Stephen King - Just After Sunset

It occurred to me that other things might show up, in time. And I’d be lying if I told you I found that possibility entirely unpleasant. When it comes to returning things which people believe have been lost forever, things that have weight , there are compensations. Even if they’re only little things, like a pair of joke sunglasses or a steel penny in a Lucite cube…yeah. I’d have to say there are compensations.

Janice has never settled on the right word for the place where Buddy lives. It’s too big to be called a house, too small to be an estate, and the name on the post at the foot of the driveway, Harborlights, gags her. It sounds like the name of a restaurant in New London, the kind where the special is always fish. She usually winds up just calling it “your place,” as in “Let’s go to your place and play tennis” or “Let’s go to your place and go swimming.”

It’s pretty much the same deal with Buddy himself, she thinks, watching him trudge up the lawn toward the sound of shouts on the other side of the house, where the pool is. You didn’t want to call your boyfriend Buddy, but when reverting to his real name meant Bruce, it left you with no real ground to stand on.

Or expressing feelings, that was that. She knew he wanted to hear her say she loved him, especially on his graduation day — surely a better present than the silver medallion she’d given him, although the medallion had set her back a teeth-clenching amount — but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to say, “I love you, Bruce.” The best she could manage (and again with that interior clench) was “I’m awfully fond of you, Buddy.” And even that sounded like a line out of a British musical comedy.

“You don’t mind what she said, do you?” That was the last thing he’d asked her before heading up the lawn to change into his swim trunks. “That isn’t why you’re staying behind, is it?”

“No, just want to hit a few more. And look at the view.” The house did have that going for it, and she could never get enough. Because you could see the whole New York cityscape from this side of the house, the buildings reduced to blue toys with sun gleaming on the highest windows. Janice thought that when it came to NYC, you could only get that sense of exquisite stillness from a distance. It was a lie she loved.

“Because she’s just my gran,” he went on. “You know her by now. If it enters her head, it exits her mouth.”

“I know,” Janice said. And she liked Buddy’s gran, who made no effort to hide her snobbery. There it was, out and beating time to the music. They were the Hopes, came to Connecticut along with the rest of the Heavenly Host, thank you so much. She is Janice Gandolewski, who will have her own graduation day — from Fairhaven High — two weeks from now, after Buddy has left with his three best buddies to hike the Appalachian Trail.

She turns to the basket of balls, a slender girl of good height in denim shorts, sneakers, and a shell top. Her legs flex as she rises on tiptoe with each serve. She’s good-looking and knows it, her knowing of the functional and non-fussy sort. She’s smart, and knows it. Very few Fairhaven girls manage relationships with boys from the Academy — other than the usual we-all-know-where-we-are, quick-and-dirty Winter Carnival or Spring Fling weekends, that is — and she has done so in spite of the ski that trails after her wherever she goes, like a tin can tied to the bumper of a family sedan. She has managed this social hat-trick with Bruce Hope, also known as Buddy.

And when they were coming up from the basement media room after playing video games — most of the others still down there, and still with their mortarboards cocked back on their heads — they had overheard his gran, in the parlor with the other adults (because this was really their party; the kids would have their own tonight, first at Holy Now! out on Route 219, which had been fourwalled for the occasion by Jimmy Frederick’s dad and mom, pursuant to the mandatory designated-driver rule, and then later, at the beach, under a full June moon, could you give me spoon, do I hear swoon, is there a swoon in the house).

“That was Janice-Something-Unpronounceable,” Gran was saying in her oddly piercing, oddly toneless deaf-lady voice. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she? A townie. Bruce’s friend for now.” She didn’t quite call Janice Bruce’s starter-model, but of course it was all in the tone.

She shrugs and hits a few more balls, legs flexing, racket reaching. The balls fly hard and true across the net, each touching down deep in the receiver’s box on the far side.

They have in fact learned from each other, and she suspects that’s what these things are about. What they are for. And Buddy has not, in truth, been that hard to teach. He respected her from the first — maybe a little too much. She had to teach him out of that — the pedestal-worship part of that. And she thinks he hasn’t been that bad a lover, given the fact that kids are denied the finest of accommodations and the luxury of time when it comes to giving their bodies the food they come to want.

“We did the best we could,” she says, and decides to go and swim with the others, let him show her off one final time. He thinks they’ll have all summer before he goes off to Princeton and she goes to State, but she thinks not; she thinks part of the purpose of the upcoming Appalachian hike is to separate them as painlessly but as completely as possible. In this Janice senses not the hand of the hale-and-hearty, good-fellows-every-one father, or the somehow endearing snobbery of the grandmother — a townie, Bruce’s friend for now — but the smiling and subtle practicality of the mother, whose one fear (it might as well be stamped on her lovely, unlined forehead) is that the townie girl with the tin can tied to the end of her name will get pregnant and trap her boy into the wrong marriage.

“It would be wrong, too,” she murmurs as she wheels the basket of balls into the shed and flips the latch. Her friend Marcy keeps asking her what she sees in him at all — Buddy, she all but sneers, wrinkling her nose. What do you do all weekend? Go to garden parties? To polo matches?

In fact, they have been to a couple of polo matches, because Tom Hope still rides — although, Buddy confided, this was apt to be his last year if he didn’t stop putting on weight. But they have also made love, some of it sweaty and intense. Sometimes, too, he makes her laugh. Less often, now — she has an idea that his capacity to surprise and amuse is far from infinite — but yes, he still does. He’s a lean and narrow-headed boy who breaks the rich-kid-geek mold in interesting and sometimes very unexpected ways. Also he thinks the world of her, and that isn’t entirely bad for a girl’s self-image.

Still, she doesn’t think he will resist the call of his essential nature forever. By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in the — ahem — carriage-house.

She walks slowly up the long acre of green grass, looking out toward the blue toys of the city dreaming in the far distance. Closer at hand are the sounds of shouts and splashing from the pool. Inside, Bruce’s mother and father and gran and closest friends will be celebrating the one chick’s high school graduation in their own way, at a formal tea. Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode. Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested. Club music will throb through big speakers. No one will play the country stuff Janice grew up with, but that’s all right; she still knows where to find it.