November Surprise (7 page)

There’s a band in the room, and they break into “Happy Days
are Here Again.” I smile and clap, feeling the infectious joy of the crowd.
Then Adrian comes up to me.

“Well, we did it. I’m sure it was the effort of the
Minnesota College Democrats that put Clinton over the edge.” Adrian laughs at
his own joke, and we embrace in a friendly hug. When we pull apart, he scans
the room. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“I was wondering if you knew. He never showed up while I was
working the polls.”

Adrian shakes his head. “I’ve never understood people who
don’t care enough to vote.”

“Well…” I stammer, “We don’t know he didn’t vote. Maybe he
did earlier in the day.”

Adrian places his warm palm on my shoulder. “Lucy, he was
never going to vote. Trust me on that.”

Sharon voted for Bush, which I can’t agree with. However, I
can at least respect it. But Bryce just didn’t vote at all? There’s nothing
respectable about that, and I can’t stay with someone I don’t respect.

Adrian squeezes my shoulder before he releases it. My face
must have fallen, because he says, “Hey, cheer up! This is a great night, and
it’s going to be an awesome four years.”

Adrian is right, yet they also won’t be without conflicts or
compromise. I’ll experience that first hand tomorrow, when I break up with
Bryce.

But for now I just smile, and say, “Right.”

We toast, to Clinton’s victory, and to the promise of years
to come.

Monty and I have been dancing together all evening. The slow
songs are the best, but we also do the Macarena and even the Chicken Dance. I
can’t stop laughing the entire time I’m quacking my hands.

Jack and his new wife, Petra, have fed each other cake.
Petra has thrown her bouquet, and all the toasts have been given. The night is
winding down, and Monty leads me off the dance floor.

“I’m really glad neither of us had dates,” he says.

“Yeah, me too.” My heart beats just a little bit faster than
normal.

“And I’m sorry about earlier. Hitting on you like that. It
was clumsy. Will you forgive me?” His face is flushed and his tie is loosened.
I’m sure I’ve noticed before how good-looking he is, but this is the first time
I’ve let myself appreciate it.

“There’s nothing to forgive.” I look around, make sure
nobody is watching, and then I stand on my tiptoes and plant a kiss on his
cheek. When he doesn’t flinch or pull away, I give him the barest whisper of a
kiss on the lips.

It’s all the encouragement he needs.

With a conspiratorial smile, he takes my hand and leads me
outside the reception hall. I follow willingly.

When we get to a dark, hidden spot, he wraps his arms around
my waist and kisses me deeply. I can feel it everywhere, my entire body is
tingling, my knees are weak, and I’m sure that at any moment, my heart will
explode.

I don’t want him to stop. But he does.

“Where are you staying tonight?” he asks.

“I was going to drive back to my parents’ house.”

“Hmm…” he leans in and kisses me some more. I press up
against him like I can’t get close enough. He tilts his head back ever so
slightly, so he can talk. “That’s a long drive. Do you want to stay with me,
instead?”

“You have a hotel room?”

“It’s close to the airport,” he whispers. “I fly back to New
York really early tomorrow.” Then he baby-kisses my eyes, nose, and chin.

I don’t answer immediately. I’m trying to steady my
breathing. “So you can make a clean get away?”

“It’s not like that.” he smiles. “And you haven’t even said
yes, yet.”

But he knows I’m going to. “You can’t ever tell Jack,” I
say.

“He just got married, Lucy. Do you really think he’ll care?”

I rub my hands down his back and across the taut muscles in
his arms. “I never had sex with him, and we dated for months. If he finds out
you and I had a one night stand…”

Monty cuts me off with another kiss. “I promise I’ll never
tell him,” he murmurs, between kisses.

We make out a few seconds more, but our kissing is
interrupted when I’m consumed with a fit of giggles.

“What’s so funny?” Monty asks.

I shake my head. “Sorry. It just occurred to me. I’m about
to do it with the homecoming king.”

Monty chuckles. “Does that turn you on?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “Kind of. Is that okay?”

He kisses my neck. I tilt my head back and sigh in pleasure.

“Are you kidding?” His lips are a mere centimeter from my
skin as he mumbles, and his arms tighten around me even more. “If I had known,
I would have worn my crown.”

Now we’re both laughing.

“You know this isn’t the sort of thing I usually do…”

He raises his face so he’s looking me in the eye. “I know,”
he says, and he smiles. Crinkles form around his green eyes, and I feel a
moment of panic. There’s no way I’m casual enough to be with him for just one
night.

“Let’s make it special, okay?” He reaches down and clasps my
hand, and I let him lead me somewhere, again. This time, I follow him to the
parking lot. Tonight, I’d follow him anywhere.

It's 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, and I’m the only one left
in the office. It’s not much of an office really, just a ranch-style building,
built in the 1970s and never intended for use beyond the millennium. It’s cold
in the winter and unbearable in the summer, and the tan carpeting, tan walls,
and tan office furniture torment me in my dreams. Still, the Southern
Minneapolis Neighborhood Association has become my second home, and right now
I’m home alone.

I walk by Sue Ellen’s desk, and see her message light
flashing.
What the hell?
I think to
myself. She’d do it to me.

I take a seat in her office chair, and pick up the receiver
of her phone. Her voicemail, amazingly enough, has no security code. If you’re
the type of person who deletes other people’s messages, you would think you’d
create a security code for yourself. But no.

I’m expecting to hear a work message, something that once
deleted, would make her seem irresponsible for not having heard it herself.
Instead there’s a deep male voice. I cross my legs and twist my hair as I
listen.

Hi. I know I was
supposed to call you back a while ago. I just didn’t have the courage to tell
you how sorry I am. Even now I don’t know if you’ll be happy to hear from me.
I’m only calling you at work because it’s harder for you to screen your calls.
But if I don’t hear back from you, I’ll understand, and I won’t call again.
Just know that I love you, and despite what you might think, I want to be with
you.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Sue Ellen’s recent mood swings
have more to do with a bad breakup than with me. If I was a better friend and
co-worker I would have asked her the right questions and discovered the truth.
If I was a better person I would feel bad for her, and I’d forgive her for all
the crappy stuff she’s done to me.

However, I’m actually
remarkably flawed. So when the robotic voice mail voice gives me my options,
(press seven to delete; press eight to archive; press nine to mark as unread) I
press seven. Then I pack up my belongings, lock up the office, and drive away
in my car. My hands are shaking and I clutch the steering wheel tightly. God.
I’m no better than an IRA member: destructive and anonymous. Sure, nobody was
killed in the Manchester bombing, but irreparable harm was done. How can I
justify my act of phone terrorism?

Later I’m sitting at Liquor Lyle’s, an uptown Minneapolis
bar, trying to enjoy happy hour. It’s still early evening on Friday, the day
after Halloween. I’m in a large room filled with small tables. Looking around,
it's clear the Goth movement has taken off; there are a lot of girls wearing
tight black, corset-type dresses, along with huge platform shoes and maroon or
even black lipstick. I feel tame in comparison, wearing little makeup, and
simple, wide-legged jeans and a cropped jersey top.

A song by Dave Matthews is playing, and I hate to say it but
I’m already getting tired of hearing his music. Surely he’ll peak soon.

I sigh. Jack is late meeting me, and I glance at my watch
even though I know what time it is. Jack is almost never late for things. In
the seven or so years that we’ve been friends, I’ve been kept waiting for him
once, maybe twice.

I roll my head around, trying to relieve the tension in my
neck and shoulders, but nothing pops or cracks the way I was hoping it would.
My body feels bloated, like my self-doubt indulged in too large a lunch.

Finally I see him, tall, blonde and skinny, wearing jeans
and a blue short-sleeved shirt over a grey long-sleeved one. He makes his way
towards the table where I’ve been sitting for the last twenty-five minutes, and
he gives me a sheepish grin.

“I got lost,” he says, and he sits down across from me.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“Not everyone has a cell phone, Lucy.”

“I thought you did.”

“Nope. Just Petra.”

Petra is Jack’s wife, but she’s back home in Iowa. Jack is
here researching restaurants, because he wants to open one of his own in Des
Moines.

Jack looks around, assessing the room. For a moment I think
he’s going to say something disparaging about my choice of bars, and I’m
preparing my response of how Liquor Lyle’s is
the
hip place right now, and if he wasn’t from a backward place
like Des Moines he would get that. But he starts in on a different subject.

“Minneapolis is crazy with all these one way streets,” he
says. “And they all have one and a half lanes. You barely have room to pass
someone, so you get stuck behind a bus or someone making a left turn, and it
takes you twenty minutes to make it half a mile down the street, then you
forget where you were supposed to turn…”

“Uh huh,” I murmur. Defending the traffic in Minneapolis is
about as interesting as waiting for him to arrive was.

“How are you, Lucy?”

I had been looking down at some initials carved in the
table. But at Jack’s question my head snaps up. He is one of those friends I
can instantly pick up with from where we last left off. Time doesn’t go by with
him; we’ll always be eighteen, and it will always be just the other day that we
were hanging out. Such a question should be unnecessary.

He sees what must be the shocked look on my face and
responds.

“I only ask because you look a little tense.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, like you could use a shoulder rub, or something.”

Any other guy and I would take that as a come on. But Jack
is completely devoted to Petra, and he and I are so platonic it’s hard to
remember a time that we kissed on the lips. He’s like my brother. A brother I
keep secrets from.

There’s what I did this evening, before coming here –
I can never tell Jack because he’s way too good to do such a thing. But there’s
another secret too, the one I’ve kept for over a year, involving a crush and a
hookup with his older brother, Monty. I couldn’t resist his charms, and I don’t
regret our night together. I never told Jack; it would just be a weird and awkward
sort of confession to make.

But keeping secrets from Jack feels about as natural as
Dolly the sheep, and like her, the secrets seem to clone themselves and
multiply.

I roll my shoulders and stretch my neck again. This time
there’s a tiny little pop, but it’s not nearly satisfying enough. “Work has
been stressful,” I tell him. Maybe I can
sort
of
confess to what is going on. “One of my coworkers is crazy. I’m worried
that if I turn my back on her, she’ll come up from behind and stab me.”

Jack scrunches his face and resists laughing. He’d better
not laugh. “Why?” he asks.

“Like I said, she’s crazy. She wants to turn everything into
a competition.”

A line forms at Jack’s temple, reflecting his effort to take
what I’ve just said seriously. I get why this might be funny; my short stature,
skinny frame and baby face cause me to be mistaken for a sixteen-year-old all
the time, and my personality is closer to Tori Spelling’s on
90210
than it is to Heather Locklear’s
on
Melrose Place
. It must be hard to
imagine me in a catfight with anyone.

To his credit, Jack keeps a straight face. “It must be
tough, working in the cut-throat field of community organization.”

“Ha, ha. Smart aleck.”

Jack has heard many a story about how I work for the
neighborhood revitalization program here in Minneapolis. My responsibilities
mostly include organizing afterschool programs and youth events. It’s not
exactly Wall Street, or for that matter, politics. But that doesn’t mean it
can’t be tense.

“Sorry.” Jack momentarily places his hand on top of mine.
“Tell me what’s going on.”

I pause before I jump in. How much can I say without saying
too much? “Okay. When I first started working with Sue Ellen I thought we got
along, but then I realized too late she took my sarcastic jokes personally. So
I stopped being sarcastic around her.”

The waiter stops by our table and I pause my story while
Jack orders his first beer and I order my second.

“So what went wrong?” he asks as soon as the waiter walks
away.

“I don’t know. She just hates me. Last month when it was my
turn to bring the office donuts and I brought bagels instead, she was mumbling
under her breath all morning about how much she was looking forward to a bear
claw.”

“Is Sue Ellen from the South?”

“What? Why?”

Jack cocks his head and shrugs his shoulders. “Her name, her
fondness for donuts. She just seems southern. Is she a member of the NRA? Maybe
you shouldn’t be messing with her.” He grins and his face opens up in such an
endearing way that it’s impossible not to smile back.

“I suppose she does seem kind of red-state,” I say. “But I
really don’t know where she’s from.”