The Secret Year (4 page)

“Let’s drive to the top of Black Mountain.”

There was a park up there, where kids went to party, or look at the view, or screw around in their cars. “What for?”

“For the view.”

“At night?”

“You can see the lights.”

“All right, if that’s what you want.”

It would be my first time up Black Mountain Road since the accident. I’d always known I would have to do it sometime. I figured it might as well be tonight.

chapter 6

Black Mountain Road wound upward beneath pines
and oaks, maples and hemlocks. You couldn’t see most of the houses from the road, just the gateposts at the ends of people’s driveways. A lot of the houses had names. Tom and I used to joke that if we gave our own house a name, it would be “Rusty Acres” or “Swampside Manor.”

I was glad that I didn’t know exactly which curve on Black Mountain Road was
the
curve. It could’ve been any one of them, and there were no mangled guardrails to give me a clue. Kids had made one of those flower-and-candle roadside shrines up here for Julia, but I wasn’t sure exactly where, and it had been moved down to the cemetery on Morgansfield Road after the funeral. I’d never visited it in either place. To me, that wasn’t where Julia was.

I’d never taken in all the details of the accident. I hadn’t wanted to picture it; I didn’t want that night to live in my head. It was only now that I wanted the whole story. The notebook had cracked me open, brought back Julia’s voice. It was like I still had something important to find out about her. About us.

I didn’t notice I’d been holding my breath until I let it out at the top of the mountain. Syd misunderstood my sigh. She said, “See, I told you it was beautiful.”

I parked facing the view. The trees of Black Mountain, a wild dark tangle, filled the slope below us. The flats spread out at the foot of the mountain in a carpet of lights.

A few other cars clustered at the far end of the lot. One streetlight stood close enough to us for me to see Syd, but not close enough to throw a real glare into the car. I wiped the windshield with my sleeve, but most of the spots were on the outside.

“Imagine seeing this out your bedroom window,” Syd said, gazing at all those lights where there used to be nothing but farms. “I wonder what it’s like to live up here.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Do you think they even notice it? To them it’s probably ordinary.”

“Probably.” I’d been to Julia’s house a couple of times when nobody else was home. Her room didn’t face the view—her windows looked out onto pine trees—and I couldn’t remember looking out any of the other windows. I had crept through the place like a burglar, trying not to leave fingerprints anywhere. I didn’t belong there.

“I’m going to live up here someday.” Syd stared as if she could take hold of the mountain, and all the land around it, with her eyes.

“Not me,” I said. “I’d rather live on the river.”

“Well, I’ll live up here and you can come visit sometimes.”

“Sounds good.” I figured she was only dreaming, but the practical details nagged at me. “How would you make that kind of money, though?”

“I think . . .” She licked her lips. “If I tell you something, promise not to tell Nick and the other guys?”

“Sure.”

“I think I want to be a doctor. The kind that takes care of little kids, you know?”

“Why does that have to be a secret?”

“Oh, the guys would make fun of me. Remember how Nick was when your brother got into college? Anyway, I don’t know if I could make it. It costs a ton of money.”

“You’d be good at it.” When I was eight and cut my hand on a broken bottle, Syd was the only kid in my class who could look at the stitches without flinching.

“I talked about it to Mr. Morea, and he said, ‘You know you have to cut up a cadaver in medical school.’ Then he stared at me like he expected me to faint or something.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know, but what worries me is the money. How am I going to pay for eight years of school?’”

I laughed. I would’ve loved to see Morea’s face when she said that. He was always trying to rattle her. People underestimated Syd because she was quiet and small, and she usually wore a big old jacket of her father’s that made her look even smaller. You’d think Morea would know better by now. When we first used microscopes in his class, he insisted on leaning over Syd and working the knobs for her, like it was too complicated for her to figure out. She finally told him, “You’re putting it out of focus,” and flicked his hands away.

“I bet you could get a scholarship,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“You could. You’ve got the grades for it.”

Syd shrugged and went quiet.

I rubbed the steering wheel. The cracks in its cover caught on the skin of my hands. I stroked the smooth patch where my mother had wrapped black tape around one of the first cracked spots. She no longer bothered patching the wheel; she said the whole thing would be covered in tape.

I liked the feel of the wheel, liked knowing all I had to do was start the car and I could go anywhere I wanted. Not that I had anyplace special to go. Just knowing I could was enough. When I looked over at Syd, staring out at the lights and dreaming about her Black Mountain future, I thought maybe she’d like that freedom, too. “Want me to teach you?” I asked.

“Teach me what?”

“To drive.”

“Really?” She smiled. “No, my parents would kill me.”

“Who has to tell them?”

“They would kill me,” she said again, but her laugh was so excited that I took her hand and guided it to the wheel. Half teasing, half ready to hand her the keys if only she asked, I slid her hand along the steering wheel.

“See, doesn’t that feel good?”

“Colt!” She pulled away and slapped my shoulder. “Don’t tempt me. Me not driving is one of the few things my parents agree on.”

“If you say so.” I was having second thoughts myself. Mom would slaughter me if she found out I used her car to give driving lessons when I hadn’t even had my license for a full day yet.

Syd sighed. “On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t notice. They’re so wrapped up in their own bullshit lately.” She rested her head against the back of the seat. “My dad’s sleeping downstairs again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I waited for her to go on, but instead she changed the subject. “Tell me about the driver’s test,” she said. I told her, and then we got quiet again. A couple more cars showed up, but they parked far away from us. We were still just sitting there when someone knocked on the window. We jumped. I hadn’t heard anyone walk up.

Keith Groome crouched there, looking in at us. I rolled down the window a couple of inches. He was so close I could smell the beer on his breath. I said, “What do you want?”

He sneered. “What the hell you doing up here?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “White trash is supposed to stay down on the flats.”

“Go to hell,” I said, and rolled up the window. He banged on the glass and hollered.

“Oh God,” Syd said, “let’s just go.”

“Why? This is a public park.”

“Come on, please. I hate this.”

“Relax. He’ll give up.”

“Well, I can’t concentrate with him screaming like that.”

I went for my door handle, but Syd grabbed me. “No, don’t. You know I hate fights.”

Groome hammered on the car roof.

“This is so stupid,” Syd said. “Can we just go?”

“Okay.” I started the engine. “Maybe I can run him over.”

“Colt!”

Groome had already stepped away from the car by the time I put it in reverse, but instead of backing straight out, I turned the car in his direction. I wasn’t really trying to run him over, but I didn’t mind if I scared him a little. He picked up a rock and flung it at the car. It hit somewhere in the back; we heard the
thunk
. I rolled down the window again. “You’re going to pay for that, asshole.”

“Sure, here’s a quarter!” he yelled.

“Just get us out of here,” Syd pleaded.

I took off, forgetting to be scared as I brought us around the curves of Black Mountain Road. I pulled over near the bottom because I was beginning to think I was too mad to drive. As much as I missed Julia, I didn’t want to meet her on the same stretch of road. I looked over at Syd.

“I hate it,” she said. “They think they’re so much better than us.”

I shut off the engine and the lights and put my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I told her. She pressed her face into my chest.

A car came screeching down Black Mountain Road then. It flew by us, with four others right behind it. They headed toward the Higgins Farm Bridge, and I laughed.

“It’s Groome and his friends,” I said. “They didn’t even see us!” I couldn’t stop laughing. I imagined them tearing around the flats, trying to teach me a lesson, and here they had driven right
past
me.

“They make me sick,” Syd said. “There’s something seriously wrong with Keith Groome.”

“Don’t let them get to you.” Even under the oversized jacket, I could feel how tense she was. I held her until her body loosened, softened. “I’ll take you home now.”

“Okay.”

I dropped her off and drove back to my place without seeing Groome and his friends again. I checked out the back of the car with a flashlight, but I honestly couldn’t find the dent Groome had made among all the other dents, dings, and scars.

I read another page in Julia’s notebook as soon as I got to my room. I didn’t go in order this time, but just opened the book anywhere, to a date in January. I didn’t read it because I was thinking about Julia as a person. Instead, I liked knowing how pissed Groome and Austin and those guys would be if they knew I’d been with her. Opening the notebook was almost a kind of revenge. Until I read the entry.

Dear C.M.,

I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t show up last night. I had a good fuming fit and threw a few snowballs in the river, waiting for you. Then I saw your name on the absence lists in the office. Turns out you haven’t been in school for a week! So you never even got my note asking you to meet me.

Are you sick? I want to call you. I just looked up your family’s number. I’m pretty sure it’s yours because the address is on the flats, near the Higgins Farm Bridge. Would you want me to call you? I feel so cut off from you. It seems crazy that I don’t even know how you are. Sometimes I love the fact that nobody knows about us. We have this secret, so juicy I can feel my mouth dripping. Other times, like now, it seems stupid to hide this way.

It’s later: I just talked to you. You didn’t sound mad. Your voice felt good in my ear. I’m glad I called.

I remembered that, all right. Last winter I got the flu, and I was out for almost two weeks. At the end of the first week, Julia called. I didn’t have a fever anymore, but I still felt horrible, beaten up and wrung out, not to mention bored. My brother had brought me a bunch of library books, but I’d read them, and I’d memorized the daytime TV schedule. Watching that much afternoon TV, I had discovered that there were about ten personal-injury lawyers who would be thrilled to take my case, if I ever had one. And I could have an exciting career in heating and air-conditioning. Anyway, I was lying there in the sheets I’d sweated on, trying to work up the energy to take a shower, when Julia called.

“Are you sick? I was worried about you,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve got the flu.” I held the phone away so I could cough. “Sorry. I’m getting better.”

“When are you coming back to school?”

“Maybe next week. I don’t know. I still can’t get out of bed much.”

There was a long pause. I tried to hear her breathing. Then she said, “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

We didn’t say much else, though we stayed on the phone for a while longer. Her voice felt good in my ear, too.

chapter 7

On Sunday Syd and the guys came over to shoot
targets. My family had a few acres of weedy muck that ran down to the river. Our land was cheap because part of it flooded every year. Twice we’d had water as far up as our house. Out back we had a bunch of different targets, and sometimes we set up cans on top of the junked cars. Dad only kept two cars behind the house; the rest were in the front. My brother Tom’s “sculpture,” a kind of wooden tower about twelve feet high, was in the backyard, too.

Nick was the best shot, then Syd, then me, then Paul, then Fred. I thought Syd was still shaken up from the night before, though, because she was missing everything today.

“So you finally got your license,” Nick said to me, when the only one who still felt like shooting was Fred. Fred liked to practice, because he was always hoping to get better. I thought he probably needed glasses but wouldn’t admit it. Anyway, Fred kept going while the rest of us sat on the back-porch steps. There was no room for us on the porch itself, what with the dead washing machine, the snow shovels, the engine parts, the half-empty cans of WD-40, and a pile of old boots.

“Yeah,” I told Nick, “but I won’t get to use the car much, except to go to work.”

“How’d you get roped into that? Busing tables at the steakhouse. Christ.”

“I don’t mind. I could use the money.”

“Yeah, some of us have to earn our money,” Paul said, leaning back and spreading his arms along the top of the step. He pumped gas thirty-five hours a week. “Who do you think you are, Nick? Austin Chadwick, who don’t gotta work for a living?”

Nick grinned. “You guys gotta learn to work the system. I told my folks they should just give me an allowance, because if I got a job it would interfere with my grades.”

We all laughed at that, except Syd. “And they bought that?” Paul said. “How drunk were they?”

“Hell, no. I gave ’em the old innocent look. ‘Seriously, Mom, I gotta concentrate on school.’” The blond stubble on Nick’s face glinted; he rubbed it to make a raspy noise. Nick liked to go for days without shaving. He thought it made him look tough. But since he didn’t have thick enough whiskers for a real beard, he would shave as soon as the hair got long and wispy.

Through all this, Syd leaned back against the step above her. She hadn’t said much today. Not that she ever talked a lot, but even when Syd didn’t speak she was still usually part of the conversation. Most of the time, I could tell what she was thinking. Sometimes the two of us would have our own silent conversation, just by looking at each other. But today she stared out toward the river, and I couldn’t tell if she was listening to us. Aside from a squabble she’d had earlier with Nick, over which one of them was going to shoot first, she barely seemed to notice she was with us.

“You think you’re Chadwick,” Paul told Nick again. “Fuck, I can see you now, living up on Black Mountain—”

“How’s he gonna work that?” Fred yelled.

“Move in with some old widow. Like Blankenship.” Paul laughed.

“Black Mountain Gigolo!” Fred said.

“Hell, not even Blankenship would take Nick,” I said. Mrs. Blankenship lived high up on Black Mountain. She was about a hundred and two, and she spent most of her time giving money to places that would name buildings after her. If she ever did go for Nick, she’d probably stamp
PROPERTY OF BLANKENSHIP
on him.

“I wouldn’t take anyone on Black Mountain,” Nick said. “They’re all bitches and ugly as shit. You seen that Lori Van Allen? You can’t tell her apart from that horse she’s always riding.”

“Julia Vernon was hot,” Fred said, and turned back to the targets. It felt like ants were swarming over me. I glanced at Syd—she was the only person who might read my mind—but she was still off somewhere else. I pretended that something about my left shoelace was really interesting.

“She’s dead,” Nick said. “How sick are you?”

While Julia was alive, I had gotten good at covering, at keeping my face blank and my breathing steady whenever I saw her or heard anything about her. It took a while. At first, it was the little things that almost tripped me up. Like the time I went into a drugstore with Nick so he could buy cigarettes, and I remembered I needed condoms. I almost got them off the shelf before I realized I couldn’t buy a box that big in front of Nick when I supposedly didn’t even have a girlfriend. Or the time I had to explain to Paul how I knew before everyone else that Keith Groome’s father had been arrested for a DUI. I got out of that one by saying Syd had told me . . . good thing she was known for being up on all the Black Mountain gossip.

I learned. At some point, hiding the truth became automatic. I could flip a switch inside, cross from one side of myself to the other without thinking. Then the crash had scraped me raw. The weeks right after Labor Day had been torture, with everyone gossiping about her death and girls crying in the school halls, but even then I’d gone numb from the constant buzz about it. Now I was raw again, focusing on the plastic end of my shoelace and wishing they’d change the subject to anything else.

“Pam Henderson wasn’t bad,” Paul said. “Nice ass.”

Nick smirked at Syd. “Hey, Syd, that’s your cue to tell Paul what an asshole he is, ‘objectifying women’ and all that.”

“Fuck off, Nick,” she said, flicking a pine needle from the knee of her jeans. I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

Nick flinched. Syd almost never dropped the F-bomb, so she had the advantage of surprise. And Nick didn’t like to be surprised. He looked around at us and raised his eyebrows in exaggerated shock. “Ooh, is it that time of the month already?”

“Leave her alone,” I said.

With the same fake interest I’d had in my shoelace, we watched Fred take his next shot. All except Syd, whose eyes were still on the horizon. Nick broke the tension by asking me, “Hey, your parents home?” He liked to help himself to their beer when they weren’t around.

“My dad, I think.” Earlier that morning, he’d been sprawled in front of the TV in his shorts, watching some infomercial.

“Shit.”

“God, Nick,” Syd said. “How can you drink at this hour?”

“It’s not that early. It’s lunchtime.”

She made a face.

“You know, you’re a real pain in the ass today,” Nick said. “What’s with you, anyway?”

She didn’t answer for a minute. Then she straightened up and said, “My father moved out this morning.” She stomped down the porch steps and went to stand in the yard, a few feet away from us, looking down toward the river.

Everyone was quiet. Fred stopped shooting. Then Paul said, “Hey, it’s not so bad. I’ve had three ‘fathers’ move out already.” But Nick reached over and gave him a backhanded slap in the ribs.

The guys looked at me as if they expected me to say the magically right thing. I knew Syd better than any of them, but how should I know what she was going through? My parents were still together, even if they hardly talked to each other. I wished Nick would talk to Syd. His parents had gotten divorced three years ago.

“We’re gonna get going,” Nick said. “Ready, Fred? Syd, you coming?”

“No thanks,” she said, keeping her back to us.

Fred gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder before he joined the guys again. When they had gone, I said, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded without turning around. We stayed like that until she said, “Let’s go down to the river.”

I reached under the steps and pulled out this orange traffic cone that my dad once stole from a road-construction site. I put it on the top step of the porch. That was my family’s signal that someone was out back, so no target shooting. Then Syd and I walked past the cars and the sculpture, past the targets and the berms behind them, through the weeds, down to the river path. If you followed it long enough, this path would take you to the Higgins Farm Bridge. That’s how I used to go meet Julia.

Weeds rustled under our feet. Bittersweet hung from the trees, its berries shining red, the only bit of color left at this time of year. When we reached a fork in the path, Syd said, “Is the tree house still there?”

“I guess. I haven’t been there for a couple of years.”

Dad had helped Tom and me build the tree house. The left fork of the path Syd and I were standing on had once led to it, but now the trail was mostly overgrown. Syd took a few steps to the left and glanced back at me. “Let’s go see.”

I followed her until she stopped, confused. “I can’t remember which tree it was anymore,” she said.

“It’s that big one off to the right. And the house is still there, see?”

We climbed up. The wood was damp, and softer than it used to be, but we tested each board and found only one rotten piece. We sat in the corner, smelling old wet wood and dead leaves. “Remember all those peanut-butter sandwiches?” she said.

We used to pack lunches to eat here, usually peanut butter. Somehow it seemed like an adventure. We would pretend we were stranded on an island. A couple of years after that, Nick and Paul snuck their fathers’ magazines out here for us to look at. And then I guess we all got too old for the tree house.

“Am I the only girl who was ever up here?” Syd asked.

“Yeah. No, wait—Tommy brought Corrie Smith one time.”

“Corrie Smith? You’re kidding.”

“Yeah, I think it was the first time he kissed a girl.” I’d caught them, and Tom had told me he “just wanted to see what it was like.” When I asked him what he thought, he shrugged and said, “I don’t see what the big deal is.” I laughed now, remembering that.

“What about you? Did you ever bring any girls here, Colt?”

“No.” I leaned back, resting against the trunk of the tree. The damp floor was cold under my jeans.

She touched my hand then, stroked the back of it. I looked down at our hands and said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She kept stroking my hand. I wanted to pull away but didn’t see how I could. I told myself maybe she was just looking for comfort, even though it felt like more than that.

A strand of hair hung in her face, so I lifted my hand—the one she was touching—to brush it away. I expected that when I moved my hand it would break things up, but instead she leaned forward and kissed me.

I shouldn’t have kissed her back. But I liked her—though maybe not the way she wanted. And her father had just left. So I kissed her back, and we didn’t stop there.

It wasn’t like with Julia at all. It was more like with Jackie; my mind flipped off in different directions. A squirrel wheezed in the tree above us, and the boards in the tree house creaked whenever the wind blew. I kept listening to things like that, and wondering what time it was and whether I had to get ready for work yet.

I don’t mean that it didn’t feel good to touch her, because in a way it did. It always does. I wasn’t exactly suffering through it. I ran my mouth over her neck and eased my hands up under her shirt. But the whole time I had a rock in my stomach, because I knew I never should’ve taken things this far.

She was the first to pull away. “It’s getting late,” she whispered, hooking her bra.

I checked my watch. I had just enough time to get to work. “I need to take you home.”

“I know.” She pulled her father’s jacket closer around her.

We climbed down without speaking.