Eleven
She tells her parents she’s going to meet up with a friend and drives to a bagel place in the next township over. Helen makes a mental note to bring back a half dozen bagels and prepares a story of breakfast sandwiches shared with an old friend from the Ampersand who’s unexpectedly in town. It feels almost like espionage, if the stakes were toasted cinnamon-raisin bagels. She feels a fluttery kind of nervousness when she walks through the door and sees him standing in line—their rendezvous point.
“I haven’t been here in forever,” she says, trying not to sound like she’s read too many spy novels. “We used to get giant bags of bagels here to sell at our morning fundraisers for the school newspaper.”
“I remember,” he says.
They order breakfast sandwiches to go and drive to Washington Rock to eat them. There’s a short, pitiful excuse for a nature-walk trail by the far end of the parking lot, and he suggests they take it. It’s a gray, gloomy Christmas Eve, and it seems unlikely they’ll see anyone else there. There are patches of snow on the ground from last night, though not enough to hide the muddy, leaf-covered path.
“My mom’s selling her house,” he says. “I met her real estate agent this morning.”
“Oh,” says Helen. “You guys have been in that house a long time.”
She remembers passing Grant’s house on their daily school-bus route, back before any of them had cars. It was a beautiful Victorian near the top of the mountain with perfectly lined-up windows that captured spectacular light at sunrise and sunset, and she used to look forward to the part of the morning when she would see it approaching on the horizon.
“I’m surprised she stayed as long as she did,” he says. “She’s talking about moving to Ireland and working on a sheep farm. I think she might actually do it.”
Helen tries to remember Mrs. Shepard, who she met only a handful of times at parent-teacher fundraising events. She remembers a tiny blond woman in a pink cardigan with gold jewelry.
“Your dad lives in Boston now?” she asks.
“For the last twelve years,” he says. “Pretty much since they separated.”
“Do you ever visit him?”
Grant shrugs. “He prefers to come visit me. He likes the sunshine and the beaches.”
Helen nods.
“What about your parents? How are they?”
She kicks a pebble in the path. “They’re good. Dad’s taken up golfing and Mom’s waging a war with some squirrels in her garden. I don’t think they’ll ever move.”
Grant nods and tosses the wrappings of his bagel into a nearby trash can. They’ve already reached the end of the trail.
“Short walk,” he says, looking around.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gone on it,” Helen says.
“Me either. What do you usually do when you’re in town?”
“Pretty much nothing,” Helen laughs. “Sulk in my bedroom and regress into my teenage self, mostly. It’s like time doesn’t pass in our house.”
They turn and walk back toward the parking lot. Helen can’t help but feel like this has been a dud of a meetup, and wouldn’t blame him if they parted ways and didn’t speak again until they’re safely back in LA.
When they reach their cars, Grant turns to her and asks, “Do you wanna go see the high school?”
“Sure,” Helen says. “You drive.”
He didn’t really expect her to say yes when he asked, let alone volunteer to carpool with him.
She hops in the passenger seat, and the sound of 106.7 Lite FM’s Christmas classics comes on the radio. She smiles at that.
“My parents always have that station on in their car too,” she says.
He drives them down the back of the mountain, past the houses that used to be as familiar to him as the faces of his friends and teachers. Some of them have changed in the years since he left—a fresh coat of paint here, a new addition to the wraparound porch there—and he always experiences a slight shock of unwanted surprise, to discover his old small town keeps changing and moving on without him too.
He parks them in the upper parking lot behind the north side of the campus. It’s where he used to park every day on his way to morning football practice.
“Wow,” she says. “I haven’t seen it in so long.”
“They added another wing,” he says. He hasn’t turned the keys out of the ignition yet; he’s reluctant to burst their bubble of warmth in the car.
“Do you think we can get inside?” she asks.
Grant pops open the door. “Let’s find out,” he says.
The first door they try is locked and so is the second. He’s about to suggest they just walk around the open track, when he remembers the side door by the teachers’ lounge hallway, where his friends used to sneak back in after cutting class.
“The lock’s broken on that one. All it needs is one good—yank.”
The door gives way, and with one metallic clank, they’re staring into the empty hallways of their old high school.
“It’s so . . .” Helen says, as she steps inside. He follows her and shuts the door behind them. “Empty.”
“Where do you wanna go?” he asks, tucking his hands in his pockets. He feels nervous suddenly, like they might get in trouble, like she might think this is just as lame as the nature walk at Washington Rock. Like she might think he’s a loser for even suggesting this.
“I wonder if the cafeteria’s changed,” she says, and leads the way down the hall.
They find the old cafeteria quickly. The floors look like they’ve gotten an update, but everything else—the tables and chairs, the walls, the windows, the inexplicable scent of graham cracker that permeates the air no matter how many greasy pizzas were eaten here—is all the same.
“They took out the vending machines,” Helen says, as they wander inside. “We used to have a coffee cart over there.”
“I don’t think they’re allowed to serve coffee to minors anymore,” Grant muses.
“I used to put three packets of sugar in my iced coffee,” Helen says, looking around with slight amazement.
They keep walking the perimeter, until Helen stops at a table near the window. “I used to sit here at lunch. Do you remember where you used to sit?”
Grant turns and points at the opposite corner. “Over there.”
Helen nods, staring at his old table as if she can see their past lunching selves. He sits down on “her” table, his legs swinging off the edge. “Nice view from this table.”
“I liked having a window so close,” she says.
“Colder in the winter, though,” he notes.
She shrugs. “I usually wasn’t here this late in December. Where do you wanna see next?”
He votes for their junior-year English classroom, but the door is locked and they can only peer through the window in the door.
“I don’t recognize any of these teachers’ names,” Helen says as they walk down the English wing. “I guess all of our teachers retired.”
“Did you keep in touch with any of them?”
“No. I should have,” she says. “I heard my favorite teacher, Mr. Choi, the faculty rep for the Ampersand, he died a few years back. Right before I published my first book.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it.
She tries a door at random and it opens—it’s a closet-room full of old, dusty books. School-edition hardcovers of classics like Great Expectations and Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Norton’s Anthology compendiums of the American literary canon—there are piles of books so high, they tower over Helen.
“Jackpot,” she whispers, and walks in. She opens one book and laughs, then tosses it at him. “First page.”
He opens it and sees the register of the names of students who once held this particular copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Sandwiched between students from the classes of ’07 and ’09 is Lauren DiSantos in a cramped cursive scrawl.
He laughs and thinks about taking a picture to send to Lauren. But would that be weird?
“I don’t even remember which ones we read which year,” he says instead, setting the book down.
“We did Shakespeare senior year,” she says, picking through the books. “Austen and Brontë sophomore year. And I don’t remember the rest. I wanna see if I can find my Wuthering Heights. If I do, I’m taking it.”
He opens a copy of Wuthering Heights, scanning for familiar names. A few names tickle the back of his memory, but nothing solid. He opens another, and a name stares back at him in bold Sharpie.
“Here,” he says thickly, tapping it.
“You found it?”
She moves over, then stops when she sees the name he’s pointing at. Michelle Zhang, ’10.
“Oh.”
“You want it?” he asks, trying to keep his voice low and neutral.
Helen touches her sister’s name.
“No,” she says finally. “It’s better off here, living its life, educating high school students.” She laughs ruefully. “That probably sounds insane.”
“No,” he says. “That makes perfect sense.”
She smiles at him in gratitude, and he swallows hard. “What now?”
“Where did you spend the most time when we were here?” she asks.
He thinks, then jerks his head outside. “Football practice. But it’s pretty cold. I guess when it was winter, we’d do some drills in the north gym.”
“Okay,” she says, and he leads the way.
Walking through the empty halls of their old public high school feels like walking into a memory. She trails her fingertips along the solid walls to reassure herself they’re real. There’s a strange, dreamlike quality to the day, and if she could, she’d reach out her fingers and touch Grant to check if he was real too.
“That was my favorite mirror,” she says, pointing at a mirror on one of the hallway intersections on their way to the gym. “I always checked my hair and clothes in it on the way to class.”
The first door to the gym is locked too, but as Grant tries the other door, Helen spots something that makes her shout in delight.
“Look at you!” she exclaims, and points up at a dusty, framed photo on the wall by the trophy case. Dunollie Warriors Varsity Football Team, 2007–2008 Season.
Grant walks up and he’s beside her before she realizes it.
“Huh,” he says, staring up at the team photo.
Helen turns to watch Grant studying the photo. “It must be weird to see yourself become a part of the background scenery here,” she says. “I remember walking past these photos all the time and not really seeing them. And here you are.”
“Weird,” he echoes.
Helen takes out her phone and snaps a photo of the framed picture.
“I’m sending this to the room,” she says. “Merry Christmas, one and all.”
“Wait, no, that’s not fair,” Grant says, and grabs for her phone. “Not unless there’s one of you and the newspaper club dorks around here somewhere.”
Helen acts on instinct and hides the phone under her sweater, out of reach. “They didn’t appreciate our accomplishments as much as yours. You’re lucky to be immortalized on the walls of our school!”
Grant laughs and seizes her by the shoulders from behind.
“Give it to me,” he says, his voice a low growl in her ear.
He has one arm looped across her chest, trapping her against his body. A strange thrill shoots up her back, and she feels him swallow hard.
“Oy!”
Grant releases her and she drops the phone with a clatter.
A middle-aged man strides toward them from the far end of the hallway. His walkie-talkie beeps from his belt and he points an accusing finger at them.
“How did you get in? I’m talking to you!”
Helen glances at Grant.
“Run,” he says, and grabs her hand, before sprinting for the closest door.
As it turns out, running wasn’t the smartest idea.
“You tripped a silent alarm,” Vice Principal Peters tells them in the parking lot, where he’s waiting with two security guards. “What were you doing in there?”
Grant watches Helen transform into a helpless female before his eyes.
“Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing,” she says. “We graduated from here years ago, and we just wanted to come see the school.”
“By breaking and entering?”
“We didn’t break anything,” Helen says, and looks at Grant with wide, innocent eyes. “Did we? The side door was unlocked.”
“Yeah, I remember we used to sneak in through that door when I was a senior,” Grant says, pointing at the offending door. “The locks were broken even back then. You guys should probably get that fixed.”
“We’re not gonna get in trouble, are we?” Helen turns back to the vice principal anxiously. She looks at him as if he has their fate in his hands, which Grant thinks is laying it on a little thick. “I swear, we didn’t take anything. We just wanted to see where . . . where we first fell in love. Right, babe?”
She smacks Grant on the arm.
He clears his throat. “Yeah. Such a romantic, this one. I told her we’d get in trouble, but . . . you’re married, you get it.”
Grant nods at the ring on the vice principal’s left hand.
“Are you two married?” he asks, warming to them.
Helen looks to Grant wildly. “No. I don’t have a ring.”
Grant pulls her to his side. “Not yet, anyway. We keep arguing about how she wants me to propose. I’m still pitching football field at homecoming.”
Vice Principal Peters beams. “Well, that’d be a hell of a story, two Dunollie alums getting engaged at homecoming. I bet you’d even make the front page of the Ampersand.”
Helen huffs and Grant grins at her. “You hear that? We’d make the Ampersand front page.”
After exchanging email addresses with the vice principal (“in case you do decide to do something at homecoming”) and some thorough apologies for disturbing the peace on Christmas Eve, Grant and Helen walk silently back to the car in the north parking lot.
“Don’t laugh,” she says. “He’s still watching.”
“What do you think the headline of our engagement story would be in the Ampersand?” he asks as they approach the car.
Helen rolls her eyes. “I’d never have let a story like that on the front page. Maybe a blurb on the sports page.”
“‘Ex–Homecoming King Finally Finds His Queen,’” Grant pitches, hopping into the driver’s seat.
“‘Ampersand Standards Plummeting; A Former Editor-in-Chief Reports,’” Helen responds.
“‘Town Daughter to Wed Her Sister’s Slaughterer,’” Grant says.
A stunned silence follows this as Helen turns to look at him.
Grant freezes. “Sorry,” he says immediately. “Sorry—”
Then she bursts into laughter.
“Oh my god,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes. “You’re going to hell.”
“And you’re riding shotgun with me,” Grant says as he throws the car in reverse.
The sun is setting by the time he drives her back to her car at the top of Washington Rock.
“That was fun,” she says. It feels like giving something up when she says it—some part of her flutters anxiously, as if to say, What if he doesn’t agree?
“Yeah,” he says, smiling at her in a way that does funny things to her stomach. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Christmas? Helping my mom clean the house, then cooking for all the Chinese aunties and uncles coming over for dinner.”
“Sounds like a good Christmas,” he says.
If he were anyone else, she’d invite him over.
“You wanna do something the day after?” she asks instead.
He nods. “Sure. You pick the time and place.”
He’s leaning against the car door, his arms folded across his chest as he watches her face. It occurs to her that there’s something incredibly dear about him standing like this, and she’s aware of a sudden gladness that he’s here with her.
A thought bubbles into her mind, and it grows insistent.
“Would you . . . would you come with me to see my sister?”
He stills and she thinks maybe she’s made a mistake reading him. It’s too big an ask for so new and fragile a . . . friendship? What are they to each other?
He clears his throat, then nods.
“Sure,” he says finally. “If you want me there.”
She thinks about the day of Michelle’s funeral, of him showing up in a sweater and tie to the one room where his presence wasn’t just unwanted, it was firmly rejected. She wonders if he’s thinking about it now too, as his brown eyes seek out hers.
“I do,” she says.
“Okay,” he says softly. “I’ll be there.”