He looked at me for a moment. “If you don’t want to go—”
“No, I do. Well...” I hadn’t put on the uniform yet and I wasn’t looking forward to the hat. “Hold on for a second.”
I returned to where my mom was pretending to fix the roll of tape in the register. “Did you hear us?” I asked her. We had been about ten feet away, so yes, she had.
“Go ahead to the stadium,” she offered. “That sounds fun. Morgan will help out.”
“Is she really going to, or is she going to hide the whole time she’s here?”
“Go ahead,” my mom repeated. When I didn’t immediately move, she threw an anxious glance over her shoulder at the kitchen, where my dad might have been listening.
So I left. I nodded at Shane and we walked out of the restaurant together, toward where his truck sat in our parking lot. “I didn’t hear back from you,” he noted as we crossed the icy pavement. My dad was supposed to have salted but he had apparently forgotten.
I didn’t have a great response for that statement. It was true that I hadn’t answered him when he’d texted to say hi and that he’d had a good time at the lighthouse. But actually, I wasn’t sure if that was true. Had it been fun? Now that I thought about it, I did remember that I’d brought up the Woodsmen team more than a few times. Probably a lot of times, and maybe it had been boring for him since that was his job. Personally, I didn’t like to talk about the restaurant any more than I absolutely had to. Also, he hadn’t been a great fit in the lighthouse—he’d had to squeeze into rooms and up and down stairs that were meant for a generation of people who weren’t his size.
But he had squeezed without complaint and had read all the various informational plaques around the place. He had also been especially taken by the view at the top of the tower.
“You can see forever,” I had remarked. “It’s that visual you were talking about.”
He had stood for a while, staring through his sunglasses across the cold, dark blue expanse of Lake Michigan, before we’d had to let more visitors take their turn.
That trip hadn’t been his first-choice activity and in fact, it probably wasn’t anywhere on his list of choices. But he had gone without complaining and had been interested in the history that he’d read off the big cards. Then he had texted me, not the next day but on Monday, and I hadn’t ever answered.
There was a clear reason for that, which I explained after I buckled my seat belt. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get back to you. I had a really bad week.” Then, to my absolute horror, I started to cry right there in the front seat of his truck, right there in our restaurant parking lot.
“Oh,” he said. He took off his sunglasses and his eyes were wide as he sat looking at me. “Good golly. Here.” He reached into the pocket in his door and handed me a wadded-up napkin.
“Thank you.” I sniffed. “Did you just say ‘good golly?’”
“I don’t like to cuss. Why are you crying? What happened this week?”
“It happened last weekend on Saturday night, after I saw you,” I said. Then I started to tell him the story, the parts that Iremembered and other details that I didn’t (but couldn’t escape now). “A guy named Corbin asked me to go to a party at his frat. I didn’t know him very well. I didn’t know anyone there,” I said. I had always been too busy to hang out with the other students, to try to make friends…also, it wasn’t a skill that I seemed to possess. “I’d never been to a party like that.”
“Never? Not in college, not in high school?”
I looked over at him and thought of what my mom had said about how cute he was. He had such nice blue eyes, almost the same color as wintery Lake Michigan. He also had great hair, light brown and slightly unruly due to some wave but also shiny, like a shampoo commercial. He was tall and muscular, how I imagined a Roman soldier from the Roman soldier era and with the same features I pictured on them: a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and straight nose. Kind of regal. Definitely handsome.
Shane was exactly the kind of person who would have gone to a lot of parties in high school, college, and the present. But I definitely wasn’t and I shook my head to answer his question. “I was busy working a lot,” I said. “I never did sports or clubs and I never seemed to meet a lot of people.”
“What happened on Saturday?”
“I drank a lot.” It wasn’t the first time I had tasted alcohol, but it was the first time I’d ever had so much. “Corbin handed me a shot when I came in and then he got me another one. He kept giving me cups of beer and mixed stuff.”
“Was he trying to get you drunk?”
“Maybe.” I tried to find a dry part of the napkin wad because more tears had started to fall. “I didn’t have to take it from him, but it seemed fun. It was what everyone else was doing, too. I wasn’t considering how I’d drive home later. I just wanted to have a good time.”
“Did you?” he asked.
No. No, I had not. “I got sick after a while. I went outside and some of the guys from the party followed me, and they were laughing. A bunch of people took pictures and there’s a video going around of me puking. I’ve been at that college for more than four years, trying to finish my degree, and no one noticed me until Saturday night.”
“Vomit? That’s all? It’s not so bad,” he told me. “They’ll stop watching soon enough.”
“It’s not just vomit.” I swabbed my eyes with the wet napkin. “There are other things, too. Before I went outside, I was dancing on a table. Tables,” I corrected myself, because I did remember a variety of elevated surfaces and hands lifting me up and down. “It’s all spliced together in the video. And when I went outside, there was an interview.” Before he could ask, I plunged ahead. “They had a bunch of questions, like, when did I lose my virginity. What was my body count. Did I spit or swallow. All sex stuff.”
He squinted and frowned. “Yeah, that’ll linger longer.”
“I answered everything. I can’t believe I did that,” I silently shook my head but it was much too late to stay quiet now. “Are you going to watch?”
