Marcus raises his hand. “That’s easy. It was getting to be prom king next to this beautiful girl.”
Marian blushes and takes Marcus’s hand. He looks into her eyes, his gaze alit with something like wonder. You canfeelthe heat between them.
“That was my favorite night too,” Marian purrs.
I accidentally catch Seth’s eye. I wonder if, like me, he’s remembering how I persuaded him to skip prom and go on a beach walk instead. How the night was exactly like this—ever so slightly sticky and lit up with a full moon. How we jumped into the ocean in our finery, and showed up at the after-party giddy, me in soaking wet sequins, him in a waterlogged tux.
We both look away.
Georgette takes the floor, describing scuba diving on a class trip we took to Costa Rica, and then it’s my turn.
I blank.
The truth is that all my favorite memories from high school involve Seth. But I’m certainly not going to admit that. So I dredge up the first innocuous thing that comes to mind.
“I’ll always remember this one night when Dezzie and Alyssa and I snuck out of a sleepover, looking for an old-school country-western bar we’d heard about out east, in ranch country. We stole Dezzie’s mom’s convertible and drove for like an hour down these dark, dusty roads blasting Patsy Cline until we found it. No one carded us and we ate barbecue anddanced with a bunch of old cowboy-ish guys until two in the morning. It was incredible.”
What I don’t add is how that whole night, I wished Seth had been there. How Dezzie and Alyssa kept chiding me for calling him, so he could listen to the band through my cell phone.
“That’s so sweet,” Marian says, beaming at me.
“It truly is,” Seth says. “Wish I’d been there.”
Seth literally had wished he’d been there. He was sad I hadn’t invited him. He loves—loved—country music. And dancing. He’s one ofthosepeople.
I tried to take him there for his birthday a few months later, to make it up to him, and found that the place had closed down.
This could be a metaphor for our dynamic in high school: him always yearning for more. Me, always just a gesture short of the devotion with which he showered me. He had such an endless capacity for affection. And I already had the poison pill I still possess: an instinct to flinch and pull back just when other people most crave my love.
“Your turn, Rubes,” Marcus says.
Seth leans back and casually wraps his arm around my shoulders.
“It was the day this one agreed to go out with me,” he says.
He’s definitely toying with me.
“We were at a speech and debate tournament in Raleigh freshman year,” he goes on, eyeing me with what I can only assume to be mock-fondness. “Marks here won, of course. After that a few of us ended up in Chaz Logan’s hotel room, and we were talking about the Supreme Court, because we were pretentious little fuckers. Molly went off on a very eloquent tangent defending Constitutional interpretation over strict constructionism, and she was so smart, and she looked so pretty—I thought my heart was going to just melt out of my chest. So when Chaz kicked us out to go to sleep, I asked if she wanted to go talk by the pool, since we were wired. We put our feet in the water, and I told her that all I could think about while watching her do her perfect oratory was how badly I wanted to kiss her.”
Everyone at the table is looking at us like we’re in a Hallmark movie. I want to wriggle out of my seat and run into the ocean, because being eaten by a shark would be preferable to the combination of shame and embarrassment that is currently choking me.
Seth chuckles, as if he is telling this story at the rehearsal dinner for ourwedding. “And do you remember what you said, Molls?” he asks, staring pointedly into my eyes.
Everyone waits, smiling.
I clear my throat, hoping I can get out the words.
“I asked you what you were waiting for.”
CHAPTER 4Seth
Molly is squirming.
Admittedly, making her squirm was my intention, but now I feel slightly bad for her.
I assume everyone at the table knows how things ended between us.
How she deleted her AIM account and holed up at her father’s ski chalet all the way out in Vail, and I commenced a six-week crying jag and lost twenty pounds.
