The Price of Yesterday : Tale of Broken Love

Marcus Hale's Point of View:

"Are you coming to Donovan's party on Friday?"

Kevin Briggs said it without looking back, tossing the words over his shoulder like you would toss a coin into a fountain, not really expecting anything back, just going through the motions. He was packing his rucksack at the locker next to mine, not looking as he stuffed everything in, like boys who have never had to worry about anything do. Without care. Like the world will take care of anything that falls.

I told him I hadn't made up my mind yet, which was the kind of answer I had learned to give when I didn't want to explain the real answer. The truth was that Richard Donovan didn't really want me to come to his party. If you could even call it an invitation, Kevin mentioning it in the hallway was the closest thing I was going to get. It was like a crumb in the social world. Not a meal. Not even a plate. A piece of bread that fell off the table by accident and landed next to my shoe.

Kevin shrugged, as if it didn't matter to him, and walked down the hall with his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floor and his baseball cap sitting sideways on his head. I saw him fade away into the crowd of students, and then I slowly closed my locker door, like I always do. My dad said I went through life as if I was afraid to change it. He didn't mean it as a good thing.

I had the bracelet in my coat pocket.

I had been carrying it for three days, switching pockets depending on which jacket I wore. I always kept it close and was always aware of how heavy it was against my side. It wasn't heavy; it was a thin silver chain with a small oval charm on it. You could buy things like that at Henderson's Jewellery on Maple Street in the glass cabinet near the front. The woman at the counter had put it in a small blue box with a lid that fit so well that when you pressed it shut, it made a soft sound like a whisper. I had probably closed and opened it forty times since I bought it. I sat on the edge of my bed after school and looked at it in the afternoon light.

$47.80. For three months, I mowed lawns on Saturday mornings, bagged groceries at the Save-Mart on Tuesday afternoons, and turned down Kevin and the other boys' offers to buy pizza after school. When I thought about what it was for, forty-seven dollars and eighty cents didn't seem like much. When I thought about where it came from, it felt like everything.

Victoria Sinclair had been sitting next to me in AP English all fall semester. Not because she wanted to—Mr. Holloway put the seats in alphabetical order, and Sinclair comes after Hale in every alphabet—but she sat there every Tuesday and Thursday and talked to me. Not at me, like most people did when they bothered to talk to me at all. She spoke to me as if she really wanted to know what I thought. She wanted to know what I was reading. When I missed something Mr. Holloway said because I was looking out the window, she moved her notebook over once. She laughed at something I said about Fitzgerald. She really laughed, with her head tilted back and her hand over her mouth. For about four seconds, it felt like the whole room had moved slightly off its axis and landed somewhere warmer than it had been before.

At the time, I was seventeen years old and had never felt that way before. I didn't know that just because someone in English class laughs at your jokes doesn't mean they feel the same way about you. I didn't know how to do it or have anyone to show me how. My dad's idea of talking about girls was to tell me not to get anyone pregnant. My mum tried once, gently, carefully, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with her hands around a coffee mug. I was so embarrassed that I only spoke in one-word syllables until she stopped.

I put the bracelet in my jacket pocket and waited for the right moment, like when you're trying to cross a busy street and you see a gap in traffic. I watched, measured, and told myself the gap was coming.

There was never really a gap. But by Thursday, I had waited long enough that I felt worse than anything else, so I told myself that today was the day. I told myself that after school, when the building was empty and the noise had stopped, I would have to cross thirty feet of cracked asphalt to get to Victoria Sinclair.

I found a place near the wall of the main building, just to the left of the double doors, where the afternoon shadow fell long and I could see the parking lot without being seen. I had my rucksack on my shoulder. My jacket was zipped all the way up to the collar because it got cold fast in this part of Georgia in October when the sun went down behind the trees. I had my hands in my pockets, and my left hand was holding the small blue box and pressing the lid shut and letting it go in a slow, steady rhythm that I didn't realise I was doing until I made myself stop.

I was there for eleven minutes. I knew it was eleven minutes because I counted them in my head while the second hand on my watch moved around its face. Students walked by in groups and pairs, talking about nothing and everything, making the kind of noise that teenagers make when they don't have anything important to do.

Victoria and Amanda came out of the door, both wearing their coats and pulling their hair back. Their mouths moved quickly and easily, like girls who have always had things to say to each other and know the other person wants to hear them. She was laughing at what Amanda said. Her laugh carried. It was the kind that doesn't try to be quiet, the kind that belongs to someone who has never had to shrink to fit in.

I stood up straight. I pulled my hand out of my pocket. I was already counting the steps across the asphalt, not because I had to, but because that's what my mind did when I was nervous. It put information in order so that it seemed like it was in charge of something.

Then I heard the horn.

One long, happy honk of a car horn, like someone walking into a room full of friends. I turned my head a little to the right and saw Richard Donovan's cherry-red convertible at the far end of the parking lot. The engine was running, and Richard Donovan was leaning out over the driver's side door with his elbow on the roof and his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, even though the sky was cloudy and there was no sun to protect his eyes from. Richard Donovan, who never had to worry about anything.

The sound made Victoria's head turn. She turned her whole body, like a plant does when it turns toward light without meaning to. The light's direction is the only one that makes sense. She said something to Amanda that I couldn't hear, and then she was moving across the parking lot toward the red car. It wasn't walking; it was moving like people do when they want to go somewhere. Richard was already smiling and reaching across to open the passenger door from the inside. He was already in the middle of saying whatever he was saying that made her laugh before she even got to the car.

She didn't turn around.

That's exactly what I mean. She got in the car, shut the door, and said something that made Richard laugh. He drove out of the parking lot, turned left onto Greenway Road, and the car turned the corner and disappeared. At no point— not once, not for half a second—did Victoria Sinclair look back toward the wall where I was standing with my left hand in my jacket pocket and my fingers around a small blue box with a lid that fit perfectly.

I stood there for a while after the car left. The parking lot was emptying quickly now, with people going their own ways. The noise was getting quieter, just like it does when a crowd breaks up—slowly at first, then all at once. I could feel the cold in a way that I couldn't have a few minutes ago. I could feel my own breathing. I could see very clearly that I had been standing at this wall for eleven minutes holding a bracelet that cost me $47.80 and three months of Saturday mornings. The person I bought it for had just gotten into someone else's car without looking back.

I didn't get mad. I want to be honest about that because it's important. People expect to be angry when they read a story like this, with a poor boy, a rich boy, and a girl in the middle. They expect something loud and obvious, like a fist hitting a wall or a voice raised in the parking lot. That wasn't what I felt. It was quieter than that and harder to put into words, but I'll try: it was the feeling of a door closing. Not banging. The end. The soft, certain sound of something that had been open clicking shut, and the instant and full understanding that it would not open again.

That door is not open. Not a single door like it.

I had been made wrong for what I wanted. That's what I thought, standing in the cold with an emptying parking lot behind me. I was born into the wrong house, neighbourhood, bank account, and father. He taught me to be serious, careful, and invisible in my wanting. All of that wrong made me a boy who saved for three months to buy a forty-seven-dollar bracelet and then stood against a wall waiting for a gap in traffic that was never going to come. I was wrong about the gap. Most of the things I thought were wrong. And I was going to stop being wrong.

Not by changing who you are. By becoming someone so completely, so permanently, and so obviously impossible to miss that no matter where I went, no one would ever think I could be left standing against a wall again.

I didn't know that the choice I was making at seventeen, when the cold was getting through my jacket, was more like closing a book than turning a page. I didn't realise that what I was shutting off in myself in that parking lot wasn't just the pain of a boy who liked a girl who didn't like him back. I didn't know that I was shutting down the whole machine—the openness, the trying, and the specific vulnerability of wanting something from someone else and letting them know you want it. I thought I was getting stronger. I didn't know that there was a kind of strength that is like armour that grows inward until you can't find the person underneath it.

I walked home. Twenty-two minutes, the same way I always went: down Greenway, left on Sutter, and through the alley behind the Save-Mart that came out on my street. The cold came up through the soles of my trainers because they were thin. I kept my hands in my pockets and my head down as I walked through the neighbourhood. I could hear the changes happening around me: traffic getting lighter, dogs barking at each other across back fences, and the quiet that comes over a working-class street in the hour before people get home from work, the cooking smells start, and the TVs turn on.

I reached the drain at the end of Sutter Street and my street. There was a big city drain with a heavy iron grate on top of it. Water moved in the dark below it, picking up the smell of Georgia red clay and October leaves. I stopped moving. I took the blue box out of my jacket pocket and held it in my hand for the last time. I didn't open it. I didn't need to see the bracelet again. I had looked at it enough in my bedroom light to remember every detail, like how the silver caught the light and how the oval charm sat in the middle of the chain. I even knew how it would have looked on a wrist I would never see it on.

I bent down next to the drain and pushed the box through the grate. It fit perfectly, but the corners barely caught on the iron before it fell through. I heard it hit the water below with a sound so small that it was almost nothing. Almost.

I got up. I put my hands back in my pockets. I kept walking home without stopping.

What I didn't know on that cold October night in 1988, when I had lost forty-seven dollars and made a decision that felt like a stone sunk to the bottom of a drain, was that twenty years later I would see a woman across a crowded ballroom laughing at something her husband said. That laugh would reach down through three decades of careful, deliberate, and expensive armour, all the way down to the boy standing at the drain on the corner of Sutter.

And everything I had worked so hard to build to make sure that would never happen again would turn out to be exactly, catastrophically, not enough.