Here So Far Away
Hadley Dyer
One
August 1992
Life’s a bad writer, my father used to say. I think he meant that most of us would write our lives differently, given the chance. If I could choose one year to rewrite, it’d be my senior year of high school, and I’d probably start with that first shack party. Or I might go even further back and make Sid stay in the valley. I always wondered how it would have worked out if the five of us had stayed together. Who knows, maybe Sid could have been the one to stop me from making such a mess of things.
Sid left early on an August morning. He came out of the house wearing his Eddie Murphy costume from the previous Halloween: leather pants, leather jacket with the sleeves pushed up, gold chain, no shirt. Natalie and I cracked up because we knew he was trying to keep us from getting emotional, Lisa burst into tears for the very same reason, and Bill blurted out that there wouldn’t be black kids at our school anymore, since Sid had been the only one.
Lisa was so mad at Bill for ruining the moment, she hardly spoke to him for a week. The freeze-out might have lasted longer, but somebody’s grandmother died, god bless her, leaving a ramshackle saltbox overlooking the bay that was perfect for a shack party. Most of her stuff had been moved out already, but there were still a few chairs and whatnot, and the taps ran and toilets flushed, which made it a five-star. When I arrived, half our school was packed into the little house, and two different Skid Row songs were blaring from competing ghetto blasters.
“Georgie Girl!”
Lisa’s boyfriend, Keith. We didn’t know each other well enough yet for him to be calling me that, but he had a joint in his hand and probably knew where Lisa was, so I smiled and pushed my way over to the staircase where he was sprawled.
“I’d offer you this, but Lisa says you’re insane when you’re high,” he said. “You punch people or what?”
“Only until they’re unconscious. Where’s Lise?”
“Living room. Hey, Joshua’s back in town, if you’re looking for some action.”
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. “But Joshua and I aren’t married.”
Keith sat up and leaned toward me, and I could see how bloodshot his eyes were already. “Why do girls always have to be in love to have sex?”
He was too stoned to be having this conversation with his girlfriend’s best friend, and I said so.
“I’m just asking.”
A flash of Lisa’s red hair in the next room. Keith had red hair too, and neither of them seemed to know how much the twin vibe creeped everyone out.
“No offense,” I said, giving his cheek a pat as I turned to leave, “but most of you suck at the sex part, so there’s nothing else in it for us.”
I crowd-paddled to the living room past town boys, farm boys, mountain boys. A bunch of them were measuring their heads with a TV cable. “One more year,” I said when I reached Lisa.
She didn’t have to ask what I meant, just handed me a sticky bottle of Long Island Iced Tea and a plastic cup. “A wise man once said, if you can’t make it better, you can at least make it blurry.”
“Which wise man was that?”
The sound of peeing from the other side of a closed door answered, so loud it seemed to be hitting the bowl from a very great height.
The door swung open. Bill was only five eight with sneakers on and had a way of walking with minimal bounce, a gliding slouch across a room. Back then he was slightly overweight and this side of slovenly, but he had honey-colored curls that no girl could resist touching and absolutely nothing embarrassed him. He was the opposite of Lisa, who was small but ridiculously strong, with huge, kinky red hair that was moussed, diffused, straightened, and sprayed to sculpture-like perfection. She carried herself so confidently, yet would be mortified by the badly timed squeak of a vinyl seat.
Bill held out a china mug with a picture of Prince Charles and Princess Di on it for me to slosh in some booze. “What?”
“Did you find that in the bathroom?” Lisa said. “You don’t even know what it was used for.”
“Let’s toast,” I said quickly, before Bill could bug Lisa with a crude joke. “To Nat and her brave battle with the Double Dragon.” (She was locked in her bathroom for the night after eating a funky pizza slice.) “To Sid and his tight leather pants—especially the leather pants. To a bitchin’ senior year. And to the five of us being together again next year, somewhere far from here.”
Lisa waved her cup vaguely toward us. “Yeah, Nat, Sid, cheers. Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“No,” I said, using the neck of the bottle to guide her cup into a more upright position.
“I do. But, George, he’s not looking at me.”
I twisted around and saw Joshua Spring angling himself into the living room.
The history here is that Joshua Spring was in love with me and had always been in love with me. It started on the first day of first grade when he trailed Lisa and me into the schoolyard at lunchtime. I reckoned he had one of two possible agendas: showing us his bird, as Dougie O’Donnell and Patrick O’Connor had done when they cornered us at recess, or stealing my Han Solo action figure. Instead, he took a plastic ring with a heart-shaped sapphire from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. Then he bolted, leaving a trail of big muddy footprints to his hiding place behind the hippo slide.