Breakheart Hill

why don’t you play Romeo?”

From the look on Todd’s face it was clear that he had never considered such a possibility. He shook his head. “No, I’m no actor,” he said shyly.

“But you’re perfect for it, Todd,” Kelli told him. She watched him for a moment, then added, “You’re the only boy at Choctaw High who is.”

Todd waved his hand dismissively. “No, I’m no actor,” he repeated. He might have said more, but Mary came sweeping up the aisle and took his arm. “We’re going to Cuffy’s,” she said to Kelli and me. “Ya’ll want to come with us?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve got to go home,” I said.

Todd looked at Kelli. “What about you?”

Kelli hesitated a moment, then glanced over at me. “You can’t go for just a few minutes?”

“No,” I told her, then added an excuse that was a lie. “I have to help my father with something.”

She turned back to Todd. “Would you be able to give me a ride home after we left Cuffy’s?”

“Sure.”

Kelli looked toward me again. “I’ll just get a ride with Todd today,” she said.

I nodded quickly, betraying nothing. “Okay.”

We all walked out of the auditorium together, Todd and Mary in the lead, with Kelli and me walking together behind them.

“What do you have to help your father with?” Kelli asked lightly.

“Something in the store,” I answered.

At the parking lot, we separated, with Kelli walking off toward Todd’s car at the far end of the lot.

“Bye, Ben” was all she said.

For a few seconds, I stood and watched her move away from me, walking cheerfully toward Todd’s waiting car. When she reached it, Todd swept around her, opened the door and let Mary and Kelli slide into the front seat. Then he walked around the front of the car and pulled himself in behind the wheel.

Within a moment, they were gone, and I was left alone in the gray Chevrolet. It had never seemed more dull and dusty, nor more empty.

On the way home, I passed Cuffy’s. Todd’s car was parked out front, and inside I could see Todd and Mary sitting together in a front booth. Kelli sat opposite them, and next to her, Eddie Smathers. Someone must have said something funny just as I passed, because I could see Eddie’s head tossed back in a wide laugh. Although I could not see it, I knew that Kelli must be laughing, too.

When I got home, I found the house empty, my father not yet home from the grocery. I sat in the living room for a time, staring at the dull green eye of the television. Then I walked to my room and eased myself onto the bed, lying on my back, facing the blank ceiling. I could feel a slight tremor in my legs. It moved upward, growing stronger as it moved until I could feel my stomach quake, my chest tighten, my throat finally close in the iron grip of all that I still so desperately wanted to hold back. Then suddenly it released me, and to my immense surprise, I began to cry.

Even now I cannot name all the things I cried for that afternoon. I do know that it was not only for the loss of Kelli, but for all that she had come to represent for me, the promise she’d held out for so long, and then so quickly withdrawn. I cried for a life that seemed beyond me, a love I would never know, a vision of happiness, of growing up and growing old in the steady embrace of something fierce and true. I cried out of pity for myself, for my terrible inadequacy, for the fact that I was locked in a sensual wasteland from which I could see no escape. I cried because I was small and physically inept, because I wore glasses, because the bolder experiences of manhood seemed always to slip beyond my grasp. I cried because I was pathetic and ridiculous.

And it is there that the story might have ended, with an inexperienced boy weeping in a melodramatic moment of romantic grief, but with the promise that he would soon rise from his bed, wipe away his tears, move steadily toward adulthood, find a life that suited him and from there go on to love a woman he could not have then imagined, raise children he could not have then imagined, achieve the quiet dignity of a good and gracious life and finally, perhaps, even recall from time to time the afternoon he’d cried so bitterly, and smile with the comforting wisdom of all that he had learned since then.

And so it might have ended.

But it did not.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 17

NOT LONG AGO NOREEN AND AMY AND I WENT TO SEE one of Luke’s sons perform in his senior play. We sat together near the front of the sleek new theater that had recently been added to the high school. A vast array of fancy theater lighting hung above us, and from our seats we faced a beautiful red curtain.

“It’s not like the old auditorium we used at Choctaw High, is it?” Noreen said lightly.

“No, it’s not.”

Noreen and Amy sat beside me, Noreen needing glasses now on such occasions, and just to the right I could see Betty Ann shifting restlessly in seats that had become too narrow for her middle-age spread. Only Luke appeared more or less unchanged from our youth, still tall and lean, his face grown more handsome and full of character. His hair was thinner, of course, and almost completely gray, but his eyes were still piercingly blue, his skin still tanned and youthful.

The play was a modern contrivance, fractured and remote, and all of us were weary by the time it ended. It was a hazy spring night, and after the play we all took a drive up the mountain road, passing the deserted ruin of Choctaw High, its crumbling brick facade shrouded in a ghostly mist. I could see the old parking lot, now weedy and untended, the wide, cracked stairs that led to the front door, the silent, unlighted gymnasium, and beyond it, the auditorium that had doubled as our school theater in those days, and from whose row of wooden seats I’d watched Kelli Troy try out for Juliet.

“That’s what we had to use as a theater,” Luke told my daughter, pointing to the auditorium. “It didn’t have any of the professional lighting and sound equipment you have now.” He laughed at the primitiveness of it. “And those rickety old plywood seats, remember that, Ben?”

I glanced over toward the old auditorium. It was dark except for the single naked light bulb that still hung above its side door, shining mistily as we swept by, illuminating nothing more than a small patch of ground. And I thought, There is where it happened, not on Breakheart Hill at all.

THE FINAL ISSUE OF THE WILDCAT WENT TO THE PRINTER only a few days after Kelli auditioned for Juliet. She’d gotten the part, of course. That had not surprised me. But it had surprised me that Todd had gone out for Romeo, and gotten the part almost as easily as Kelli had gotten Juliet. Eddie Smathers, still trailing after Todd, had also tried out for the play, and had been given the role of Friar Laurence. Sheila Cameron had landed the role of Lady Capulet, and Noreen the role of Nurse. Mary Diehl had been offered Lady Montague, but had turned it down, deciding to be the production’s costume designer instead.

“You should try out for the play, Ben,” Kelli told me the afternoon we completed the Wildcat’s last issue.

I shook my head, continuing to proofread the final article before sending it to the printer.

“Paris,” Kelli said. “You could play Paris. Miss Carver’s still looking for someone to play him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said glumly.

Kelli returned to her own work, her head bent over the little desk against the back wall. She said nothing else, no doubt confused by the mute and sullen atmosphere that had gathered around me by then.