When You Were Here

as if the words she was about to say have vaporized. She finds them somehow. “So I was going to get lunch. Do you want to join me?”
    “Yes,” I say, and within seconds I’m in the car and on my way to her.
    I find her at an outdoor café. She’s wearing big brown sunglasses pushed up on her head. The sun is bright, but she’s not shielding her eyes. She’s looking right at me as I walk toward her and sit down next to her. She’s got on a short skirt, this green corduroy skirt that she wore when we went to the movies one time last summer and sat in the back row and barely watched a scene on the screen.
    I can smell lemon-sugar lotion on her too. Her lotion, her scent.
    “I love this weather,” she says, and tilts her face to the sun. She closes her eyes and soaks in the rays, and I have free rein to look at her. At her neck, her throat, her shoulders, since she’s only wearing a tank top. Forget the library volunteering. Maybe Holland will take me to lunch every day this summer. Maybe she’ll sunbathe, and I’ll pass the days watching her.
    She opens her eyes, sees me looking at her. But she doesn’t look away, nor do I.
    “Because, you know, I’m allergic to cold.”
    “And fog,” I add, because I know this riff, I know how she feels about hot and cold, and it is so easy to slide back into our banter, our back-and-forth.
    “And any temperature below seventy degrees.”
    “And windchill.”
    “ Windchill. The worst thing ever invented.”
    “And snow. And ice.”
    “Of course. Let’s not forget ice,” she says, and mock shudders. Then the waiter comes by and asks what we want.
    She orders a sandwich, and I do the same. Same orders, same choices, same food we used to pick when we came here before. A group of friends about our age sits down at the table next to us. Two girls, two guys. One of the girls has short blond hair, the other a blue streak in her hair, and they’re laughing about no more boarding school and talking about the start of Juilliard, it sounds like.
    “So about graduation,” Holland begins.
    I hold up a hand, reflexes kicking in. “Is that why you asked me to lunch? Because I really don’t want to talk about it. I’m sure your mom already reamed me out on my voice mail.”
    “You think that’s what I’m going to do?”
    Like I have any idea what she’s going to do anymore. Like I had any clue she was going to excise me from her life after all her promises, all her words, all the ways she told me we weren’t like any other high school couple, that we were different, that we could last. She repeated all those promises, and so did I, the day she drove off to San Diego. Ibelieved all of them. Every single last one. And then, poof. She pulled her disappearing act.
    And yet, here she is, inches from me, her bare legs close enough I could run a hand over her knee, watch her shiver and smile, and then she’d ask me to do it again. My body is filled with complete emptiness and complete longing at the same time, only there’s not enough space in me for both, so they fight and argue and run masking tape down my middle to divide me.
    “I thought it was awesome. Like, the kind of epic thing people will be talking about for years. Remember the time Danny Kellerman told us all to eff off? ”
    “I believe the words were fuck everyone , Holland.” I cannot resist teasing her on this front. She has never sworn. She has never lobbed the F-bomb.
    “Bleep,” she says. “Besides, you didn’t miss much. I mean, you were at my graduation dinner. It’s just a chance for people to tell embarrassing stories about you.”
    “Like the time you threw your copy of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying into the pool, calling it As I Lay Failing ?” I say, recounting the stories that were shared one year ago when Holland finished high school and my mom and I joined her family for dinner.
    “That is the cruelest novel ever assigned to high school seniors.”
    “Or how you’d announce every few months that you had a new plan for what you wanted to study in college. Some days it was environmental science; some days it was Frenchhistory,” I say, prompting another trip back in time, and I don’t know why I’m doing this, why I’m acting as if we’re still those same people who went to dinner together with our families a year ago. Except that it feels good to remember when I was happy.
    Holland and I were together the summer before my senior year at Terra Linda and her freshman