August 1989, Cypress Estates

It was six months or so since Missy and I had read “The Telltale Heart” in senior English. But it was The Telltale Calculus that was on my mind that night in the pool. Sixteen hours left to change her mind, or at least to come clean about the calculus. Or both. I still couldn’t make up my mind.

Missy, as usual, could read me like a book. "You're thinking about the first time you had me over here, aren't you?" she asked me.

“Cannot tell a lie,” I grinned. I was indeed reminiscing about that day in May. Unabashed as ever in the late spring afternoon, pulling down the bottom of her lavender bikini as it strained to contain her endearingly big rear end (which had always looked so fantastic in tight jeans or a full skirt alike, as I had known for years), she hadn't looked the slightest bit uncomfortable about nerdy old me seeing her half-naked.

Four months later, both of us now fully naked, we sat facing each other in the dry shower stall in the women's changing room, trying to work up the courage to go out and skinnydip in the pool. We had no fear of being caught there, for the poolhouse was closed -- we'd jumped the fence -- and the whole condo complex was just as quiet as it always was on a Sunday night. But that last step still seemed like an awfully big one now that we were nearly there.

"It was the beginning of a magical summer, after all," I added. It was also one of two things that had been on my mind all that summer, the other being how I had duped her into thinking I was a genius at calculus when in fact it was my mother's boyfriend, Craig, who had simply kept me one homework ahead of her all semester. Since she'd been warning me all summer that we were over with once the summer was ("I want nothing to do with this town ever again, Joseph, and I'm sorry, but that has to include you!"), I had a few hours left to come clean to her or keep it to myself forever. Even now, I still wasn't sure which was the right answer.

Missy gave me no cause to worry about math right then. "It's been magical for me, too," she cooed. "I really am sorry it's got to end tonight, but it does, okay?"

"Oh, come on!" I protested. "Summer with little ol' me was that magical?! And that's why you're calling it off when we'll only be a few hours apart by train?"

Now Missy looked near tears. Once again I felt that stab of guilt I'd felt every time I'd stepped over that line since she'd bonded with me when her life had fallen apart back in February. And yet I could never seem to be honest with her that what had brought us together in the first place -- my supposed genius in math -- was a lie. I was eighteen and very unaccustomed to someone like Missy thinking I was wonderful.

“Never mind that now,” Missy proclaimed, and she got to her feet. “Come on, let’s go outside.”

I found a little solace in knowing she must be just as scared as I was of going our separate ways, if even going outside naked was the less intimidating option. But I had no complaints as I followed her outside. My insides did do a flip. "Wow, did you feel that?" I asked her. "Butterflies!"

“Oh, I know! But it feels great, doesn’t it? So free!" She slipped into the warm water.  

"Free is a good word for it," I said. “Listen, Missy…”

"Joseph, you know, that's how I've felt with you since...February. Set free. I'll always be grateful for helping me through that, even if we do never see each other again."

"And yet you seem to want to make sure we don't."

"Joseph, I've told you before!" she said, taking my hand in both of hers under the water. "If we do meet up somewhere in the future, that's great! I just don't want us to have unrealistic expectations. We're only eighteen, Joseph. I want to see the world, don't you? Junior year in Paris maybe, and then maybe I'll go to Asia to teach English, or join the Peace Corps or something. "

"That doesn't mean we can't try."

Missy shook her head. "That's what my sister and her friends said. Best friends forever! That was just three years ago, and already they hardly even see each other when they're here on break."

I nodded sadly, and looked out at the trees and found myself enjoying the sound of the cars on the highway beyond. For the four years Mom and I had lived at Cypress Estates, that sound had been an incentive to work hard on my studies. After a disastrous run back in junior high, I decided I'd had enough of being the introverted underachiever. If I had to be a nerd and a loser, at least I could be the loser with the best grades. And so had begun four years of holing up with my books, with Mom's old Cat Stevens and Carole King records for company and never letting myself anywhere near the television until my homework was done.

All that work, plus a flair for creative writing that had landed me a column in the school newspaper, had landed me a scholarship to NYU. At 2:06 the following afternoon, my mother would kiss me goodbye at the train station, and I'd be off to New York. Missy would be off to Johns Hopkins the following day (her parents wanted her on the fast track to med school, no matter how many times she said she had no real interest in it) and, she’d been warning me all summer long, that would be that for us.

There would be no time for writing letters anyway, she'd said again and again. E-mail would soon put a stop to such excuses, but that was a few years off yet.

Missy took me in her arms in the shallow water. "It's only that I want to start over completely. You know that, Joseph, and you know why. I'm Missy until my mom and I leave on Tuesday. Once I get to Hopkins, I'm Melissa. And I'll miss you, but that's all I'll miss about this town. But you'll always be the guy who saved my life back in February, and saved my calculus grade too."

I laughed through the stab of guilt I felt. "Now who's being melodramatic?"

"Seriously, Joseph, don't sell yourself short! You were great through those days, and all I could ever think was, this is the boy I've ignored or teased since the second grade, and suddenly he's not only saving my ass in calculus, he's also the best friend I've ever had. And you are, even if you had terrible taste in girls before last year."

I laughed, happy to steer the talk away from math. "Not that we’re bitter about Jenn, are we?" My two-year crush on Missy’s ex-best friend was probably the worst-kept secret in our school.

“Bitter about having my best friend tell the whole school I was pregnant and had an abortion when I was really just out with the flu?" She looked near tears. "And seeing how many people believed it? Some of the very same boys who used to practically drool over me and the girls who wanted to be me? And that's why I wish you'd stop getting hung up on me being popular. I'm a person, not a goddess. I have feelings and problems just like you always did, and I've done dumb things too, like go out with Jenn's ex-boyfriend and think she'd be cool with it. Besides, now I know how when you're one of the beautiful people, everyone wants to see you get hurt and they get a big kick out of it when you do.” She took a deep breath. "Tell me, really, what did you ever see in Jenn? Besides those tits, I mean?"

"Oh, I always preferred your breasts," I said, and in support of the point I gave them both a gentle rub.

"Liar! Who could resist hers?"

"Well, of course I noticed them," I confessed. "Hard to miss, after all, and there used to be all sorts of debate in the locker room about her bra size, but nobody knew for sure..."

"Thirty-eight double D," Missy said. "I hope they're down to her knees by the time she's thirty."

I couldn't help laughing. "I'm sorry, Missy!"

"It's fine. But what did you see in her?"

"She was really friendly with me when no one else in your gang was. I'm sorry, but it's true."

"No, I know," Missy admitted. “I'm so glad I asked you for help with calculus," she added, topping it off with a kiss.

I felt a chill despite her warm body and the warm summer air. It would have been so easy to come clean back in February or March! Why would she have cared back then if Craig was helping me first before I helped her? But she went on with the last thing I wanted to talk about. "If I hadn't noticed you always getting the answers in class and asked you for help when I was slipping, we wouldn't have gotten to be friends at just the right time -- or wrong time, I guess. Calculus is so sexy, you nerd!" She threw her arms around me again and we toppled over into the water.

Well, of course I was willing to help her. Why wouldn't I be when Craig was always so happy to help me?

Craig, my mother's boyfriend, was a guy in the worst sense of the term. But he was an engineer, and he was more than willing to help me with math to get on my good side and impress Mom. It had worked, and I'd sold my soul to help Missy.

Missy had never been the wiser, not even the one time she had met Craig, on prom night. Craig had let me have his '82 Oldsmobile for the occasion when Missy's father wouldn't let her near his BMW, and she had thanked him very politely while the bastard had done his best to catch a glimpse down her dress.

So many times I could have confessed through the summer, but instead I had always chickened out. No reason not to come clean now, I mused.

Missy had actually beaten me by three points on the final, but that had made me feel better about my fraud. Now once again I resolved that she did not need to know -- especially now that I likely was never going to see her again anyway -- that I'd been going to Craig for help, always just one homework ahead of what we were doing in class. But once again it made me feel manipulative, and by the time Missy stopped in the shallow end, I was once again thinking maybe I ought to tell her.

Just as I was about to do that, though, Missy steered the conversation in another direction entirely. "Go lie down in a deck chair," she whispered.

"Well, okay, Missy, but..."

"But nothing! Go dry off and lie down! Now!"  

I’ll not share the details of what happened next, but it was memorable. I let it slip halfway through. “I love you, Missy!”

“I love you too!”

Our eyes met in surprise. But now wasn’t the time to talk about that.

It wasn’t long into the afterglow when my conscience caught up with me again. "Listen, Missy," I said...but before I could finish, a car door slammed somewhere nearby.

Missy jumped up off me with a start. "We'd better get inside!"

A mad dash got us back to my place. After confirming that my mother wasn't home, we both dissolved into relieved laughter and clung to one another for a good five minutes in the kitchen.

"I can't believe we got away with that!"

"It'll always be a great memory!"

"Sure will. Want to shower?"

"Yes," she said. "But...Joseph, what you said out there?"

"You said it too!"

"Yes, and it's true. But we shouldn't have said it, should we?"

"I get it. No need to explain." With that, I was off to the bathroom. I didn't need to hear it yet again, after all. And she didn't need to know my secret either.

"My sister said she'd be by around nine," Missy told me as I patted her dry after the shower. "That'll give us time to get our story straight about what I was up to with her friends. I owe her a big favor, don't I?"

"We both do," I agreed.

"Her and calculus," Missy said with a laugh.

I figured this was my last chance to do the honest thing. But once again I didn’t. We were both out cold nearly as soon as our heads hit the pillow.

"Joseph! You get up right now!"

I told myself it was just a nightmare, not really my mother standing over my bed and hollering at me, and I waited for that moment of bliss when you realize it was only a dream. But Mom's angry voice and her jostling my shoulder didn't vanish into the mist, and Missy wasn't lying there to comfort me. She was standing behind Mom, swathed in my bathrobe and looking humiliated. Worst of all, she was clutching Craig's calculus book.

"Get out of bed, you, right this instant!" Mom growled. "I come in to offer to make you French toast for your going-away breakfast, and this is what I find?! Just how long have the two of you been up to this, anyway?!"

"None of your business, Mom, I'm eighteen!"

Mom slapped me across the face and I tumbled back onto the bed. "How dare you talk to me like that, young man?!"

"Mrs. Chadwick, please!" Missy piped up behind her.

"You stay out of this, you little slut!" Mom snapped. Turning back to me, she went on, "I was ever so happy to have you help her with everything Craig taught you and -"

"Mom!" Now I was more furious than scared.

"Oh, you wanted Missy to think you were the math genius in the family? Don't worry, moron, I've told her all about Craig and how hard he worked to get everything through your thick head! I've even shown her his textbook, and I can see she enjoyed reading his notes to you." Turning back to Missy, she asked, "Did some of those shortcuts sound familiar, dear?!"

Missy responded only with a dejected look at me.

Mom grabbed her arm. "You're coming to my room to get dressed, and then I'm going to drive you home and tell your parents everything."

"Mrs. Chadwick, no! Please!" But Mom wouldn’t hear a word of it.

I got dressed in tears, telling myself at least now there was no doubt about anything - it was over for sure, and I no longer had any secrets to feel guilty about.

Missy still had the cursed textbook in one hand when Mom ushered her out. "Missy begged me to let her write her goodbye message in Craig's book," Mom declared icily. "I hope you'll learn your lesson every time you use the book."

I nearly laughed through my rage. Mom knew I was planning to major in French and I had no intention of ever opening a calculus book again. But there was no use in trying to explain anything now. 

Missy handed me the book. "Don't look until you get to New York," she whispered in my ear as she handed it to me.

"Uh, okay!" I replied through my bewilderment, wondering why she didn't just call me a fraud and a liar and tell me to go to hell already. That made me that much more certain that she had written me a nasty kiss-off in the book. Why would I want to wait until I got to New York for that?

Then Mom shoved her out the door and followed with a dirty look back at me, and they were gone. 

I thought about setting fire to the book in the kitchen sink, but I settled for burying it in the deepest reaches of my closet.

Just as Missy had predicted, we never did see each other again. I never heard if she got to Paris or Asia, and I have no idea where she might be now. I never even heard what her parents had to say about our last night together. Mom wasn’t talking when she got back, and of course I knew better than to ever ask after the storm had passed.

I, however, did get to Paris after college. I’d been over there for a couple of years when my mother bought a house and sent me everything I had left in my old room. By then, Missy was just a bittersweet memory, one of those pretty faces that floated across my mind when I'd had too much to drink. So when I found Craig's calculus book in one of the boxes, I was no longer afraid to see what horrible things she might have jotted down when she'd discovered my deception. I thought I might even get a kick out of it at this late date. Live and learn, after all.

So I fearlessly opened the cover. Sure enough, there was a note in her handwriting: "To Joseph, with all my love, thank you for being there when I needed you, and please tell Craig thanks for the help with the calculus as well! Melissa, August 21, 1989 (You win -- please come to Baltimore for Thanksgiving!)”