Page 15 of The Cadence

“We were friends in high school,” he answered simply, and didn’t include any information about my failing grades and how he’d been forced into that relationship with me.

I guessed that it wasn’t very important anymore.

I wondered if he would mind that I’d shared—maybe overshared with those two women.

They weren’t under any obligation not to pass along the story, either.

I tugged on his sleeve. “I think I did something that you won’t like,” I announced.

“What?” he called back, and I gestured so that he would lean down and I could talk into his ear.

“I told Kasia and Audrey that you got in trouble, and that was why you had to tutor me,” I said louder, but he shook his head.

“What did you say about tubers? Do you mean potatoes?” he asked.

It was too noisy for us to have this conversation.

I took his hand and pulled him toward the front but with me in the lead, we weren’t getting very far, not very fast. Will stepped ahead and plowed a path for us so that we made it outside.

The parking lot was quiet due to the two guys guarding it, although there was a small crowd on the sidewalk that got excited when they saw Will emerge.

I pulled his hand again and we went around the side of the bar.

“What did you need to tell me, and do you have to do it here?” he asked. We were next to the dumpsters and it wasn’t the most pleasant spot.

“We’ll go back in soon. I was trying to say that I told some people that you had to help me with school as a punishment. I said that you got in trouble for defending Albert, too.”

“Who?”

“The little guy who was getting pushed around when you stepped in,” I reminded him. “You threw his bully down the stairs, but it was by mistake.”

“I meant to throw him against the lockers, but I missed,” he said. “I didn’t know the little guy’s name.” He paused, and looked above my head. “He was crying and trying not to let them see.”

“Albert and I had an art class together and he was always so grateful that you stood up for him. For the next three years, nobody ever touched him again, either. It’s a wonderful story and it says a lot about you, your character, but I started thinking that I shouldn’t have said it.

Maybe you wouldn’t want people to know that you’d been in trouble, even if it was a good kind of trouble. ”

“I don’t care about what happened when we were in high school. What else are you telling people about the two of us, how we are now?”

“Us now? I only say that we knew each other a long time ago and because you’re a generous, caring person, you offered me a job. Someone asked me about leaving Chattanooga and I said that I’d had to, because you were worried about me living in my car.”

“What the hell? You broadcast the news that you were going to have to live in your car?”

“Not broadcast! I only told one woman named Ember, and she didn’t seem to think anything of it. I won’t repeat it,” I promised.

“There is no way, no way in hell that I would have let that happen,” Will told me. His voice, already deep, had dropped low enough that it sounded like an earthquake rumbling, if that was something that happened in real life and not just in my imagination.

“What did you have to do with it?” I asked.

“I might have moved into my car at any time at all and you wouldn’t have even known.

Until you came over after the funeral, we hadn’t seen each other since the day of your graduation.

” I had gone and sat in the hot bleachers to watch the ceremony on the football field, and I had clapped as hard as I could when they’d announced William Franklin Bodine and when he’d given his speech as the class valedictorian.

Afterwards, I’d hung around his car so that we could talk, and things had progressed.

That day marked the last time we had spoken for seven years.

“I wouldn’t have let it happen,” he repeated. “Don’t tell people that.”

“They’re not thinking any less of you,” I assured him. “They’re not blaming you for my financial situation.”

“Consider how this looks, Calla. Here I am, making more money than I can spend, and I allowed you to live in poverty. I swear to you, I didn’t know. I didn’t know about your grandmother being so sick, either.”

“Will!” I reached up to put my hands on his shoulders. “Why are you talking like this? No matter what happened when we knew each other before, it doesn’t mean that you owed me anything afterwards.”

“Doesn’t it?” He looked over at the overflowing dumpster and grimaced. “Should we go back inside?”

“Sure, and I won’t admit to anything else about me. I wasn’t doing it to upset you or make you look bad, I swear.”

He reached up and took my hands. “I know that.”

And I knew that he had always worried about people watching his behavior and noticing all the flaws.

I didn’t care much what they thought about me, but he did, and he wasn’t the only one.

When I’d started high school, my grandmother had warned me not to give anyone any grist for the mill.

I hadn’t known what that meant so she’d gone on to explain.

“You don’t need to tell them how you grew up, nothing about your mother or father,” she’d cautioned. “Nobody needs to hear your business.” Nobody needed to know the whole truth, or even part of it.

“I’m sorry,” I told him now. If anyone was looking for grist about him, I’d provided it, and I shouldn’t have.

“You don’t need to apologize to me for anything, not ever. Let’s get the hell away from this trash.”

We went back to the party and I kept my conversation light and non-specific. I didn’t say another word about my personal problems regarding death or living rough, and I didn’t discuss anyone else’s punishments. The evening went well.

We hadn’t done much that day besides sitting in an air-conditioned stadium, but I was tired anyway and when Will finally asked if I was ready to leave the bar, I was. We went out to his car, slowly.

“Why are you limping?” he asked me.

“These are my good shoes and they give me blisters on my little toes. I only wear them for important occasions. I got them for the ninth-grade dance.”

He looked down at my feet, and I understood what was going through his mind. These sturdy shoes with their thick elastic straps and metal buckles were not what most girls had worn to the freshman dance.

But he said something different. “Those made you taller. When I first saw you, I thought you’d grown.

” Then I knew he was thinking back to the day of my grandmother’s funeral, because he had noticed my height.

He slowed down more and offered his arm, which I took, and it wasn’t that far to where he’d parked.

“You have some more money now,” he noted as the guard moved the barricade for the car and we exited the lot. “You don’t have a lot of expenses.”

“You mean, I can afford a new pair of shoes that don’t hurt? That’s true, but I’m also saving.”

“For what?”

“My grandma called it a rainy-day fund,” I said. “I want to have money put aside in case anything happens, so that I don’t need to worry. Maybe I’ll want to go back to beauty school, and I know I’ll want my own apartment.”

“What?” he asked me. “Why?”

“I can’t live with you forever,” I answered. “I wouldn’t do that! No matter what you said about not having guests, eventually you will want to have people stay with you. Your friend DeSean, for example, or your mom.”

“I have five other bedrooms besides mine if I want to invite them.”

It was true that it was a very large house. “But you had privacy before and now you don’t,” I argued. “You have a stranger living in your back yard.”

“You’re not a stranger.”

“I’m someone you knew years ago, but we never saw each other during all the time since. We never even texted a ‘hello.’ We are strangers, pretty much,” I countered.

“Ok. Ok,” he repeated, and was quiet for a moment. Then, out of nowhere, he made an announcement: “I hate avocados.”

“Pardon me?”

“I hate avocados,” he repeated. “They make my mouth itch.”

“Are we talking about allergies again? I don’t think I have any to food, either.”

“When I get cold, my fingertips turn white,” Will continued. “That’s why I wear gloves for so much of the season. It doesn’t bother me, though.”

“Oh, you’re going over weird medical things? Ok,” I said. “Once, I got a splinter right through my hand that came out the other side. How’s that for disgusting?”

“I’m not trying to disgust you,” he responded. “I can’t stand opening the mailbox. It’s from when I was a kid, when my mom didn’t want to get the mail because there would always be notices about money we owed. She refused to look in there so I had to do it for her.”

“That’s too bad, and I know what you mean about the fear. Whenever I used to walk up the road to my mother’s mailbox, there was always a terrible surprise inside.” It had mostly been court documents, but there had been bills, too. “But why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t want us to be strangers,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that you don’t know me. I don’t want you to think that you have to move out, either. You don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to, not right away. I have to save a lot more.” The fact that I had already gotten another job to help me do it? It just didn’t seem like the right time to share that information.

“I don’t think you should at all. Why would you? Why would you leave a safe, secure house?”

“It doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to you,” I pointed out. “At any time, you could make the decision that you wanted it back and then I’d have to go, and I don’t even have a car to sleep in anymore.”

“Didn’t I just say that I would never, ever let you live like that?”

We were quiet for a moment and I looked at the trees that loomed along the sides of this dark road. Where I’d grown up, I’d been out in the middle of nowhere, but it had been open land. The forests here made it feel so different.

“I don’t actually think that you’d kick me out,” I told him.

“Good. I wouldn’t ever do that, not even to a stranger. Which you aren’t.”

It was exactly what I’d been thinking, too.

I’d been trying to convince myself of the fact that I didn’t know him—our closest connection had been on the TV screen as I knelt in front of it to watch his games late at night with the sound turned down!

But in spite of what I’d told him and in spite of what I’d repeated to myself, it didn’t really feel like he was a stranger at all.

He was the same person who had come in a borrowed truck with a borrowed mower to chop down the grass in my grandma’s front yard.

He was the same person who had thrown that jackass down two flights of stairs for being a bully.

He was the same Will Bodine, despite the time that had passed, and despite the money and the fame he’d acquired.

I was the same, too, in all the ways that mattered.

I hadn’t changed much from the girl who’d walked into high school in shoes that didn’t fit, who didn’t understand how lockers worked, who hadn’t sat in a classroom, and who had certainly never met anyone like him before.

And if neither of us had changed, then this was going to end in a disaster, all over again… at least, it would for me.