Page 4 of Only One Bed: Anthology Vol. 1
That morning, the boy who’d asked me to be his date decided that he wanted to go with someone else. I was devastated, embarrassed and planned to spend the night in my room crying when Julian showed up.
Apparently, my mom called my brother in Atlanta, who called his best friend in New York. Julian found a suit and drove all the way from Brooklyn to be my date. He set up his camera on a tripod in our living room and he took about a million pictures of us using a tiny remote control.
My parents have a framed photo of us posing side by side and staring at the camera with big smiles, but I’d never seen this shot before. In the photo I was holding in my lap, Julian and I were facing each other. He must have said something funny because we were laughing as I adjusted his tie. In the split second that photo taken, our eyes locked. It was a completely unplanned candid moment and it was the most beautiful picture I’d ever seen. It reminded me of Benito’s little girl with the orange. It was a perfect moment full of power and emotion captured in a split second.
The driver’s side door clicked and creaked as Julian pulled it open.
“Okay. I managed to get a signal.” He climbed into the driver’s seat. “Triple A says it’s gonna take at least three hours to get someone up here, so that means at least—hey what’s up?”
I wasn’t aware until Julian said something but I’d been staring at the photo in my lap with tears in my eyes.
“Why do you have this?” I whispered as I handed him the picture. He took it from my hands, gently brushing my fingertips in the process.
With the photo in his lap, he exhaled a deep breath and whispered. “It’s my favorite photo in the world. The best one I’d ever taken.”
“Julian…” my voice trailed off because I wasn’t sure what to say or how I wanted to process this new information.
“When Marc called me and told me what Tyler did, I was pissed. I was relieved when he asked me to take you as a favor, because I was gonna do it anyway—”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because.” He exhaled. “I’ve known you almost our whole lives. I cared about you. And if we’re keeping it a hundred, I wanted to whoop Tyler’s ass for canceling on you, the day of prom. Who does that shit? Especially to someone like you.”
“Someone like me?” My ability to form sentences and use words escaped me as I listened to Jules speak.
“C’mon, Dee Dee. You’re smart, funny, kind and I didn’t realize it until you came down those stairs but you’re the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
“Wow. I never knew you felt that way.”
“I didn’t either until I got home and saw the pictures. Do you remember that night?”
I’d never forget that night. My mom came into my room and sat on my bed. She rubbed my back and told me that my prom date was here and it wasn’t Tyler. She helped me get dressed and put my make up on.
I was almost a hundred percent sure I was going to walk down that stairs to find my dad or, by some miracle of airline miles, Marcus in a suit.
But it was Julian.
He was grinning at me, holding a corsage to match my dress. We posed for pictures. My mom cried and my dad joked about using his shotgun if Julian kept me out late. We went to prom and stayed long enough to make Tyler jealous. We were crowned prom king and queen, but I’m sure it had more to do with Julian’s lingering popularity at our high school and everyone knowing what Tyler did to me. He took me out for pizza and we sat in the parking lot and talked until it was time to take me home.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Of course I remember. That was one of the best nights of my life.”
“Me too. I started thinking about you in a way I never had before.” He sighed. “And I haven’t stopped.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that night?”
“I wanted to but…” he trailed off.
“But what?”
“You were seventeen.”
“So, you were twenty.”
“And…you were seventeen.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Well, I wasn’t seventeen at MoMA.”
“No, you definitely weren’t.” He bit his bottom lip with a wistful expression. “When I saw the subject of my favorite photo in the world standing in front of my second favorite photo in the world, it just…it felt like fate.” He turned his body to face me. “You were even more beautiful than I remembered. And different somehow. I can’t explain it but walking around that museum, talking to you and learning about all the amazing things you were doing and seeing. I felt like I wanted to do and see those things with you. I wanted to experience the world through your eyes. I wanted to share my world with you. When you had to go to class, it felt like someone was squeezing my chest. For weeks I was afraid to travel anywhere without cell reception, because I was afraid of missing your call, but you never called.”
