Time Flies (8 page)

To:
Melanie

From:
Finn Miller

Subject:
Re: Re: sweet dreams of you

Were you a good kisser in my dream? The best. Bet you still are in real life too.

To:
Finn Miller

From:
Melanie

Subject:
Re: Re: sweet dreams of you

Guess you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?

Finn Miller and I were actually flirting. Flirting. FLIRTING.

I loved wings—butterfly wings, angel wings, even the Brownie wings I got when I flew up to Girl Scouts, which I was pretty sure I still had tucked away in an old jewelry box somewhere. But wings had been done and done again in metal sculpture. So I went with a small boat propeller I’d found picking through the metal section at a junkyard for my third box spring lady.

As a hat, it wasn’t very Southern. To make it work with the box spring hoop skirt, I welded strand after strand of thin curly wire to it, and then tied them all together under the chin of my third box spring lady in a jaunty little bow.

I added a parasol, of course, because repetition of elements brings cohesiveness to a series, and because the other box spring ladies had them and I didn’t want the third one to feel left out. Her parasol was extended over her head, back up to her propeller.

I gave her long, sexy eyelashes from the same curly wire, just because I could. They made her look happy, even glamorous. I could picture her saying,
Beam me up, Scotty
. And her propeller bonnet would whir and rev up and she’d raise her umbrella higher. And then a fresh, cool breeze would come along. And she’d flutter her eyelashes as she floated up, up—and away from it all.

If only I could hitch a ride with her. I’d have her drop me off at the reunion. I’d float down from the sky—strong, fearless,
alive
for the first time in years. Finn Miller would be waiting for me outside in the parking lot, sitting on an old New England park bench underneath a sky full of stars, the faint strains of “Stairway to Heaven” drifting out from the building. And the minute I set eyes on him it would all come back.

Because nobody knows you better than somebody who knew you way back when.

I’d buried the other paper boys in the bottom of the trash, but Finn’s face was now tucked into my yearbook, marking his page. I was curled up under the covers in the guest room, letting my thoughts wander as I held the yearbook. Thinking maybe I’d even sleep with it under my pillow and see if it might trigger a long, sexy dream.

My cell phone rang and I jumped. My heart went into overdrive, as if someone had caught me. Doing what? Acting like a lovesick high school girl? I reached for my phone and my reading glasses on the bedside table, saw that it was an 800 number I didn’t recognize, somebody trying to sell me something.

I got rid of the call, but my heart had triggered a full-blown flashback, bringing all those old feelings back.
Oh, no, it’s him! Did he see me looking? Is he looking at me? Uh-oh, here he comes. How am I going to handle this
?

And that’s when I finally remembered Finn Miller.

B.J., Veronica, and I met, like we did every day in high school, in the crowded girls’ room before the first bell rang.

“Are you sure it’s not too short?” I said. I stood on tiptoe and peered at myself in the mirror through the swirls of cigarette smoke rising from the stalls behind me. The waistband of my brown-and-ivory diamond-plaid A-line skirt had to be rolled down just right so the skirt didn’t poof out at the hips. I contemplated my lackluster thighs in the mirror. Was it possible they didn’t quite match? It was too gross to consider.

We still had a dress code and Mr. Bernardi, the assistant principal, was not above asking his secretary, Miss Knowles, to measure the distance between the middle of a kneecap and the hem of a skirt with a yardstick. B.J. said they were both perverts and she’d fight them all the way to the Supreme Court if they tried anything with her. I was hoping I’d have time to roll my skirt back down before we got to the office.

“Get over it,” B.J. said. “It’s not even close to wicked short.”

B.J. was wearing a denim skirt she’d made by cutting off a pair of dungarees, opening the crotch seam with a stitch ripper she’d stolen from Home Ec, then overlapping the pieces and sewing them up again. When she elbowed her way in to claim some mirror space, her new creation rode up to within inches of her underpants.

She pulled the pink-and-orange-striped cover off a tube of Yardley Slicker, waving it around as much as possible to make sure nobody missed it. Then she added a topcoat of Frosted Slicker over her Yardley Pink Frost lipstick. B.J. had Basic Slicker, Frosted Slicker, Surf Slicker, Sunny Slicker, and Tan-Tan Slicker, plus Uptown,
Downtown, Good Night, and Good Morning. On the days she wore most of them at once, her lips took on the consistency of frosted Jell-O.

I reached into my fringed macramé bag and pulled out my own Yardley Liplighter case. One end held a Frosted Slicker and the other a London Look Lipstick in Pinkadilly, one of six new man-trapping colors. It even had a mirror attached to it that the Yardley magazine ads said were for peeking behind me to make sure I was being followed.

The Liplighter combo had only cost me $2.50 even though it was a $3.60 value. The Slicker came free with the purchase of the lipstick, saving me just over two hours of babysitting for the bratty kids down the street.

Beside me, Veronica dug her index finger into a Yardley Pot o’Gloss tinted lip gloss in an unfortunate bright coral color her mother had picked out. B.J. and I offered her our Frosted Slickers at the exact same moment.

“Jinx,” we all said at once. Then we passed around B.J.’s creamy blue Cover Girl eye shadow, the exact same kind that Cybill Shepherd wore in
Seventeen
.

The bell rang and we walked down the crowded hallway together and then separated for our classes. Without my friends as bookends, my self-esteem took an immediate nosedive. My mouth went dry and I had to force myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other so I didn’t get stuck in the hallway alone forever.

I ducked into the doorway of my math class and dropped my head as I headed to my seat at the back of the room.

When I sat down in the beige Formica chair, I tried to yank some of my skirt under me so the back of my possibly mismatched thighs wouldn’t stick to the chair and have red marks on them when I stood up again. I moved my math book to the top of my pile and opened my five-section spiral notebook to the math section. Mr. Jackman was standing at the front of the room writing on the blackboard. He had a smudge of chalk shaped like a handprint on the back of his suit jacket. Last week it had been a jagged piece of masking tape that said
TELL ME I HAVE A NICE ASS
.

Beside me, Finn Miller looked over and smiled.

By the time I figured out he was smiling at me and I smiled back, he’d looked away again.

Then I looked away.

When the bell finally rang at the end of class, I squeezed my thighs together so my underpants wouldn’t show when I swung my legs out from under the desk. My skin peeled away from the chair painfully, like a Band-Aid.

Once again, Finn Miller and I looked at each other.

Then we both looked away.

B.J. and Veronica were waiting for me in the hallway, retouching their lips.

“So,” Veronica said. “Did you talk to him?”

My heart skipped a beat. “
Shhh
.”

“Ch-ch-
chiiiicken
,” B.J. said. “Where is he?”

“Shut. Up.” I scrunched my shoulders up around my ears and reached back to make sure my waistband hadn’t started to unroll. “Come on, you guys, let’s get out of here.”

All these years later, sitting on the guest room bed clutching my high school yearbook, I tried to imagine this lifelong ch-ch-chicken finally turning into a red-hot hen.