The Beginning of After

and shiny. He’d lost more weight and gotten kind of tan. He looked about five years older.
    And then there was me, dressed as sushi.
    “Hi, David.”
    His eyes swept up my costume, but stopped before they got to my face.
    “Don’t tell me. Yellowtail, right?”
    “How did you know?”
    David smiled sideways. “In California, there’s sushi everywhere. I ate a lot of it.”
    “There you are!” I heard Meg’s voice behind me and spun around. She was panting. “I thought you were with me, I’m sorry. It was so crowded it took me a few minutes to realize—”
    Meg caught sight of David and her mouth dropped open.
    “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked angrily. It was what I had planned to say, once I’d decided which was weirder: David showing up like this, or David knowing what kind of fish I was supposed to be.
    “I’m here to see Laurel,” said David, now raising his eyes to mine. They were perfectly round and completely open, telling me it was okay to let my gaze lock on. “I just got in tonight and I went to your house . . . to see Masher . . . and nobody’s home. And I knew there was a dance here so I figured I could find you. . . .”
    He wanted to see his dog. Well, of course. I dropped my eyes away.
    “Laurel, maybe you can give him your house keys? Your grandmother’s probably still at my place.”
    I looked at Meg, then behind her at the lights of the school as they seemed to quiver from the energy of the dance. Music boomed from the gym, where no doubt the rest of our sushi platter was looking for us, and Gavin was wandering around as a big pair of chopsticks with nothing to pick up. Joe was miles away ripping ticket stubs at the movie theater, and I had nobody hoping to see me.
    “Meg, just go in,” I said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just go. To the dance. I’ll . . .” I glanced at David. “I’ll go home with him.”
    “But you’ll miss the fun,” she said weakly.
    “Not really,” I said. “And you’ll have more of it without me there.”
    Meg tilted her head as if she was about to shake it in denial, but stopped. She knew I was right.
    “What do I tell the girls?”
    “Tell them I realized I wasn’t ready for a big social event yet. It’s kind of the truth anyway.”
    “Let me go with you,” she said hesitantly.
    “No, I want you to stay.”
    “I promised Nana . . .”
    “She’ll be okay with this, I swear.”
    Meg narrowed her eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
    “Please just go. I’ll fill you in later.” I wasn’t sure if that was true.
    Meg gave me a confused, dirty look before walking back to school without saying good-bye. I watched her rectangle of white Styrofoam grow smaller on her way across the grass, then turned back to David.
    “Thank you,” he said. “I really can’t wait to see Masher.”
    “He can’t wait to see you,” I replied, and started following David to his father’s Jaguar, which was parked in the faculty lot and definitely not shiny anymore.
    We drove to my house in silence. My costume was wedged in the Jaguar’s backseat, and I fought the urge to climb back there with it. Anything to not be sitting silently next to David, dressed head to toe in white like a gigantic neon sign of dorkiness.
    When we passed the Kaufmans’ house on the way to mine, David craned his neck to look up at it, not bothering to hide the pain in his eyes.
    We pulled into my driveway, the Volvo still absent, but he didn’t turn off the car. He just stared straight ahead at our garage door.
    “Sometimes I play that night over in my head, with things going differently,” he said. It came out sounding distracted, dreamy.
    I didn’t answer.
    “You know, like, instead of going to Kevin’s to piss off my parents, I do the decent thing and go with them to Freezy’s. We would have had to go in two cars.”
    He looked at me, and I tried to hide the shock on my face.
    “It might have changed everything,” he said.
    I thought of my Wondering Well. It had been Suzie’s suggestion. Every time I felt myself drowning in what-ifs, I wrote them down on a piece of paper, folded it up, threw it in an old mayonnaise jar, and screwed the lid back on tight. It was a way of getting them out, letting them go.
    My Wondering Well was getting full, and I’d need to find another jar soon.
    Swallowing hard, I finally said, “It might have. But it didn’t.”
    David sighed and nodded, then turned the car off and sat