comment that provoked the birth of “rump slap,” but Will knew it was the soccer player. He remembered the soccer player’s name and exactly what Cat had said about him, which was, “Trent Bly’s legs are so exquisitely dreamy that I don’t even notice the front teeth thing anymore.”

“What front teeth thing?” Pen had asked.

“I’m sure it’s not his fault,” demurred Cat.

“What’s not his fault?”

“It probably has to do with the way they’re shaped or the way they’re set or something.”

“Elucidate.”

“I’m sure he brushes. Of course, he does.”

“Cat.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Cat!”

And Cat had sighed and done the thing she did to indicate resignation that was half-shrug, half-Charleston shimmy, pointed to her front teeth, and said, “Food.”

“Food? In his teeth?” said Pen.

“Always.”

“I never noticed that.”

“He sat next to me in psych last semester.” Again, she pointed to the place where her two front teeth met. “Spinach. Bread. Lunch meat. Just the teensiest bit. But every day. Without fail.”

Will laughed, and that’s when Pen jumped up and said it: “Rump slap!”

She was referring, it turned out, to the Old West practice of hanging a man by setting him on a horse under a tree, dangling a noose (possibly a lasso knotted noose-fashion, possibly an ordinary rope, if there was a difference; Pen didn’t know; none of them knew for sure) from a tree branch, looping it around the man’s neck, and then slapping the horse’s rump to make the horse run out from under the man, causing his neck to snap like kindling.

“Although I’m not sure why I think this happened in the Old West. Maybe it only happened in westerns,” mused Pen.

“Do you watch westerns?” asked Will. “Because I’ve never watched you watch a western.”

“You’ve never mentioned watching them,” added Cat. “In all the time I’ve known you, not one mention.”

“So maybe it only happens in novels about the Old West. I don’t know which ones. I don’t even know if I’ve ever read that kind of novel, but I must have,” said Pen.

“Doubtful,” said Cat. “You really aren’t the type.”

Pen groaned with impatience. The source of the rump-slap scenario wasn’t the point. Historical accuracy wasn’t the point. The
point
was the no-going-back comment, the irretrievable, irreversible, eternally damning remark, the one that broke the relationship’s neck, sometimes even before the relationship
had
a neck.

“Trent Bly could cure cancer, negotiate peace in the Middle East, and reunite the Beatles, and he’d still be the guy with food between his teeth,” Pen said.

“Per
pet
ually,” Cat added. “Food between his teeth per
pet
ually.”