Going Vintage (17 page)

“What’s El Modena?”

“It’s called the Open Space too, you know, that big hill off of Cannon Street. We’ll go there. I don’t have anywhere I need to be yet.”

I nod. Cooling off is what you do when you’ve had a little spat with someone. We both know I’ve moved beyond that to full-on hysterical.

He tunes the radio to something acoustic and soft, and lets the music continue the conversation. He’s a careful driver, staring straight ahead so I can have the privacy to deconstruct in his passenger seat.

The only person I hate more right now than Jeremy, or Jenny, is myself. I hate that I am crying, hate that I still care about a boy who hurt me the way he did and that he’s not acknowledging his mistake. I hate that I believed him to be one person, only to see this whole other person come out who must have always been there. And I hate girls like me. I have never been this girl before. If I were outside of this situation, if I were watching another girl go through this, I would shrug and say, “He’s a tool. Get over it.”

But I haven’t. And I can’t.

Jeremy was partially right about the relationships in my life. I’ve never gotten in cat fights with girls, never had problems with boys, never had huge tension with my family. Maybe I’m not solid enough to even manage the conflict. My only stability is mobility.

I rub the napkin against my eye. At least I’m trying to move on. It’s a very small
at least
, but I hold on to it with everything. The List is my attempt to find reason in this unreasonable situation. It’s all I really have to push me through to the moment when Jeremy becomes a two-dimensional memory and not the flesh-and-blood person haunting me now.

Oliver drives. Jeremy would try to fill the silence with talk, would try to fix my problems, or tell me it’s not that bad, or even try to top my story with something worse. But Oliver doesn’t. He just drives.

He parks at Cannon Street, at the base of a hill, which I guess is Open Space. You have to love a park that’s so straightforward with its name. There’s not much to it—it’s a patch of undeveloped land sandwiched between a sea of subdivisions. I’ve driven by here, but I’ve never actually hiked up. Hiking seems very, I don’t know, laborious.

I flip the visor down and try to get all the mascara and snot off my face. It’s a failed effort. Oliver made that funeral crack earlier about my black dress, and right now it doesn’t feel too far off.

“Let’s go.” Oliver slips out of his car and starts up the trail.

I scramble after him, tears still spilling down my cheek. It’s sunny, warm, breezy … one of those days you hope tourists
don’t experience because they’ll inevitably sell everything and move out for the weather. “We’re not hiking this whole mountain, are we?”

He looks behind his shoulder. “It’s a hill. Something to do until you’re ready to go home. Besides, it’s hard to cry and hike.”

He’s very right. It’s also hard to hike and think, hike and breathe, hike and wear questionable ballet flats. I follow him for a good ten minutes, watching the ball on the top of his beanie bounce, Oliver’s long gait stretching from step to step.

I know he’s giving me space, and I appreciate the solitude, but I also wouldn’t mind him next to me, if anything so he can catch me if I keel over. Pretty soon I’m going to accidentally accomplish Do Something Dangerous when I fall over and twist my ankle. “Oliver … I can’t go any farther.”

It’s all dry sage and prickly pear cactus and dirt. Nowhere to sit, except back at the car, which is half a mile away.

He bounds down the trail and stops just in front of me, his tie loosened like a lawyer at the end of a long day. “Having fun?”

“You didn’t tell me that you’re so athletic,” I say.

“I
am
point guard on the Mötley Crüe basketball team. Besides, walking up a straight line doesn’t require advanced skill.”

“But you’re so fast.”

He shrugs off the compliment. “You stopped crying.”

“I could have stopped crying in the car.”

“No. My hula girls were mocking you. Besides, check the view.”

It’s not like there’s this grand view of the ocean or even Los Angeles. We’re not that high up and we can’t see that far out. But there are some housing developments, and more important, a relatively smog-free blue sky.

“I’ve never been here,” I say.

“Really? I thought Jeremy would’ve taken you. We used to hike this all the time in middle school.”

“No more use of the
J
word.”

“Just for a second.” He cracks his neck. “I want you to know I didn’t mean to invite Jeremy. He overheard me telling someone else about the meeting, knew you were trying to get a club together, and said he wanted to come. I didn’t know he was going to propose to you.”

“Jeremy wasn’t proposing to me.” I give a hollow laugh, thinking how ridiculous a proposal would be. I hadn’t planned on forever with Jeremy. I don’t really know what I’d planned on. Maybe when we went away to college things would fizzle, but whatever happened, it would be mutual, friendly. That I would always look back on my first love as something real and right. Now I can’t decide if I was ever really in love with Jeremy, or just in love with love. Did I want a boyfriend so badly that I accepted the warm body, just like he did with me? Or is it Jeremy specifically who I want? Wanted. Past tense. Mostly. “He was apologizing. Although, actually, he never said
I’m sorry
. Or admitted that he was wrong.”

“So he
was
wrong.” Oliver said.

The breeze picks up to a gust and an old water bottle bounces past us. I get a faint whiff of Oliver’s orange musk
again, unless there’s a tree somewhere close. “Have you ever heard Jeremy talk about a girl named Jenny?”

A look of understanding crosses Oliver’s face. I wish I’d phrased that question in a different way or at a different time. I don’t want him to understand what happened. I don’t want anyone to know what an idiot I was. “No. But we aren’t kissing cousins.”

“Um, I’d be worried if you were.”

“That’s an expression, Mallory. Jeremy’s not really my type.”

“No?” I smile, relieved by the shift in focus. I can’t believe I just said Jenny’s name out loud. “Why not?”

“I try to stay away from blood relations. And I like girls. So that’s two strikes. I’m sure you could help me find a third.”

Try thirty.

“Oh, and here’s another.” Oliver gives a theatric grimace. “He used to tease me when we were kids. The scars still run deep.”

I hesitate. Jeremy is always a nice guy to his friends, but he has a temper with people who make him mad, and Oliver could certainly be on that list. “What for?”

“Really awful things. Smarty-pants, weirdo.” Oliver fakes a sniff.

“Kids can be cruel.”

Oliver tugs his beanie off and starts playing with the fountain of yarn on top. “I don’t know what he did, Mallory, but I’m sorry. For him. I don’t think he tries to be a jerk, if that helps. You know my uncle isn’t the best relationship role model.”

I do. Jeremy’s parents are still married, but his dad has high expectations and a sharp tongue. Jeremy always swore he would never say the things to a woman that his dad says to his mom. And he never did, to me. That wasn’t his problem. He just said nice things to two girls at once.

“And I do know he really was … really is into you. You’re the only girl I’ve ever heard him talk about, and it was always good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He twists off a piece of yarn. “So whatever happened, it’s probably not you. Just him. And it’s not even him, not completely.”

“That’s good of you to defend his honor.”

“I don’t know about that.” Oliver dangles the string in the wind. “Give me your finger.”

I hold out my left ring finger, my wedding finger, and he shakes his head. Seriously, Mallory? No. This is not your second fake proposal of the day. He grabs the pointer finger on my right hand and ties the string around it. “This is a reminder.”

“What am I remembering?” The Open Space suddenly feels very small, and now that he’s closer, I smell apples with the oranges, apple shampoo. Jeremy always used a pine shampoo.

Why am I thinking about Jeremy?

I’m not.

Why am I thinking about Oliver?

I’m not
.

“Remember that you don’t have to forget what happened, but you can forget the pain.” Oliver’s eyes darken. “I promise.
Sometimes you think there is no way anyone has ever hurt like you have, that you’ll never stop hurting, and then little by little you do, until it doesn’t. Hurt. Not like it does now.”

“How do you know that?”

Oliver holds out his right hand and there’s a braided twine ring. “I made this when my parents got divorced. It was bad. Like choose-her-or-me bad, and my dad doesn’t exactly want to play catch with me since I went with Mom. It’d be a long throw, anyway—he’s in Toronto.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.
They
should be sorry. And I still hate them, a little, at times, and there are moments that are big and painful, but it’s not like … how do I say it … like—”

“Someone singeing the entire surface of your skin with a curling iron, one limb at a time?”

“That would be the overdramatic version, but sure. The memory stays. The agony fades.”

I knew that, about Oliver. He’s Jeremy’s cousin through their moms, and that’s why Oliver moved to Orange in middle school, so his mom could be close to her three siblings. It’s funny how something that is just a random fact that you hear about someone—parents divorced, Dad far away—is really that person’s life, something they deal with every day. He must think I’m such an idiot, crying over a high school breakup, but he isn’t looking at me like I’m an idiot. He has a gentle smile on his lips, not his half smile, and I almost want to clink our rings together in solidarity. I don’t know this kid at all, but in this little way, I feel like he knows me completely.

I turn my face to the sun so I’ll be too blinded to cry. Why is he being so nice to me? I don’t know how to respond to it. Jeremy always asked if I was on my period when I got weepy. “Okay. Well, thanks. Smarty-pants.”

Oliver grabs at his chest like he’s been stabbed. “Not you too!” He slumps onto his knees and gasps for air. “Can’t … breathe.”

“The weirdo line was probably right too.”

“Well, now you’re taking it too far. Beat you back.”

I trudge behind him down the trail and within fifteen minutes he’s driving me home, hula girls swaying to his acoustic music. He keeps his eyes on the road, but every few minutes he casts me a quick glance, a reassuring smile. It’s not lost on me that the string is on the same finger I used to wear Jeremy’s ruby ring.

Oliver Kimball. Huh.

Chapter 13

1960s items I spend all my savings on at thrift stores and antique shops:

1. A teal rotary phone that works, but with lots of static
.

2. Analog clock radio with peeling fake wood exterior
.

3. A gray high-waisted skirt with two Peter Pan collar shirts I can tuck in, a knee-length plaid skirt that looks like it’s half of an old Catholic school uniform, and an ugly brown housedress that’s at least true to era. Maybe I can get Grandma to spruce it up with some stitching or buttons
.

4. Saddle shoes that smell like roast beef
.

5. A satchel. Backpacks don’t jive
.

6. Vinyl records. Two singles from poppy, hair-sprayed girl groups I’ve never heard of and Help! by the Beatles. Okay, so Help! came out a couple years later, but I am in grave need of a breakup song to repeatedly play on Dad’s record player. “Yesterday” fits the bill
.

Jeremy doesn’t try to talk to me for the rest of the week. I’m almost happy that I have no default person to hang out with that weekend, that I can do anything I want with whomever I want. I can do something dangerous.

Or I can take a sewing class at the community center.

Ginnie agrees to take the seven o’clock class with me. She’ll go to a party or something afterward, while I shall “research” early sixties cereals like Cap’n Crunch. And by research, I mean eat. Alone, in my bed, without even a good rom com to keep me company.

Ginnie has afternoon practice, so I go an hour early to the library by the community center. The library, with the books and articles and Dewey decimals, is admirably vintage. I want to check out some books for my history paper, but they’re harder to find that I thought. The City of Orange’s library card catalog has, naturally, gone online. When I ask a librarian for help, she points to the computer. Telling her I can’t use it makes me feel like a little kid whispering that I have to go to
the bathroom. But I finally end up with a stack of books, half about the Industrial Revolution, the other half a mix of novels, etiquette books, another cookbook—anything that can achieve time travel with a flip of the pages.