Going Too Far(14)
Author: Jennifer Echols

One night down, four to go.

Before my shift at the diner started, I ran inside the trailer to snatch last year’s yearbook. Throughout the morning, between cooking orders of bacon and eggs, I flipped through the pages.

Alphabetically, he appeared on the first page of senior photos, where After, John should have been. But his name was printed Johnafter instead. That Mr. Harrison was a real card.

I double-checked the name, because the photo wasn’t the cop. It was a senior in the fake tux they made boys wear, with a thin face and longish blond hair. Like a normal boy.

The only thing I recognized was the heavy-lidded dark eyes. At first. But as I studied him, the sensitive mouth seemed familiar. And the chin. Last night in the dark car, the only thing I could see clearly most of the time was his chin in the glow from the radio.

In fact, the longer I stared at this normal boy, the clearer the memory became of glancing at him in Spanish class last year. We passed yesterday’s graded homework down the rows and leafed through the pile to pull our own sheets out. One page was always decorated with intricate doodles in the margins, careful little illustrations of the Spanish words. Perro. Sombrero. Corazon. I watched where this paper went. To an older boy with blond hair in his eyes, cute but shy, not my type. Not the type to like girls with purple hair, or whatever color mine was that month. Anyway, he wouldn’t look at me, or if he did, not for long. I would have remembered his dark eyes.

I stared into those eyes in the yearbook photo. I examined the caption underneath. Johnafter. Track 1, 2, 3, 4. Track Team Captain 4. ACT High Scorer 4. He got the highest score in the school on the ACT. So did Tiffany.

I was called upon to spoon up some cheese grits just then, but I puzzled over the problem in my head. Something didn’t fit with Johnafter.

Just a few years ago, our town was in the middle of nowhere. Lately Birmingham had spread out to meet us. The outskirts of the metropolitan area were only a few miles away. Our small town had lost some of its charm and retained all its backwardness. Families moved to this area from up north to work in the car factories springing up everywhere. Not knowing any better, they bought the cheap houses being built here. They stayed here until they figured out it was no fun and moved closer to Birmingham. So for all practical purposes, our town was still in the middle of nowhere, but now we had a Target.

If you were college material, right after graduating from our high school you escaped to UAB. Then you found a professional job and settled in Birmingham, never to return. Except on special occasions, such as passing through on your way to the beach.

If you weren’t college material, you settled here in town. You had a baby at nineteen and then thought, duh, it’s too bad I don’t have an education, because I need a job. After a few years of working as a janitor, then a telemarketer, then a vinyl-siding salesman, you opened a shitty little diner. Your ingrate daughter got sick and dyed her hair blue. What a disappointment. You wanted said ingrate daughter to remain in town and keep your restaurant out of trouble by doing a large portion of the work for free. But alas, your daughter was college material. If she could keep out of jail.

What you did not do was make the highest score in the school on the ACT, then decide to cut your blond hair off, put on twenty pounds of muscle, become a cop, and stay here.

Something had happened to Johnafter.

I peered across the bag of chopped onions at the yearbook on the counter. I stared at his photo, with my hands over my mouth. And I realized that something was happening to me. For the first time in my life, I had a crush. On a cop. Who was never leaving this town.

Beware the Ides of March.

When I got off work at two in the afternoon, I rode my motorcycle to the city park. I could have jogged my daily five miles up and down the highway in front of Eggstra! Eggstra!, but I preferred the park. The hospital and rehab center were nearby. Lots of people with knee injuries or multiple sclerosis gimped along the track. It made you think that if they could do it, you could do it. Even if you had just spent eight hours flipping pancakes at Eggstra! Eggstra! on top of eight hours being faked out by a teenage cop.

As always, I stretched my muscles in front of the decorative park gate tiled with red, blue, and yellow handprints from my elementary school. Tiffany’s handprint was there, and Brian’s, and even Eric’s. Mine was toward the bottom-left corner. I still remembered how thrilled I was to see my handprint and name on the wall for the first time, back when I was young and dorky(er). I thought I was famous. Along with everybody else in the third and fourth grades. Now I regretted that a little piece of me would be cemented to this place forever.

I braced myself on the wall with one hand, put my leg behind me, and pulled on my ankle to stretch my quadriceps. My head throbbed and my blood tingled from too much caffeine.

The trees in the park held tight to the tiniest bright green leaves. The sky was so blue it looked fake, and the yellow daffodils looked plastic, like in a cemetery. This told me I was really sleepy and/or I really needed to get out of town.

And jogging toward me came the ghost of Johnafter.

I think I actually did a double take. His shirt was off, showing the sort of six-pack abs I saw all the time on TV but rarely in person. His white skin glowed against the bright greens and yellows of the park. Probably from living in the dark on night shift. His blond hair looked white, too, and from this distance, his dark eyes were holes in his face.

He didn’t look like a forty-year-old cop to me anymore. I didn’t see how I had ever made this mistake, either. And he didn’t look like the boy from the yearbook. He looked like what he was, a nineteen-year-old with a fantastic body. Get this—I resisted the urge to hide behind the tile wall, I felt shy in front of him. Like I admired him from afar, but I knew I didn’t have a chance with him. Suddenly I wished my hair was not blue.

He jogged to a stop in front of me and panted a few times to get his breath back. Finally he said, "Hey," as if I was some girl from school instead of his prisoner.

"Hey," I said.

He looked at the wall. "Are you on here?"

I put my leg down and kicked my handprint on the wall to show him. I picked up my other ankle behind me.

He bent down to look at my handprint. "Mmph," he said. "Near Eric."

This irked me for some reason. "Are you on here?" I asked quickly. As I said it, I realized I’d been scanning the wall for his name the entire time I’d been stretching.

He walked to the opposite end of the wall and reached way up to put his hand over a handprint. It was almost as far from mine as possible.

I craned my neck to see. "Why is yours the only one on the wall that’s black?"