I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (9 page)

Wednesday, September 1, the first day of school, began with a bounce and a nudge. The bounce I was used to, coming from Caitlyn Pryce, finally captain of the varsity cheerleading team as she was born to be. She bounced her hello at me and bounced into our traditional Missed You Over the Summer hug, and then she did something very un-Caitlyn-like.

She stopped bouncing, and she nudged me with her elbow. Her eyes told me to quit fooling with the stubborn lock on my locker and look to my right.

Chad Dykstra was strutting—there’s no other word for it, but
promenading
comes close—down the hall, a part of the hall he alphabetically had no business being in first thing in the morning, with his equally alphabetically displaced girlfriend hanging on his arm.

“Hi, guys,” I called out as they passed, and they both said hi—to Caitlyn too—and pretended they had just noticed us and were happy to see us but couldn’t be bothered to stay a while and chat.

Once they passed, Caitlyn asked, “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“About the two of them? And what they lost this summer?”

I heard. We all heard.

School, senior year,
East Vision
, volleyball—Kirsten and I were both on the team—and friends kept me sufficiently focused so that missing Jared, which I did, terribly, did not distract me from putting out a newspaper, spiking balls over nets, and turning in my homework on time.

But I ticked off the minutes each night before ten, when Jared would call just to ask how my day was, to tell me he loved me, to tell me he missed me, and to say
dream of me
before hanging up.

Hope College did the neatest thing I don’t know how many decades ago. They bought sixty-three homes—actual houses—surrounding the campus, converted them to student housing, furnished them with ugly but functional furniture, and called them cottages. Beeuwkes Cottage, Dosker Cottage, Reese Cottage, Kruithof Cottage, Van Zyl Cottage, and fifty-eight others. They’re only for upperclassmen, and single-sex with all the rules of a dormitory applied.

Jared and his friends lived in Beeuwkes, and, no, I am not making up the name, nor the fact that it rhymes with
mucus.

I visited him there the third weekend of September. Kirsten rode with me and saw Charlie. We went to dinner, went to a football game, went to parties. And later Jared escorted us to Nikki Hopkins and Brianna Borssom’s room in Cook Hall. Kirsten and I spent both nights there.

Nikki and Brianna had been friends of Jared’s since the beginning of last year. They were sophomores then and dated Jared’s two roommates. They had also been friends of Trish’s but fell out with her when she treated Jared so badly. She didn’t come back to Hope that year.

We ended up having an impromptu dance party in the hall on Saturday when someone cranked up her iPod loaded with songs from the eighties—“Safety Dance,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “We Got the Beat,” and “Walking on Sunshine,” which someone played twice, and no one complained. We danced for twenty-five or thirty minutes before returning to Nikki and Brianna’s room—there were nine or ten of us in there—and we munched on potato chips and drank Diet Cokes, and we talked. We talked all night, and we had talked all night the previous night. By morning, we were puffy-eyed and disheveled and completely satisfied.

The dancing was fun, but the conversation was better. Sometimes we all talked at once, sometimes two or three of us did. Sometimes just one. Sometimes you broke away from one conversation to enter another only to return to your first. Everyone shared her stories, opinions, thoughts, and ideas. And everyone, somehow, listened too.

We chattered about music, boyfriends, classes, food, celebrities, magazines, books, professors, teachers, summer, winter, weddings, siblings, God, parents, ourselves, our lives.

One of the girls in the room was struggling with her parents’ expectation that she “use the brain God gave her.”

“They just keep saying that as if I’m not,” she said.

“She’s really smart,” someone said to Kirsten and me.

“She gets all A’s.”

“Yeah, but if God gave me this great brain, then shouldn’t I be doing something real with it? Something important like medical school? And then if I don’t, if I do what I want to do, then am I letting Him down? Am I letting my parents down?”

“What do you want to do?” Kirsten asked.

“Teach high school history.”

“Why does it have to be medical school?”

“The world needs good teachers.”

“I could never dissect a body. I would completely fail Anatomy 101.”

“I could do it. I just don’t want to.”

“You’ll make a great teacher.”

“Kids are going to love you.”

“Yeah, but is it enough?”

There were more conversations like this one. One girl said her chiropractor father wanted her to leave Hope and enter chiropractic school so she could go into the family business with him. She was majoring in sociology.

“Aren’t you guys just overpriced massage therapists anyway?”

The sociology major threw a pillow at her, and everyone laughed.

“Have you ever had a massage?”

“You know who gives the best massages?”

“Who?”

She named the guy.

“He is so hot. Isn’t he going out with that girl in your Spanish class?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you know about his massage abilities?”

“One night at a party. She wasn’t there.”

“She doesn’t know?”

Laughter.

The conversation turned toward parents again.

A girl in the room said her parents divorced when she was an infant, and she grew up with
a really cool stepdad
who is “totally supportive of my wanting to go into music in some way. I just don’t know what way yet.”

“I have a stepdad,” I said.

“Do you like him?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you love him?”

I shrugged. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess. I mean, yeah. He’s okay.”

“Are your parents divorced?”

“No.”

I told them what happened.

“Oh, my gosh, that’s awful.”

Someone squeezed my shoulders from behind.

“Are you and your mom close?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not entirely sure she’s my Real Mother. I think she’s not entirely sure either.”

Some girls giggled.

“So—what—you guys have nothing in common?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing,” Kirsten confirmed.

“And she’s never really forgiven me for it,” I said. “I think all our differences make her feel like I’m rejecting her, so I try not to have too many, but I have tons, including, but not limited to, my teeth.”

“That’s so sad.”

“It’s really okay,” I assured them. “I mean, it’s not like she hates me or chains me to the basement steps.”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t okay. You need a hug,” Nikki said, and then she hugged me.

“We all love you even if your mother doesn’t,” Brianna said, stepping over Nikki to hug me.

“I love you, but I’m not hugging you,” Kirsten teased.

“Oh, yeah?” Brianna said and hugged Kirsten next, and we turned the room into one big, laughing hug-fest and started talking about the sixties and love-ins and long hair and our hair, and I could not wait to live in a dorm—any dorm—next fall, could not wait to meet my roommate and the other girls on the floor to find out which of them would be my Nikki and my Brianna and the other girls there in the room that night. And, oh, the Real Conversations we were going to have! College was everything I imagined it would be.

I told Jared every detail of the previous night as we took a walk on the beach the next day, which was clear and breezy. We kicked off our shoes and rolled up our jeans and quickly acclimated to the cold water at our ankles.

When I finished my account of future dorm life, Jared laughingly said, “I knew you’d love Hope.”

“I love everything about it.”

But suddenly I sighed and looked at my feet for a step or two.

“Yes?” Jared finally asked.

“You won’t be here next year.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be, but I promise you this. I won’t be far. But, yeah, the time has gone so fast. You’ll see. It will for you too.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. Trust me. You’ll be having so much fun, and you’ll be so busy, you won’t even miss me.”

“Don’t say that,” I said, shocked.

“Ah,” he laughed and nudged me with his elbow.

We passed the rest of the walk—about an hour—in silence, occasionally smiling at each other, but otherwise lost in our thoughts. And worries.

Back at my car, just before Kirsten and I left, Jared said to me, “Don’t make any plans for the night before your birthday. I have something in mind.”

“The night before?”

“Yes. I’m coming in, and I’m going to take you out. In fact, I’m going to knock your socks off.”

“My grandmother warned me about guys like you. Except it was pants. Not socks.”

“Just don’t make any plans on the second,” Jared said. “Promise?”

“Yes, but only if you promise that I get to come back here. For another weekend. Soon. I’d really just rather have that for my birthday.”

“No, this is better.”

“Promise?” I teased.

“I do,” he said very solemnly, very close to me, and when we kissed good-bye, I felt my knees shake, just a little.

Jared came home Saturday, October 2, around three o’clock, right at the time I was getting my hair cut. He was happy, he said, to hang out with his parents for a little bit and would pick me up for dinner at eight.

I was upstairs when he arrived at my house, and I lingered there, calling down to Mother that I was coming,
I’m almost ready; I’ll be right down.

I had been ready twenty minutes. But it was nearly my birthday, and I figured that—like Peter—I was entitled to make an entrance every now and then. Or for the first time ever.

And anyway, I was a little nervous.

I walked down the front steps, not the back ones that entered right into the kitchen where the three of them were chatting.

Jared, across the kitchen talking with Whitt, saw me first, and his expression of impatience transformed into one of those all-for-me smiles. For a second, I thought I saw something similar on Whitt’s face, but I didn’t take the time to study him and returned my gaze to Jared.

And then my mother gasped.

She pressed both hands flat against her chest and, catching herself, forced a weak but polite smile to her face.

Jared crossed to me, held my face a moment, and then ran two fingers along a strand of newly darkened medium-brown hair.

“This was worth the wait,” he said and kissed me quickly and called me beautiful, and Whitt seconded it while Mother lamented, “Bronwen. What on earth did you do?”

“I undid something, Mother,” I told her and soothed her with a kiss on her cheek. “This is my natural color.”

“But—yes—yes,” she managed.

But that was all she managed.

Jared told my parents we’d be home no later than twelve thirty or one, and since I’d have no curfew once I turned eighteen, Mother could not object. It helped, though, that Jared explained every moment of our evening—dinner, movie, a walk downtown, maybe late-night coffee.

“And then the first
Happy birthday
of the day,” he said.

“Sounds like you have quite a birthday in store for you,” Whitt said.

“Beats turning thirteen,” I said without thinking.

“What was so bad about thirteen?” Mother asked, and I summoned all my internal restraint against the rage I suddenly felt—
Are you kidding me?!
—and quickly said, “Oh, you know. No girl likes being thirteen.”

“Thirteen was a rough one,” Whitt said. “Hmm.”

“Hmm,” I said back.

We dined late, skipped the movie, and got decaf to go at the Java Bean, which was sparsely populated that night.

Jared took a blanket out of his car, and we walked to Reeds Lake, to my Favorite Place on Earth, and we sat in the lovely quiet there for an awfully long time, by which I mean it passed much too quickly.

“Cold?” Jared asked me.

“Only a little.”

He moved behind me, wrapped his arms around me.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much better.”

Better still when he began kissing me. I tipped my head to one side, eyes closed, enjoying his kisses and the warmth of his breath on my neck.

“Bronwen?”

“Hmm?” I said.

He held his left wrist in front of me.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Five after midnight,” I said, reading his watch.

“After midnight?”

“After midnight.”

“It’s today,” he said cheerfully.

“It is today.”

“Happy birthday, Bronwen,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

I twisted around, a bit awkwardly, to face him, to force him tacitly to admit the joke, retract it, laugh, tell me he
was just kidding, and
please, please, please don’t say that you were.

He pulled a ring out of his coat pocket, a marquise-shaped diamond in a thin gold band, and held it up for me to see. I spun completely around on the blanket, ending up on my knees in front of him. As I watched, half smiling, half stunned, he slipped the ring onto my finger, stopping at the knuckle. He looked up, raised his eyebrows at me, smiled, and I shouted, “Yes, I’ll marry you! Are you serious?!”

He grinned and gently worked the ring over my knuckle. A perfect fit.

“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

We kissed, which I interrupted by smiling, and we laughed together and talked at once.

“I’ve been—”

“I can’t believe—”

“—planning this for—”

“—that you want to—wait—sorry—”

“That I want—?”

“No, tell me.”

More laughter. More kissing. More smiling. Then I sat back.

“You’re absolutely sure?” I asked.

“I am absolutely sure,” he said. “I love you. I want us to be a family. I’ll be your Real Family, Bronwen. I already am.”

“You are. You really are.”

“Then let’s make it official. Let’s make it happen.
One, two, three years. Whatever. Whenever. I’ll get a job in Holland. You’ll go to Hope. Once we’re married, we’ll live at my parents’ cottage. We’ll save a ton of money, and then—who knows where we’ll go. We’re young. We can do anything we want.”

“Anything? All I want to do is marry you.”

All I wanted to do was become Bronwen Sondervan. A Real Member of a Real Family who did not hand me the ketchup bottle because they knew—
knew, knew, knew
—I did not like it. And that it began here, in John A. Collins Park where I was last a Real Member of a Real Family, had to be a sign that this was good.

That it was meant to be.

We stayed for another hour in the park, talking, kissing, making plans for our future and how to tell everyone. Back at my front door, it was difficult for Jared and me to say good night to each other. He lingered forever—and I wanted him to—until eventually I said, “I’ve got to go in or else Mother will come out, and I don’t want to tell her now.”

No, we had already arranged just how to do it.

“Okay, good night. Dream of me,” Jared said, and I watched from inside as his car lights disappeared at the end of the street. And for the first time in over half my life, I hoped the Lilywhites would not come to take me away.