The Lights In the Sky

Chapter 3

Dad drove me up to the front sidewalk of the school. There was a whole line of cars there as usual. In a school that small, I know pretty much everybody. All the familiar students walked past the truck and up to the front doors. I hardly even noticed them or recognized their faces. It felt like the blood was all draining down to my feet; my head was light. My hands even began to shake a little bit. Dad didn't say anything, he just stared forward.

"So do we just pretend not to be afraid?" I said. He shrugged in his way.

"Just a coincidence," he said. And the way he said it, I think he almost believed it himself.

I didn't know what else to do and I certainly didn't have anything to say, so I pulled myself out of the car. I shut the door behind me without saying that I loved him or anything. We usually say that to each other, but we both sort of mumble it because otherwise it would be too awkward. But he pulled away without it. I was left staring at the space where the passenger window had just been. I didn't even watch him leave the school. Just hiked my backpack up on my shoulder and stood there. Everybody pushed around me without saying anything.I don't know how long I was staring out into space before I woke up and walked into the school.

I'd been dating Deborah Marlowe for maybe nine months at that time. It didn't really start out as a crush, either. That's mainly the difference between middle school and high school. In middle school,you just get these stupid crushes on girls for no real reason other than probably hormones. But this was the first time that I felt different about the whole dating thing. We started talking in History class. She gets really good grades for the most part, but she struggles with History. Whereas I suck at most of our other classes,but I'm pretty good at memorizing dates and how things fit in a chronological order. I saw this documentary on TV recently, though,and it suggested that maybe time isn't real at all. Like, it's just an illusion or a dimension, in the same way that if I walk across this room right now, I could turn around and come back to this same spot. I like that idea. Who wouldn't? You can think about all your favorite little moments and if you could just wrap your brain around the fact that it didn't happen in the past, but that'sit's happening right now, that it's always happening and always will be, then you could actually be in that moment again. That idea makes me feel like there's less weight on my shoulders.

Anyway,we were both pretty mediocre in History class. My grades were never that spectacular. They used to be. Back in middle school I was always on the top honor roll. Then I got distracted by other things in high school and everything settled down into pretty average territory.Deborah sat right in front of me in History, though, and we did this thing in that class where we would pass our worksheets up to the person in front of us for grading. Then they would write down our score and hand it back. Some of the other students complained that that was an illegal policy; it undermines your right to privacy and all that. But it never really bothered me. If you're embarrassed about your grades, you should just work harder. Deborah took notice,though; she would grade these ten-point worksheets and she saw that I was good at putting things in sequence. The open-ended answers were another story, though. She offered to be my partner on a project we had to do, where we had to make a poster about a figure from World War II. Combine our strengths, you know? We were given Dr. Josef Mengele, which is pretty messed up, because I really didn't want to know most of that stuff. But we got an A on it, so that brought my grade up overall and I offered to take her to Pizza Hut as thanks and then, yeah, we started dating.

She's really pretty if you haven't met her. She even has red hair, which most guys seem predisposed not to like; do you know that actress, Amy Adams? I always describe Deborah's hair like that. Oh, and I never call her Debby; she doesn't like that. Not in a stuck-up way, she just doesn't like the way it sounds.