Time Flies (11 page)

“Have I worn you down yet?” B.J. asked when I answered my cell.

“Mirrored sunglasses are a reunion don’t?” I said. “Really?”

B.J. barked a laugh into my ear. “Absolutely. Well, unless you’re Dog the Bounty Hunter. And I think even he’s on borrowed time with the sunglasses indoors look. Anyway, what’s new?”

“Let’s see. I just finished watching an episode of
The Flying Nun
, and last night I had a dream that Corita Kent asked me to paint something for her.”

“Ha, the
Flying Nun
part better be a joke. Okay, enough small talk. I’m not hanging up until your flights are booked. And I don’t want to hear any whining about how much the tickets cost. It’s your own damn fault for waiting so long.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

There was dead silence on the other end. I used the time to scroll through my email, just in case something else had come in from Finn in the last three minutes.

B.J. cleared her throat. “Really?”

“I just said I would, didn’t I?”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. You talked me into it, that’s all. You’re very persuasive.”

B.J. blew a gust of wind into my ear. “Spill it.”

“There’s nothing to spill.” I took a quick breath. “Hey, do you remember Finn Miller?” I asked, the lure of saying his name out loud impossible to resist.

“Of course I do. You drooled all over him in Algebra
and
Geometry. Didn’t you two even go out, or almost go out, or something like that?”

I did my best imitation of nonchalant. “I’ll have to check my diary and get back to you.”

“Well, he’s single again, too, you know.
And
he’s going to the reunion.”

“Gee, what
don’t
you know?”

“What can I say, I’m on the committee. His profile is a ten, too, or at least a nine-point-five. Divides his time between Malibu and Chicago, or maybe it was Maui and Cleveland.”

“Ha,” I said. “And he has a private plane. And he invented a daily vitamin that reverses gray hair.”

“No, no,” B.J. said. “Actually it not only gets rid of the gray, it turns your hair any color you want it to be.”

“Cool. Like Flintstones for grown-ups. You just pick a vitamin and, presto, ten minutes later your hair turns Wilma White or Frosted Fred.”

“Or Bamm-Bamm Blue or Pebbles Pink. And it’s time-released, so it lasts all day and most of the night.”

“All day and most of the night,” we both sang.

“Jinx,” we both said.

“I think we may have botched the lyrics,” B.J. said. “But who was that anyway?”

“The Kinks, I think. I used to love that line about believing that you and me will last forever. Ha.”

B.J. laughed. “You and me
will
last forever—it’s the rest of the stupid world we have to be concerned about.”

“This is true.” I closed my eyes to picture the metal sculpture—a big steel vitamin bottle with Flintstone-like figures climbing out and spilling over the sides. Maybe for a playground
or a children’s museum, although it would have to be installed out of climbing range to protect it, and possibly sandwiched between big sheets of Plexiglas.

Or maybe Finn Miller would commission me to make it for his Maui estate.

“Okay, let’s get your flights booked,” B.J. said. “And, for the record, I still think there’s something you’re not telling me. Oh, and don’t forget to call your sister and let her know you’ll be in Marshbury. She’ll kill you if someone else tells her first.”

I pulled myself away from my email screen and found the Delta site. B.J. already had it up at her end, and in no time we’d figured out the best flights and I’d punched in my credit card number.

Delta took me to another screen and gave me one last chance to bail. I hesitated, then shut my eyes and pushed
CONFIRM RESERVATION
.

“Done?” B.J. asked.

“Done. And thank you. I think.” It took me every ounce of willpower I had not to add,
So, guess what? Finn Miller emailed me. And we’ve been, well, emailing
.

I loved B.J., but she wasn’t exactly subtle and she did have a slight tendency to take things over. One mention of Finn Miller and she’d probably be planning the wedding. Or at least booking us the honeymoon suite.

We weren’t in high school anymore, and I didn’t have to tell my best friend everything. Finn Miller was my delicious secret.

CHAPTER 11

To:
Finn Miller

From:
Melanie

Subject:
Reunion

I’m in! Flights booked and everything. So that means now you HAVE to go. What song do you think will be playing when we finally see each other again after all these years?

To:
Melanie

From:
B.J.

Subject:
5 Reunion Do’s

1. 
Do
move beyond once a loser, always a loser. The dorks are the ones who have it all going on now. The popular kids peaked in high school.

2. As opposed to “OMG, OMG, OMG! You look SO much better than you did in high school,”
do
go with a simple “You look great.”

3. 
Do
step out of your comfort zone and be the first one to say hello and start the conversation.

4. 
Do
bury the hatchet. No matter how horribly you were dissed by a classmate all those years ago, you will look a lot better if you at least appear to let it go.

5. 
Do
make sure you reserve plenty of time for a catty après-reunion postmortem with your real friends to balance out all this good behavior.

P.S. Call me.

B.J. answered on the first ring. “All I wanna do,” she sang.

“Is have more fun,” I sang back.

B.J. sighed. “Bummer, we still can’t sing. Or remember lyrics. I hate that.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “If the music is loud enough, we can fake it. Remember when we used to think Queen was singing ‘another one likes to dust’?”

B.J. sighed again.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you think it’s too late to go on a diet?”

“You mean in terms of our life expectancy?”

B.J. snorted. “No, I mean in terms of Derrick Donohue. He never once, in all four years of high school, gave me the time of day.”

“Whoa, where is this coming from? You’ve never even mentioned him.”

“I just remembered it.”

“So now Derrick Donohue is going to be your midlife crisis crush?”

“No way. He missed his chance. I just want to look so amazing he eats his heart out.”

I walked over to the freezer and opened the door. “Come on, Beej. We both know diets don’t work. You lose a few pounds, and a year later you’ve gained it all back plus six more.”

“I don’t care about a year later. I only care about the reunion. Listen, I think we should both get a copy of that high school reunion diet book ASAP. How bad can it be—there’s a glass of red wine on the cover.”

I switched my phone over to my other ear. Buried way in the back of the freezer, behind two bags of coffee beans, I was pretty sure I could see a chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich that had formerly belonged to Kurt. “Or we could just buy the red wine and read a good novel instead,” I said as I reached for it.

“No, really, I’m not kidding. You’re supposed to lose twenty pounds in thirty days on it.”

“I think it’s twenty
years
in thirty days.”

B.J. blew a puff of air across the miles. “Oh, puh-lease. Like that’s going to happen. Maybe we can just find a drive-through that does liposuction.”

I tucked the phone into the crook of my neck and tore an
opening in the plastic wrapper that covered the ice cream. A freezer-burned mini iceberg glistened up at me, irrefutable evidence that my freezer was now officially single, too. And that Kurt was really gone.

But it was okay.
I
was okay. Because I had somewhere to go now, too. Where Finn Miller would be waiting for me.

I blew a puff of air back at B.J. “Don’t be ridiculous. The only diet we need is dying to have some fun. We are sooooo going to rock that reunion.”

I brought my three box spring ladies into the kitchen and lined them up side by side across the length of the granite island. Then I opened the liquor cabinet and eyed what was left in there after Kurt had absconded with most of it. I rooted around until I found three shot glasses and placed one in front of each box spring lady. I filled them all with a dollop of red wine, and then poured a human-size glass of wine for myself.

I held up my glass. “Wish me luck, ladies.”

I touched my big glass to each of their tiny ones.

“Wait,” I said. “Why can’t you come, too? It might be a good thing to have some extra moral support. Plus, when everybody at the reunion starts bragging about how important they are, I can just happen to have you with me.”

They seemed to think this was a genius idea, so after I acknowledged the fact that I was not only talking to box spring ladies but answering for them, too, I finished my wine and helped them polish off theirs. I mean, the whole thing was barely crazy if
you factored in that it wasn’t just a pleasure trip for them—I’d be looking for a possible consignment sale, too.

I headed up to the attic to look for the biggest suitcase I could find. I dragged it down the creaky attic stairs, then went back for my carry-on.

“Damn,” I said a few minutes later. I’d managed to fit all three of the box spring ladies into the big suitcase, but there was no way in hell I could zip it closed, unless I turned their big hooped skirts into hot pants.

I sighed. To be honest, the whole good-bye toast and suitcase thing had started out as an elaborate stall to put off calling my sister, Marion, which I’d been trying to make myself do ever since B.J. had nudged me, but now I really wanted to take them with me.