Remember When (Remember Trilogy #1) (9 page)

   He tossed the pick back into the dish before noticing my jewelry box. He ran a finger across the intricate lid, saying, “This is pretty awesome, all the carvings. It looks old.”

   “It is.” I don’t know what prompted me to continue, but I added, “It was my mother’s.”

   Trip’s hand stopped over the engraved surface. He didn’t look up as he asked, “Was?”

   God. It had been so long since I had to talk about this. Everyone I knew at sixteen had been in my life at twelve... I’d already been through the story with anyone who I considered a friend. Everyone else just made it up. I didn’t think I wanted my mother’s desertion to be the first thing Trip found out about me.

   I tried to sound casual as I shrugged and offered, “She died a few years ago.”

   I wondered if he was fooled by my attempt at nonchalance or if he could actually hear the lump in my throat. In any case, he pulled his hand away from the jewelry box as quickly as if it had burned him. I hoped he wouldn’t ask too many questions- it was my first attempt at lying about the situation and I didn’t really like how it felt. But he didn’t even raise his head as he simply offered, “I’m sorry.”

   Again I shrugged, trying to seem unaffected. “It was a long time ago.”

   He refocused his attentions on the photos taped around the perimeter of my mirror as I tried to ignore the knot of guilt growing in my belly. He was pointing to a picture of me as a little kid; Dorothy Hamill haircut, sitting on a Big Wheel, wearing a white karate uniform and an American flag draped across my shoulders. “Is that you?”

   I leaned over his shoulder, pretending to get a better look. My arm grazed his back, which caused me to shiver. And I may have imagined it, but I swear he flinched a little from the touch as well.

   “Yeah. That’s me, all right. I was pretty obsessed with Evel Knievel back in those days.”

   Trip started laughing. “That’s hysterical.”

   “I was kind of a tomboy.”

   “No way. I’m not buying it.”

   Then in one fell swoop, he grabbed my snowglobe off the dresser and flopped down backwards onto my bed. He propped some pillows behind his head and crossed his feet at the ankles, shaking the thing like it owed him money.

   You’d think I would have been a nervous wreck having Trip first in my room, then in my
bed
. The sight was definitely surreal, but more phenomenal than terrifying.

   “Make yourself at home.”

   “Oh, no. I couldn’t impose.”

   At that, he flashed me a devastating grin and held up the globe for me to see. We both watched as a blizzard overtook New York City, before the storm subsided into harmless flurries.

   “It makes music, you know,” I said. I walked the few steps over to my bed and sat on the edge. I wasn’t even self-conscious as I overlapped my hand around his and turned the globe over to wind up the bottom.

   Trip gave it another good shake, instigating another snow storm as the plucky strains of “
New York, New York”
filled my room.

   I remembered the Christmas my mother bought it for me. We’d taken a trip into the city, just the two of us, to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. I felt so cosmopolitan- even if I wasn’t able to put that description to it at the age of eight- walking around amongst the noise and excitement of New York with the crisp, winter chill all around us. She was wearing this phenomenal green velvet coat with fur-lined trim. I loved the way it felt against my cheek whenever I’d lean into her throughout our sightseeing. It felt special to have her all to myself for the whole night, a rare event that didn’t occur too often after my baby brother came along. Even before then, I remember the feeling of always wanting to keep her close so she wouldn’t just slip away.

   I watched Trip balance the snowglobe on his chest with one hand and tuck the other one behind his head. He had such a contented look on his face that it made me feel calm, too. Maybe a little
too
relaxed.

   “She didn’t die.”

   “What are you talking about?”

   “My mother. I lied. She didn’t die, she moved out. When I was twelve.”

   “Oh.”

   “I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I lied about it. I guess you asking about her just caught me off guard. I thought it would be easier to just say that she died. Not that you wouldn’t have found out eventually anyway. It’s just... I never had to actually
tell
anyone about it before.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “Well, everyone around here already knew everything. Or thought they did. I never had to
explain
, you know?”

   “Why’s that?”

   “Small town.”

   “Oh.”

   The song ended and Trip looked up to meet my eyes. I couldn’t really discern the expression on his face, but I hoped it wasn’t pity. He broke the silence when he asked, “You want to talk about it?”

   I reached over and grabbed a scrunchy off my nightstand and started playing it with my thumbs. “Not really. Is that okay?”

   “It’s
your
life, Layla.”

   In that shared moment, he continued to lock my gaze to his, holding me prisoner with his eyes, and I suddenly realized he was going to kiss me.
Oh my God this is it!
My heart slammed against my ribcage, probably so violently that Trip could actually see it. The seconds of quiet seemed to stretch out into eternity as I sat frozen, staring into that beautiful face, waiting for him to move first.

   Without another word, he bounded off the bed and returned the snowglobe to my dresser, breaking the moment. “Hey, I’m starving. Whaddya got to eat around here?”

   Okay, then!

   I resisted the urge to nudge the snowglobe a half inch into its rightful place and instead led Trip back to the kitchen.

   He sank into one of the chairs and cracked his Coke while I called out an inventory from the pantry. After much deliberation, he finally settled for some regular Doritos, lamenting the fact that they weren’t Cool Ranch. Through a mouthful of chips, he started, “So, I was thinking... this assignment we have to do.”

   “Yeah?”

   “Well, I figure most everybody is gonna get up there and give some stupid report, you know, just read off a piece of paper or something.”

   “That’s normally how one gives a report, yes.”

   “Yeah, but we’re supposed to do a visual, too.”

   “Uh-huh. I was planning on picking up some posterboard or-”

   “Well, I was thinking of doing something a little different, maybe.”

   I watched Trip lounge back in his chair with a mischievous little grin on his face and realized I’d be submitting to whatever scheme he was cooking up.

   I was in no position to deny him anything when he looked at me like that.

THE GRIFTERS

   As it turned out, Trip’s scheme entailed the brilliant idea to film our own version of
Romeo and Juliet,
set in Norman, New Jersey, circa 1990.

   We spent the rest of that first afternoon deciding on how we were going to answer some of those questions in Mason’s booklet and outlining our filming schedule.

   The plan required me to “borrow” a video camera from work, which I did without guilt. It’s not like I was going to keep the thing, but at the cost of renting it for the next couple months, I may as well have bought one of my own. At the pathetic minimum hourly wage Totally Videos was paying me, that thought wasn’t even a possibility. Because they paid me such a lousy salary, I decided to justify my liberation of said camera as an early holiday bonus. It just happened to be three months ahead of the holiday, is all.

   The next day, we found out that Trip had gotten the job at Totally Videos and was scheduled to start on Monday!

   Our thoughts on that news were that it was best to keep our association under wraps in order to remain employed. But Martin, sleuthing genius that he was, became hip to the fact that we were friends on that very first day. I suppose we weren’t necessarily as stealth about our relationship as we had hoped to be.

    Trip had become easily bored with register duty, a detail compounded by the fact that the store was having a slow day. He decided to make better use of his time by hiding behind the display racks of the drama section and flinging Skittles at me.

   I tried to ignore him until the candies started coming by the handful, causing me to drop the pile of tapes I’d been returning to their proper spots on the shelves.

   I grabbed the empty box of
Terms of Endearment
off the shelf and chucked it at him, just narrowly grazing his head as he ducked out of the way, knocking over a bin of rolled movie posters.

   That prompted him to hurl the entire, theatre-sized bag of Skittles in retaliation, sending a rainbow of tiny projectiles pinging off the shelves and scattering across the floor.

   Martin had been in his office during our little war, but he must have been watching us on the security cameras, because he chose that moment to come storming out the door. Upon seeing the two of us laughing our asses off amidst a pile of videos, posters and candy, we guessed the jig was up. He commanded us in a booming voice to, “Clean up this mess before any customers come in and see it!”

   At first, I thought that Martin could have refrained from jumping down our throats. I mean, obviously we were planning on cleaning up our mess, and we sure didn’t need some dorky kid just out of high school chastising us like he thought he was actually some sort of authority figure. I thought that maybe if he slathered on some Oxy every once in a while and got himself a decent haircut, he could find himself a girlfriend and lighten up a little.

   But then suddenly, I kind of felt bad for him. The poor guy was only trying to do his job while having to deal with us two idiots all day.

   Trip must have been thinking the same thing, because neither one of us busted his balls and just went about the chore of picking Skittles off the carpet.

   But even scouring about the floor on our hands and knees was actually pretty fun. Trip made working there bearable for the first time, even if from then on, we toned it down a bit for Martin’s sake. Having him there proved to make work less of a trial and more of an adventure.

   Who am I kidding? If I’m going to be honest, I’ll admit that Trip proved to make my
life
less of a trial and more of an adventure!

   Week Two of our film collaboration had us trying out the pilfered camera for the first time. It took us a little longer than expected to learn how to use the clunky thing, a task that probably would have been made much easier had I thought to grab the accompanying User Guide during my heist. But after affixing the camera to my father’s tripod (also “borrowed”), we managed to get off some very educational test shots of Trip doing cannonballs in my pool. It was at that point that I realized Mason wasn’t going to be grading me on my ability to watch Trip Wilmington strut around my backyard in his swimming trunks. I wouldn’t have traded that sight for a 4.0 if my life depended on it, but I knew we’d eventually be expected to do some actual work.  

    Week Three, we decided we were going to need to learn how to edit our film (that we had yet to start shooting). It was my brainchild to “borrow” Bruce’s VCR and rig it up to mine. With some advice from Roger Vreeland at the AV club, we (legitimately) borrowed some of his cable wires and spent the better part of our afternoon getting the primitive editing station set up and running. We’d practiced splicing our films by playing the raw footage in one VCR while recording selected scenes in the other. But after about an hour of this, Bruce came home from football practice and confiscated his VCR from Trip and me, leaving us back at square one.

   Before I could risk the implications of “borrowing” another tape player from my father’s room or the den, Trip came up with a way to hook the camera directly into my VCR. That system turned out to be way better than our original one, so we thanked Bruce for his inadvertent help by spending the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen, baking him some chocolate chip cookies.

   The following Thursday was my birthday.

Chapter 12

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

   I woke up before dawn, a bundle of nervous energy, and hopped right into the shower. My appointment at the DMV wasn’t until ten o’clock, but I didn’t want to be a minute late. My father had agreed to let me play hooky from school so that I could go down and take my driving test. I’d waited seventeen whole years to get my license and there was no way I was going to wait an extra minute.

   My dad knew that I was excited, but he was still surprised that I had gotten up as early as I did. I met up with him in the kitchen, where he was sitting at the table with a coffee and hidden behind the
Star Ledger
. He lowered the newspaper just enough to peek over the top.