Descent Magazine
Leilani Mate
Stella Vu
Written by
Designed by
I ran into a boy I’d known some years ago in the parking lot of our old school. Hey, you, I said. We had exchanged a few meaningful words in those years we knew each other, so the greeting felt appropriate. I was probably in love with him then, but from fourteen to eighteen it is likely that I was a bit in love with every boy I knew.
then I joined the student council, then everyone was thinking about college. But yes. I was often wrong in history. The receptionist handed me my diploma. It was a decorated rectangular thing, shiny with newness and important Gothic letters. She gave it like she was getting rid of me, like in those four years and seventeen days I was stupidly helpless and now no longer her responsibility.
He said, You? What are you doing here? I said I don’t know. I never liked telling him many details about anything, which is maybe why our teenage love never came to be. I walked into the front office and asked to pick up my high school diploma. The receptionist told me I was four years and seventeen days late. O.K. I said. I wasn’t good with time. I knew that some moments ago I attended this school, and since then those moments multiplied or subtracted or divided in a way I didn’t understand.
I remember you had all these big life thoughts, the boy I knew said. I didn’t deny it. In those years I talked incessantly about moving far away and making something new of myself. That was when we still took the bus, I said. What does that have to do with anything? He asked.
The boy I knew came up to me in the office. You know, he said. I realize now that you were mostly wrong about everything in Mrs. Brenson’s history class.
If you remember, between the stops on Fourth and Meadow, there was that beige house with the big columns, I reminded him. It was so nice and so big and the yard had a fountain. And when we were on the bus it looked like the house was running away.
Maybe, I said. But I was busy with calculus,
All I wanted then was a car, he said.
43