Some lives don’t actually have a best day, that particular kind of day that sets a heart’s compass to true, forever. But I guess in a way I’ve been lucky, and I know mine exactly: it was the day I was finally all but forced to marry my brother.
It seemed like we’d been waiting absolutely forever. And while the setting might’ve been far from anyone’s first choice, the decorations were perfect, the music we’d settled on seemed to please everybody, and the room felt packed full – everyone was so genuine, so real – despite the modest number of guests.
–And okay, there was an open bar, too, but who wouldn’t want to be a little naughty when you had the legal permit to basically shoot the moon anywhere in City Hall. (Jail included! Ahem..)
We have a wedding video, of course, but I never end up watching it unless I’m showing it to someone else. I just remember it so much better from where I was … all of the dimension – the scents, the quality of the lighting, all the laughing and dancing, the sympathetic judge actually setting off small fireworks indoors (his bailiff laughing alongside), it was amazing. It wouldn’t – couldn’t! – have been as wonderful if it hadn’t been so weird. I knew I was living the best time of my life, and that’s enough.
My name is Alia, and I’ll try to tell it like it was. —I miss you so much, baby. Shit, I’m already crying.
My part of our story starts in early high school, though of course it actually began long before then – but it took us ages to sort it all out, like a family working on a jigsaw puzzle where no one person could see all of the pieces. It felt like Marck and I had finally finished putting it all together that day we were married… but I guess no real story ever ends when it should, or how.
During my first year of high school I was too shy for sports, and it felt like the kids in band and orchestra had already been playing together for so long that it was too late to start – but choir seemed doable. I vividly remember that first day, when the choir conductor went student-by-student, having each of us sing a few notes back to him, then telling us to move here or there. With over sixty kids in the room, it took nearly the entire hour for him to parcel us into sections of sopranos, altos, tenors, basses. Individually and on the spot like that, some of us were just awful, wretched; it really seemed like I had made a terrible mistake – I’d wanted to hide in the choir, but everyone had already heard my solo voice quaver and shake.
With about five minutes of class left, the conductor jumped over to the piano and gave each section four notes to sing; some kids in each voicing were good enough to remember their part, so the rest of us were able to follow along if we went sharp or flat.
With two minutes left on the clock, the conductor centered himself before us, gestured with his little baton, and then holyshit music came out, a simple little major chord progression, but it was music and I was helping make it. Everyone in the room liked it too, the whole hour worth that little bit; so the conductor had us sing it again, everyone happy that we were all on our way together now. There was gusto all around.
It felt good to sing, really good, and I couldn’t stop smiling. So I remember very clearly looking across the curving auditorium at the dark-haired, dark-eyed tenor smiling his big warm smile back at me, and I could feel I was blushing but didn’t care. We just traded gazes and dimpled grins until the bell rang a few moments later. I can remember thinking that it was going to be nice to be able to look at the boy as the year went on, and when he was later revoiced from a second tenor down to a baritone, his new seat gave me an even better view, mm-mmm.
Choir was always easy for Marck, a fun but unchallenging way to spend first period each day. It was different for me – I had such terrible anxiety and couldn’t play any instruments, but along with the other altos I felt safe enough to sing clearly and accurately, and that became a really important part of my life; I still sing to myself every day.
I finally learned Marck’s name a couple weeks after that first day, when he decided that we’d traded grins and shy smiles for long enough. My heart fluttered when he walked right up to me after class and told me his name, holding out his hand for shaking. I replied in turn, nervously, but felt better when he looked down as he held his hand out – like for business or something – and blushed and then instead just touched my elbow and said, “It’s nice to meet you, finally, er, you know.. um, okayseeyoutomorrowbye!” I was glad we were both a little nervous, and I was sure I liked him.
Over the course of that first semester we made all kinds of eyes at each other during choir, as there was a fair bit of downtime when the other sections were rehearsing individually with the conductor. We started a game where we’d mouth words at each other from across the room and basically try to lip-read what the other was saying, and we both sucked at it, which made it really funny when we’d talk after class and compare notes on what we thought the other had said.
One day, Marck came up to me before class and asked if I liked olives; I grimaced and said nope, not even on salads or pizza. He grinned a bit devilishly, but I didn’t make anything of it at the time.
Then, later, when we were mouthing words at each other from across the room, he told me he loved me. I nearly fainted. I couldn’t sing for crap that day, and I ran out of the room before he could find me and say anything. I came in late the next day to avoid giving him an opportunity to speak to me, and he didn’t press.
Later that week, though, once we’d again traded silent goofs and showed off our dimples, he again mouthed that he loved me, and again I nearly fell off my ass. I got sooo nervous, making sure we wouldn’t meet in the halls before class, or after, or during the day. I was so fluttery that the idea of finding words to respond seemed laughable, a total joke; what did he expect?? I wasn’t turned off, I was just overwhelmed and unable to sort anything out. I could barely pay attention in my classes or do any homework.
Finally, he trapped me at the end of choir one day, all but pinning me in the narrow hallway so that I had no escape against the press of all the other students exiting and the next hour of choir entering. My mind blanked in panic, I had no idea what to say or expect. He walked up so close that I could smell his shampoo, kick at his toes if I’d wanted.
“Olive juice,” he said.
I’m pretty sure my confused reply consisted of the dumbest non-words ever falteringly uttered on the planet, a total mouth-fart.
“Olive juice,” he said again, over-emphasizing the facial motions as he spoke, and my heart hit the floor. Hard. I wanted to die, right then and there, please God, kill me. Mouthing the words “olive juice” looks exactly like mouthing the words “I love you.” Saying more with my response than any words ever could have, I ran away before he could see me start to cry.
I didn’t look at him during choir for days, then a week. I avoided him like he was diseased, fled from his sight whenever I could. He didn’t chase after me. I hated his stupid guts, hated myself and my stupidity.
Then one day he was waiting for my bus after school, despite that he normally rode a bus going to the other side of town. I didn’t say anything when he sat down beside me, and that was when he apologized for seeming like he was teasing me – he really wasn’t, he said – and he told me the next part of our shared puzzle. Given that he was on the wrong bus and he’d have to call for a ride home – and no way was he getting to use my phone – or walk five miles to get there, I decided to hear him out. Still, my slow forgiveness came later.
“We know each other,” he said to me.
“Duh.” I refused to look at him.
“No, really – like, we’ve met before, when we were little kids. I remember you.” He clearly wanted me to, as well.
My inner snark blossomed. “You must’ve been a jerk then too, and I, like, blacked it out or something.”
“No, look I’m really sorry, but listen a sec – we used to play together when we were like seven or eight, and we both went to that stupid Sunday school where we glued together popsicle sticks to make churches and steeples and fences and stuff,” he said. And then I started to remember some things – yeah, okay, I’d been sent to a local church’s Sunday school for a little while, despite that my parents never went to church; it had been an utterly bewildering experience.
“Fine, then, so BFD.”
“Don’t you remember how we were, like, little besties then? You were, like, the only girl who was fun. You kinda still are,” he said. But I didn’t recall all that much, just little vignettes, and I was not inclined to forgive.
“So you thought you’d humiliate me and then stalk me on my bus?” Good line; stay strong, girl.
“No no no, really, seriously, it didn’t mean anything, honest.” It didn’t mean anything? Christ, what an asshole. What was he thinking? I didn’t respond.
“Alia, really, honest – you’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met, like, then and now. I didn’t realize it was you until a little while ago, and when I did I thought it was awesome, like luck or fate or whatever the right word is.”
“Kismet,” I said, glad to be able to correct him.
“Um.. okay sure, yeah, that. Look, come to the football game with me on Friday” – I hated football – “and we’ll get a slice of pizza afterward and make up, okay?” I made him wait almost an entire minute, then grudgingly said okay.
He ended up buying a whole pizza with the toppings I liked – spinach and mushrooms – which I’m pretty sure he hated, but he did it anyway. As he talked about our shared childhood, the memories began to come back to me. He looked so different now, almost like a man instead of the little boy he used to be; it seemed like two totally different people.
Back then, his family had lived just three houses down from mine. We used to do dumb shit – try to set things on fire with sparklers, chase each other outside when it was raining and jump in puddles and get really muddy, caterwaul along with our parents’ music that we didn’t like in order to force them to change it – all kinds of stuff. We were maybe a little rotten then, which was fun. I remembered that he made the pornographic “Land O’ Lakes lady” (an older boy’s influence) out of that brand of butter’s cardboard packaging and then put her in his popsicle-stick church during Sunday school crafts; that was actually why we both got kicked out. It was pretty awesome being bad there, then getting out of Sunday school altogether.
But not too long thereafter his family suddenly moved away, and neither of us could really remember why. One day he just never showed up at our after-school babysitter’s house anymore, and he was gone.
So, after that pizza, we started dating. At first he would just come over to my house so we could study together. We weren’t even in the same pre-calculus or American history classes, but our homework mostly overlapped and our parents were none the wiser, at least for a while. My parents liked Marck – my mom would smile and fold her hands and say that he “comported himself like a perfect young gentleman.”
He’d stay for dinner maybe once a week, sometimes watch TV with my family. (It was all pretty great – teenage hormones, yay!) But we didn’t really do anything, at least at first. Every once in a while he and I would sing a choir song for my parents – when one of our parts carried the melody, anyway – which helped to affirm their trust in him.
Suckers. We started to make out in my room while “studying” (mmmmm..) , and he never once made fun of my pink lacy curtains or girly stuff or anything.
Then, at some point a while later, we went over to his house for dinner and I met his mother for the first time – but when she saw me and I introduced myself she went all chilly and unfriendly, almost like she was mad at me or something. She let me stay for the meal, but I could barely eat anything and I called my mom to come pick me up right afterward. I guess, once I left, Marck’s mother went ballistic on him and forbade him to come to my house anymore, for any reason, and grounded him for a month – yeah, like that wasn’t going to raise any questions.
So it definitely seemed like something weird was going on when, not long thereafter, Marck sneaked over to my house after school and my dad suddenly got really upset and told me that Marck was bad news, that I didn’t know what I was doing, and that Marck wasn’t welcome any more. I told my dad he was full of crap and why was he doing this to me?? He didn’t explain, but he set strict curfews for me and was suspicious, for weeks, of just about everything I did and where I went – I remember that even my mother was kind of confused.
It was a while before Marck and I learned the next piece of our shared puzzle.
