Chapter 1

I don't normally read Cosmopolitan. Honestly. I don't.

A thirty-year-old man, traveling alone, reading Cosmo – with this month's wiry, bronzed entertainment nymph perfectly posed amid the bold-typed headlines, staring out at whoever is sitting across from the reader – well, it's one way to draw raised eyebrows. And I'm not big on attention. The guy running the airport magazine kiosk from his wobbly-stool perch shot me a quizzical look followed by a presumptuous smirk. Part of me wanted to throw a copy of GQ or Men's Health on the counter to reaffirm my masculinity. My more cynical side was tempted to buy a women's hairstyle magazine, and maybe one of those glossy bridal catalogs-disguised-as-magazines. “Which name do you like better,” I would have said. “Susan or Miranda? All my friends tell me I look more like a Susan.”

It would give the guy something to talk about later; a better tale to tell. Maybe there is a magazine-kiosk-dude convention somewhere, and this guy could win some sort of prize. In the end, I ignored his stare, bought a pack of gum with the Cosmopolitan, and went to wait for my flight.

Generally, I make it a policy to stay away from magazines with airbrushed, tanned and toned perfection gracing the cover, whether written for men or for women. Real beauty is never flawless and pretending it is seems counter productive; a standard set too high. Beauty has its place. I'd be a hypocrite to say it has no role. But elevating random genetics and good luck to the level of a virtue that eclipses all other virtues is hazardous. As a songwriter friend once wrote, “God knows the world is cruel place when beauty don't grace your head.”

After taking the “Is He Marriage Material?” quiz on page seventy-seven (and validating the opinion of my last girlfriend: no, I’m not) I was reminded why I didn’t consider such a magazine worthy of the paper it was printed on. It was a news story the night before had peaked my interest in this issue of Cosmo, though.

Packing my bags with the 11 o’clock news as a sort-of-soundtrack, I saw a story that hit close to home: an interview with an actress, who I had gone to high school with, detailing how she had decided to move back to the Midwest to give her son a slower lifestyle than they were living while splitting time between Los Angeles and New York. The key to a slower, happier life, she said, was to find somewhere in fly-over-country to live and raise her child. She told the interviewer how she was looking forward to her son’s first day of school in his new surroundings, free, she hoped, from the drugs and violence and pressure found “even in the private schools in California.” During the interview, she mentioned an article in the issue of Cosmo I held in my hand. An article that ultimately provided little in the way of pertinent information, while being chocked full of useless tid-bits about some hunky star or another the actress had worked with. (Liam Niesson, apparently, preferred his espresso prepared in a stove-top, Italian-style maker, as opposed to more modern methods.)

The story hit close to home for three reasons: First, the actress being interviewed was Lila Broussard, a high-school classmate of mine. Second, that “slower, happier” mid-west town she talked of moving back to was my home town of Hamilton, Ohio. Finally, Lila’s son, Adrian, would be a student in the school where I taught; a student in my classroom.

The trip I was taking to South Carolina was supposed to be a “work free” trip. I had promised myself there would be no thoughts of the upcoming school year, no thoughts of the students and their parents, and no concern over lesson plans or room decoration. But the mention of the magazine article had intrigued me enough to break that promise to myself. A little work wouldn’t hurt, I figured. A “work free” trip would prove to be little more than an idle hope.

***

The twin-engine prop plane made a smooth landing after a quiet flight; the Sunday morning, South Carolina air was void of turbulence. The locals call the flight from Charleston the PJE – Puddle Jumper Express – and it was the last leg of my day’s journey from Cincinnati to Charleston, then on to the small, municipal airport at North Myrtle Beach.

After the plane rolled to a stop, I stood and stretched along with the four other passengers, ducking to exit the doorway. The bright, early-August sun darkened my self-tinting glasses, and the heat and humidity of a Carolina coastal summer morning welcomed me. Descending the stairs to the oven hot concrete, I looked toward the tall glass walls of the terminal area. The glass was a mirror of the world behind me, obscuring the terminal area excepting the occasional ghost-like figure moving behind the reflected scene. I caught my reflection and wondered at the pooch of “desk work fat” that rested above my belt. It was the first summer that I hadn't worked off the extra pounds. I made a mental not to address it later.

A gust of cool, dry air blasted past me as I stepped through the sliding doors and inside the airport building. My glasses adjusted to the darker, cooler atmosphere. A thin film of condensation clouded my vision. I removed my glasses and wiped them clean.

“What’s with the glasses, Grant?” said a familiar voice, the blurry form of its owner returning to sharp focus when my glasses were back in place. “I thought you gave those things up years ago.”

Cory Evans was sitting perched atop a stool at the coffee counter not far from the door. Typical of most Sunday mornings, Cory’s beard was gray, patchy stubble, and his hair an unkempt shock of white straw. Cory had always believed that a day of rest was designed to allow man to rest and not “an excuse to get all dressed up and in a hurry to impress those sitting in the next pew with your fancy clothes and shoes.”

“I’ve been having trouble with the contacts,” I said, walking to join Cory at the counter. “I’ve had to wear the glasses again for a couple months now.”

“You hated those things, working at the golf course and having them fall off your face ‘cause of the sweat. If I remember right, you tossed a pair of glasses into the big pond, right out in the middle by the fountain aerator. I think you might say you were a little frustrated.”

We both cherished that summer—now a dozen years in the past. For me, it was an adventure. For Cory, it was a summer of healing.

After graduating from high school in Ohio—the summer before I would journey off to Indiana for college—I decided to fulfill a boy-hood dream: to live on the beach. With no plan, and no money, I set off for the coast, and landed in North Myrtle. Initially, I had been clinging to the delusion that I could find a cheap place to live and work a few side jobs just to make ends meet. The rest of my time would be spent enjoying the sun, the sand, the ocean.

The reality turned out to be that there are no cheap places to live on the beach, and the cost of living in a beach community surprised me. Upon arrival, I learned it would be impossible to do much living if I didn’t get a good job, and work as often as possible. So, with the exceptions of Friday afternoons and Sundays, I worked as often and as long as the management of the Surf Golf and Beach Club would allow.

I did the kinds of work an inexperienced young man would be allowed to do on a lush, private golf course. Mostly, I was assigned to the digging or laying sod in “non-course” areas and weeding the flowerbeds around the clubhouse. I was not allowed near a green or tee-box without thorough supervision.

Working long days through the hottest summer on record left me exhausted at the end of every day, having turned what seemed like gallons of water into sweat that clung to my body in the profuse humidity. I would walk the mile to the one-room apartment I shared with a college student who also worked at the golf course and collapse face-first on the uncomfortable, still-damp bed beneath the window air conditioner that drowned out the ocean just a block away. Some days, I ended up sleeping from the time I got home until the alarm went off at 5:15 the next morning. But most nights, I was able to drag myself to the shower, clean up enough to not scare off tourists, and make it down to the water’s edge to enjoy the last hour of daylight on the nearly deserted beach.

It was the greatest summer of my life.

That summer, I met Cory, who became my excuse to return to North Myrtle annually. Cory was a retired North Myrtle cop who worked at the Golf Club a few hours a day to kill time and make some extra money. We became friends almost instantly.

Cory was right about my unusual disposal of a pair of glasses, though he was in error thinking it had been the pond at the 18^th hole where I had launched the spectacles to a murky grave. Trying to mow a steep embankment in the hot afternoon sun, struggling to keep my footing while being hassled by the glasses constantly slipping down my nose and startled by a snake slithering right between my feet, I ripped the glasses from my face and with every ounce of strength I could muster, tossed them into a collection pond filled with water lilies and snapping turtles.

The glasses disappeared into the water, reminding me of the first day I had been assigned to mow that bank. I watched a mother duck leading her young ducklings in a slow swim across the water, only to see one of the little ones suddenly disappear, just as my glasses did. The duckling had been snatched from below by one of the basketball-sized snappers in the pond. It was a phenomenon that would be repeated until the supply of ducklings had been exhausted, and the mother duck was left to make the slow paddle across the pond alone.

Cory woke us from our memories. “They finally caught the big momma,” he said. A waitress approached and I pointed to Cory’s coffee cup in reply. She poured a cup for me, and moved on down the line.

“Was Big Mamma the turtle Sid claimed was the size of a first grader?” I asked. The powdered creamer barely changed the color of the coffee, and I wasn’t anticipating the flavor would be any better than the aesthetic appearance.

“Sid’s crazy in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t far off in describing that monster.” Cory sipped from his cup. “They didn’t exactly catch her. A golfer, searching for a ball he had miss-hit, found her belly up on the edge of the pond couple weeks ago. Newspaper came out, along with some bio-EPA types. Said it was the chemicals we use on the course that killed her.”

“And it was as big as Sid claimed?”

Cory snorted in reply. “Almost. Bigger than I imagined. Thing must have been older than me. And our chemicals killed it? Hogwash. Monster died ‘cause it was old.”

I tried the coffee, which was even worse to drink than to look at.

“How have you been?” I asked, wondering if I would get a straight answer, or if I would have to dig for information about Cory’s health.

“Feeling better,” he replied. “Doc says I’m supposed to give up the cigarettes and the coffee, though I’ve not figured which I’d rather do without, so I’m still enjoying both.”

Cigarettes and coffee. Cory never went more than an hour without one or the other, and usually both. “Are you at least trying to cut back?”

“Trying, but it’s hard. I’ve tried to drink decaf, but it’s no good. Tasteless brown water. Kinda pointless, to me anyway. And those nicotine patches didn’t do much for me besides making my skin break out.”

We sat in silence; awkward because there was rarely silence between Cory and I. But I knew his health condition was worse than he would admit. Heart problems and a battle with pneumonia had kept him sidelined for most of the spring and part of the summer. Only in the preceding few weeks had he been able to return to the golf course.

Well, hell, you didn’t come here to see the inside of this airport or to talk about my addictions. What say we go hit the lunch buffet at the Captain’s Plank?”

“All the seafood you can eat and sweet iced tea to wash it down? Sounds like a plan.”

I dropped a few dollars on the counter, having barely touched the coffee, and followed Cory out to begin my vacation.

***

The Grand Strand area isn’t somewhere you go to get away from crowds, but if you know where to go, you can avoid them. Walking north along the beach, beyond North Myrtle and away from the large beach-front hotels, there is an area much less densely populated, where the ultra-wide beach gives way to sand dunes and tall beach grasses. By positioning a blanket just right among the mini-dunes, you can relax peacefully, relatively isolated from others, except the occasional long-distance jogger or middle-aged man in a loud-flowered shirt and black-socks-with-sandles, using a metal detector to find lost treasure.

By Wednesday, I had come to look forward to one particular jogger. She was a sun-streaked brunette, small in stature, and she wore a University of Kansas tank top. Her tan betrayed a more-than-casual interest in outdoor activities. She ran by me heading north every morning, not long after I had found my “spot” to read in, and would pass again thirty minutes later, headed back to the South. The second day she ran by me, we exchanged a quick wave hello, adding the actual words, “Hi” and “How are ya?” on the third day.

On the forth day of my vacation, instead of running on by on her way back south, the jogger slowed down and stopped to talk.

“So is this your house,” she asked, pointing behind me, “or are you just one of those people who hates the ‘stacked like wood’ atmosphere of the main part of the beach?” I knew she had been running for several miles, but she was barely breathing heavy.

“I’m an anti-crowd beachcomber,” I said. “I’m not big on sharing my blanket with greased up people all wedged in together. Plus, there are too many kids down there this time of day to get any real reading done. Last, but not least, that house is worth way more than I could ever afford.”The house on the property behind me was built up on concrete and brick stilts, and was probably worth at least ten times more than my annual salary. The “yard” of the house was the beach and dune area where I was sitting.

“Unemployed?” she asked with a smile.

“Teacher,” I replied.

“I’m Kathy,” the jogger said, extending her hand. “And I already knew that wasn’t your house.”

“Oh, really?”

“Well, I had a pretty good idea. Last week, when I was jogging by, there were about twenty guys up on that balcony. They whistled and hollered as I ran by. The language they used to try to convince me to join their little get together wasn’t very polite, or convincing. None of them struck me as a ‘sit on the beach and read for four straight days’ kind of guy.”

I offered her a water from the small cooler I had with me. She accepted, and offered a “I can't stay long” in return.

“So, would a ‘sit and read’ kind of guy, who was self-consciously minding his manners, be the kind of guy you’d consider having dinner with?” I asked.

Kathy smiled at me. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Grant. Grant Williams.”

Kathy adjusted the earphones of her radio, and put them back on her head. “How about we start with coffee, Grant Williams? Eight-thirty, at the café on Third Street?”

I agreed and Kathy the Kansas University jogger continued back south, down the beach.

***

“A date?” Cory asked. “Now that’s something new.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘new’. Different, maybe, but not new. And, I'm not even sure I would call it a date.” I had called Cory from my hotel room, begging out of our planned dinner for the night. The normal itinerary for my vacation was to spend the day reading, sunning, napping, and generally resting, followed by an evening dinner with Cory where I would buy him an extra beer or two. The Coors Light would provide extra incentive for Cory to tell (and retell) some of the stories which I had come to cherish. He told stories about growing up in a beach community, working on the police force, and even a few about his time spent working at the golf course. Each story was tinged with his unique sense of humor and somewhat exaggerated. I took careful mental notes of the details of the stories, especially the words he used when imitating other characters. Cory’s stories had unintentionally – and unknown to him – become the basis for a novel.

“Well, I guess one night without you buying me dinner would be alright,” he said. “As long as you give me a full report tomorrow.”

***

The coffee shop was quiet, with just three or four other patrons enjoying the acoustic guitar playing on the sound system. Kathy the jogger had already taken a seat in a booth near the back, where I joined her after buying my coffee and a couple of cookies. She sat with her back to the wall, which is where I would normally sit so I could observe all of the action in the coffee shop. Since Kathy had beat me to the seat, I was forced to sit with my back to everyone else. As I sat down, I realized for the first time how much younger this girl was than me.

“You shaved,” Kathy observed.

When we had met earlier in the day, I had been sporting a three-day beard. “I figured it was proper to clean up a little.”

“I hope you don’t mind the coffee shop meeting,” she said. “I work here, and it’s easier to just meet up here than try to get home and get changed for dinner.”

“This is fine,” I said. “You’re from North Myrtle?”

“Just for this summer, I am. I thought it would be fun to live out here before going back to start law school.”

Fresh out of under-grad and on her way to law school made her seven years younger than me. I was starting to feel old.

“Back to Kansas?” I asked.

Kathy grinned. “Books weren’t the only things you were reading on the beach, huh?”

We both laughed. I told her about my summer in North Myrtle eleven years earlier, spent much like hers, working more than I thought I would, but enjoying it just the same.

After telling me about the anxiety associated with starting law school, she asked me what level I taught at.

“I teach elementary school,” I replied.

Kathy almost choked as she laughed at the same time she was taking a drink of her coffee.

“Didn’t you say you hated kids on the beach?”

“I think I said I didn’t want to be around the kids on the beach when I was trying to read,” I replied. “Just wait until you are a lawyer. You’ll want to vacation as far away from judges and other lawyers as you possibly can.”

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Do you like teaching?”

I should have said yes immediately. I was rarely unhappy when the students were actually learning. I knew the joy of seeing a student “get it”, the way a furrowed brow would release and a smile would overtake an anxious face. I knew the pleasure of helping an underachieving student succeed, and a bright student reach for even higher knowledge. And yet I could only answer after pausing; continuing only with reservation.

“I love teaching,” I said, “when I get to actually teach.”

I went on to explain how little of being a teacher is actually teaching. I told her how most of my time was spent preparing for and reacting to standardized tests that were given at the wrong time of the year to be of any value, and how regardless of what level students are at when they come to me, I’m expected to help them learn at a fifth-grade level, even the ones who can only read and do math at a second-grade level. I explained the drag on time, energy, and resources created by the bureaucracy and politics of the educational system, and how frustrating it was to feel like so little of the effort I put into the job actually resulted in any kind of positive influence in a student’s life.

“You have so many parents that don’t care if their child does well,” I told her, “as long as we keep them out of their hair during the day. You have other parents who are so concerned with their own child’s school experience that they make demands and foster expectations that are to the detriment of the other students. You have students who are exposed to drugs, and guns, and sexual situations at a younger and younger age, and they become more crass, more violent, and more vulgar. And then, you have some fellow teachers, comfortable with the status quo, who don’t want you to succeed and who will even actively work to make sure you don’t.”

“Do you ever feel it is worth it?” Kathy asked.

“Yeah. There are still occasions where I think I’ve helped a student. But they are so few and far between, I wonder, sometimes, if those few victories are worth the fight.”

At some point I found myself reaching across the table, forgetting my earlier reservations about Kathy's age. My hand found hers, and – much to my surprise – she didn't pull away.

We continued to talk until the shop closed at midnight. Kathy told me all about her family back in Kansas, and her dream of working in the rape and sexual battery division of a big-city prosecutor’s office. I figured there was a reason behind her desire to spend her career working to put male sexual offenders behind bars, but that topic seemed too intimate for a “first coffee” night. I was suddenly self-conscious about holding her hand, and as she told me more about the kind of work she hoped to do, I attempted to release her hand, but she wouldn't let me. I could see in her eyes that she appreciated the gesture, but had decided to hold on.

When we left the café, I walked Kathy back to her apartment a few blocks away, she linked her arm through mine as we walked. The one-room apartment reminded me of the one I had rented eleven years earlier, with a small porch dominated by a whining window air conditioner. We stood in awkward silence for a moment, not really sure how to end the non-date.

Then, against my better judgment, I leaned down to gently kiss her. Almost immediately, I regretted the action.

“I feel I should apologize,” I said, knowing that no matter her reaction, the sentence sounded lame.

“It's ok,” she said with a smile and a sparkle of mischief in her brown eyes. “You aren't that bad a kisser.”

We both laughed. She reached up on her tiptoes to initiate a kiss of her own.

“Is it the age thing?” she asked. “Because, I'm not too worried about the difference.”

“That's part of it,” I replied, though admittedly my reservations about her age seemed to melt away pretty easily. “I also think a kiss should mean something. It isn't just a casual act. And, unfortunately, in this case, it doesn't seem like there is much chance of it meaning much in the long term.”

Kathy smiled. “Don't apologize. You never know what may or may not be meaningful.”

Kathy and I exchanged e-mail addresses, and said our goodbyes. I walked back to my hotel, strolling along the moon-lit beach, trying not to think about returning to work the next week, and after the night I'd had, thinking about things other than work shouldn't have been too difficult.

Yet, in an odd way, the night reminded me of the coming year, precisely because of how it had progressed.

Ever since I had learned that Lila's son would be in my class, it had reawakened parts of my own childhood I had forgotten about.

Lila and I had been classmates beginning in second grade. For the next five years we lived a similar life. We were both from single-parent families, with mothers who worked hard to keep us above the poverty line, flirting with middle-class affluence through the shunning of their own interests in favor of those of their children. Lila and I were school friends, playing four-square or kickball during recess and sharing typical grade-school experiences with a common group of friends.

By middle-school we didn't see each other as often, sometimes only having one or two classes together at any given time. She wasn't pretty then, certainly not one of those girls of whom people later say, “I always knew she'd be a star.” She was too tall, and her coordination never quite caught up to her height. She moved awkwardly, and – in hindsight – was self-conscious about it.

The pixie-cute girls were the ones the boys talked about most, pretending to ignore the growing attraction while working to impress the girls at the same time. The features that would eventually be alluring made Lila gawky and fragile. She had glasses and braces, and one eye was green while the other was brown. And while most of the other kids found the mismatched eyes unnerving, I always found it intriguing.

In eighth grade, Lila and I were in two classes together: math and orchestra. It was in orchestra where we talked most. I was the last chair of the second violins. Practice was something that bored me, and I allowed playing baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood and watching TV to be my after-school activity of choice. Lila chose to practice, and worked her way up to the second chair of the first violins. The conductor would often call on Lila to play parts for the rest of us to hear “the way it is supposed to sound.”

We talked immediately before class, as we stacked our books and folders on the table and unpacked our instruments, tightened our bows, and prepared to play. Lila would offer me the use of her rosin, because mine was inevitably missing or cracked into small pieces.

We didn't talk about anything of substance. Neither of us had a close friend in the orchestra. It was mostly filled with students a year older or a year younger than Lila and I. She would complain about a teacher or an assignment, and I would offer my own assessment of the situation which would make her laugh. When Lila would laugh at my jokes, I found her even more intriguing.

Near the end of the school year, our orchestra group took a field trip to see the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Lila and I sat together on the bus, and again during the concert. When the lights were lowered and the music began to fill the auditorium, Lila shifted in her seat so that our shoulders were touching. After the second movement, she crossed her legs so that her foot lightly brushed against my leg.

At the intermission, we separated; Lila talking to a group of students from another middle school while I talked to our orchestra instructor. I returned to my seat first and looked around. Lila was still several rows away talking to another girl. When the other students began to return, the seat next to me was filled not by Lila, but by a ninth-grade boy who was not only our best cellist, but also the center for the junior-varsity football team. I was deflated by Lila's absence. I sat rigid in my seat, staring forward as the lights began to dim.

Just as my hope was dimming with the lights, Lila sidled down the narrow row, stood in front of the cellist and said, “Ryan, I think you accidentally sat in my seat.” As Ryan moved back down the row, Lila smiled at me and sat down. By the time the music resumed, Lila's hand was gripping the edge of her seat only inches from my own. Tentatively, I reached out my little finger, greeted with the electricity of skin brushing skin. To my surprise, Lila didn't pull her hand away from the touch. Soon we were holding hands surreptitiously. We stayed that way until the lights came up and we released our grip to join in the applause.

The ride back to Hamilton was strange. Lila and I sat silently for most of the ride, our hands again joined beneath a jacket draped across our laps. What had once been easy, humor-laced conversation was now awkward silence. I was enjoying the idea of holding Lila's hand while at the same time experiencing a mouth as dry as unbuttered toast.

Back at school, Lila and I parted ways, she to her mother's waiting car, me to wait for the number 18 bus. Before we got off the bus, she told me she was spending the weekend at her grandmother's house in central Ohio. “I'll be home by Sunday afternoon, though,” she said.

I spent Friday night longing for Sunday. It was painful to wait. I felt I wanted to hear her voice, to make her laugh, to reaffirm the friendship while acknowledging the new, added dimension of an obvious physical attraction. But it was all so new. My emotions were volatile. As Saturday wore on, the rush of that initial physical touch some how morphed into a building insecurity. What was she thinking? What was I thinking? What would our classmates think? Why should I care what other people thought? But I did.

Sunday came finally, and suddenly it seemed it had come too soon. I spent the afternoon pretending I was busy while debating myself whether or not to call her. Sitting in my room, I began to doubt that calling her was a good idea. To do so could jeopardize the friendship, I figured, because I had no idea what I would say if she actually answered the phone. The reason for calling was the very thing I had no experience talking about. Even worse, not calling would send a signal that I lacked interest, which was no accurate. As I tried to convince myself one way or the other, it was the one time I remember wishing for a sibling with whom I could discuss such matters.

By the time the sun was setting, I convinced myself that calling her was the only option. I would see her the next day. I would ask to use her rosin. I would turn to her to confirm the answer on a math problem. Three times I picked up the phone, three times I failed to finish dialing the number.

The next day, Lila hardly acknowledged me. Seeing that she was avoiding me kept me from taking the initiative to speak to her. In math class, she walked to the other side of the room to work with a different group of students. In orchestra, she was unpacked and seated at her chair by the time I came into the room. I attempted to rosin my bow with the ragged piece in my violin case, then went to sit two rows behind her. I couldn't concentrate on the music, transforming my barely adequate playing to something even less like music. By the third time through the piece we were practicing, I laid my bow on the music stand and just listened.

Lila didn't speak to me for two weeks. Finally, the last week of school, we were unpacking our instruments at the same time. I was still attempting to apply and adequate amount of rosin to my bow. Lila laughed at me and handed me hers. Hearing her laugh wiped away the silence of the previous two weeks. When I returned it to her, I thanked her.

“Don't mention it,” she said. I was pretty sure her words were filled with more than one meaning.

That summer, Lila transformed. Her body began to catch up with itself, evening out and beginning to show indications of who she would become. We saw each other a few times that summer during a summer enrichment program at the local branch of a state university. The easy friendship was replaced with a slightly more tentative version, but we were speaking again. But her world was expanding. She was invited more and more into the world of the more popular students: parties and teenage dramas I was close enough to know about, but too common to be a part of. Even as we were reestablishing a basic appreciation for each other, our spheres of influence were drifting further apart. One minute I was contemplating the amazing fact that perhaps I hadn't completely lost some slim hope of rectifying my mistake, the next I was hearing that Lila had gone to a movie with Joe Blackburn and allowed him to feel up under her shirt during a darkened-theater make out session.

I quit orchestra after the ninth-grade year, respecting the music enough to not continue if I wasn't going to practice in a way to do honor to the art. We had only a few classes together once we moved to the High School building. We still spoke when we saw each other, but I was quickly just a spectator in Lila's rapidly developing life.

***

The rest of the week went by quickly, as every good vacation week does. I was successful – for the most part – in keeping my mind off of the “real world” back home. Cory had arranged for me to play golf at the Surf Club on Thursday and Friday, free of charge. I found it was difficult to play golf on a course you had helped to maintain. I did not want to make divots in the finely manicured grass, which meant that I wasn’t hitting the ball the way I should. My score reflected my reluctance to swing naturally.

By Friday night, I was tanned, well-read, and well fed. Exactly the vacation I had been looking for. I left Cory’s house around eight o’clock to return to my hotel room, planning to go to bed early in anticipation of my flight home the next day. I dozed off to the glow of Sports Center (the Reds were continuing their post All-Star Game fade) in an otherwise dark room.

I awoke to a rumbling, growing growl which seemed to say: “Broussard.”

In that moment of post-sleep confusion, I struggled to identify the noise I heard. The TV was still on and I used the remote to quiet the set. When the sky outside my hotel room lit up in a strobe-like flash, my mind finally cleared enough to realize that what I had heard wasn’t some one shouting the name “Broussard” but was, instead, the rolling thunder of an approaching storm.

As the thunder intensified outside my window, that name continued to rattle around inside my head, as it had since I read it on the memo a week earlier. “Grant,” the memo said, “Adrian Broussard will be attending Adams Elementary next year, and I have assigned him to your class. Let me know if this presents any problems.” It was signed by the building principal of Adams, Margaret Luke. Adams had been the school I attended as a child, and the school where I had taught for seven years since graduating from college.

Adrian Broussard. The son of the girl who had been my biggest crush.

Trying to put Adrian out of my mind for one more day, I rolled over in bed, facing away from the window and the light display outside. I wasn’t really tired after spending a day reading on the beach, catching the last of the summer sun, watching people walk by, but I closed my eyes tightly anyway, trying to force myself to sleep. I wanted to sleep, to put the dreams of the past – and the thoughts of the immediate future of the upcoming school year – behind me, but the thunder rolling along the beach continued to overcome the steady hum of my room’s noisy air conditioner.

Instead of sleep, I thought about Lila.

In high school, Lila Simmons became the girl every guy wanted to date. The problem was – after her brief dalliance with Joe Blackburn – she never dated anyone from school, choosing college students from Miami University or even settling for the occasional high school dropout. She quickly became the kind of girl who was more at home in the bigger world outside our high school community. More and more she was in our world, without being a part of our world. Her unavailability made her even more desirable.

Lila’s social life was the hot topic for rumor mills among the groups of adolescent boys who gathered, almost instinctively, to discuss the most resplendent girl in school. Nothing was off limits when it came to talking about Lila. The boys found solace in our mutual disgust over who ever she happened to be dating, and the girls took comfort in finding ways to look down at her. “Serves her right,” we would say when we found out yet another college boy had achieved his short-term goals and moved on to other, “more mature” offerings. We didn’t exactly revel in her pain, but we looked at her with a level of self-righteousness.

But the hatred and grumbling were only superficial. None of us, had we been honest, felt “worthy” of Lila’s attention. We still voted her onto the homecoming court, supported her as Senior Class President, elected her prom queen, and reaffirmed that she was “Most Likely to be A Star” in the Senior section of the yearbook. It would have been easy to dismiss her as just another pretty face, but she excelled on every level. Hardly a week passed when her picture did not appear in the local paper, accompanied by a story detailing some honor bestowed upon Miss Simmons by her classmates or some civic organization. She was the queen of any number of local fairs and festivals, but her influence extended into more academic and philanthropic areas as well. She excelled in science fairs and academic quizzes, while volunteering time at the local hospital and even working on a building site with Habitat for Humanity.

Lila obtained an air of perfection. She was an icon to the students, and to the city itself. Hamilton had endured a period of decline; jobs and people were leaving by the thousands and the future was uncertain. People were looking for something to pin their hopes to, someone who could point to brighter days that surely lay ahead. In some other town, a politician or religious leader or business mogul might be that shinning beacon to energize the community, but in Hamilton that focal point was a beautiful, smart, engaging teen-age girl. By the time she graduated high school, she was among the most beloved people in the whole city.

But while she was talented and brilliant in many ways, the same could not be said about her when it came to relationships.

***

I dozed off, slipping back into a shallow sleep until the thunder brought me back from my dreamless slumber. I turned in my bed as the violent battle continued outside. I rolled over in bed again, trying to untangle the sheets entwining my legs. Again awake, I sat up on the edge of the bed and stretched my legs. I'm normally a light sleeper, and even more so when I'm in an unfamiliar place. I pulled back the heavy curtains covering the glass door to the balcony and sat in an arm chair to watch the lightening illuminate the ocean.

The wind picked up, blowing streams of fat raindrops against the glass of the sliding door that led to the balcony and its ocean view. As the lightening flashed I noticed the books stacked next to the bed, and considered using my insomnia for something more productive than reliving my adolescence. Instead, I continued to indulge the thoughts of high school, and the one girl who had been the center of attention.

At graduation, rumors of Lila’s pregnancy began to circulate, fueled by an incident the morning before at graduation practice. Just as Lila walked up to the podium to pretend to address the class with her speech, she visibly wobbled and had to be steadied by one of the faculty members up on the stage. They helped her sit down, but only moments later she ran from the stage, and according to one witness, barely made it into the girl’s restroom before throwing up.

The pregnancy rumor shocked everyone who heard it. Her older male companion at the time was an even bigger loser – in our most humble estimation – than the other guys Lila had been known to associate with.

His name was Leon Broussard, and he would have graduated two years before our class, had he taken the initiative to actually finish high school. Leon was the stereotypical drop out candidate: he neglected his work, talked back to teachers and staff, fought with other students more often than he turned in homework, and made it known that he didn’t care about any thing, or any one.

By the time he was seventeen, Leon had been arrested, held in a juvenile corrections facility, beaten so badly he was taken to the hospital, and stabbed by the jealous husband of a woman Leon had taken a liking to. When he dropped out of school during his senior year, Leon was kicked out of his house and lived in a stolen car for a few months until he found other arrangements (paid for by the wife of the man who had stabbed him, on the order of a civil judge and jury). Teachers began using Leon as an example of what would happen if you didn’t take school seriously. But at some point, he had captivated Lila Simmons, and the lectures that had at one time ended with the phrase, “You could end up like Leon Broussard,” no longer had the same impact. Sure, he had dropped out of high school and had several run-ins with both death and the law, but he had bounced back with a job working at his uncle’s auto body shop. He had a lot of money (at least to those of us working part-time for minimum wage at the local grocery store), he had his own parent-free apartment over the garage where he worked, and – more importantly – he had Lila.

In the months leading up to our graduation, Leon was involved in several questionable events. First, he began driving – and eventually wrecked – an expensive sports car which would have strained his auto-mechanic’s budget. Added to the new car, he began taking Lila to some of the more refined restaurants in town almost every night. To go along with the more posh surroundings he was finding himself in, Leon drastically upgraded his wardrobe, and even began to wear jewelry designed to sparkle in the light. The final unexplainable purchase was a condominium he secured in a new development overlooking a golf course just outside of town. The condos sold for a minimum of $125,000, but the realty agent who had sold Leon the house – the mother of one of my classmates – said that Leon had requested some modifications which increased the price even higher. She also said that he had paid with cash.

Leon was making some very non-mechanic wages somewhere, and he was living the high life.

The source of Leon’s extra income was a mystery, but it was obvious he wasn’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing cars in a mid-sized mid-western town, a fact which became even more apparent when he quit the garage job altogether. Common opinion around town – and in the hallways of Hamilton High School – put the odds in favor of some illegal activity: gambling, money laundering, drug trafficking, or some other organized crime. For several years the county prosecutor tried to pin a few petty charges on Leon, but he was never convicted.

The romance between Lila and Leon started over the Christmas break of my senior year, about the time he started driving the new car. By Spring Break, things really heated up. He bought Lila a large diamond ring, which he presented to her during a dinner in a revolving restaurant overlooking Cincinnati and the Ohio River.

The day school resumed, we were shocked at the brazen way Lila bragged about spending the entire break at Leon’s condo while her parents were out of town. She showed off the ring he had given her, prominent there on her left hand. Leon's condo became her home, and by the time the graduation rumors began to circulate, we were all more disappointed than surprised. By the time Lila began to show her pregnancy that summer, no one was even affected by the news.

The lightening and thunder outside my hotel room was subsiding, fading as the storm moved north, up the beach. I got up to get a drink of water, and returned to bed. I was suddenly tired, and three hours after turning off the TV, I finally drifted into a deep sleep.

***

I woke to a cloudy sky the next morning, ate breakfast, and finished packing my bags for my return trip to Hamilton. I had one last stop to make before leaving, and I was checked out and on my way there by ten o’clock.

The sun had conquered the early morning clouds and renewed its seemingly endless assault on the East coast by the time I turned my rented car down the access road snaking between the fourteenth and fifteenth holes of the Surf Golf and Beach Club. The cool air which had followed the storm the night before was long gone, replaced by the hot and humid weather typical of summer in Horry County, South Carolina. I parked next to the maintenance building and walked toward the open garage door.

It was hot there, even in the shade of the tall trees that served to hide the maintenance building from view of the golfers dotting the fairway of the fourteenth hole. The heat index – a “reverse wind chill factor” invented to give the weathermen in warmer climates something to talk about – would reach well over one-hundred by noon, but that wouldn’t slow down the men and women in white outfits who ambled along, chasing after their small, round, white prey.

It was time to say goodbye to Cory, and to the other employees of the golf club. I found him in his typical mid-morning position: sitting in a chair at the card table in the break-room area, one hand on his hip, and the other hand lying across his leg with a lit cigarette between his index finger and thumb. He head was bowed, staring down at the cigarette he twisted between his fingers. That pose, which Cory assumed daily, always reminded me of what the model for Rodin’s The Thinker must have looked like when the sculptor told him he could take a break.

Cory glanced up when I walked in. Seeing me he said, “So, this is it for another year, huh?”

“Afraid so,” I replied. “No one tracked me down on the beach and offered me a job doing basically nothing for twice as much as I make now, so I guess I’ll have to go back to teaching. Of course, if you wanted to take me up on my offer and come visit me in Ohio, you could see me again before next summer.”

Cory laughed his reply, “You’ve got to be kidding. Ohio’s too cold for these old bones.” He paused to take a drag of his cigarette then said, “You really should come down for Christmas this year. Unless of course you are planning to visit Kansas for Christmas.”

“I don’t think Kansas is going to be an option,” I replied. I knew I shouldn’t have told him anything about my coffee date with Kathy. He was blowing it way out of proportion.

“I hear in Kansas City, they got’s some purty lil’ women there,” he laughed.

“Stop misquoting blues lyrics,” I said. “I’m not going to be going to Kansas City.”

“Well, my offer stands. You don’t have any family left up in the cold North, and Jade and I would be happy to share the holidays with you.” At the mention of his daughter, Cory gave me a sly look and a watched for my reaction. I tried not to give him one, but the smile on his face told me my reactions had betrayed me yet again.

“Haven’t you tired of trying to fix us up yet? I asked.

“No, not really. And you oughta know by now that I won’t give up until one of you gets married.” He took another drag from his Marlboro. “When that happens, I might give on up. But only if I like who you choose to hitch up to.”

We both laughed at the comment. It was good to see Cory laugh. There had been times in our friendship when he did not – could not – laugh. After a bitter divorce, followed by a battle with his son over some money in a trust fund and that son’s subsequent suicide, Cory had little to laugh about. In the proceeding months, Cory’s health had deteriorated significantly, and even now I suspected he was putting on a braver front than was warranted.

We were silent for a few minutes. Cory remained in his chair, staring at the smoke rising from the smoldering cigarette in his hand, while I stood awkwardly next to the break table, trying to think of some clever way to say goodbye.

“Take care of yourself, Cory.” It was the best thing I could come up with.

“You do the same,” he replied, dropping the cigarette to the concrete floor and grinding it out with his foot. “And don’t let those brats get under your skin this year.”

His comment was a joke, but as with all good jokes, there was a kernel of truth. Cory knew that while I genuinely loved the kids I taught, it was becoming harder with each passing year to put on the brave face and charge into the daily battle.

“It promises to be an interesting year,” I told him.

We said our goodbyes, and as I waved to Cory who was standing in the doorway of the maintenance building as I pulled away, I thought it would be another year before I would see him again, and I suddenly caught myself wondering if he would still be there the next time I came back.

Maybe you’d better plan to come back here sooner than next summer, I told myself. It was something to think about.

***

Seated aboard the plane, watching South Carolina disappear beneath me, I noticed the woman next to me reading the same issue of Cosmopolitan I had picked up on my initial flight. She was reading the story about Lila, and I asked her what she thought.

“She can't be real,” was her response. “Its all too good to be true. Beauty and brains and a desire to 'rekindle family values' or whatever. Seems like a put on. Like its all just for show.”

I shrugged at the though. “Maybe it is all for show. At least the part about moving back to Ohio for family values and clean air. The air in Hamilton isn't that clean.”

“I wonder if all of it isn't just a story,” the woman said, closing the magazine and staring at Lila looking out at her from the cover. “Like maybe it wasn't as hard of a life as she makes it out sometimes, with having a kid and all of that.”

“That part wasn't easy,” I told her. “And Lila didn't make it up.”

“You know her?”

I thought about that. “I knew her. A long time ago. We were even friends, kind of.”

The woman looked as if she wasn't quite sure whether or not to believe this stranger who claimed some special knowledge about a famous celebrity. “So she's legitimate?”

“What she says about her decision to move back to Ohio,” I said, “may or may not be true. I have no way of judging that. But I do know that most of what is written about her life in Hamilton is pretty accurate, save a minor detail or two.”

I recounted what I knew of that summer after high school, and remembered the letters sent to me in Myrtle Beach by my best friend, Peter, who was working concession stands at Babe Ruth baseball games back in Hamilton. He was slaving away selling Cokes and Bombpops to Little Leaguers while I enjoyed the “glamorous life” of a golf course gopher. Nothing he wrote about the escalating drama of Lila’s life surprised me anymore. The spell she had cast over me had been broken. It was a strange change of circumstance: the girl I admired, envied, and longed for was now the girl I felt pity for.

Lila and Leon were married about the time she started to show. In his letters, Peter described seeing Lila and Leon fighting outside the movie theater, yelling and screaming as if they were behind closed doors rather than in public. Not long after that, his letter reported the latest rumor: Leon was leaving Hamilton, and his six-week marriage, behind and moving to New York.

After Leon left town, Lila filed for divorce. She and her baby lived with her parents through the hard times that followed. Her parents – who had hated Leon as much as anyone and who had begged Lila to end her relationship with him before she regretted it – never mentioned “that man” or the entire affair again, but few of the friends Lila had sacrificed during her relationship with Leon were not so forgiving. Most everyone she had been friends with left for college, or went somewhere else to work, or just moved to get away from the town they were sure stifled their creativity or sophistication. Lila stayed in Hamilton, working menial jobs, raising a newborn son.

But she began her trip back to respectability soon after her son, Adrian, was born. She began auditioning and winning roles in plays put on by the local Civic Theater group. She was talented, and enjoyed the stage. I saw her in a performance the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and immediately fell in love with her again. The play was weak, and the rest of the cast even weaker. Lila was not. She was radiant. She was beautiful. Her voice, her eyes, her smile, her self-confident walk all penetrated me to the core.

Soon, she had a central role in every production. The local paper raved about her performances, touting her as a great talent. Slowly, she began to regain the status she had enjoyed as a teenager. Eventually, she founded her own theater group to perform in schools and retirement centers. It was her idea of public service, and it caused a sensation throughout the city. Lila was again a beloved and popular figure. The icon had been restored.

She got her big break the year I finished college. A talent scout for a major ad agency – in Hamilton visiting an aunt – saw Lila’s portrayal of Elaine, the feisty girlfriend in Arsenic and Old Lace. After the show, the executive rushed backstage to meet Lila, forgetting the reluctance he had expressed to see a “bunch of bumpkins bumbling around a poorly constructed stage, lit with sub-standard lighting and wearing the same wardrobe as they had in last season's butchering of Annie Get Your Gun”. He asked Lila if she would be interested in doing a magazine advertisement photo shoot in Chicago, to which she – of course – agreed.

That ad was a success, and it launched Lila’s national career. One ad led to another, and another, and eventually to a series of television commercials. A television producer in New York saw one of the ads and contacted Lila, asking her to be the co-host of a new game show he was trying to sell to syndication. Lila left Hamilton and her son behind, and for the next three years, she was the Vanna White of the game show Double Your Dollar.

After getting her feet on the ground, and some money in her pocket, Lila brought her son to Los Angeles to live with her. Her game show experience led to a role in an off-Broadway musical, then a bit part in a Broadway play, which eventually led to a major role in a Broadway play. Reviews of her performance were mixed, but she became a sensation anyway. She was interviewed by Letterman and Regis. She was on a special episode of Oprah dedicated to successful, divorced mothers. Her work in ads, commercials, and bit roles in major motion pictures increased every month. She became a brighter star in her hometown.

Lila returned to Hamilton often and shared her wealth with her old community. She funded foundations and donated equipment and money to area schools. She donated her celebrity to various fundraisers. In Hamilton, Lila Broussard was treated like a queen. As my plane touched down in Cincinnati I realized, I, Grant Williams, would soon be teaching the Queen’s son.

I told Cory this school year would be interesting.