Lightning-fast, Jason reaches across the table and lays his hand on mine. My eyes snap back to his, and my temper jumps, because he touches when he isn’t allowed.
“I’m certain she understands who you are.” He removes his hand, apology blazing in his eyes. “Just as you understand who she is. You needed each other, you needed what you each brought to that home. You shouldn’t beat yourself up because you were a grumpy five-year-old who wouldn’t dance.”
“I wasn’t grumpy,” I, well, grumble. “And I did dance. I just… I think I’m the original inventor of the silent disco.”
“An outside-the-box thinker,” he sniggers. “That’s commendable in itself.” He picks up his wine and takes a contemplative sip. “So, it was just you and your mom? No siblings?”
“It was just us, for a while at least. But,” I shake all that off. “We’re here to talk about you. Let’s order, then you can tell me more.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Jason looks around the restaurant in search of our server, then picking up his menu, he lets his eyes glide along the list with seeming disinterest. “What’s good?”
“The pasta is good. The chicken.”
“That’s what you’re getting?”
“Yup, and garlic bread, because I’m physically unable to say no to carbs.”
He chuckles and sets his menu down. “Then that’s what I’ll get too. Now let me tell you about this one time Maria and I were planning to disassemble prom.”
“Prom?” I burst out laughing. His words are so unexpected, so jarring. “What?”
“True story.” His lips wrinkle in a way that indicates embarrassment, but with a side of impatience. “Maria and I loved to party, and we loved to dance, but the idea of prom – kings, queens, humiliation if you weren’t asked out by the cool kids, worse if you weren’t asked out at all – we thought it was terrible. So we set out to have it dismantled and discontinued.”
“I’m not too sure that worked out,” I tease, “seeing as how prom is still going strong, even now.”
“Right.” He chuckles. “It didn’t work. But we tried with all our might. We were advocating for the students who would never get a date, we were advocating so that they wouldn’t feel less because of it.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, we each got a one-week suspension from school, and then detention for weeks more. Though that detention was never completed. We dropped out of school not so long after prom.”
“You dropped out?” I set my wine down and sit forward. As always, his stories are riveting; they grab me by the throat and demand I listen until the end. “How? But you’re a college graduate.”
He smirks and makes himself comfortable in his seat. “This is true. ‘Dropped out’ is a false description of what happened during that part of my life. My mom and dad felt I was making poor life choices. And what’s more, they felt that Maria was a terrible influence on me – nevermind the fact that half of our crazy plans were mine to begin with – and so when I was in tenth grade, my folks pulled me out and put me into a school for wayward youth.”
“No way!”
He nods, serious and foreboding. “Way. I went to bed one night, just like any other, except this particular night, Maria wasn’t texting me like she usually would. I was getting impatient, because I wanted to hear from her, but I wasn’t worried. She was always insanely independent, so I never had to worry. I went to sleep around ten or eleven, expecting to have unread texts by the morning. But if there were texts, I never got to see them. I woke up around midnight to my parents tossing a suitcase on my bed, they packed my things, and I was out the door long before the sun came up, still in my boxer shorts. The next day, I was enrolled and already in what some would describe as military school, but…” He shudders. “Worse. They were mean, they were strict, and when you fucked up—” His eyes pop wide and tear back to mine. “I’m so sorry. Excuse my language.”
“No. It’s okay.” I wave in his direction. “Please go on.”
“Well…” he hesitates. “If you messed up, if you fought with any of the guys, if you got less than eighty-five percent on any given essay, assignment, or test, then you were punished.”
“What kind of punishment?”
“Well, they thrilled in torture,” he says. “Not, like, electric shocks or peeling off fingernails,” he adds with a faux laugh. “But the sleep deprivation kind. Food deprivation. That sort of stuff. We were made to stand guard all night outside the dorm rooms. We had a stick, which we were to hold like a gun, feet together, shoulders back, and we were to stand for twenty-four hours. Once every six hours, we were excused to use the bathroom, we had five minutes, then it was back to our post. No sleep, no food, but we were given water.”
“That sounds awful.”
He smiles and looks down into his wine in contemplation. “It was. Most guys learned fast not to screw around. But see… I was mad. At my parents, at the school, at the whole world. Maria was back home, I missed her like I would miss my arm, but I had no way to contact her. Her family left town soon after I was moved, and I wasn’t told that until a year or so after I was shipped out. So I lost contact, which means the worst part of those twenty-four-hour stints was the thinking time. That in itself was torture, because all I could think about was her. Where was she? Was she okay? Was she happy? Was she still as in love with me as I was with her?”
“So that was it?” Sadness coats my every word. Heartbreak. Longing for someone I don’t even know. “You lost contact forever?”
“That was it.” He sucks on his bottom lip. It’s like he has a million things he wants to say, but he’s only giving me a few. “Military school led to the real military. I stayed for a little while, got my degree – government funded – got fit, got beat up a lot,” he chuckles. “I was a little too free-thinking for some of the guys, a little too mouthy, and when I screwed around and talked back to our superiors, my entire unit would often share in my punishment. The guys took care of that pretty quickly. So I learned to conform… for a little while.”
“Because you were beaten up?”
He nods, and swallows down his laughter. “Because I was mouthy. I stayed in long enough to get my degree and a little on-the-job training. Then I left, and got a job in the private sector.”
“Which brings you here to work on Colibri, the youth center being developed in town. And Maria?” I ask. “You never heard from her again?”
He studies his glass of wine and shakes his head. “I have not seen her once since high school. I haven’t spoken to her. But from the moment I was a civilian again, I started searching. It had been years by that point, but she was still on my mind, ya know? Still in all of my thoughts, and though I tried to shake it – because surely, by that point, she’d have moved on, right? Her world would look completely different by then – I just couldn’t let it go.”
“But you didn’t find her. You said—”
“Right.” He smiles and looks up to meet my eyes. “I didn’t find her, but I went back home and found my mom and dad.” He stops for a moment, and chuckles at something dark and mean in his mind. “I found them, and I used my powers of persuasion to get them to talk.”