It was a different Friday than any other. It was the last day of high school, and as every kid found themselves dangling at the diminishing precipice of childhood and young adulthood, they could not move themselves but to wade about, lingering, as did Caleb. There, with his frail, slender fingers latched around a slim red hardcover book, he struggled to lift his shoes from the floor as all the other twelfth graders swam around him. Since it was the last day, they were all allowed to make their rounds to other classrooms to say goodbye to their favorite teachers and sign yearbooks.
Ivy's last period was Spanish. He paused beneath the threshold, watching her multitask as she chatted with a group of friends while she quickly signed yearbooks. Walking in a straight line would never feel so treacherous, finding his destination without triggering a landmine of inquiries demanding to know what he was doing there. Luckily, moving through a crowd unseen was his area of expertise. No one bothered him. If anyone stared, it was only briefly. Her desk was covered with a mountain of red books already. She barely saw him approach, and neither did the others.
He cleared his throat meekly, sounding off hardly a gurgle. It wasn't to get anyone's attention, anyway, but a token gesture he'd do to be able to say that he tried.
"¿Qué tal?" she facetiously answered to his astonishment.
He had already made a half-turn towards the exit. He froze. Her actually talking to him was a point he didn't recall even getting to in his dreams. He felt his heart slamming against the inside of his ribcage. His brain was just as frantic. It fired a million crazy thoughts per second, all fantastic and scary and vivid and detailed, yet never in the company of the thing he actually needed to say at the very moment he needed to say it. To say his mind had gone blank, then, was a misdiagnosis. It was more like data overload. The remedy: shut down and let the mouth babble like it belonged to an infant.
"Oh, uh, I'm uh, I uh, I mean," he stammered. He watched her pupils bounce back and forth as she tried to keep track of both conversations going on: the human adolescent conversation with her friends, and the baby talk with Caleb. Her attention appeared to be inching back toward her friends, though. He decided it was better that way. It gave him the impetus to barrel through his spiel. "Could you sign my yearbook?" He let the words burst from his mouth before starting to make that turn again.
"Oh yeah, for sure, just leave it there," she dismissively reassured before returning her full attention to her group. He was alone again. For awhile he hung there in limbo, half-pontificating the surprising yet anti-climactic ease of the recent transaction, and half-wondering how long he should hang around knowing there was no one willing to talk to him and make it seem less weird that he was just standing there, swaying his torso with his clammy hands in his pockets.
Finally he was able to let himself wash away, like a lone slab of driftwood taken by the current. He tumbled back out into the hallway, having nothing else to do but return to his class, park himself in his usual seat and stay there, wringing his hands as he pondered what he was supposed to do next. The bell rang finally, and then all the other kids darted around him, while he stayed in his seat, like a stone caked in the muddy riverbed watching them all race overhead. Even the teacher followed them all to the hallway.
From his desk by the window, he could still hear the cacophony of lockers clashing and banging in great numbers, soon dwindling as more time went on, until finally, nothing. After the silence had been there long enough, he thought he could move again. He crawled from his seat and meandered back into the hallway, shuffling his feet over the ground, making no attempt to avoid the loose papers that had been joyfully tossed about on the hallway floor. He lingered in front of his locker, slowly twisting the lock in its proper combination.
"This is yours, isn't it?" a familiar voice asked.
His eyes scanned the cover of the book. It was attached to an arm, and a shoulder, and a neck, and a cheek belonging to the girl with summergreen eyes smiling brightly into his. It was times like these that his brain would forget to give him words appropriate for the situation, or hardly any at all, for that matter. So, instead, she helped him.
"You walked out before I had a chance to do yours. Didn't you want it back?"
Her voice, he thought. He wondered why he had never recognized that before. Where do I recognize her voice from?
Caleb whipped his head over his shoulder as he nervously eyeballed his surroundings in every direction.
"It's okay. No one's here. Surprised to see anyone still here, actually," she continued, peering around the empty hall. "Pretty much everybody couldn't wait to run out of here."
The silence had long been unsettling, and it was congealing over into the irreconcilably awkward. Enough time had passed for his brain to grow tired of entertaining every single running thought, and for his balls to find themselves. His brain and balls both came to the table and all finally agreed: say something, you idiot.
"Oh yeah, thanks," he sighed with a believable shrug. "I must've— forgotten." He put his hand on the book to retrieve it, but she didn't move hers right away. It was maybe only a second, just one long, confusing second. She gave a timid laugh as she dipped her nose and swept her hair behind her ear.
"Do we know each other?" she asked hesitantly.
"Uh, well—"
"It's just that you asked me to sign your yearbook and I felt so bad because I couldn't remember off the top of my head where I remember you from."
"Biology," he blurted out, instantly regretting it. She seemed taken aback, at least judging by the way her tiny lips fixed themselves wide apart.
"Oh," she finally managed.
"Um, yeah."
"No, yeah, I felt like— that's all? I feel like I knew you from something else."
"Yeah, it's nothing, ya know, I probably shouldn't have asked, so, ya know, I'll just take my book back and—"
"There were no other signatures in there," she pressed, though he had already started backpedaling, nearly tripping over himself as he took off. "Was I the only one you asked?"
"Yeah, ya know, I just really enjoyed that Biology class and—"
"'Ya— know,'" she slowly repeated to herself. "Hey wait!" she cried. "Won't you sign mine!"
He stopped in his tracks. Though his entire brain told him to flee, his feet took him back to her. "Uh, well, sure, I guess."
She gave him her electric green gel pen. It still felt warm from her writing with it. She set her bag down, retrieved her yearbook, and handed it to him.
"Just sign it anywhere," she said. First, he opened it to the inside cover. It was doused in multicolored ink, not just signatures but complete with heartfelt messages and mini-letters from her adoring friends. He flipped through the book, scanning the similarly covered pages.
"It's weird. I really don't feel anything for this place," she declared. "Now that it's quiet, to be honest, I think I like it better this way."
"You've got so many signatures in this thing," he muttered, still shuffling through the pages.
"I made an effort to get everyone to sign it, not as a memento, but something else."
"'Something else?'"
"I wanted to be sure of something. See, for a long time I've had this fantasy that all these people around me were in the way of someone really special, someone who'd be waiting for me outside of class when the bell rang. Someone waiting for me, but I never know who. I feel like if things were a little different, I would've enjoyed school. I would've done whatever and not been worried about who I had to impress. But even so, now that my family's moving away, I feel like I just can't walk away, because I feel like I'd be leaving something behind. Something I didn't notice."
He found a space in an inconspicuous nook between the margin and a picture of band practice and scribbled his signature.
"Caleb," she read with a painted smile as he handed back the book and pen. She sounded almost disappointed as she hesitated to receive them from him.
"I would've added something like, I don't know, 'have a good summer,' or something but I didn't have any frickin space, ya know, so."
"So..."
"So...yeah, here you go," he muttered. She took the book and put it in a pile at the bottom of her locker as she resumed her scramble to get everything remaining to fit inside her backpack.
"Um, do you need help with any of that?"
"Sure," she replied with a smile, offering him a large black trash bag.
Caleb smiled, too. She stood above him, cleaning the top shelf of her locker while he was crouched below, emptying out the bottom. Not saying much; not having to. In that perfect moment, he wasn't overthinking. He was barely thinking at all. Instead, he noticed things about her he'd never known before, and every detail entranced him further: her bashfulness, her softness, her light. He had never dreamed of anything so vividly beautiful. She talked, and he just listened, though it only sounded like music. Somehow, the things he thought would annoy him to hear about, like the lives they planned to live now that high school was over, became important and worth pontificating. As they spoke, their faces were brightened by their smiles and a spark in their eyes, the kind that would illuminate when a person truly believed in anything.
He felt the sweat trapped between the joints of his trembling fingers as they clung to the yearbook. It was as if they were melding together. He was too scared to set it down anywhere and relinquish the moment. He didn't want to ever let it go, as if the sensation of its texture was the only proof that he wasn't dreaming.
Caleb stood there planted in an not-too-intimate no man's land, dangling from the edge of their days as youth, with every fleeting second becoming more precious. He was never more aware of the importance of the present and the critical effect it had on his eminent eternity. So there he anxiously stood, and he could look at nothing else but the girl beside him, with her hand resting so close to his. Yet he knew to cross even that distance was such a daring leap to make. So instead he hung there, gazing over the edge of the cliff.
Then finally, she said, "I guess we'll probably never see each other again, huh?"
"What do you mean?" he babbled in protest. "Now that we know each other, we've got the whole summer now and—"
He watched her shake her head.
"I'm moving. My parents already made up their minds."
If Caleb was a bit more mature, he might have been able to form an actual response, but his brain kept coming up with nothing. Her actually talking to him was a point he didn't recall even getting to in his dreams. As he moved his lips, her words filled the void that his voice could not.
"Sorry. Maybe that's not the way to say it. It's better to look forward to seeing each other again, rather than saying goodbye. Don't you think? So maybe we will. We'll see each other. I think it's fifty-fifty. Like maybe one day, we'll pass each other by, thinking we're not close enough to stop and chat. Or we'll glance each other's way without even recognizing or remembering. Like perfect strangers. Of course we'll see each other again, but will we be friends?"
"We're friends now. So, of course we will be."
She searched hard into his eyes, before finally relenting with a tiny giggle.
"Of course we will be."
The calm was interrupted by the impatient blare of a car horn from outside, and a man on the driver's side calling out, "Ivy! Ivy! What's taking so long!"
"Sorry, I've gotta go!" Ivy said frantically, whipping her head around. Suddenly, her gaze turned to ice and her voice began to tremble when she tried to speak.
"Well, I guess, if we don't say goodbye, then what?"
"I dunno."
"I've never graduated high school before, so, do I say 'see you around,' or 'see you never,' or—"
"Whatever feels right, I guess," she chirped.
He turned away, hanging his head for a moment. A flash went across his face as his eyes brightened.
"See you on Facebook!" they said in unison.
"We probably won't interact on it, and that's fine."
"One day, I'll probably see something you post and think it's really funny, but, I won't think we're good enough friends for me to actually 'like' it."
"I'll probably absolutely loathe your political opinions, to the point that I decide to just hide you."
"And that's where we'll be."
"And— that's where we'll be."
Between their smiles, the chasm separating them, for one moment at least didn't feel so wide.
A middle-aged gentleman in a blue blazer and tan slacks stepped out of the car and came inside. He took a couple steps and put his hands on his hips.
"I've been looking all over the place for you, kitten. You're late for dinner," he admonished.
"Hey, daddy," she greeted as she started toward him. There was a cautiousness in the way she walked to him, like walking on a tightrope. She shot one last hard glance at Caleb as if to tell him not to follow. She tried to appease him with a faint smile before turning away again and facing the older gentleman.
The man put his hand on her back and rubbed it in a wide, slow circle. "Hanging out with boys, too? You know your mother wouldn't like that."
"Oh, daddy, I'm just part of a mentorship program. That's not my boyfriend or anything."
Her eyes didn't venture up to his, but the man was glaring down at her. He already appeared to be a very stern man, like a principal tasked with disciplining an unruly group of students, and he had the chiseled, weary wrinkles in his face to show it. Seeped down inside the crevices of his eerie smile there was something malignant and awful, like his countenance of warmness and courtesy was as thin as the veil that covered his grinning skull. Caleb had never seen such a look.
"You're getting so big, so fast. You're still daddy's girl, right?"
She wouldn't look at him still, so his tender caress became a claw that yanked her by her underarm. It made her squeak and turn to him with a wounded look in her eyes as she conceded.
"Yes, daddy."
"Good. Now, come along."
She sank into the passenger side front seat and the man shut the car door behind her. They sped off in a cloud of dust.