Page 61 of Never Forever

13

Later That Night

Carrie

The bandshell at night was a happening place. The kids’ park across the road was packed with people and at some point in the years between high school and now, a track had been built around the whole park. There were all sorts of people getting their steps in now that the sun had set, the temperature had dropped.

I noticed a teenaged girl stretching in the grass.

Weidman stood at the lip of the bandshell, a cast of about twenty people sitting inside the bandshell facing her.

The genius of the community summer play was the age range. I saw Mr. Dickow, a regular in the summer show. It was rumored he did Summer Stock in Connecticut for years before becoming a fifth-grade teacher up here. He was a low-key comic genius.

There were lots of teenagers, I recognized Blue Streaks and her friends.

The cast on stage caught sight of me as I approached the bandshell. My red hair was recognizable at this point. I was like a red-headed Rapunzel with the extensions. No living person walked around with this much hair.

There were some quiet gasps and elbows digging into sides.

Weidman turned. She wore a purple caftan that billowed around her. Bright red lipstick, Chuck Taylors and two pencils behind her ears.

“Carrie!” She cried and held out her arms for a hug. Which I gladly fell into. A quick hug and I turned to face the cast, my arm slung over Weidman’s shoulders.

“Good looking cast,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, and everyone in front of me blushed. Except Mr. Dickow, who winked at me. We’d been co-stars in that strange version ofCats. “Tell them a little bit about yourself, Carrie.”

“I’m Carrie,” I said.

“We know, you’re famous!” one of the kids said.

“Well, I grew up out on the island. Weidman was my theater teacher and my very first director.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Everything I learned, I learned from her. I got a television show my sophomore year and my first feature film when I turned eighteen. Yes, I only had two lines and was a dead body in the corner of the screen for about ten minutes. Before I became a zombie and Keegan-Michael Key chopped off my head.”

“I play a dead body,” Verity Petit volunteered. She was certainly a local I knew. “In the play. I mean, I get killed halfway through and then I kind of lie there for a while before the scene changes.”

“It’s not easy, is it?” I asked her and she laughed, eyes wide.

“All I can think about is my breathing.”

“She hyperventilated last night,” Weidman said out of the corner of her mouth. “Maybe you could teach her somebreathing exercises? I can’t have a dead body sit up in the climax of act two and ask for a paper bag.”

“Let’s talk, just the two of us, Verity,” I said to the pretty blonde. We were in school together at some point. She’d been a quiet and dreamy kid. Constantly in love.

I wondered how that worked out for her.

“Oh my God,” one of the beautiful twenty-year old women muttered, her attention over my head. “He’s back again.”

“For real?” A good looking twenty-year-old guy asked, and got up on his knees to get a better look. I turned and caught sight of Matt Sullivan, running around the track with the teenage girl who’d been stretching.

“He’s not sweaty yet,” the guy muttered, sitting back down on his butt. “Talk to me when he’s sweaty.”

“If you could talk to your old boyfriend,” Weidman said, again out of the corner of her mouth. “Tell him to keep his shirt on, and maybe…I don’t know…find some other place to run. He’s distracting my cast.”

I nodded but couldn’t muster any snappy comeback. I was caught, the way the wind caught his grey tee shirt and pressed it against his stomach. His chest.

So many memories of that first summer. Of watching him run out of the forest and then down the road. To me. Smiling the whole way.

I was pressed face first into the memory of how he’d smell. Like sunshine and hard work. Sweat, but good sweat. Salty and sweet. My stomach squeezed remembering the way he’d feel against me those few times we hugged that summer. Damp and hot and hard against my chest.

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