“What’s this?” asked Cat.
“Just something I needed to say to you,” Jason said, shoulders high, hands shoved into the pockets of his pants.
Pen bristled and was preparing to say, “You needed? Do you think anyone here gives a shit about what you need?” when Jason surprised her by adding, in the small, taut voice of someone possibly about to cry, “I mean, something I hope you’ll read, even though I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t feel like it.”
Cat’s eyes widened, and, absently, as though it had a mind of its own, her hand lifted and started to reach out in the direction of Jason. Oh no, you don’t, thought Pen. Do not do it. As though it had heard her thoughts, the hand drew back and landed in Cat’s lap. Cat shrugged.
“All right,” she said. “If I feel like it later, I’ll read it.”
Jason’s mouth gave a twist, and he seemed about to say something else, but then he just tugged a hand out of his pocket, lifted it in a good-bye wave, and walked out of the café. Through the window, Pen saw him take off running the instant he was out the door, the white bottoms of his sneakers flashing.
Cat set the envelope on the table gingerly, as though it were fragile or dangerous.
“My name’s not on it,” she said a little forlornly. “Maybe he forgot it.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know how to spell it.”
Cat smiled.
“What do you want to do, sweetheart?” asked Pen.
“Split a cinnamon bun.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Tell Jason to shove his stupid letter up his stupid ass.”
“Good.”
“Then throw it away without reading it.”
“Yeah, right. That sounds like you.” Pen smiled.
Cat laughed. “How about this: call Will, get him to meet us at our place, and read it together?”
“Well.” Pen paused. “Why don’t we call and tell him we’re coming to his place?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Just in case.”
She waited. The subject of Will’s temper had come up a few times since Halloween, and they had always handled it with circumspection and gravity. In fact, there wasn’t one thing funny about it, and, although she didn’t tell Cat or Will this, Pen found the whole of Halloween night physically, chest-tighteningly, stomach-knottingly painful to discuss. (“Do you think he could have killed that guy, if you hadn’t been there to stop him?” Cat had asked once. “Of course not,” Pen had said, almost as sure as she sounded, but not quite.) But since the inherent seriousness of a subject had never stopped them from joking about it in the past, Pen thought it might be time to try.
Without missing a beat, Cat nodded. “Just in case he decides to throw a refrigerator through the wall.”
“I like our refrigerator,” said Pen. “It’s shiny.”
“And it has an in-door ice dispenser,” Cat reminded her. “Which is extremely handy.”
THEY SPLIT THE CINNAMON ROLL THREE WAYS. CAT WAS TOO NERVOUS to read the letter aloud, and no one brought up the idea of Will’s reading it (he seemed averse to even looking in the direction of the white envelope), so the duty fell to Pen. The letter was unexpectedly long and, more unexpectedly, lucid. Although everyone hated to admit it (and didn’t admit it out loud for some time), it was quite a good letter, particularly the end:
Like a lot of people, even though I knew I could be a jerk at times, I always thought of myself as a good guy, but after what I did to you, I can’t think that anymore. A good guy does not leave a girl by herself outside on the ground at night (even if she does have a blanket over her), period, let alone having a seizure. I’ve done a lot of thinking since Halloween and I realize that I am turning into someone I don’t want to be. I think a big part of the problem is drinking, so as of one week ago, I quit for good. I know you probably don’t care about that in terms of my health or well-being because you probably wish I would drop dead (justifiably), but I wanted you to know that I will never do to anyone else what I did to you. I am sorrier than I can explain.
Sincerely,
Jason Rogers
P.S. I have a younger sister and if any shit-for-brains did to her what I did to you I would summarily kick his ass.
LIKE THE MUSIC POURING OUT OF JAMIE’S RIDICULOUSLY SOPHISTICATED sound system, the past seemed to come at Pen from all sides, sharp and clear and real, and, momentarily, she felt the urge to turn the SUV around and head home. Nerves, is what her mother would have said, just a minor nerve-quake. Pen decided to buy herself some time. She steered off the main road and drove through an ancient town of woods, upright, stoic houses, and what might possibly qualify as the most charming post office on the planet.
She was surprised at how well she remembered the letter. Partly this was due to, after that first, breathless, trisected cinnamon-bun reading, many subsequent readings (mostly in Cat and Pen’s apartment, mostly by Cat, who would, for months, interrupt Pen’s eating, or television watching, or studying—once even her sleep—with an “Okay, listen to this,” followed by an excerpt from the letter), and partly due to the fact that bits of the letter became, irresistibly, stock phrases for all three of them, and eventually for their friends and family members, for a ridiculously long time. (Just last month, Pen had scolded Jamie by saying, “You shouldn’t stuff your sweat-drenched running clothes into the hamper, period, let alone having a seizure.”)
But more than any of that, Pen knew that the reason Jason’s letter had stayed with her so resolutely was that reading it out loud that day had triggered in Pen what could only be called an epiphany, although she had never called it that to anyone but herself, suspecting, as she did, that what had hit her, at age twenty, like a ton of bricks, was an understanding that most people acquired much earlier in their development. It was simply this: for the first time, she understood that it was possible to form an opinion about a person, an opinion based on solid evidence and a vast quantity of justified self-righteous anger, to even have this opinion reinforced by trusted colleagues, and to be, at least partially, wrong.
Actually, this was something Pen had already known to be true about other people. Other people could and often did form wrong, negative, vehemently held opinions about their fellow human beings. But as Pen read Jason’s letter, she was shocked to discover that she, Cat, and Will—she, Cat, and Will—were fallible in exactly the same way everyone else was. If a boy they had branded, once and for all, as a complete and irredeemable cad could reveal himself to be an incomplete and potentially redeemable one, what else might be possible?
With more than ten years gone and oceans of water under the bridge, Pen couldn’t help but regard the long-gone college-boy Jason in yet a different way: as somebody’s son. For someone out there, Jason had been the sun and moon, the basket into which someone had placed innumerable eggs, a walking, talking universe of promise and heartbreak. You screwed up in a way that you should not have screwed up, but good for you writing that letter, the mother in Pen said. Well done.
With the Replacements jangling, growling, and banging around her, Pen thought again about Halloween night, the moment after Will had told her that she was right, that he had done, on purpose, the ugliest thing that Pen had ever seen up close. She remembered the hard ground and the burning moon and the stillness and the cold seeping into them all. For Pen it had been a moment of truth, a fulcrum moment. She had stood on the fine point of all that had just happened and she had teetered. I could walk away, she had considered. Get up, brush the dirt off my dress, and go. The thought was appealing. It caught her by the wrist and pulled, but at the last second, she had stopped teetering. She had yanked herself loose from the idea of leaving and had stayed. I’m in. For better or for worse. She had sat on the ground thinking those words, making a vow. For better or for worse.
Pen realized now that she had never regretted it, not even after Cat left, after Will left. It mattered, being a person who stayed, who counted herself in, for good. Paul Westerberg rasped out a song Pen had always loved
, “Hold My Life.” With a sigh, but without bitterness, Pen thought, When did I ever do anything else?
CHAPTER EIGHT
WILL WAS WISHING LIKE HELL THAT HE HADN’T COME. NOT 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?”