Max Collins - Girl Most Likely

At their table, Krista was sitting alone, looking a little lost.

“You all right?” he asked, not sitting, just leaning in, a hand on the back of her chair.

With a pleasant smile and aching eyes, she said, “I think I’ve had all the frigging fun I can take.”

“Where are Jessy and Josh?”

“On the dance floor, trying to be sixteen again.”

“They’ll pay in the morning. What about Frank and what’s-her-name? The one who somehow makes ‘sexy’ annoying?”

She laughed. “They, too, are recapturing their youth. Me, I’ve been asked to dance once... by a female. Also, my father refuses to dance with me.”

“Sounds like a jerk. You want to get out of here?”

She nodded. “Please.”

Outside, as they headed for the Toyota in the nearby side lot, the temperature had dropped, their breath visible. They both added not wearing coats tonight to their lists of regrets. Krista was shivering as he got behind the wheel.

He asked, “You okay, honey?”

“Yes. I just... I’d so been looking forward to seeing those people, and I was happy to see them, even the ones I wasn’t happy to see.”

Such observations were what made designated drivers necessary.

She was saying, “I had a good time. I really did. So why do I feel sad?”

“I think you just defined ‘bittersweet,’ honey.”

“Thank you for going with me, Daddy.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it. You were the prettiest girl there.”

“Oh? Prettier than Astrid?”

“Astrid’s pretty. But she doesn’t remind me of your mother.”

She leaned against him as he drove, taking the winding road out of the lodge’s acreage slow and easy. “Part of me can’t wait for the next reunion,” she said. “Another part of me wouldn’t mind never seeing any of them again.”

Neither Keith nor his daughter could have dreamed that the reunion was just getting started.

You are proud of yourself for staying so cool at the reunion. No one would guess you are boiling inside, not even your “significant other,” as the now all-purpose term puts it. And who knows you better?

You are friendly to one and all, not pushing it, and mostly just lie back, watching, watching, watching. What you will almost certainly be forced to do doesn’t bother you — that part of it will be dispatched with a detached coolness.

But withstanding the buildup, the suspense of the uncertainty — and the threat of something happening here tonight, with so many people present, where it all could slip away from you — that is what drives you to the brink of madness.

You wonder if you did the wrong thing, not taking care of Astrid in Chicago. Before she even got here. But what had been easily accomplished in Clearwater would have been so very complicated in Chicago. And anyway, you hope you won’t be compelled, made to do anything like that tonight.

So you watch her from a distance. With talk and laughter all around, which you participate in, as if you were part of the festivities and not apart from them. Isolated in your peril. Alone in what you might have to do.

Astrid seems very natural, at ease, unlike her rather plastic way in high school. Of course, when they’d been behind closed doors or otherwise by themselves, she had been different. Human, vulnerable, revealing that her self-confidence and friendliness as shown to the other kids was something artificial, a brittle candy coating.

Not a phony, exactly. But you know from your heart-to-heart talks years ago that she had been a homely, overweight child who had sprouted and blossomed but still carried that insecurity within an attractive shell. She’d always been smart but had seen the good-looking girls around her achieve popularity even before the boys had reached puberty.

In her high school prime, she seemed to pride herself on an effortless ability to snatch a boy from another girl, but not just any girl — only the pretty, popular ones, with the best-looking, mostly jock boyfriends. Yet she’d stayed superficially friendly with each girl she wronged, despised by them until they again admired her, even adored her. Those she’d betrayed would respond to her interest and flattery and not stay mad at her. It was all those unfaithful boyfriends’ fault, right?

Wrong. But perhaps you are the only one who knew that. Well, no — Astrid had known. She’d revealed it to you, in your intimate moments together. You saw the pleasure, and guilt, of a onetime wallflower’s revenge.

But tonight, as she glides to a pause with this one and that one, here the center of a group, there in a private conservation — something seems different about her. Nothing plastic about her now. Or has she only learned how better to fake it?

She seems sincere, all right, and those she’s engaging with one-on-one are listening with pleasant expressions, responding to her shy, sad smiles with nods and smiles of their own, in most cases. With a few of those she approaches, something else is engendered — a coldness, even held-back anger, resentment... what are these conversations about?

She isn’t talking about you, is she?

You note that at first she’s busy with these groups of former classmates worshiping her. It takes a while, until well after dinner with the band starting in, for her to seek out individuals — and that is exactly what she’s doing now, seeking them out.

And then it begins to make sense, some of it anyway. Those women she has singled out are in many cases the girls from whom she stole boys. Some are here with the men those boys became. Others have wound up with someone else. Maybe in some cases these women wish Astrid had stolen those boys away permanently. Maybe others are grateful Astrid was a thief of hearts, because they wound up with someone else, someone better, someone they deeply loved.

So. You have it now, you get it. Mostly she is making amends. She is apologizing for her long-ago bad behavior. Most of her onetime classmates are ready to fawn over her — she had been the class favorite, student council president, resident diva of chorus and drama. But for that handful of girls she had done wrong, Astrid was something else. Something dark, and — in a melodramatic high school way — evil.

This was good. She was in a frame of mind for making amends. Perhaps she would be receptive to them as well.

Late in the evening, you follow her from the banquet hall. Watch her go into the restroom. Wait for her, until she emerges, and just happen to run into her. You greet her warmly. She smiles, but there’s a stiffness and her ice-blue eyes are cold.

“Could I have a word?” you ask.

“I don’t think so.”

“I just want to congratulate you on all your success.”

“... Thank you.”

“And I want to apologize. Make amends.”

She frowns a little. Still very beautiful — perhaps more beautiful as a woman than as a girl. So much perfect blondeness. Such high cheekbones.

“I sense,” you say, “just observing... that you’ve been making a few apologies yourself. That you’ve been the one making amends.”

She draws in a breath. Her breasts rise and fall.

“People don’t always respond well to apologies,” you say. “But a person has to try, right? I can tell your results tonight have been something of a... mixed bag.”

She almost smiles. “That’s true. We should talk sometime. But not here.”

“I agree!”

“And, after all, you’re not alone here tonight, are you?”

“No.” You smile nervously — the nervousness is real, but not for the reason she may think. “I should let you go. We’ll talk sometime?”

She nods. “Sometime.”

You return to your table. Join the conversation. From time to time, ’09 classmates come over to say hello. You dance a few times with your significant other, no one else. Then you leave the reunion.