Time Flies (30 page)

“That’s the spirit.”

I started tapping alternating feet as if the galloping sound might help get us there sooner. The rhythm was almost soothing.

“Hurry!” I yelled.

“If I go any faster, we’re going to get stopped for speeding and then we really will miss the reunion.”

I’d done my best to pretend I wasn’t watching the clock in Veronica’s kitchen while we waited around to make sure Fawn was okay. She was curled up on Veronica’s lap sucking on a Popsicle while Veronica dabbed the mosquito bites on her back with ointment. They were angry and swollen, but they appeared to be her only physical damage.

Finally Veronica set us free. “Go,” she’d said. “You still have time to make it.”

“Are you sure?” B.J. and I both said at once. Neither of us took the time to say
jinx
.

Veronica blew us a kiss. “Love you both. Now get the hell out of here.”

B.J. passed a sports car cruising up the highway in front of us. “Do you believe Fawn had that laptop with her the whole time? Veronica probably could have just emailed her. It’s a whole new world, Louise.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said. “We are soooo going to miss the reunion.”

B.J. took a long swig of her Tab. “We’re not going to miss it. We’re going to get there just in time to make an entrance. We’ll be the hit of the party, Romy.”

We passed an SUV and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to
look. Then I opened them again so I wouldn’t have to die without any warning. My stomach growled, long and loud. I was gripping the sides of my seat as hard as I could, but I risked letting go long enough to take a quick sip of my Tab. “The food will be all gone, too. I knew we should have gotten two orders of french fries earlier.”

“Think how flat our stomachs are going to be when we get there. It’ll be like we went on the high school reunion diet after all. Just remember not to touch the Goldfish until we make sure they’ve finished all the dorky reunion games.”

I didn’t say anything. I just went back to tapping my feet. Maybe I could tap a hole right through the floor of the Mustang and jog us along a little faster, like the Flintstones used to do.

Flintstones made me remember B.J.’s and my fantasy about Finn Miller creating a daily vitamin that reverses gray hair. Which made me remember the sculpture I’d imagined he was going to commission me to make for his Maui estate. Did they have estates in Maui, or just big beach houses? I could always scale the size of the sculpture up or down accordingly.

“You know,” B.J. said, interrupting my pipeless pipe dream, “even if we miss it, Fawn’s okay and we were there for Veronica when she needed us. That’s all that really matters.”

“Yeah, right.” I mean, easy for B.J. to be so generous. Her husband hadn’t just pulled her life out from under her. I leaned over to turn up the music.

B.J. reached over and turned it down again. “You know, the whole time we were growing up, all I ever heard was how nice that Melanie was. Even my own mother would say, ‘Why can’t you be a good girl like Melanie?’ I might not always show it, but at least I’m there when you need me.”

It was a direct hit. B.J. didn’t get mad often, but she had a knack for it when she did. I searched for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

“So, guess what? Finn Miller emailed me. And I emailed back. And well, we’ve emailed a few times.”

“
What?
And you didn’t tell me?” B.J. forgot all about the guilt trip she was laying on me and pressed down on the accelerator.

“Don’t!” I yelled.

She slowed down.

“Don’t!” I yelled again.

She sped up. “How could you not tell me that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to jinx it.”

We pulled around another car and I tried not to scream. We stayed in the passing lane.

B.J. glanced over at me. “I guess I can understand that. Okay, so fill me in. You’ve Googled him and checked out his Facebook profile, right?”

“No.”

“Are you kidding me? What kind of a crush is that?”

“Sorry. I’m a couple of decades out of practice.”

“It’ll come back. It’s like being Nancy Drew, only without all the legwork. And with a red Mustang instead of a blue roadster. Come on, Facebook. Now.”

I gripped my seat with one hand while I opened the Facebook app Troy had installed on my cell phone and tracked down Finn Miller.

“What’s it say under relationship?” B.J. asked.

“Divorced.”

“Good sign. See, you’re compatible already. What does he look like?”

I squinted at my phone. “Little. And square.”

B.J. shook her head. “Somebody needs to make bigger cell phone screens. You know, like those big phones with numbers that look like alphabet blocks.”

I rummaged around unsuccessfully in the depths of my shoulder bag for my reading glasses.

B.J. shook her head. “Somebody also needs to make reading glasses that come when you call them. I think I left mine back at the hotel. Oh, well, we’ll find out soon enough. Wow, Finn Miller—I’m trying to picture him from high school . . . Ooh, I know.”

She leaned over and reached under my seat. The car swerved.

I screamed. “B.J., knock it off.” My heart skipped a beat. I waited to see if I’d go into full-blown panic mode.

“Sorry. Listen, reach under your seat and see if you can find my yearbook.”

“You brought your yearbook?” I fumbled under my seat carefully with one hand. And to think I’d been too embarrassed to pack mine. Maybe I should have brought my Spin-the-Bottle bottle for backup, too.

“Of course I brought my yearbook. I figured we could look at it right before we went in, so we’d have a better chance of recognizing people. Do you know that you can download age progression software now? I thought about uploading my senior picture to see if I turned out even better than I was supposed to.”

After I finally managed to find the glasses and open the yearbook, I realized it was too dark in the car to see a thing. Life was just too damn complicated. “Hey, you don’t happen to have a flashlight, do you?”

B.J. reached for the glove compartment. Mustang Sally swerved over the line and the SUV beside us leaned on the horn. B.J. gave it the finger.

“Please, B.J.,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and tried to make my just-returned dry mouth go away.

B.J. handed me the flashlight. “Come on, start with Derrick Donohue.”

“Derrick Donohue?”

“Remember? He’s the one who’s going to take one look at me and eat his heart out that he never gave me the time of day in high school when he still had a chance.”

“Right. Okay, here he is. What do you want to know? And don’t you dare take your eyes off the road.”

“Do you think he was as cute as I think he was?”

“I guess he was pretty cute. In a bad-haircut kind of way. He looks a little bit out of it in this picture, though. And his yearbook quote is
Don’t drink the bong water
.”

“Hey, give him a break. It was a different time back then. Okay, find me.”

I flipped through until I found B.J.’s picture. “You were gorgeous, Barb. That orange mock turtleneck was so becoming on you.”

“I know, I know. And how about my quote:
Her eyelashes would sweep the cobwebs from any man’s heart
.”

“No wonder you got most conceited.”

“Hey, I
resemble
that remark. What was your quote again?”

“I’m afraid to look.”

“Do it.”

I took a deep breath and finally faced my own picture. As
soon as I saw it—frizzy hair, bad eyebrows, tentative smile—all the insecurity of the time came back as if it were yesterday. Or even today.

B.J. turned her head.

“Keep your eyes on the road!”

“Relax. Come on, what does it say?”

“
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough
. Mae West. Ugh. So much for yearbook quotes as prophecy.”

“Hey, Thelma, chill, you’ve got plenty of time to get it right. Okay, Finn Miller.” B.J. put on her blinker, and I could actually see the off-ramp up ahead. I hoped it wasn’t a mirage.

I opened to Finn’s page on the first try. Apparently practice really did make perfect. “
School’s out
,” I read, as if I hadn’t already memorized it. “
Memories past. Don’t ever doubt. The fun will last.
”

“Not bad.”

“Where did you say he lives now?”

B.J. reached for her Tab. “As I remember, he divides his time between the Hamptons and the south of France.”

“No, I think he’d need a ski house. And maybe an urban loft, too.”

B.J. sighed. “What if this was the movie of our lives and we were just getting to the good part?”

“What would we call it?”

“Hmm, excellent question, Louise.” B.J. pulled off the highway and took a right.

My breathing slowed down and the elephant climbed off my chest. I twisted to the left to take the pressure off my real tattoo.

B.J. hit the steering wheel with the palm of one hand. “Oh, oh, I know. What about
B.J. and Melanie’s Midlife Adventure
?”

“See, you always do that. Why can’t it be
Melanie and B.J.’s Midlife Adventure
?”

“It’s not about top billing, Mel. It just has a better ring to it that way, that’s all.”

I drained the rest of my Tab. I crunched the can with the heels of both hands and threw it over my shoulder. It made a pleasing metallic sound when it hit the others in the backseat.

We wove our way through the back roads to Marshbury, an occasional glimpse of the stars breaking through the tall trees. I tried to imagine this movie of my life having a happy ending.

I reached over and turned the music on again and hit
SHUFFLE
. The first orchestral strains of “Nights in White Satin” filled the car. Maybe it was a good omen. Maybe it was just the luck of the shuffle. My heart filled with yearning anyway.

We circled the harbor and found the road that led to the reunion.

“Hey,” B.J. said. “Remember how they always made one chaperone at each dance the designated tapper? Whoever it was had to walk around during the slow dances and tap you on the shoulder if any hands started to roam, or if you were getting ‘too cozy,’ and you’d have to separate.”

“I kid you not,” I said, “if you tap me on the shoulder while I’m dancing with Finn Miller, I will never, ever speak to you again.”

CHAPTER 32

I grabbed my door handle.

“Wait. I just want to sit here for a second.”

“Are you crazy? We’ve only got seventeen minutes left.”

“Eighteen.” B.J. sighed. “It’s just that this has always been my favorite part. You know, right before you get somewhere, when it’s all potential and the night can be anything. Derrick Donohue could be standing right by the front door hoping to catch a glimpse of me.”

“And ‘Nights in White Satin’ could be playing and Finn Miller’s eyes could light up the moment he sees me. Okay, time’s up—let’s
go
.”

“How does my hair look?”

“Great,” I said. I jumped out and gave my hair a quick fluff. I slid one side of my off-the-shoulder peasant blouse back down
to where it was supposed to be. My white jeans had been whiter a few hours ago, but hopefully it would be dark enough inside that nobody would notice. We’d put our strappy sandals on in Veronica’s driveway. I had to admit mine were a lot less comfortable than my flip-flops had been.

A middle-aged man wearing only a pair of striped boxer shorts ran out the front door of the marine center and streaked around the building. A crowd of middle-aged people holding drinks followed him. He climbed the steel cable railing, wobbled, then pounded his chest and let out a Tarzan yell before he flopped forward into the water.

It was enough to get B.J. out of the Mustang. “Who do you think
that
was?”

The spectators, most of them dressed, peered over the railing and cheered.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. He just looked like somebody’s father to me. Come on. I can’t wait any longer. And I really need to find a bathroom.”

“Fine. But before we go in I should probably give you a heads-up—”

A thunderous roar came from the deck, followed by a big splash.

“B.J., I mean it. Hurry. We’re down to fourteen minutes.”