A Thousand Steps

59

That afternoon after his paper route, Matt and Laurel Kalina walk south along Main Beach. It’s a perfect day, a spangled ocean and a tan beach under blue sky. Three times already, people Matt barely knows, or doesn’t know at all, have run up and congratulated him. They’re all wide-eyed with astonishment, surprise and relief: It’s unbelievable, man, unbelievable.

But right now, Laurel is another story. Matt has taken her hand twice since starting down the beach from the lifeguard tower, and Laurel has retracted it both times. She is subdued. She’s been hard to get a hold of the last few days, busy with her writing and the Pageant and friends.

“Matt,” she says, stopping and squinting up at him, then taking a deep breath. “I need freedom. Freedom to grow as a person and meet new people and to write. It’s the most important thing in my life. To be a writer. I’ve started a novel that takes place in France during the grape harvest in Bordeaux. My professor is very positive but I know it’s not very good. Yet. I have a chance to go there in late August, to France.”

“You mean break up?”

“I mean to continue, as friends.”

Matt feels as if the iron ball that hobbled Jasmine has been dropped from the sky and landed on his head.

“Okay.”

“I knew you would understand and approve.”

“I don’t either of those, but it’s up to you, Laurel.”

“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Is there some other way?”

“You mean and stay together?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

They pass Thalia without a word. Matt thinks of Bonnie but more of himself. He’s just been dumped by the first girl he’s ever cared about. The first girl he’s admired and liked and wanted to kiss and probably even loved. He looks at Laurel, sees a tear from under her sunglasses spreading down her cheek.

“I know you’ve changed, Matt. Inside and outside and it’s good. You’ll change again. So will I.”

“We can change together,” Matt says, having absolutely no idea if that’s true. Julie and Bruce didn’t. Two of his friends, their parents were divorcing.

“Then there’s Sara,” says Laurel, with a flash of pained hostility in her eyes.

Matt shrugs. “I don’t think that was going anywhere.”

“I’ve thought this through a thousand times,” she says. “I talked to Rose and Mom and Dad and my professor. I prayed and prayed and cried. Matt, I’m very sure this is what I need to do. And I’m sorrier than I can describe. If I were writing this scene it would be the saddest scene of all time. That’s how it feels to me.”

“Me too.”

Another gut-wrenching silence, this one all the way to Cress Street. Matt feels suddenly chilled, as if the breeze has changed from west to north but he knows it hasn’t.

“Friends, Matt?”

“Yes, good.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I really don’t know. I’ll try.”

“I love you.”

He feels the storm inside, the pressure in his ears, and the sting in his eyes. The painful lump in his throat. But he’s got enough pride to tamp it all down. And enough anger to state the obvious.

“That doesn’t add up, Laurel. All the stuff we did. Together and happy to be with each other. Now this.”

“There are different kinds of love, Matt. Give it time. Please.”

They stop and Laurel kisses him on the cheek. More tears as she reaches into her beaded macramé bag and hands Matt a thick, rolled-up tube of typing paper with a yellow ribbon around it.

“I tried to get it all in here,” she says. “Yellow means friendship.”

She runs back the way they’ve come, angling toward Brooks Street where she lives.

Matt heads north too, for his own home. Drops Laurel’s gift-wrapped papers into a Main Beach trash can.