The Secret Year

  “You want to shoot? I could set up the targets.”

  “Okay.”

  I was glad to have her talking to me again. After all, we’d been friends since first grade. I liked her back then because she was the only girl who would climb to the top of the monkey bars. We used to sit there with the wind blowing our hair around, thinking we were up so high. To us it was Mount Everest.

  On Saturday I went for a walk on the river trail. When I got to the bridge, I crossed under it and kept walking south. Kirby was there, sitting on one of the boulders. I climbed up and sat next to her. The breeze blew her hair into her mouth.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  “You, too.”

  “Where’ve you been lately? I couldn’t find you at lunch.”

  Did that mean she’d been looking for me? “I’ve been eating outside.”

  “Oh.”

  The sun glare off the river made us squint and look away from it. And whenever we looked away, we glanced at each other, but we didn’t let our eyes meet. I stared at a dead snag, the silver skeleton of a tree, on the riverbank. It was a perfect perch for an eagle, though no eagles sat there today. Thinking about eagles kept me from thinking too much of the dream I’d had about Kirby last week. I was glad she couldn’t read my mind, but I wondered if she could sense something.

  “Want to walk up to the waterfall?” she asked.

  “I guess we could.”

  But we didn’t move. The sun heated our faces and the rock we were sitting on. She brushed a strand of hair away from her lips. I kept staring at her mouth and wondering if she noticed. She tilted her face toward the sky and closed her eyes. That made it easier to talk to her. “I called you last weekend,” I finally said.

  “Really? I didn’t get the message.”

  “I didn’t leave one.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I wanted to talk to you in person.”

  “What about?”

  “Nothing much. I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi,” she said, grinning at me.

  I focused on the river until it blinded me, until the sun glare left purple spots in my vision. That was good; I couldn’t see her expression when I looked back at her and said, “You’re driving me crazy.”

  She said, “Well, good. Then we’re even.”

  Now I wanted to see past the purple spots and couldn’t. “What?”

  She laughed. “Don’t act so surprised, Colt. I thought it was kind of obvious, what was happening between us.” She brushed her black hair out of her face. “But I wanted to make sure you were over Julia. I don’t want to compete with a dead girl.”

  “Well, I don’t want to compete with Michael.”

  She waved a hand. “You know that’s over. We’re friends now.” She paused. “One reason we broke up was the way I felt about you. It wasn’t fair to Michael, to keep seeing him when I was attracted to somebody else.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “No. There were other reasons, too. I don’t mean to blame you.” She stared out at the river. “So you still haven’t told me you’re over Julia.”

  “I am.” I had finished Julia’s notebook; I’d read Pam’s letter. There was nothing left. “Lately, all I can think about is you.”

  Kirby smiled and looked back at me. I leaned forward and put my mouth on hers. Kissing her was like diving into black water.

  For a week after that, I was so wrapped up in Kirby that I hardly noticed anything else. We ate lunch together at school. We talked on the phone every night when I got off work.

  I did wonder how Michael was going to take it, seeing Kirby with me, but he didn’t have much of a reaction. He just nodded, as if he’d seen us together thousands of times before. As if he’d never mentioned running into a burning building for her, or asked me to help him get her back. I hoped he’d meant it when he’d called that a momentary lapse, when he’d told me he was done with her.

  Syd was the other person I worried about, even though she’d told me when she broke up with Fred that things were okay between us now. The first time she saw me with Kirby, her face went blank for a few seconds, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but then she relaxed. She talked to both Kirby and me without any edge in her voice.

  Kirby came over on Friday night. To get ready for her, I threw my dirty clothes into the basement and kicked some empty cans and old homework papers into the closet. I put fresh sheets on the bed. Then I lay on the mattress, smelling the clean sheets and imagining Kirby’s skin against their cool whiteness. Not that I was sure I’d get to see that, but it was nice to think about.

  I looked at the water stain that had crept across my ceiling and tried to count the months since I’d last had a girl in my room. There was Syd, but we’d been friends for so long, and she’d seen my room so many times, that I’d never made any special preparations for her. And Julia had never been here at all.

  After I’d been to Julia’s house, she’d hinted about coming to mine. I didn’t see how we could manage it because Tom was too unpredictable, often changing his mind at the last minute about whether he was going out or staying home. I couldn’t imagine Julia in my room anyway.

  Sometimes she had driven me home from the bridge. One spring night she pulled up in front of my house and teased, “Should I come in?”

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, opening my door. But she put her hand on my arm.

  “I’m just kidding. You don’t have to get so nervous. What, are you running an illegal casino in there or something?”

  “Yeah. Don’t tell anyone or we’ll have to kill you.” I gave her a quick kiss, but before I could climb out of the car, she spoke again.

  “I don’t expect you to have marble floors and chandeliers in every room. I’m not stupid, you know.”

  I got out and came around to her side. She rolled down the window, and I said, “Yeah, that’s why I don’t want you in my house. Because we only have chandeliers in half the rooms.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, then shook her head. “See you next Friday.”

  I reached in the window and grabbed her wrist. “Come in then.”

  She kept her hands on the steering wheel. “No, forget it.”

  “You wanted to, so come on in.” I wasn’t sure who was calling whose bluff at this point, but I could tell from the way her hands clamped on the wheel that she was not getting out of that car.

  “I don’t have time tonight.”

  I released her, and she drove away. She never did come inside. After that night, she never even brought it up again.

  My mother was at work and my father was slumped in front of the TV when Kirby arrived. I don’t know if Dad even realized Kirby was in the house, although she said hello when she passed him. I took her right into my room.

  “So this is Colt Headquarters,” she said. “This is where it all happens.”

  “Yeah, if by ‘it all’ you mean sleep and homework.”

  She stopped in front of my TV. “Wow, this looks like the one my grandparents have in their basement. How old is it?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  She wandered through the room, reading the titles of the books on my shelves, running her fingers along the edge of my desk. I sat on my bed and watched her, feeling a little like she’d peeled back my skin to touch the bones and muscles inside.

  “What’s this?” She held up a seashell.

  “A shell.”

  She made a face that said, Give me some credit. “I mean, why is this shell, out of all the shells in the world, in your room?”

  I leaned back and kicked off my shoes. “My grandparents once took Tom and me to the beach for a week. I was about—nine, I think. It was the only ti
me I ever saw the ocean.” As I talked, I could hear the roar of waves against the shore, and taste the salt. I saw the immense stretch of water, more water than I’d ever imagined in my life, water that gave me my first idea of how big the world was. “Tommy piled up a whole bunch of shells. He wanted to bring them home and make things out of them. But Grandma said we should leave them, because animals needed to live in them, and other people would like to see them, too. Tom got so upset that she said we could each take one shell home.”

  “That’s nice,” Kirby said, turning the shell over in her fingers. Then she set it back on the shelf.

  She asked me about a trophy I had (junior high, relay race). She pulled out a few books. “Oh, I loved this!” (The Catcher in the Rye.) “I never got through this.” (Catch-22.) “Did you like this?” (Into the Wild.)

  I took a deep breath.

  “What?” she said. “It wasn’t any good?”

  “No, it was good.”

  “It must be sad.” She watched my face, obviously trying to figure out what was bothering me.

  “Yeah . . .” I decided to just tell her. After all, I didn’t want to make a bigger deal over it than it was. “Julia gave me that.”

  “Oh.” She put it back on the shelf.

  “You can borrow it if you want.”

  “Maybe.” She touched the spines of several other books, but didn’t ask me about them.

  I watched her fingers, touching all these things that were mine, stroking the wood of my shelves and desk, tracing invisible patterns on the furniture. I got up and stood behind her. She went very still, and I put my arms around her. I wanted to kiss her neck, to move my hands up over her chest, but it seemed too soon. I just held her. She settled back into me.

  “Where do you want to look next?” I whispered in her ear.

  “Hmm . . . there’s the closet,” she murmured. “I haven’t seen that yet.”

  “Nothing in there. Just some clothes. And some junk I cleared off the floor and crammed in there when I knew you were coming over.”

  She laughed. “You cleaned up for me.”

  “Yeah. I even vacuumed.”

  “Wow, I feel like a queen.”

  Now I did kiss her neck. She turned around and kissed me. All week, we’d been stealing kisses at school between classes, and in the few minutes between school ending and me leaving for my shift at Barney’s. This was the first time we’d been alone together without a clock ticking over our heads.

  She broke away for a second to say, “I know where I want to go next.”

  “I hope it’s the same place I want to go.”

  She led me to the bed.

  “Yep,” I said, “same place.”

  We lay down together.

  I didn’t know how far she’d want to go, where she would draw the lines. I didn’t want to draw any lines myself. I tried to focus on what we were doing at the moment and not worry about what was going to happen next.

  After we’d made out for a while, long enough for me to lose the sense of where my mouth ended and hers began, she took off her shirt and bra. I got up to lock my door and take off my shirt. When I came back to bed, as soon as I touched her, she shivered.

  “You cold?”

  “No.” All the time shuddering, as I ran my hand down her bare arm.

  “Do you—want to stop?”

  “No.”

  We never did stop.

  Everything I’d felt for her the day of the snowstorm, the day I showed her the waterfall, the day I first kissed her on the rocks by the river, boiled up and boiled over. Afterward, as we lay there catching our breath, still wrapped around each other, I said, “I love you.” I hadn’t planned to say it. I just opened my mouth and it came out.

  “Um, you don’t have to say that now,” she joked. “I’ve already slept with you.”

  “I mean it.”

  She rolled on top of me then, her long black hair sweeping over my face and neck, and she put her mouth next to my ear, and she said it. It went right into my head, her breath and the words, filling my ear and filling me up.

  chapter 18

  I was scheduled to work on Sunday morning. When I came out of the house, I found my mother’s tires gashed open.

  I walked all the way around the car and then stood in the driveway for a minute, staring at the damage. Somehow I’d expected this. I’d always known somebody would pay for that night at Groome’s. Groome was not the type to just swallow and take it.

  I went back to the house and called Nick, waking him up.

  “What the hell?” he yawned.

  “Hey, Nick, how are your tires?”

  “My what?”

  “Your tires. On your car.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d check them if I were you.”

  “Hold on.” After a couple of minutes, he was back. “Shit!”

  “All four?”

  “Hell, yeah. You, too?”

  “Yep. You better call Paul. I have to find another way to work.”

  “Shit. Groome is going to pay for this.”

  “I guess he considered it payback,” I said.

  “How did he know it was us?”

  “We didn’t exactly keep it a secret.” I checked the clock. “I’ve got to go, Nick. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I called Sunil, who was on the same shift as me, and he agreed to give me a ride. I left a note for my mother about the car. I was glad I wouldn’t be there when she read it.

  Mom still hadn’t calmed down by the time I got home. “This is one hell of a kick in the ass!” She stalked around the kitchen in her bathrobe, emptying the dishwasher. She threw things into drawers, jabbing at me occasionally with a spoon or a spatula. “You know our insurance doesn’t cover this.”

  The rock in my stomach got heavier. “It doesn’t?”

  “Hell, no. That car’s such a piece of junk anyway, it wasn’t worth it to get full coverage.” She pointed a fork at me. “You’re paying for two of those tires. You wanted the responsibility of driving, this is part of it.”

  “I know.” Really I should be paying for all four, but how could I tell her that without telling her about Groome’s tires? She’d kill me. “I have the money.”

  “Do you know what new tires cost?” She slammed a drawer shut. “Idiot kids, probably. Think it’s funny to slash tires. I’d like to wring their stupid necks.”

  “Mom, I—”

  “Do they know how long I’ve got to stand on my feet to earn those tires? Christ. As if I didn’t have better things to spend the money on. Like food.”

  “Mom—”

  “Oh, go study or something. You’re in my way.”

  I got to my room as the phone rang. I picked up my extension and heard Nick’s voice.

  “This is war,” he said.

  Paul’s tires hadn’t been touched, but Fred’s had. This told us that Groome had less than perfect information. He didn’t know that Paul was involved, he didn’t know that Fred wasn’t, and he couldn’t have been completely sure about Nick and me. Not that that stopped him from taking his revenge.

  “I’ve had it with Black Mountain,” Nick told me on the phone. “Adam Hancock taking my parking space because he thinks Black Mountain guys own that end of the lot. Austin Chadwick looking at me like I’m some piece of shit he stepped in. Groome’s just the worst one. This Friday night, we’re going up there to the park, and take over.”

  I thought Nick had been watching too many movies. “The four of us are going to take over a mountain? With what?”

  “What do you mean, four? I’m talking about all the kids from the flats. We’re sick of this shit.” He raved on, describing in detail what he wanted to do to Groome’s car, face, and internal organs.
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  “Wait,” I interrupted. “How many people are in this with you?”

  “Everybody. You, me, Paul, Fred . . . and Ryan Coates, and Jimmy Reilly, and Mike Dunn . . . and each one of them is telling ten more people. We’ll have every kid in the flats up there.”

  More people must’ve been hassled by Groome and Chadwick than I’d thought. Either that, or these guys didn’t fully understand what Nick had in mind. “You sure they don’t all think this is just a big party?”

  “It’ll be a party, all right. Friday night,” Nick said. “You can ride with me.”

  “I want to go with you,” Kirby said.

  We were at the river, sitting on our boulder, the spot where I’d first kissed her. It was Wednesday, one of the few afternoons that I didn’t have to work. “Kirby, I’m not even sure I’m going.” I hadn’t made up my mind about Friday night on Black Mountain. After all, Nick’s last bright idea had gotten me four slashed tires.

  “You’re going. I know you. And I want to be there.”

  “Why? It’s not your fight.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t live on the flats.”

  “Well, I sure don’t live on the mountain,” she said.

  “It could get ugly.”

  “It’s already gotten ugly.”

  I sighed. She had an answer for everything.

  “Don’t give me any crap about how I’m a helpless girl who needs to be protected,” she said.

  “I wasn’t going to. But I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t.” She tossed a strand of hair out of her face. “I’m not asking your permission, anyway. If Nick won’t let me come in his car, I’ll take my mother’s. Or walk.”

  “What are you going to tell your Black Mountain friends if you show up in Nick’s car with us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I rubbed my hand on the rough stone beneath us. “Going out with me is bad enough. You come to the park with us Friday night, and I don’t think they’ll be taking you to the country club anymore.”