venturing backward: homecoming fantasy (audio) (written December 7, 2014)
a post from my old blog “venturing backward”
At the dawn of senior year, I was at the Musson elementary school playground. It was the first week of August 2005. Kate, Brad, Chockley, and I were sitting in a circle at the top of a slide. We were playing Ten Fingers. And, for anyone relying on the scandalous, it was damn hard to get my fingers down.
The longer we played, the more jealous I grew of how experienced Chockley was in the business of teenage life. The more regretful I became about wasting a whole semester on fanatical religion.
But it didn’t matter too much now.
Because with Graham and Chockley, I was a regular in Jess’s basement. We’d sit around on her couches – watching stupid movies, drinking Propel, eating Cheez-Its, blurting out cuss words that her parents sometimes heard.
If we got bored, then we’d get up, head for the cars, and drive to Best Buy or Taco Bell. We’d eat burritos and cinnamon twists in the Target parking lot on Rochester Road. Sometimes we’d bust out the old faithful – N64 – and play some Mario Kart.
A couple days after playing Ten Fingers, we went on an interstate excursion. Brad, Jess, Kate, Chockley, and I drove down to Cedar Point in Ohio. Cedar Point was an amusement park full of rides like The Raptor, Millennium Force, and Power Tower.
The whole way back that afternoon, we sang along together. We worked through the entirety of Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticismalbum.
We all knew every word. It was our high school anthem.
I had just gotten back from a month in Germany. My girlfriend had dumped me in the hallway of a Berlin youth hostel. I was still a bit upset about it.
Graham found the whole thing disappointing. Mostly because he had never met her. So he went on calling her “Mystery Woman” instead of her real name. He told me I’d be okay without Mystery Woman.
And I was recovering fine. On a few nights that August, I had Brad and Graham over for sleepovers. Graham would bring backpacks full of toilet paper. We would leave the house around midnight and go throw it all over some trees in somebody’s yard. Then we would ding-dong ditch.
Once, an angry-dad type caught us. He yelled at us and we bolted. He got in his car and chased us down. We disappeared between the houses. He turned off his headlights and coasted silently down the roads. He was clearly hoping to catch us carelessly popping out of the dark suburban yards.
We couldn’t allow him to keep us trapped in this subdivision. To escape, we were ducking behind bushes. Creeping around the corners of people’s homes. Sprinting past trampolines and across the concrete. Jolting over the road just before his shadowy car turned a corner. Eventually, we made our way to Musson Elementary School.
It was a refuge. We stayed there on the swings for a while. We laughed and chatted until we were satisfied he’d probably given up. And then we made our way back to my house to play Halo.
We didn’t look for aliens anymore. But there was a sense of agnosticism about them. You didn’t just come out and deny their existence.
Deep down, I knew the aliens were watching us during our midnight subdivision adventures. They were hiding behind houses while we walked down the streets with our backpacks full of toilet paper. They were lurking in the trees when we jumped late at night on my trampoline. They were crouching down on the top of Adams High School as we walked down the half-lit Highlander Highway. They could see us through the windows as we sat on the couches in Jess’s basement.
One night that August, I fell asleep in Brad’s basement while several others around me stayed awake chatting. I was listening to a lot of Jimmy Eat World in those days, and a lyric came to mind as I drifted out of sleep: “I fall asleep with my friends around me / only place I know I feel safe / I’m gonna call this home.”
I played that song in my car the whole drive home that night.
The dawn of senior year – it felt that way.
I had a sense it was all ending because I was about to be a 12thgrader. Then - if I got in - I was going to Michigan State. I was going to double major in History and English. I didn’t know who else in my social group would join me in East Lansing. And that seemed scary.
I'd never even been to East Lansing.
But it was still a long ways off.
Right now, there was a girl named Renee. She was a year younger than me, about to start 11thgrade. She could sing. She was in musicals. She was on color guard. She read a lot of books. Sometimes she wore her long, brown hair a little curly and it made me want to die. She was beautiful in a way that left me feeling enchanted any time I was around her.
I had never felt so strongly about anyone before. Not Jess. Not Tanya. Definitely not Isabella.
I felt that, if we kissed, my entire world in Rochester would simply cease to exist. There would be nothing left of it but the two of us. Not even the aliens would survive the emanating shock waves.
I had a fantasy where maybe we went to Homecoming together. She’d be in a beautiful dress with her wonderful brown hair.
I'd never been to a Homecoming. I wanted her to be my reason to go.
I hung out a lot that August with our mutual friends, Olivia and Sarah. One time, the three of us drove south to Clawson to see some of Olivia’s screamo-band people and also this cool girl named Nicole.
At Nicole’s place, Sarah used her piano skills to play Death Cab’s new song What Sarah Said on Nicole’s piano. I liked listening to that.
That same night, I let the girls paint all my nails, apply make-up to my face, and dress me up in girl jeans with a pink sweater. It was a funny joke at the time. We took a picture of it.
But then I had to get my 8th grade sister, Kenzi, to help me remove the nail polish. I went into her pink bedroom that night. She agreed to help me out. But I wound up sticking an open wound on my thumb straight into her nail polish remover. I screamed and she giggled at me.
Renee was forgiving about these kinds of silly mishaps.
There was a problem, though. Renee and I had a friend named Marcus. Marcus, in fact, had introduced me and Renee just a few months before I went to Germany.
Through Marcus, Renee and I had become very close friends that spring.
And Marcus had really liked Renee for a very long time. I thought he would make a move on her while I was in Germany. But I returned to find he hadn’t.
The first week of August, he and I were driving around one afternoon. He was about to go on vacation with his family, but he had a plan for once he got back. “I think I’m going to ask Reneeto Homecoming,” he confided to me.
“That’s cool,” I said. I could have vomited all over my steering wheel.
Renee was at band camp about 20 miles north of Rochester while Marcus went on vacation.
I drove up there to see her the night of August 11th. We sat together on the floor in a hallway for a while. A guy named Chris came and talked to us for a bit. I wanted him to go away so I could tell Renee how I felt. Someone took a picture of me staring him down while Renee smiled at the camera.
Eventually he went away. And I told Renee I liked her.
I knew what I was doing was going to hurt Marcus, but I couldn’t help it. Being with her, hearing her, seeing her – it left me without any questions. It gave me a mission with an acceptable degree of collateral damage.
She told me she liked me, too.
Driving southward back to Rochester on I-75 that night, I called Graham and told him about it. It was the kind of happiness that made you want to throw your cell phone out the window.
The next day, on August 12th, band camp was over and she was back in Rochester. Marcus was still on vacation for another week or so.
Renee and I drove around together for a bit in the subdivisions. We stopped the car on the side of the road. We walked for over an hour between dozens of Rochester houses and Rochester yards.
We got lost at some point. It took us a while to get back to my car. Everything looked the same.
But the whole time, we held hands – and we told each other we wanted to be together.
That night, we made out in the parking lot of Brewster Elementary School.
After I dropped her off at her house, I showed up to Brad’s with messy hair. Everyone there laughed at me knowingly. But I knew the shock waves would take care of it all.
Because Renee was my girlfriend.
She had clinched it: August 2005 was the best month of my life.
