Hannah Gersen - Home Field

She put the dress back on. The new hem hit midthigh, and it was jarring to see her mother’s dress so radically changed. As always, Stephanie thought her knees looked bony and overly large. Her father said they were strong, athletic knees, the kind that wouldn’t blow out. Everything came back to sports for him.

“Looks better now,” she said, pulling on her jean jacket. She put her hands in the pockets and found the half pack of cigarettes she’d scrounged from one of the booths. She held up the rumpled package. “Want one?”

Mitchell frowned, his long features turning dour. He had a haunted, thin face, one that had always reminded Stephanie of photos from the Civil War, the daguerreotypes of teenage soldiers. She remembered, with a twinge, the intensity of her old crush on him.

“You think you’re going to look like Marlene Dietrich with a ciggie in your hand? Please, you’re Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

This time she was sure she wasn’t imagining the irritation in his voice. “Why are you being so mean?” she said. “All night long you’ve been acting like you don’t want me here.”

“Sorry, I’m just stressed,” he said. “I’m supposed to go to school next week and now my dad’s saying I can’t even bring my car. He’s still pissed I’m not going to Frostburg. I have to take the bus from Hagerstown. It’s going to take, like, ten hours.”

“You can’t take the bus to college! Let me drive you. My dad’s not coming with me. It would just be the two of us.”

“Your dad isn’t taking you?”

“It’s one of his double practice days. I mean, he offered, but I could tell he didn’t want to. And we would have had to take two cars with my brothers coming along and all my stuff. But there’s room for you.”

“I couldn’t. It doesn’t even make sense. Boston is so far out of your way.”

“So what? Come on, how much fun would we have?”

“No, it’s okay. I might not have to take the bus. My mom is looking into Amtrak. It will be good. I have too much shit anyway. Fresh start.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Stephanie said. But she was surprised that he would turn her down so quickly — surprised and hurt.

“So what are we going to do tonight?” Mitchell said.

“Sarah’s having a party,” Stephanie managed to say. It was dawning on her that Mitchell was really going to leave. She could see it now, she could imagine him waiting on a brick platform, wearing his long black coat and one of his mother’s crocheted caps, carrying his big duffel and maybe a backpack. And then he would board a silver train and be whisked up the Eastern Seaboard to Boston, a city full of students, a city full of people as smart as he was. He was just a few days from starting a whole new life. And she was happy for him. But she was sad for herself. She no longer felt optimistic about leaving Willowboro. It felt like some other girl had decided to go to Swarthmore, and now she wasn’t confident she could fulfill that girl’s fancy private-school ambitions. She wasn’t even sure that girl would ever return. If it was just a matter of keeping the ambitious girl’s seat warm, of biding her time in sadness, in grief, then she could do that. But the more Stephanie thought about it, the more ludicrous that idea seemed. You couldn’t “sub in” for yourself, waiting for some previous happiness to return. Because you would never forget the sad shit that went down. It got engraved onto your brain. Stephanie pictured her mother’s brain, intricately engraved, like some Roman sarcophagus.

“I don’t want to go to Sarah’s,” Mitchell said. “It’s just going to be a bunch of football dudes. And everyone’s probably already drunk by now. Let’s go to the dollar theater.”

“Not everyone will be drunk,” Stephanie said. “Dan will be there. He doesn’t drink.”

“Because he’s Mormon,” Mitchell said.

“That’s basically why you don’t drink.”

“I’m not Mormon!”

“No, but you come from a religious family.”

“You think that’s why I don’t drink?” Mitchell asked. He seemed genuinely curious, open to the fact that he might not know himself as well as he thought. It was this sincerity that Stephanie had first noticed about Mitchell, even before she knew anything about him, when he was just an interesting-looking boy in her freshman geometry class, a boy who always finished his in-class assignments early and used the extra time to read the Jean M. Auel novels forbidden in his household.

“I don’t know,” Stephanie said. “Maybe you’ve absorbed certain puritanical attitudes.”

“Well, look at your family,” Mitchell said. “The attitudes you’ve absorbed . I mean, your dad?”

“What about him?”

“Um, hello? He basically presides over a kingdom of ’roided-up homophobes.”

“No one on my dad’s team uses steroids!” Stephanie wasn’t going to touch the homophobia. She and Mitchell had never talked about the fact that her father was obviously uncomfortable around him. They had never talked about it, because what was there to say?

“This isn’t even coming from me. You’re the one who’s been complaining. Didn’t you just tell me he was going to coach a practice instead of taking you to college?”

“One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” Stephanie said, even though she was as hurt by her father as she was by Mitchell. Her mother hadn’t hurt her in this way; even at her most spaced out and distant, Stephanie always felt her mother was with her in spirit.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Mitchell said. “Your dress doesn’t look that bad.”

“I’m just sad because we’re leaving in a week, you know? I don’t want to say good-bye.”

“You say it like I’m dying!” Mitchell joked. And then realized his mistake. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Stephanie said. The problem was that Mitchell was excited to go away to college and she wasn’t, and he knew she wasn’t, and he’d been trying to conceal his own excitement out of courtesy, but now he was getting tired of hiding his true feelings. And Stephanie felt guilty, but at the same time, she felt jealous, because it was like Mitchell got to go away to school and assume some fabulous new identity while she became — what? She didn’t know. And it scared her that she didn’t know, and it scared her that she didn’t know if this rift between them — if that’s what it was — was occurring because they were naturally growing apart, or if it had to do with her mother’s death. She couldn’t see her life clearly anymore, and clarity was the most important thing to her; it was her secret power. Her mother had taken that from her.

“Let’s just go to the party,” Mitchell said. “You can smoke your filched ciggies, and I’ll have pretzels and lemonade with Dan. It’ll be positively thrilling for all involved.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” Stephanie said. “I can go by myself.”

“No, no, no,” Mitchell said, shaking his finger. “Friends don’t let friends go to the suburbs by themselves. If worse comes to worst, we can always cruise the dual .”

“Cruising the dual” meant driving on the dual highway outside of town, driving but never exiting, just going around and around in circles and taking in the sights of the commercial strip. It was a “classic” Willowboro activity, so classic that Stephanie and Mitchell had never bothered to try it, although they’d always said they would do it before they left for college. Tonight would be the perfect night to give it a whirl — or it would be the perfect night, if only Stephanie could be the girl she used to be, the impatient overachiever who liked nothing better than to view her hometown from a certain ironic distance.