“Down, down, up-down-up,” she’d say, encircling my wrist with her fingers, moving my hand to the beat. “There you go. Just like that.”
Mindy wasn’t especially pretty, wasn’t one of the girls Lou and I speculated about on Friday nights. She had a sweet round face; her dark hair was frizzy and a little wild. But it wasn’t really about her looks; there was just this current running between us, a really strong connection. Her absence always felt abrupt and unfair when we parted at the end of the day, like somebody had unplugged the radio in the middle of a good song.
And then one afternoon that spring—we’d just put The Sapling to bed—she matter-of-factly informed me that her parents were going away for a long weekend to celebrate their anniversary. We were standing in the hallway, not far from the main exit.
“If you’re not busy, maybe you could come hang out with me.”
I was so startled, I laughed out loud.
“Hang out with you?”
“Yeah.” Her face was completely serious. “Bring your guitar. We could jam a little.”
“Mindy.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I can’t come to your house.”
“It’s okay.” She put her hand on my arm. “I won’t tell anyone.”
I jerked my arm away, more forcefully than I meant to.
“Please don’t touch me.” The hallway was empty, but I felt exposed and vulnerable. “Not in here.”
She hung her head for a moment. There were tears in her eyes when she looked up.
“You’re such an asshole,” she said. Then she turned and walked away, the guitar case banging against her leg.
Mindy was cold to me for the rest of the semester. She started calling me Mr. Weede again, in an overly formal voice, and ignored me at the Sapling publication party. She didn’t even say goodbye on the last day of school. I was sad that I’d missed my chance with her, but I knew I’d dodged a bullet.
I did run into her at graduation, in the happy chaos after the ceremony. I was wandering through the crowd on the football field, searching for students to congratulate, when I heard a familiar voice.
“Mr. Weede! Over here!”
She smiled when I spotted her, as if all was forgiven, and beckoned me to meet her parents. They were a mismatched pair—the father big and swarthy, the mother wan and petite—but somehow Mindy looked like both of them.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” her mother said. “You did such a terrific job with the magazine.”
“Your daughter did all the work,” I said. “I just take the credit.”
“She talks about you all the time,” her father told me. “Mr. Weede this, Mr. Weede that. You made a big impression.”
“She’s a great kid,” I said. “I’m really gonna miss her.”
Mindy was blushing, her mortarboard slightly askew.
“I’m gonna miss you too.” Her voice broke a little. “Thanks for everything.”
We stared at each other. It was still right there, that current humming between us. I’ve only felt that electricity with one other person in my entire life.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Good luck in college.”
We hugged for the first time right there on the football field, right in front of her parents. I could feel her body through the flimsy gown, and I didn’t want to let go.
Three days later she rang my doorbell at ten in the morning, and I invited her in. There was no reason not to. She was eighteen, a consenting adult, no longer a high school student.
We only had two months together, but they were good ones. She was working as a waitress that summer, covering lunch and dinner shifts, so mornings were our time. I never knew for sure if she was coming over—she liked to surprise me—so most days I just sat around after breakfast, drinking coffee, wondering if she would show up. And then she went off to college, and that was the end of it.
Believe me, I know how shady this sounds. She came on to me. We waited until she graduated. It was beautiful. No one got hurt. It’s all true, but I would laugh at one of my male teachers if he got caught with a student （even a former student） and tried to make the same excuses.
You’re the adult, I would say, right before I fired his sorry ass. You have all the power. It’s up to you to do the right thing.
For what it’s worth, that was the only time I ever crossed the line. I met Alice a few months later, and we’ve been together ever since. I’m not saying I’ve been an angel this whole time, or even a very good husband. There were a handful of affairs over the years, but they were always with age-appropriate people, and most of them weren’t very serious. All of it stopped the day my wife got sick.
Mindy and I lost track of each other for a while, but we recently reconnected on Facebook. She’s in her late fifties now, a married woman with three grown kids. I visit her page sometimes, usually late at night when I’m feeling nostalgic.
There’s a photo I like to look at, a black-and-white throwback from the talent show in 1979. Mindy’s sitting on a stool, strumming the guitar she used to let me play, her mouth open in the shape of an O. She looks so young and serious in the spotlight, a stray curl falling across her forehead, and I remember how alive I felt on those summer mornings, the agony of waiting and not knowing, the coffee going cold in the mug, and the way my heart jumped when the doorbell rang.
Lily Chu
I was a little early for my meeting with Dr. Flick—she was helping me out with my college essay—so I took a seat in the reception area, right across from Front Desk Diane. That’s what everybody called her. It was originally meant to distinguish her from Attendance Lady Diane, who retired when I was a sophomore. It was so people didn’t have to say Black Diane and white Diane, which would have been even weirder. Front Desk Diane was the white one.
“How are you, honey?” She called everyone honey. “You have a good summer?”
That was a complicated question. Most of my summer had sucked—I was stuck in Green Meadow, working as a lifeguard at the town pool, which sounds okay but was actually incredibly boring.
The end of summer was a lot better, because I went to a two-week code camp in New Hampshire and fell in love with a person named Clem. It was officially a Girls’ Code Camp—that was the only reason my parents let me go—but Clem is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. We flirted for twelve days and finally hooked up on the last night, both of us feeling stupid for having waited so long, wasting all that precious time. It was an amazing experience, but also really confusing, because I’d always assumed that I was straight, not that I’d had a lot of practice. And now I was back at school, with all kinds of work to do, and absolutely no motivation. All I could think about was Clem. They were a sophomore at Wesleyan, and I had no idea when or if we’d be able to see each other again.
“Pretty good,” I said. “How about yours?”
“Quiet.” Diane shrugged. “I spent a week at the beach with my sister and her family, but that was about it.”
“How’s your father?”
“Same.” Her face turned sad. “Maybe a little worse.”
Front Desk Diane’s father had Alzheimer’s and lived in a memory care facility. I knew this because we’d done a fair amount of chatting during my junior year, when I had gastrointestinal issues and needed to see the nurse on a semi-regular basis. For some reason they made you check in at the main office first.