Street and the Snow Hut, too?”
I nod again. “Dang,” he says, but he doesn’t sound too disappointed. In fact, he seems kind of… relieved.
He grins a little and says, “Yeah, okay… one of my resolutions for next year is to be more spontaneous, so… I’m going to flip the script right now, get a jump on 2015 and take you on a different kind of New Year’s Eve tour.”
“Different?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” he says, sitting back down and inching the tour bus back onto Pompano Street. “We’re about to take a detour from Boring Street and head straight down Memory Lane.”
As he drives through town I sit back, adjusting my free T-shirt and squirming in my seat a little. I haven’t been home in years, and so much has changed.
As we pass the Burger Barn where I made out with Booger Barnes after closing time and the Shake Shack where I used to give away free smoothies on the weekend, the post office where I mailed my college application to State and the bank where I bounced about twenty checks my senior year, I can’t help but be transported back in time.
Memory Lane? Do I need a bus tour to get me all the way there?
We pull onto Crescent Drive and I look around at the tiny houses, most still awash in the glow of Christmas lights strung over every garage, doorway and eave.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Reggie announces, the volume turned down slightly as we creep through the sleepy street, less than an hour before midnight. “We arrive at our first stop, Mindy Lane’s house.”
My mouth gets a little dry and I inch closer, to the very first chair behind the driver’s seat. He turns around, smirking, as the car idles in the street.
“What… what happened here?” I ask, playing innocent.
“This is where you first kissed Bradley Simpson,” Reggie announces, standing and leaning back against the little padded area of the dashboard so that he’s facing me. “It was Halloween and Mindy was having her annual keg party. You were dressed as Raggedy Ann and Bradley came as Spiderman, because he was always sooooo original and…”
“But, you couldn’t know that,” I say, shaking my head and feeling the scratchy new ball cap he gave me. “No one knows that. I… I wasn’t with Bradley that night. I was with Carter Holmes.”
“You might have come to the party with Carter, and you might have left the party with Carter, but you kissed Bradley in the hall outside the upstairs bathroom…”
He pauses, cocking his head and staring at me curiously.
“How… how could you know that?” I ask. I mean, he’s right, but there’s no way he could have known that unless… unless…
He nods, as if reading my mind. “That’s right, Tara. I came out of the upstairs bathroom just as you were getting hot and heavy. Your back was to me, and Bradley didn’t care, but I was friends with Carter, so… I got out of there right quick.”
“You told Carter?”
He shakes his head, holding up his hands in surrender. “I never said anything, honest.”
His eyes say he’s telling me the truth. My gut says the same. “So… why did he break up with me two weeks later?”
Reggie shakes his head, sitting back down and putting the car in gear. “Maybe because Bradley Simpson had the biggest mouth in all of Frostbite High?”
I sit behind him, blushing, as he drives around the corner, up the block and pauses outside the gazebo in Paradise Park. Putting the van in park, he stands and faces me again, leaning against the same backrest and wearing that same, sexy smirk.
“What… what are we doing here?” I ask, heart doing a familiar thump-a-thump.
I stare at the weathered gazebo, winking merrily under a few dozen strings of blinking Christmas lights. It didn’t look like that over ten years ago, in spring.
“Don’t you remember?” he asks, nudging the toe of my black sneaker with his own.
“I do,” I sigh, recalling the warm breeze on my face that bright afternoon. “But… how could you?”
He ignores the question and spreads his arms, using his tour guide voice to announce, “Stop two of our tour finds us at the gazebo at Paradise Park. Or, as we kids used to call it, the ‘Kissing Cottage’.”
He chuckles at the memory and, so help me, so do I. “It was here that you asked Grover Chance to senior prom.”
I shake my head. “There’s no way you were there, Reggie,” I say, crossing my legs, then re-crossing them in the different direction.
He nods, then shakes his head. “I’m not proud of it, Tara, but… I followed you that day.”
“What? Why?”
“I had…” He looks away, toward the gazebo, a mysterious smile crossing his lips, lighting his face with more than just the dozens of blinking white lights. “I wanted to…”
He turns, and our eyes meet, and I lean forward, asking a silent question he refuses to answer. Instead he nods, as if making a decision, and slips back into the driver’s seat. Before I can press him further he pulls away, announcing, “One last stop before our first break of the evening…”
I shake my head, sitting back, not sure whether to be insulted, or honored, or flattered or… creeped out.
Sure, we’d graduated together, but Reggie had never said more than ten words to me our entire senior year. Okay, maybe a dozen, but… no more. And no less.
We were in a few of the same clubs and extracurricular activities, but he was always so busy and cocky and goofing and aloof, I always kind of wondered if he knew I even existed.
I’m staring at the cheery store front windows along Wahoo Way, most still frosted with fake snow and filled with plastic Santa’s and blow-up reindeer. The Post Office is dark and deserted when he pulls up in front of it and parks the tour bus.
Standing, quietly, he turns to face me. But he doesn’t stand this time. He takes off his headset and puts it on the podium, sitting calmly across from me. “This is where, on Valentine’s Day, you found out you’d gotten accepted at the Winston School for Fine Arts…”
He pauses when I flinch, quietly, recalling the very moment when I’d opened that long, thin, tan envelope.
“You’d gotten a P. O. Box with some of your Christmas money, so your Dad wouldn’t intercept the mail and find out you were applying to all those Creative Writing programs…”
His voice trails off, and mine picks up. “He wanted me to go to State, and be a lawyer, like him…”
“You were wearing the heart necklace Gary Chance gave you for Christmas,” he continues, softly, staring at his shoes.
“He broke up with me that night,” I recall, picturing the scene. “Took me out to dinner, I bought him this fancy pen to sign his football scholarship with, and he waited until we were walking to the car to break the news. Didn’t even buy me dessert…”
He nods. “You were wearing that little black dress you bought at the mall…”
I shake my head and cover my eyes, overwhelmed that he knows so much about me. That he always has. When I open them again he is starting the tour bus and we drive, in silence except for the jazzy Christmas music still playing softly over the speakers.
We arrive in front of the Snow Hut, a snow cone stand shaped like an igloo with a service window in the front and little picnic tables scattered all around. It’s casual and laid back, the place all the surfers would hang out before or after shredding the waves.
It looks closed, but Reggie shuts off the engine just the same. “Gimme a sec,” he says, turning to me in the driver’s seat. “That is, if you’re still talking to me.”
I nod, smiling, heart pounding, and watch his long, lean body slip out of the tour bus and disappear behind the giant plastic igloo. In no time lights go on inside, and then outside, as strings of them – the large, exposed bulb kind – flicker to life stretched high above the rough wooden picnic tables.
Music, more Christmas music, practically the same album from the bus tour, jazzes to life and I step from the van for the first time in almost an hour. He slides open the window and says,
“Have a seat, your order will be right up!”
Then he slides the window shut and I sit down at the nearest table. The breeze is cool and I hug my shiny new T-shirt, feeling the cold. He comes out, carrying a cardboard tray and two snow cones sticking out of white and red striped paper cones, just like I remember.
He has something draped over his shoulder and a bottle of champagne in his free hand. I smile and feel that little stirring in my belly, the same one I felt when I first saw him standing in the tour bus.
“Here,” he says, handing me a white jacket. It’s puffy and soft and has the red and white “Snow Hut” logo on the back. I notice he’s wearing the same thing, just in a hoodie version.
He sets the cardboard tray down and pops the champagne, letting the cork fly into the air until it lands, softly, in the sand a dozen feet away. Smirking, he pours bubbly over the dome shaped cones, handing me one that’s still fizzing.
“I call ‘em Polar Bears,” he says, nodding for me to taste. “I pour a little vanilla flavoring over the shaved ice, then bubbly on top of that. What do you think?”
It’s sweet and cold and warm and soft and hard and absolutely, positively… perfect.