“Oh my God, that was amazing. Can we do that again this weekend? Party at the tree house!” Bianca claps her hands as if it’s not eight a.m. on a Tuesday.
“Yes! I’ll tell the whole crew. We’ll go after the football game. Do you think your cousin can get us a keg?” Rachel turns to me.
“I can’t ask for that again.” I shake my head, almost stomping my foot to show them just how down it is.
Crap, I should not have done that for the last party we had right before the school year. I knew it would come back to bite me in the ass. While I’m not the “let’s do ten shots and get buck naked” kind of party girl, I can let my hair down and have a good time. So, when Scott couldn’t come through with his alcohol supply for the end of summer barn party the seniors threw, I called in a favor to my cousin. She lives a town over, is twenty-one, and has offered to buy me whatever I want a number of times.
I’ve never taken her up on it until that one time, and I knew my friends would expect this alcohol source to continue. After all, it’s not easy for high schoolers to get liquor on demand. But isn’t it funny how we always find a way?
“Okay, we can talk about it later. Gotta run!” Rachel bulldozes over my protests.
“But, I—”
“Love you, Kenny!” Bianca hums my nickname.
I clamp my lips shut, because there is no point in arguing. And it’s all teasing anyway, no harm in it.
Unfortunately, we’re all in separate homerooms, so it’s high fives, hugs, and goodbyes for us until lunch. I’m in mostly advanced classes, as is Rachel, but Bianca decided to sprinkle her senior schedule with more electives than academic courses.
But, we did all get put into the same lunch period, which is amazing. Finally being allowed to sit in the senior courtyard is pretty damn exclusive, if you ask me. In reality, it’s just a bunch of picnic tables right outside the cafeteria doors that only seniors are allowed to occupy. Though we treat it like the Buckingham Palace gardens.
As I walk into homeroom though, my mind shifts to him. Of course, it does. I haven’t been able to go the last twenty-four hours since he stepped out of that truck without thinking of Everett Brock every other minute.
I’m honestly surprised Rachel and Bianca haven’t broached the subject, but maybe they’re giving me time to come to them. After all, I had a bit of a meltdown when the military came to tell us he was dead. A meltdown is putting it lightly. I had to take almost a month’s leave from school, I could barely get it together.
Two years ago, Everett left for basic training. He was deployed as a Marine some couple of months after that, though his letters never contained specific details because he wasn’t allowed to disclose them. I estimate that around six months into his deployment; again, I have no specifics to back this up, he was taken by the enemy as a prisoner of war. That term comes from the officers who contacted Marcia, his mother. She had told my mother this at the table in our breakfast nook, and I was eavesdropping on the stairs.
Right then, I’d dropped to my knees and prayed on the top step. For God to bring him home. For Everett to be strong through whatever he was going through. My nightmares were things of blood and horror, thinking about what he must be enduring. For three months we hoped, held the vigils, wrote letters to the military, and tried to be positive.
Then, the black car of death arrived, with government officials claiming to believe they had sufficient evidence proving Everett’s death. They handed his mother a folded American flag and promptly went on their way.
I remember the day of his funeral, almost the entire town of Brentwick standing in the cemetery. It was a sea of black, sobs coming from every which direction. When they lowered the empty casket, the shots rang out—the military had arranged for a twenty-one gun salute. I jumped at every single bullet fired, as if they were all being riddled right through my heart.
This was the boy I thought I’d marry someday. Not that we’d ever dated, or had any moments that crossed over into the territory of more than friends. It was more of a feeling. A larger sense of fate’s plan in the grand scheme of things. Everett and I had danced around each other since we were children, teetering on the edge of becoming something more for the years we were in high school together.
I’d even been so bold as to ask him a few times, when I was tipsy and he couldn’t help but plant me in his lap at a party, why he’d never made a move. We’d sit there at the barn, our friends surrounding us, and he’d tap me on my nose while his other hand played with the hem of my shirt. Usually, he’d brush me off, say something about being friends or that I was his kid sister. Which inevitably shattered my heart and caused a mess of drunk tears by the time we arrived at one of two best friend’s basements to sleep off the alcohol.
And then, on the last night before he shipped out to boot camp, we found ourselves in the same position. Anyone who saw the way he held me, or saw the way I looked at him … they knew it was much more than a friendly gesture. So I asked him to kiss me. To give me my first kiss, the one I’d been holding out for.
“It’s not our time, yet, Kennedy. Plus, you’re still too young. I’m going away, and you’re going to live your life here. But when you turn eighteen, I’m going to come back for you. And I’m going to give you the kiss we’ve both dreamed about. Wait for me.”
I always used to love that he insisted on using my full name when everyone else shortened it to Kenny.
Of course, the sophomore me who had drunk two wine coolers that night hadn’t understood why he couldn’t just kiss me right there on the spot. It had annoyed me, frustrated me. So much so that I didn’t write to him for the first four weeks, because I was sulking at his trying to teach me patience.
But over time, I had to admit that what Everett had proposed was poetic. He was right, in a way. I hadn’t known then what I thought I did. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t our time.
Though, once he was captured, and eventually pronounced a casualty of war, I thought we would never have our time. I’d waited for him, and he’d died.
Now, he’s back, and everyone in my high school is talking about it. It’s all I can think about.
Well, that and the kiss he owes me. I just keep wondering if he’ll ever make good on his promise.
3
Everett
I’m back from the dead, motherfuckers.
Well, I guess not the dead. The seventh circle of hell is more like it, though at that point, you just wish you were dead.
I suppose I actually am. At least that’s how everyone keeps looking at me, like they’re utterly shocked to see my skin and hair where they assumed there would be rotting bone and dead eyes. I don’t have the energy to tell them that’s how I feel on the inside.
Do you want to break a person? Toss them in a four foot by eight foot hole for three hundred and sixty-five days, starve them, beat them within an inch of their life, and then throw away the key. That’ll get the job done.
How do you just pick up a life that is no longer anything resembling that? Normal people leave the house, have friends, smile, enjoy aspects of the living, breathing world around them. I can no longer do those things. It’s like the enemy sliced into my chest with their box of tools and removed the part of me that can feel anything. I bet if you took a scalpel to my leg, gutted the thing wide open like the belly of a fish, I’d feel absolutely nothing.