Meet Me Here (3 page)

“We’re going out,” I say. “Just for an hour.”

Dad shakes his head, as if I were headed to the moon. “
Out
?”

Mallory nearly jumps with excitement. “We won’t be gone long,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” Dad says. “Thomas is done for the night. I can drive you back to your house, if you need me to, but he isn’t going anywhere.”

“It’s my graduation,” I say. “And I’m ready.”

“If you were ready, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he says to me. And then to Mallory: “I’ll meet you in the driveway.” He’s already turned to leave my room when Mom speaks up.

“I don’t think an hour is going to kill anyone.”

Dad stops but doesn’t face any of us. Mom never challenges him, rarely calls him out on the way he parents—like an iron fist. Sure, she’ll come in behind him, patting me on the shoulder and telling me it’s just how he is. That he loves us. But she never does this.

Dad still hasn’t turned around when he finally says, “I expect you’ll do what’s right,” and walks out of my room.

I look at Mom. She shakes her head and whispers: “Go have fun. But be back soon. Eleven, okay?”

I lead Mallory out of my room, not planning to stop until we’re in my truck. Jake is still at the kitchen table, and Mallory pauses like she expects me to have a conversation with him, too. Or maybe it’s because he looks so different now. Either way, I only give him a quick nod and then open the door.

I pull my keys out of my pocket and start to unlock the truck when Mallory stops me.

“No, let’s walk. Like we used to.”

“Walk? Where?”

She raises her eyebrows, but I’m still amped from defying my dad. Unable to shake the electricity of leaving. She hits me and says, “The bridge, stupid. Where else are we going to go?”

It’s not far, a mile or so, but walking feels too slow. A brake to our momentum. I want to go fast, to put an exclamation point on what just happened.

“But we’ll get there faster if we drive,” I say, opening
the truck. She comes over and closes the door gently, nodding toward the road, the bridge. Before she starts walking, ignoring the fact that I still haven’t moved, she says, “C’mon, it will be fun.” It’s not until she’s a good fifty feet away that I jog to her.

“That’s what I thought,” she says, smiling tentatively. There’s a cautious familiarity with her tone, an invitation to jump back into our old skins when nothing was off-limits, when everything was engaged passionately. Everything was intimate. But like anything that’s been shed, what used to fit is now tight.

The untailored silence carries us until we’re at the edge of the train tracks, the embankment nothing but dirt and a few roots poking through the ground. I lower myself down and offer my hand to Mallory.

She ignores it and jumps down.

As soon as her feet hit, she immediately walks to the far side of the bridge, scanning the ground, searching for something. After a few seconds she yelps with excitement and drops to her knees, digging into the ground with a rock. When she turns around to face me, twin circles of dirt on her knees and a coffee can in her hands, it catches me like a punch.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“I know.”

“Are you sure that’s it?”

She opens the lid, and a tiny puff of dust rises between us.

“Oh, yeah.”

She pulls out what looks like a switchblade before hitting a button to reveal a comb instead of a knife. “Somebody went to Myrtle Beach. Yours, of course.” She tosses it to me, and I turn the metal kitsch over in my hands. I got it, along with a shark tooth chain necklace, the summer of fourth grade and couldn’t be found anywhere without either. We’d go to the grocery store, and I’d switch it open and run it through my hair. At school, open and through the hair. I would give it a swipe now except the bristles are caked with grime.

Mallory smiles quickly before looking back into the can.

“Ugh, remember this genius idea?” she says, pulling out a single Twinkie and tossing it toward me. I jump back, laughing. When it hits the ground, the package splits but the cake barely moves. “‘They last
forever
, Mallory:’ that’s what you said.”

“I remember,” I say, bending down to investigate. The Twinkie isn’t rancid or, honestly, even misshapen after all these years. It is decidedly a Twinkie. A disturbing shade of gray, yes, but a Twinkie still.

“I was right!”

“Oh, my God, don’t be an idiot,” she says.

“Look at it! It’s still whole.”

“Well, I’ll let you have the first bite,” she says, turning her attention back to the can.

I come closer to Mallory, looking over her shoulder as she digs. I can’t deny the excitement. We buried this the summer before fifth grade. It was raining, and neither of us wanted to be stuck at home. When she showed up with the old Folgers can and told me we were leaving a time capsule for future Thomas and Mallory, I always figured we’d dig it up a couple of weeks later. On the next rainy day.

“Get in on this nostalgia,” she says, handing me the can.

A couple of plastic rings, a collection of old movie tickets, faded and unreadable, a few train-flattened pennies. In the bottom, curled up around the inside of the can, a purple notebook.

It sends a shock through me. I pull the notebook out and open it. Mallory’s loopy cursive is like a time machine. The first page is a map from each of our houses to the bridge, with “meet me here” written across the top. As if either of us would ever forget how to get to the bridge. The next page is a long letter, unsent, to a professional wrestler we both admired, Randy “The Beefcake” Simpson. The rest of it is just as random.

“I forgot about this,” I say.

“‘The Book of Adventures,’” she says, pointing to a flash of silver writing on the dark purple cover. “‘And Other Miscellany,’ obviously.”

I close the notebook. “We were really lame.”

I mean it to be endearing, but it sounds dismissive. As if I want to minimize what stuff like this meant. Mallory pulls out a plastic ring—purple, with flowers—and slips it onto her pinkie.

“I don’t know,” she says, studying the ring. “We seemed pretty cool to me.”

She’s smiling, the way she always would when we were younger. Big and goofy, like she just won a prize at one of the fly-by-night carnivals that appeared in the empty lot next to SuperMart overnight, disappearing just as
suddenly a week later. She waits a moment before putting the ring back in the can.

Then she looks at me and says, “Why did you do it?”

My stomach clenches. I could play stupid. As if I didn’t know exactly what she meant.

The last day of summer, just before sixth grade. We were going to different schools for the first time that year, and I was sick about it. She had planned one last hurrah, and the instructions showed up on my windowsill in typical Mallory fashion. A map adorned with princesses riding unicorns, all of it done in ironic pink and purple marker. I had a packing list, a destination. We were going to do what every kid in our small town had boasted and threatened to do since the beginning of time: sneak through the legendary fifteenth-floor door of the haunted Grover Hotel. The one with the warnings. The one that surely hid the kinds of horrors we’d internalized from every scary movie we’d ever seen.

“I didn’t want to stop being your friend,” I say.

She picks through the can without looking at me. “Okay. But I want to know.”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

Her face drops because it’s bullshit, and we both know
it. I struggle to find the words because the truth still hurts. It feels like a betrayal, even now.

Of course I was going to meet her that afternoon. She called, I went. That’s how it worked. I was getting a headlamp from the garage when Dad came up behind me, the map in his hands. He held it like it was a dirty magazine, pinched between his finger and thumb.

The conversation was quick, over before I could say two words.

I was almost a man, and I needed to start acting like it. No more make-believe. No more running around with pink and purple maps in my pocket. No more Mallory. Of course he never said I couldn’t be friends with her—not directly. But I understood. If I wanted to be like him and Jake—every man in my life—it had to start right then, no questions.

So I didn’t go. For the first time ever. I didn’t respond to her phone calls or to the knocks at the door. Being at a new school made the separation final. But right now, standing in front of her, I’ve never felt as ashamed.

The first time I saw her in high school, every reflex inside me angled toward her as if no time had passed. I walked up to her in the cafeteria and stood there, hoping
she’d say something, grant absolution. Her new friends didn’t know me, so I was just another awkward freshman. Their laughter was loud and embarrassing, and I split. A week went by, followed by four long years, neither of us making a move in the other’s direction. And the longer I’m standing here, her eyes on me, the more I realize how stupid that was.

“You know how Dad is,” I finally say.

“I do.”

“It’s his way or nothing. ‘Gotta be a man, Thomas. Can’t be seen around town like that, Thomas.’ I didn’t know what else to do. He found your note, and he told me I couldn’t go. . . . Do you know what it’s like to have somebody expect so much from you when you’re not ready?”

She wipes at her eyes quickly, nodding. “Yes.”

I hold on to the can like it’s a life preserver and I’m stuck in the middle of the ocean.

“Basically I’m trying to say—”

She wipes her eyes one more time. “That you’re kind of an asshole?”

“I mean, I was eleven.”

“Still.”

“Would you call an eleven-year-old an asshole?” I ask.

“Well, probably. But I’m not the best example of good behavior these days.” She halfheartedly throws a punch. I look at the ground, trying to will up the courage to actually apologize. Because as always, I can’t stand up for anything.

“I wish I wouldn’t have listened to him, if that matters.”

“It does,” she says, her eyes drifting back to the inside of the can.

“And I’m sorry,” I say, but Mallory tries to wave it away. I take the can from her and force eye contact. “No, really. I was the biggest eleven-year-old asshole, ever.”

It makes her laugh, the sound echoing off the concrete walls of the bridge. “You should put that on a T-shirt. I’m sure they’d love that in the army.”

She gives me a stiff salute, clicking her heels together and everything. I try to hide the way my body goes rigid.

Would I have told her? Surely. And right now that feels like a bit of grace. She doesn’t have to be burdened by this, too. Instead, she’ll learn, just like the rest of the town, that I’m nothing like my brother, my father. That I’m a fraud.

I shake the can and say, “You should keep this. Do some of these things with Will.”

She pulls off the ring and drops it in the can and then
rolls up the notebook and stuffs it back inside. Then she says, “Yeah. Maybe I will.”

She walks a step behind me, neither of us saying much as we cross the field and walk back up Plateau Road toward my house. Every few minutes a car comes flying by. One honks, another flashes its lights, and we both stop, turning around to see an older couple shaking their heads disapprovingly. When we get to the entrance of my neighborhood, the manufactured houses set off in the distance in precisely placed rows, Mallory stops walking. She looks serious as hell, her eyes focused on me like I might sprint away. Like she’ll need to give chase. Without saying anything else, she opens the can and pulls out the notebook.

“What are you doing?” I ask, and she shushes me, flipping through the decorated pages of the notebook. When she finally finds what she’s looking for, she holds it close to her chest.

“What if I said you could apologize to me
and
right all of your past transgressions in one teensy little hour?”

“I’d say you have no idea what time I’m getting up in the morning.”

She hits me with the notebook.

“You really piss me off, Bennett. I’m trying to get you to take me to the Grover, but you’re like some preprogrammed computer. ‘Must Go Home. Fun does not compute.’”

She tilts her body like a robot as she talks. When I don’t respond, she sighs and pushes the notebook toward me. It’s a list, one hundred reasons never to go to the Grover Hotel by Mallory and Thomas, age nine and three-quarters. I skim the rest of the pages: unicorns, a halfhearted ninja. Each page is a flip-book of Mallory. I stare at the notebook for another second before I hand it back to her.

“Any other night and I’d go,” I say.

She smiles faintly and nods a couple of times. “You’re right, sorry. You’ve got a lot going on, I just thought it would be fun. But hey, at least I’ve got this, right?” She shakes the can once before putting it back under her arm. “Give me a ride home at least?”

As we walk toward my house, I wait for her to bring the full-court pressure. To come up with 101 Reasons Why Thomas Is Dumb and Boring and how it’s impossible for me to resist her plan, the magic words that got me so many times before. But she doesn’t say anything, just walks next to me, expressionless but not upset, in the summer night.

My house is still lit up, and I see Mom and Dad yelling at each other before I hear them. Dad’s pointing toward the living room, where Jake sits unmoving on the couch, the backpack on his lap. Mom has her face in her hands, and when Dad tries to pull them away, she shakes loose and runs to their bedroom. It’s impossible that Mallory didn’t see it, didn’t hear the words coming loud and emphatic from my dad’s mouth.

“He’s fine.”

We’re standing at the top of the driveway, and they can’t see us, have no idea that we’re watching or listening. Most of the time, when they’ve argued about Jake—whether he needs help or what that even means—it floats through the thin walls of our house, coming to me as invisible words. I never saw Mom crying or Dad sitting at the table, like he is now, reading the paper like nothing’s wrong.

I run down the driveway, get in the truck, and start the engine. Dad squints out the window, stands up, but I’ve already backed up to Mallory. I’ve got the door open when he comes out, calling my name. At first she doesn’t get in, her face shocked and confused and, maybe, excited. I have no idea how to explain the desperation, the pain. How badly I need her to get in the truck right now so I don’t
have to talk to my dad, so I don’t have to pretend again—like always—that Jake is fine.

When Mallory takes a step toward the truck, Dad says her name, but she’s already in the seat and buckled before he’s taken three steps.

I put the truck in gear, and then we’re gone.