The Leftover Club Read online

  It was on one of these Saturdays that we ended up at that neglected playground with a bag full of candies and a bottle of orange soda to share. Within minutes we lay on our backs on that dusty merry-go-round amidst empty candy wrappers, staring up at the sky and using our feet to propel it in an endless circle.

  We discussed our favorite show (The Incredible Hulk) and the music we had recently discovered (ELO) courtesy of his AM/FM handheld transistor radio that followed him everywhere he went, hanging by its strap from his handlebar. It now sat next to our heads on the merry-go-round, blasting hits from the Top-40 station. We predicted which would top that week’s America’s Top 40 as we sang along with all the songs we knew, with lyrics so far beyond our maturity level we didn’t even understand what we sang.

  After I belted out a Donna Summer song with gusto, he handed me the soda to wet my whistle as a reward.

  “You sing good,” he praised.

  “Well,” I corrected.

  “Whatever,” he dismissed.

  I giggled as I sucked on a sweet candy stick coated with colored sugar that was supposed to taste like fruit. I wanted to tell him I was sorry that his dad flaked out again, but I learned a long time ago that he didn’t like to talk about that kind of thing. Instead it was time for Operation: Distraction. “So what movie do you want to see?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not really in the mood to see a movie.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to see my dad,” he said.

  I turned my head to look at him. That softly worded confession was unexpected. I saw a tear at the corner of his eye.

  “Why doesn’t he want me, Roni?”

  I turned over on my side and propped up on my elbow. I didn’t know what to say, or do.

  He turned on his side to face me, mirroring my posture by propping up on his elbow. “Sometimes I think you’re the lucky one. Your dad didn’t leave you on purpose.”

  “Still hurts,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said.

  “And your dad can change his mind someday. He can come back.”

  His dark eyes were big and sad. “He won’t.”

  I didn’t know what to do so I reached for his hand, just to let him know I’d always be there for him, no matter what. He smiled. So did I.

  He pulled himself up into a sitting position, hooking one leg around one of the poles. “It’s your turn. From last time,” he said.

  I laughed. Since we had been coming to this playground all year, we had to get creative with our games. We played truth or dare like most kids, but with this old merry-go-round, we came up with another game, “Truth, Dare or Puke.”

  The object of the game was for the askee to sit in the middle of the creaky old merry-go-round while the asker spun it as fast as they could. While the askee was disoriented, the asker would level their challenge… to tell an embarrassing truth, to agree to an even more embarrassing dare, or to stumble off into the corner and toss his or her cookies.

  Naturally the longer it took you to answer the question or respond to the dare, the more likely you were to puke. It ensured absolutely honesty and immediate compliance. I learned one of his most embarrassing moments in school involved laughing so hard milk came out of his nose. He learned that one of my most embarrassing moments included farting in church. He accepted my dare to act out Greased Lightning, and I accepted his to do a knock and run at the crabbiest neighbor’s house.

  As we got older, our dares got a little naughtier. We tested out curse words and shoplifted candy and vandalized a newly laid section of sidewalk. During our last game, he dared me to show ‘mine’ if he showed me ‘his.’ The idea of being in any way naked in front of a boy was unthinkable. I tried to change for truth, but he was empowered by the one thing I refused to do and kept spinning me around the merry-go-round, laughing so hard I thought he might wet himself. Thankfully I finally puked and it was over, and even more thankfully we had already put a rule in place that we could never repeat a dare.

  So I felt more confident as I climbed off the merry-go-round and started to spin him where he sat. After a few turns, I asked, “Truth, Dare or Puke?”

  “Truth!” he said as he held onto the bar.

  I thought for a moment, but then decided to go with an oldie but a goody. “Who’s your latest crush?”

  I couldn’t wait to hear how he answered this oft repeated challenge between the two of us, as his answers had ranged anywhere from Judy Jetson to Miss Maloney, our fourth grade English teacher. He always answered honestly because he knew I never judged. How could I, with my moony-eyed crushes over teen idols named Davy, Leif and Chachi?

  Only this particular day, he hesitated. That was new. He looked away as he held on. “Dare!”

  I laughed. After as much as he tortured me last time around, there was no way I’d let him off the hook. “No way! You chose truth.” I spun him even faster. “You’re gonna puke!” I warned with a big grin. “Better tell me who!”

  “You!” he finally admitted.

  I lost my footing and fell right on my face. I spit dirt from my mouth as I lifted up from the ground. He scooted to the edge and stalled the ride with his feet. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded as I rose to my feet. I wore red shorts and a multi-colored stripped tank top, all of which was now covered in dirt. He jumped off the merry-go-round to help me brush it off, but I backed up immediately. “I’ve got it,” I mumbled. I hopped up on the merry-go-round before he could say anything else. “My turn!” I declared as I took my place in the sacred circle.

  He hooked his shoulder under one of the bars and started to spin me around. Once we were going pretty good, he said, “Truth, Dare or Puke?”

  Fearing he might want to know who my crush was, or worse… if I had a crush on him, too, I had no choice but to opt for dare.

  I had to hold on tight as he spun me even more out of control. Then, surprisingly, he hopped up onto the merry-go-round and scooted to where I hunched in the middle. His eyes glittered as he said, “Kiss me.”

  My mouth fell open. Was he serious? We had lived in the same house together for going on three years, living and interacting much like brother and sister. Now in one afternoon he told me he had a crush on me and he wanted to kiss me?

  For a girl who barely got Valentine’s cards, this was all very confusing. I was growing dizzier by the second, and I suspected it had little to do with the child’s ride we were on.

  As the merry-go-round still spun and Dylan still waited, I realized that I had two options. I could scramble off the merry-go-round and hopefully puke out of Dylan’s line of vision, or I could just kiss him.

  So I leaned over and kissed his cheek, just like I did my mom or his mom, my aunt Daphne or my cousin Charles.

  Dylan’s eyes were dark as I pulled away. As I lost myself in them, I knew he was none of those people. He wasn’t my cousin, or my brother, or even just my friend. He was now a boy. And not just any boy, he was the first boy in my life to admit he had a crush on me.

  And I felt exactly the same.

  It was a very significant moment.

  Even though we were spinning, it felt as though time had slowed down to a crawl. When he leaned forward, I did too, until our lips met tentatively as the world spun around us. His lips felt warm and firm on mine. It felt so good that our passionate peck lingered, just like we had seen on movies and TV. We didn’t pull apart until the spinning wheel finally slowed to a stop.

  “Ew, gross!” we heard a boy say, and we scooted apart instantly. A group of fifth grade boys who regularly made life miserable for us happened to be riding by the church at exactly the wrong moment. “You’re making out with your sister!” he said, as if that was the grossest thought ever.

  There was only one thought worse: “Your fat sister!” the other boy said.

  When I turned back to Dylan, I saw that he had flushed deep red. He scurried off the merry-go-round. “She’s not my sister!” he
screamed back at our tormentors. He looked back at me, as if seeing me through brand new eyes. “And I didn’t kiss her!”

  He turned away and ran home.

  10: Who Says You Can’t Go Home

  September 21, 2007

  Bryan and I sat together on my sofa, both of us in green face masks, wrists deep in a big bowl of popcorn as we watched an old Audrey Hepburn movie. Since Meghan had elected to spend her birthday weekend with her dad, I had my apartment to myself. And since I had been utterly depressed about it, Bryan took pity on me and announced we were long overdue for an Epic Movie Marathon Sleepover.

  Scattered across my coffee table was a decimated pizza box and a stack of DVDs full of beautiful, elegant people, many of whom were long dead. They were still the best odds for romance we had, given we were both currently single. Perhaps that was why he was singularly focused on going to our 20-year reunion. He got a perverse thrill figuring out which classmates had finally come out of the closet, especially if they had contributed at any point to his own oppression as a gay teen.

  “You just want Dylan to switch teams. Admit it.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe he hits for both. It’s 2007, it’s not exactly unheard of.” I shook my head. I was sure of relatively little in my life, but one thing I knew I could take to the bank with 100-percent certainty was that Dylan Fenn was absolutely, positively, indisputably heterosexual.

  Bryan wasn’t necessarily convinced. “Think about it. He’s almost unnaturally gorgeous and yet he’s never been married or in a long-term relationship. He wears pretty girls on his sleeve in some endless quest to prove his status as a hyper-stud, even all these years later. I’m just saying, an argument could be made.”

  “Maybe all he needs is ten minutes alone with you,” I teased before blowing him a kiss.

  “Now there’s an idea,” he pondered wistfully. “How’s that for a 20-Year-Theme? The Leftover Club Finally Fucks Fenn.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I think you have a better shot at that than I do. But I already told you, I’m not going.”

  “Party pooper,” he accused with a glare. “We could get the whole gang together. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Ride Again.”

  I laughed. “Don’t you mean the Three Musketeers? We’re down one member from last reunion, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. ‘Charlotte.’” He laughed. “Did you ever think one of us would ever have a go at him?”

  “Nope,” I mumbled.

  He leaned up and opened my laptop.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m just looking. There’s no harm in looking, is there?” He opened up a website devoted solely for hooking up with former classmates.

  I shrugged before I leaned my head on his shoulder to watch him scroll through all the names to find our high school. Once he found our school and our year, he typed “Olive Young” in the search box. Her photo popped up, a face we hadn’t seen in more than twenty years.

  Olive didn’t last our sophomore year, opting instead to move to Africa and be with her folks during our second semester. She never returned. Instead of college, Olive went to live with her hippie parents in Central America, where they had gone to build a school. She wrote the Leftovers for a while, but those ended when her family went to Tibet to study with the monks. After that everyone lost touch, as you often do after high school.

  The name under her photo was a hyperlink, so Bryan clicked on it. It took us to her website. She was an artist living in Northern California. “She actually did it,” Bryan said with a grin.

  Olive had always wanted to be an artist, and now it looked like she had finally gotten her chance to live her dream.

  After what happened with Dylan, we were all sure she’d never draw again.

  11: I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On

  January 29, 1986

  “You ask him.”

  “It’s your idea. You ask him.”

  “I can’t ask him.”

  “Then I guess he isn’t going to be asked.”

  Olive and I stopped fighting to stare each other down that Wednesday afternoon in my bedroom. What she was proposing was ridiculous. Impossible. I shook my head. “He’d never go for it. It’s just too weird.”

  “It’s not weird,” she snapped. “It’s art.”

  “Well, I’m not asking him. And that’s that.”

  “Not asking me what?” we heard Dylan say from the doorway. Apparently our discussion carried two doors down the hall to disturb him as he did his homework.

  Olive blushed bright red. This was her golden opportunity to ask him her monumental favor, if she found the courage to do so. She took a deep breath, which I ended up mirroring.

  “Some artists in my class have been invited to share their work during an exhibit at the museum to showcase new talent.”

  He leaned against the door frame. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  Her blush deepened. She nodded. “I do a lot of natural stuff. Still life. Landscape. That kind of thing.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  She took another breath. “I want to draw you.”

  His eyebrow arched. “Me? Why?”

  The answer was obvious to us Leftovers. But Dylan seemed genuinely curious. “Because…,” she started. “You’re an athlete who concentrates on perfecting your physique. And since you’re, like, Roni’s brother, we figured it might be easier to ask you than approach someone we didn’t know.”

  “We?” he asked as he glanced my way.

  “I told her you wouldn’t go for it,” I clarified, just in case he was piecing it together that I might want to see more of his body. It was a body I had to wrench my eyes away from before he could see the rush of hopeless teenaged hormones the mere thought of it inspired.

  His eyes narrowed. “Shows what you know. I’d love to do it,” he told Olive.

  She sputtered in spite of herself as he vaulted onto my bed, crossing one denim-clad leg over the other as he ripped the band T-shirt from his torso. I panicked as he unfastened the button on his jeans.

  “What are you doing?” I squeaked.

  “You wanted to see the male form, right?”

  With confidence of a man twice his age, he slid down that zipper until he revealed his taunt abdomen. A thin, dark line of hair pointed straight toward the band on his red underwear that peaked out over the edge of his jeans. It reminded me in vivid detail that he was actually undressing himself on my bed. “That’s good,” I said immediately.

  His eyebrow lifted. “You sure?” he asked, before adding, “Sis?”

  The edge in his voice made my eyes travel up his body to meet his. Was he mad? His hard eyes remained locked with mine as Olive scrambled to open her sketch pad to a blank page. Within a heartbeat she used a charcoal pencil to draw the bold lines of his body, as if she was trying to get as much done before Dylan had the presence of mind to get dressed and call the whole thing off.

  But he looked more than comfortable as he slid one hand along his tummy, hooking his forefinger in his jeans. The other arm he propped over his head, drawing attention to his thick, wavy hair and those soulful dark eyes.

  They were, in fact, even more lethal than the beckoning bulge in his jeans. Those lazily hooded eyes remained locked with mine, as if issuing yet another dare.

  “Kiss me,” I could hear an echo from the past command.

  Thank God Olive was there or I might have been sorely tempted to do just that.

  But then again, if Olive wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be on my bed at all. He’d spend the four hours between the last bell of school and our moms coming home locked up in his room, blasting his heavy metal from an entirely different world. In order to escape the snare of his unrelenting gaze, I turned to my boom box and pushed “play” on the mix tape he had made for me. The salacious sounds of W.A.S.P. filled the room, which really didn’t help my conundrum. I parked myself right behind Olive and focused, intently, on her progress instead.


  I would like to say that the whole experience got easier as the minutes ticked by; that the longer he sat, half-naked, in front of us, the more mundane it became.

  But the longer he lay there on my bed, the more my jumbled thoughts returned to every instance we’d ever shared between us, from a kiss on a forgotten church playground to the dance just months before, when I felt that body pressed tightly against mine.

  How Olive was able to stay focused and work was beyond me. Her hand didn’t even tremble as she captured every vivid detail of the teen dream before us. Half the sophomore class, probably male and female, would have killed to be in our shoes at that very moment. It felt as though it was dragging on forever, but then the light of the day had faded and it was going on six o’clock. Our mothers would be home soon, and I had to get dinner started. Begrudgingly Olive put away her work for the day, gathering her belongings so she could make that long trek home. Dylan reached for his shirt and slid off my bed.

  “I’ll drive you,” he offered my friend, who – though she had spent hours staring at his half-naked form without shame – blushed at the idea of being in a confined car with him. She stammered her thanks and followed him from my room, sending a stark look of terror over her shoulder at me.

  I would have offered to go with her, but the same idea scared me shitless as well. I used the excuse that I needed to start dinner to stay behind. I was just adding the tomato sauce to the sautéed onion and pepper when he returned ten minutes later.

  He walked into the kitchen where I worked, grabbed a can of soda from the fridge, and then walked over to stand directly behind me to inspect my work. “Smells good,” he said in a low voice that tightened my nerves further in a knot.

  “Thanks,” I murmured. I cursed the tremor in my hand as I stirred.

  “Can I have a taste?” he asked softly.