Today is Kevin's birthday. Had he survived the accident, he'd be 35. I think of him every day; I don't want him to be lost, to slip away into the ether like some forgotten character in a misplaced book. So,I keep him – what vestiges linger after so many years – in mind. It's a shame that I didn't know him longer, that I don't have more to hold on to. It's a shame, too, that others didn't have the opportunity to know him. Previously, I haven't introduced any of the flashback episodes – I prefer to let them stand on their own – however, I feel this one warrants some context. The following piece (as are the other flashback episodes in this blog) is an excerpt from the memior I was writing during grad achool. It's taken from the first chapter, which is written from my 17-year-old perspective, and details the events of May 25, 1991. It leaves off where my memory of that night ends (the next chapter picks up when I awake in the hospital).
The Blue Canoe – a 1980 Country Squire station wagon – rolls up to a spot in the lot outside Tim's townhouse.
"Shaggy!" I'm out the door and bounding down the steps to greet him.
For the longest while, Kevin seemed mildly annoyed when I called him Shaggy. I'd been trying to figure out for weeks who it was that he reminded me of, and it just popped out one day, not long after I met him. We were in the band room after school, before Jazz Band practice, when he said something distinctly Scooby-Dooish. From behind the old beat up piano, before I was aware the association had been made in my head, the word popped out of my mouth – "Shaggy!" The name had been right there, hiding under my tongue, but I just couldn't seem to get to it. And then, Zoiks! , it hit me in the head and knocked the word right out before I even realized that was it.
Apparently others saw the resemblance, and from that day, the name stuck. Kevin was none too happy about it. Finally, one day, when he seemed to be genuinely angry after the fourth person in as many minutes passed by him and said, 'Hey, Shaggy!' I said, "Kevin, if it really bugs you, I'll stop calling you that."
He said he didn't mind a bit when I said it, but when the moniker caught on with everybody else who knew him, and more or less replaced his given name, that's when it began to bother him a little. I could call him Shaggy. Everyone else was told to shut up.
The affectionate nickname was not my only transgression against Kevin's name. My first offense was when Mike, a mutual friend, introduced us.
"Vicki, this is Kevin Arrowsmith," Mike had said.
My face lit up in recognition; but before I could ask, "You mean, like the band?!" Mike quickly jumped in.
"Different spelling. A-r-r-o-w, not A-e-r-o".
"Ah," I'd said, still smiling like an idiot at the similarity.
Fortunately, Kevin managed to look past my doofosity, and we became good friends.
Kevin's got a great sense of humor. Good Counsel's dress code isn't specific about ties, and Kevin often wears the uniform tie from his after-school job at Giant to school – dark blue, with big white G's, the word GIANT written across each in red lettering. I once asked him, "What's up with the Giant tie, Kevin?" He just smiled at me and said, "Ever notice where a tie points?"
"Shotgun!" I yell, and go for the dingy silver door handle on Kevin's car.
"No way!" Tim squeaks, close behind me. "You always get shotgun!"
"That's because I'm cuter than you are," I say smugly, and open the door.
There's a sharp shove in my back, and I lose my grip on the handle. Tim pushes me aside and scrambles for the door.
"Bastard!" I regain my footing and shove him back. "Bastards in the back! That means you!"
Tim laughs, grabs my hands so I can't open the door. "Nuh-uh! You!"
I wrestle free of him. "Ok, Kevin, who rides shotgun?"
"Aaaw, man! That's not fair!" Tim says.
I cross my arms, give Kevin my best pouty face.
"That's cheating! That's so not fair! C'mon, Kev!" he pleads, probably hoping to win Kevin over with some testosterone-imbued innuendo of male-bonding.
Kevin looks at Tim, then at me, then back at Tim. He shrugs. "Like you'd pick any different?"
"Thought so," I smile, and hop in front.
Another sudden shove at my back, I'm pressed to the inside of the open door. Tim scurries in behind me. He sits on the broad bench car seat, grinning up at me, more like Garfield than the Cheshire Cat.
"Fine, be a pain," I say, and slide in beside him. "Now you've got to sit in the middle! Ha!"
"Amazon bitch," Tim mutters under his breath.
"Keebler Elf," I say.
"Bite me."
"You wish."
Kevin laughs at us and gets back into the driver's side. He puts the key into the ignition, but doesn't turn the car on.
"Seatbelts," he says.
I tug on the pale blue shoulder harness to demonstrate it is fastened. "Way ahead of ya." I know that Kevin will not budge unless everyone has their seatbelts on. I always wear one, anyway.
I look over at Tim. "Ha! You don't have one!" The seatbelt for the center front seat is buried somewhere in the deep crevice between the seat and its back.
Kevin looks down at Tim's lack of seatbelt. He jerks his thumb toward the back seat. "Ok, in back."
"Fine," Tim finally relents, and hops over the seat into the back. "But if I've got to sit back here, so do you!" he says, and tries to pull me over with him.
My seatbelt holds me in place. I stick out my tongue at him. "Saved by the seatbelt!" I say triumphantly, and we pull out on to Bowie Mill Road.
On the way to the music store, Tim and I explain our plans to form a band to Kevin. He's in. By the time we arrive at Lakeforest, the mall is just about to close. We manage to sneak into Sam Goody and browse the sheet music for about fifteen minutes before an acne-faced clerk with long stringy hair chases us out of the store.
"We're closing up," he says, after not-so-subtly clearing his throat to get our attention. Kevin, Tim, and I are deeply immersed in a discussion of the musical genius of Led Zeppelin as we leaf through an anthology of their greatest hits.
I peer down the long aisles of shrink-wrapped tapes and CDs and check the front of the store. Another bored-looking clerk hangs onto the bottom of a large metal gate, which he has pulled half-way down over the store's opening into the eerily vacant mall.
I buy sheet music for a few songs I've been wanting to learn – though I'm disappointed not to find any arrangements by George Winston – but we haven't found anything the three of us agree on, and decide to come back tomorrow, when we'll have more time to peruse the offerings.
Walking out of the air-conditioned mall into the unusually warm night is only slightly unpleasant; the sweltering heat of the day has disintegrated into thick, humid night air that clings to our skin, but it is no longer unbearable. Once I'm over the initial shock of the transition from artificially cold to unnaturally hot, it's really not so bad. Somebody mentions a carnival of some sort going on tonight, right across Rockville Pike from the mall, at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. It wasn't the county fair; we knew that wasn't until late August.
The three of us, along with my friend Mary, had stopped by a small carnival held at a golf course in Olney last weekend, and we'd had a good time. Kevin fed Mary and I quarters as we bought chance after chance to throw darts at a corkboard covered with three rows of brightly colored balloons. Finally, we'd hit enough of them to claim our prize – a black and white poster depicting a shirtless, impeccably-chiseled guy in low-slung jeans, over the caption "All Men Are NOT Created Equal".
Kevin looked genuinely disgusted. "You mean I paid for that?"
"Well, you also got to laugh at our lousy dart-throwing abilities," I said.
"They can laugh all they want," Mary said, leering at our prize with a salacious grin that looked almost obscenely misplaced on her otherwise angelic features – sky blue eyes and pale skin surrounded by a halo of blond hair. "I don't care. This guy is hot!"
Mary and I immediately dubbed the poster guy "Derek". It just seemed like the name a hot guy would have. Looking at the poster, it certainly fit him. We'd carried Derek around as Kevin and Tim glared balefully at him, and had a custody battle over him on the way home in the car. I'd get to keep Derek for this month, and Mary would get him next month; we'd switch back and forth. The arrangement seemed to go over just fine with Derek.
And the suggestion to stop by the carnival at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds goes over just fine with me. The three of us hop into the Blue Canoe – no quibbling over the front seat this time, since it's such a short ride – and go to see what there is to see.
Turns out there really isn't much to be seen. Just a few carnival games set up, a collection of rickety-looking rides with long lines spurring out of them, and swarms of people pulsing through the walkways en masse.
We take a cursory stroll around the grounds, hoping to stumble into something or someone interesting, but as we complete our circumnavigation it is apparent that we're out of luck.
"Well worth the price of admission," Kevin laughs as we're absorbed into the heart of a swarm headed toward the entrance/exit gate. A large white square with "$5" painted in green hangs over the ticket booth, to the right of the gate. Tim and I laugh along with him – we'd snuck in through a hole in the fence.
"Man, that was a bust," Kevin says as we walk down toward his car.
"Yeah," I say absently, concentrating on stepping over the indentations that mark the individual cement blocks in the sidewalk, trying to do so without being obvious about it. Don't step on a crack, break your mother's back drums through my head with each insidious crevice avoided. I've always been cautious about that – not superstitious, just cautious – ever since my mother was in a car accident when I was 7 and ended up in traction with slipped disks.
"Ugh. Why's it have to be so freakin' hot out?" Tim says. He lifts his Marlboro baseball hat enough to slip his hand under and push his dark, wavy hair back under it. He pulls his silver-rimmed glasses from his face and wipes the lenses with the end of his shirt. Before he puts them back on, he does a trademark Tim trick – lifts the collar of his T-shirt out, pulls it up so his head disappears, and wipes his face with the inside of his shirt.
"You're going to get stuck in there one day," Kevin says.
A quick mental image of Tim, his arms flailing wildly from the sides of his headless torso, flits through my mind and I stifle a giggle.
"Can't help it," Tim grumbles, "I hate the hot weather."
Warm air clinging close about me, I can understand what he means. It is warm, close, damp; like something big had just licked us. You don't need to bother sweating when you go outside; the atmosphere wraps your body in its clamminess for you.
"Hey," I say, looking at my watch, "It's only a bit past ten, not so late. Why don't we go to my house and go swimming?" I didn't think my mom would mind. I had to be in by 11, and this way I would be home. She hadn't said anything about bringing anyone with me.
"Yeah, that sounds cool," Kevin says.
"Shotgun!" Tim says. He sprints the last hundred yards across the rocky parking lot toward Kevin's car.
"No way!" I say, and take off after him. I catch up easily and pass him quickly. For all the teasing I've endured about it, that's one advantage of being tall – longer legs means bigger strides. I can cover a lot more ground than Tim can, and at a much faster pace. I lean against the passenger door and wait for Tim to catch up to me. Kevin, uninterested in our childish display, strolls at an unaltered pace behind Tim.
"Amazon bitch," Tim growls when he catches up. He leans, chuffing, against the car.
I smile sweetly at him. "Aw, it's ok," I say, patting him on top of the head. "You'll grow up to be a big boy one day."
He gives me the finger, and lights up a cigarette. I debate making the remark about smoking stunting your growth, but decide to keep it to myself this time. Besides, I was walking proof to the contrary. If it did stunt your growth, then I was thankful – otherwise I'd be over six feet by now.
Kevin eventually catches up to us, wearing an impish grin. "Don't know what you two are in such a hurry about," he says. "We're not going anywhere till I find my keys."
We all check our pockets, although I know I don't have them. After ten minutes scouring the car, scrounging around in the dusty gravel of the parking lot, retracing our path up the sidewalk and through the grass, we see the faint glimmer of metal, glinting off the headlights of a passing car, between long blades of grass that grew wild and scraggly along the chain-link fence. A relatively small wad of keys sits in the dirt, not a foot from the jagged, narrow opening in the fence.
Tim puts up only a half-hearted attempt to claim the front seat for the ride home before he yields. "I was up at 6AM for work this morning," he says as he hops over the back seat into the flat cargo area at the rear of the station wagon. "I'm beat. I'm taking a nap."
I slip into the front seat beside Kevin with a complacent smile. We fasten our seatbelts, and Kevin fires up the Blue Canoe, guiding it out of the parking lot and sailing us into the warm summer night.
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