Freedom’s Child. Jax Miller

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       7

       High School Sweetheart

      Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,

      To pick up where I left off last: ah, prom, yes. 1989. If you recall from my last letter, I think I was still floating on cloud nine after Mark Delaney had asked me, that bad boy of William Floyd High School I was assigned to tutor in English in the after-school program. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart—quite the opposite, in fact—but he spent too much time smoking under the bleachers instead of actually in class. I remember my mother laughing at me because I sat, perched on the kitchen stool next to the phone, just waiting for Mark to call and cancel. I wish you guys could have known my mother; there was nothing not to love about her. Except cancer. You can’t love cancer.

      Anyway. Oh, God, I’d nearly forgotten about that dress, something with pink silk and black lace; I think I was going for Madonna’s “Material Girl” meets Desperately Seeking Susan. I wish I still had that old thing. It was the last dress my mother made for me. Consider yourselves lucky, to have missed the biggest embarrassment of our generation: fashion trends of the ’80s. I still cringe at the thought.

      When Mark came to my door, my mother didn’t like him right away. He wore one of those tuxedos printed on a black tee with a leather jacket, smelling like an ashtray. His naturally dirty-blond hair was dyed black. What kind of respectable man wears eyeliner? Mother would shake her head and read her Vogue magazine, Estelle Lefébure was on the cover that month, I remember. Mother’s sweet tooth was for fashion, a gene that’d skipped me, apparently. Believe me, I’ve been referred to as a lot of things, but fashionable was never one of them.

      I sat in the front of the Dodge Colt, with Matthew, Luke, and John sardined in the backseat, ready to crash prom and spike the punch with Absolut. Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” in the cassette player. It was a big deal back then, to still be in high school and have a car, that wasn’t your mother’s, with a cassette player.

      Mother would worry that Mark only wanted to ride my coattails of good grades and being valedictorian into college, and would constantly warn me that if he ever knocked me up, she’d kill me, cut off his pecker, and then kill him too. This point was made quite often.

      On the way to school, the brothers passed around a joint. I declined, earning the comments of being a priss, that I was probably glued at the knees, that Mark should have stayed with that easy bitch of a cheerleader named Donna. I can’t smell marijuana or Love’s Baby Soft today without thinking of that night. From the backseat, Matthew kept pulling at my curls (reminder: huge hair was the in thing). Matthew always pulled at my curls. He had that Billy Idol thing going on, the spikes, the leather, fingerless gloves. The bleached hair. He even practiced curling his lip in the rearview mirror and faking a British accent. Ah, to be seventeen again.

      Between the comments, Mark would look over at me from the driver’s seat with a particular look, a look that said he couldn’t keep his eyes off me, a look that said he thought he was falling for me, a look that made me weak in the knees. My heart pounded so hard I literally thought I might get sick. And in that moment, I knew I was looking at the most beautiful person in the world.

      When we arrived, Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” echoed into the parking lot. The others disappeared somewhere into the side doors of the gymnasium, being that they weren’t in our graduating class. Mark thought it’d be romantic if we stayed outside, always the outlaw. When he pulled me close and began to sway, my body felt weightless. Toward the end of the song, he made a hook of his finger and lifted my chin. It was my first kiss—yes, at seventeen, embarrassing and pathetic, I know. But the times were different then.

      And while I’d love to tell you that we entered prom and danced the night away, we actually never made it inside.