I was nineteen years old, a year out of high school and going nowhere. Not college, not even vocational school. I was working in my dad’s garage. It was what I wanted to do, and it was all I’d grown up expecting. We were from the wrong side of the tracks, blue collar manual labor, and not near good enough for Andrew Spelling’s little princess of an only daughter. At least not where her dad was concerned.
If she’d had brothers and sisters to divide his focus, if her mom hadn’t died when she was so little, if he hadn’t been such a stuck up, overbearing bastard, maybe things would’ve been different. Sure, I made the decision on my own. But not without a lot of help from him, behind the scenes, the pressure, the gossip. How I was going to hold her back.
Michelle was all-American, blue-eyed blonde perfection even then. Her straight white teeth, her pretty smile, her straight-A report cards and how she tutored underprivileged kids for free after school. Her blue ribbons for equestrian events when she was little and for academic decathlon in high school. She was so perfect she got scholarships she didn’t even apply for. They tried to give her a full ride to Tulane, but she had her heart set on Columbia. That girl was Ivy League material a hundred percent.
Never mind her fantastic laugh, her dry sense of humor or the fact that she’d take any dare if the prize was tacos. Never mind who she really was under the veneer of daddy’s little girl.
She had never looked down on me. But I had been convinced he was right. I was an albatross around her neck, dragging her down and keeping her from achieving her potential. She had talked about staying in Rockford Falls and going to the community college in Overton for a couple of years to stay close to me. We would’ve had two more years together, before she had to spread her wings. I wasn’t going to make anything of myself in that length of time, and I couldn’t move away and follow her. She had bigger, better things to do. I wasn’t going to stand in her way, not even if it killed me to tell her that lie.
We had gone out to the Falls the night before her graduation. Her final exams were over, and we spent the afternoon swimming and getting a little sunburned, picnicking, fooling around. When night fell, I pulled a contraband bottle of cheap champagne out of the cooler in my truck and we toasted her future with paper cups.
That waxy Dixie cup of lukewarm champagne had been bitter in my mouth with what I had to say. I’d gotten her to get in the truck, convinced her we should go home. When we were almost there, I parked a block from her house and got out, opened her door.
“I want to walk you the rest of the way. For old times’ sake,” I said, remembering with each deathly step the times I’d walked her home from school before I was old enough to drive and then walked all the way to my house across town.
“It’s not like you’re never driving me home again,” she had joked.
“You graduate tomorrow night. Let a guy get nostalgic,” I had said like it was nothing.
“You’ll be there, won’t you? You’re coming to the party at the club after?” she pressed.
I’d been putting it off for weeks. I had known that her dad was throwing a fancy party at his country club for his daughter’s graduation. She’d shown me her dress, something long and white like the gown a debutante would wear in an old movie. If I even touched a dress like that, I’d get grease on it from working in the garage. My fingerprints were always dark no matter how much I scrubbed my hands. Like I would be leaving a stain of my working class, wrong side of the tracks handprint on her flawless elegant gown. I hated that dress and everything it stood for.
“I’m not going,” I said abruptly.
“What? You have to be there, Drew,” she said, stopping and facing me. “Please. You know I want you there. Not everybody’s like my dad. You know Trixie’ll be there and Laura and Noah. They’re your friends too. But don’t go because they’ll be there. Come to it for me. You know I never ask you to be around him because he’s so uptight, but I’m not ashamed of you. Please say you know I’m not ashamed of you. I want a chance to see you all dressed up again. You looked so slick at prom.”
“That was a mistake,” I said, my voice gruff.
“It was not a mistake and you know it. Why won’t you come to the party?”