***
I stood in my bedroom window, brushing the effects of a windy day out of my hair. Finally, after years and years of heat-curled, teased, gelled, and over- sprayed hair being in fashion, the rest of my silly culture was slowly starting to move back toward the hairstyle I’d had all along – which was really no hairstyle at all.
Through the window, I could see all the way to the end of our block. It meant that I knew Wayne had arrived the moment his car turned the corner. I’m not sure if he knew I could hear the music playing from his car stereo from where I stood behind the window screen. The song was New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” I never should have made him that mix-tape.
Instead of risking a big, noisy scene with the whole family in the front entryway, I dropped my hairbrush, skipped up the stairs, and out the door. I barely paused to call good-bye to no one in particular as I dashed out of the house.
Wayne’s eyes were on the door of my grandparents’ house as I stepped outside. We hardly glanced at each other before I looked down to my feet. I pulled in a deep, therapeutic breath and let it out with a quick, indistinct prayer. This was probably not a good time to rely on my own strength and judgment alone. And then, I climbed into Wayne’s car, blushing and fumbling toward the safety of small talk.
“You made it.”
“Yeah, Upton’s really not that far from the city,” he said, even though we’d had this conversation before. “I don’t know why I used to complain about it.”
“It’s a quick drive. That’s what I keep telling people.”
“Yup. Not far at all.”
“Yup. So – how’s the new job?” I ventured.
Wayne nodded at the windshield as he drove down Upton’s main street. “Good, good – it’s going good. It’s pretty different from what I’m used to. But I don’t miss the old TacoTown uniforms – that’s for sure. And I just feel cleaner. I mean, I don’t smell like chilli powder half the time anymore. Even my skin seems healthier now that I’m not working with grease. Feel that.” He grabbed my hand and swiped my fingertips across his rough cheek. The car demanded to be put into third gear so his hold didn’t last long.
I hoped my laugh didn’t sound too nervous. “It’s hard to gauge your skin’s condition through all the stubble,” I said.
Wayne answered with a laugh just as uncertain as my own. “Sorry about that.”
I cleared my throat. “So this new Barry guy seems all right.”
Wayne was nodding again. “Yeah, he’s cool. He’s known as a bit of a womanizer but he’s still a pretty decent guy otherwise.”
“A womanizer? And you introduced him to your sister anyway?” I remarked, remembering the hungry look Barry had cast at Crystal when he’d been introduced to her at the park.
But Wayne just shrugged. “Barry wouldn’t pull anything with a girl who meant something special to me. That’s why I didn’t worry about bringing him to meet you two.”
It was almost a confession. Wayne realized it and broke into an uneasy cough. “That’s enough with the pleasantries, Mack. Where’s a good place to sit and talk around here?” he asked. “Someone once told me that fresh air helps with clear thinking.”
“Pull over right there,” I said, pointing to a wrought iron gate standing in the gap in a caragana hedge.
Wayne squinted up at the words forged on the gate. “Upton Municipal Cemetery? We’re going in there when it’s already getting so dark?”
“Yeah, it’s the only outdoor place we can talk without the whole town gawking at us. It’s prom night. Everyone’s out ogling each other.”
As if he’d been waiting inside the hedge just to prove me wrong, someone came slumping out of the cemetery gates precisely at that moment. It was Aaron, the boy from school who waited to comfort me the morning after Mum’s surgery. I could tell it was him by the way he was wrapped in his dark trench coat, wearing his long bangs like a haphazard veil over his face. His posture didn’t look at all self-conscious. It seemed like he hadn’t noticed us at all.
“Where did that kid come from?” Wayne asked.
I took hold of the car’s door handle. “He was just enjoying our perfectly lovely town cemetery – like we would be if you’d get out of the car. I told you, it’s a nice spot,” I said, feeling a little protective of Aaron – protective and vaguely worried about him too.
Wayne rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how you can stand to live here.”
“It’s really not so bad.” I sighed hard as a hundred little things flashed through my memory – like my name at the top of the school honour roll, the cows on the train tracks, and a tiny turquoise bird perched weightlessly on my finger.
“Watch your step on the Texas gate,” I warned as we walked up the cemetery driveway.
Wayne stopped in front of the rows of iron cylinders set into the road to keep hoofed animals from coming any further. “Is that what these things are called?” he asked. “I didn’t know there was actually a name for them.”
“Yeah, there is. And there’re dangerous for small-footed people as well as animals.” And then, out of some sort of automatic sense memory of how I once hurt my ankle walking over it, my hand came up and clasped Wayne’s arm as I walked over the gate. His hand clamped over mine, pressing it between his fingers and his arm.
I coughed and gently pulled on my hand. “Thanks,” I said as I stepped back onto the gravel roadway. But my hand did not come free. Instead, Wayne pulled it away from his arm and held it in both his hands as he began to speak.
“Mack, you’ve been a really good friend to us this year – me and Crystal both,” Wayne said. “The way we were raised – well, there wasn’t a lot of kindness in it. But you, you’ve been really kind to us.” He stopped, gently squeezed my hand, and laughed at himself. “I sound like a sappy idiot.”
“No, you don’t,” I said quickly. “It’s all right to be tender.”
He let go of my hand and started to walk. I followed him between the rows of graves.
“That’s just what I mean. No one else in my life has ever talked to me that way,” he said to his feet. “I think Heather Vander Kaamp would have believed something like that too but – I don’t know,” he continued. “I couldn’t get her to say the things I needed to hear and I sure didn’t know how to talk to her. It’s all right that it didn’t last between me and her. Being with her really just made me feel – lonely.”
It was awful. “You don’t have to feel lonely. Crystal loves you. So does Darren,” I hurried to say.
Wayne stopped walking and turned to face me. “I’m not lonely,” he said. “I’m with you.”
My heart was beating fast and I could tell the colour had risen in my throat, unseen in the nearly dark cemetery. “But I’m no one,” I said.
He ignored the comment. “It was when Heather Vander Kaamp left me that I knew. I remember watching you fall asleep on the couch –”
“By accident, at opposite end from you, with your feet on the floor, and all the lights and the television on –”
“Right. At the time, I was still breaking my heart over Heather V., in my own way. But when I looked over at you all curled up there, just before I went upstairs, I felt sad at the thought of leaving you, even though we’d be in the same house all night long. It was totally unexpected and – weird.”
“Weird,” I repeated. Then I remembered. “But after that, you still tried to get me together with Darren.”
Wayne frowned. “Oh, that,” he growled. “Yeah, that was me being a jerk. I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened. I never thought you’d go for him but something in me wanted to see him try for my own information – kind of as a low risk trial of how you’d react if a guy who wasn’t a Mormon tried to go out with you.”
“Low risk for you, maybe. But for Darren – your twin brother–”
He winced. “Yeah, it was pretty sick, but I got what I deserved. Darren
really surprised me. He was actually a lot better at chasing you than I thought he’d be. He nearly had you a couple times, didn’t he?”
I turned my back to him. “I don’t really want to talk about it –”
“Of course you don’t,” Wayne said. “I know. But you’ve got to understand how much I hated to see the little triumphs Darren had with you, even though I smiled and acted supportive at the time. In the end, it was me who finally convinced him to give up on you.”
“You suggested Shelley for him and everything?” I raised my eyebrows.
I could hear Wayne’s smirk as he spoke from behind me. “No, that was his idea. This thing with Shelley is never going to go anywhere. The fact is, someday Darren’s going to wind up with Crystal and become my brother for real.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yeah,” Wayne insisted. “That’s what’s right for him—only it’s way too soon for either him or Crystal to see it yet. Until they figure that out, any other relationship either of them tries is just going to feel wrong. Not like this...”
Wayne was still behind me but I could tell he had stepped closer. Even then I didn’t turn around to face him. I was too overwhelmed and breathless to look at him. He stooped to rest his chin on my shoulder as he locked his arms around my waist. “There was never a time,” he said, his warm breath moving past my ear, “when I didn’t feel strongly about you. Even when I thought I didn’t like you, it was always – so powerful.”
He inclined his face toward mine and I felt the evening stubble of his cheek against my neck and jaw. I breathed in deeply, filling my whole head with his scent. It was a blend of the nice designer cologne I had helped Crystal choose for him last Christmas and the rich, complicated smell of the real grown up man he was nearly finished becoming. I tipped my head to rest against his and folded my hands over where his were closed around me. We’d been wrong about each other when we first met. Wayne wasn’t a dragon. He wasn’t a monster of any kind. Maybe nobody is.
He was speaking again. “You must know it too. You need to be with me – no matter what,” he said with every atom of his natural gift for authority.
We stood like that on the cemetery lawn, between the hedges planted and pruned into unnatural tidiness and symmetry. We didn’t speak anything more. Wayne had already decided what would happen next. He didn’t doubt for a second that I would turn my face to his and let him kiss me. What he didn’t suspect was that I was actually tormented by my own doubt.
Here was a boy with muscles and whiskers and eyes like Johnny Depp’s who wanted to be with me – me, the remnants of the ugliest girl of faraway Hugh Allen Junior High School. Here was the beautiful, unattainable boy who had tried his best to hate me when we first met. But through some miracle, I’d succeeded in winning him over in the biggest way there is to win someone over. Here was living proof that I was loveable – loveable enough to change another person’s heart and mind. Here was a guarantee that I would not be lonely. How could I be expected to resist it?
“Hear that bird singing?” Wayne said, his lips brushing the skin of my face as he spoke. “I hear it a lot but I can never tell what kind it is. It’s sort of beautiful.”
I tilted my head slightly away from him so I could listen to the birdsong too. It was high and clear and melodious – and utterly familiar. At the sound of it, my smile crumbled.
“It is beautiful,” I agreed. “And it’s a robin.”
Wayne maintained the circle of his arms around my middle as I turned to face him. I put a hand on each of his shoulders and straightened my arms, pushing a stiff distance between us. When I finally spoke, I found there was no way I could look directly into those eyes.
“Wayne – I’m so sorry...”