My friend Mark’s mom had been unwell. Mrs. Schrope doesn’t like people to fuss over her, however, since I was only in town for a couple days, she agreed I could stop by. My sister Shannon accompanied me. As we approached the house, a midsize car blocked the Schropes’ driveway. An older gentleman with sparse silver hair stood outside the driver’s door looking uncertain.
My sister and I grumbled:
“Who is that?”
“What’s he doing here?”
The man waved feebly, a paper surgical mask dangling from his wrist. Presuming him one Mr. Schrope’s pals, I braked and lowered my window. The man said, “I’m sorry. Am I in your way?”
I studied him, slight slump, running shoes with pants, a flowering plant pressed against his breast. The fella looked and sounded so apologetic that I started to feel bad for him.
I said, “No, no. You’re fine. I can park in front.”
He smiled. I nodded reassuringly, then edged my car past the driveway. I could tell my sister was studying the guy while I executed a flawless three-point turn. As I shifted the car into park, Shannon spun around and asked, “Is that Trey White?”
I met Trey White in high school. He and I still share mutual friends, including both Schrope brothers and their parents. He pursued me after college, then, as soon as we got together, Trey made it clear that he wasn’t thrilled to be my boyfriend. He said things like, “You’re nowhere near good enough for me.”
And, “I don’t know why I’m even in this relationship.”
During the years we were together, Trey took issue with my weight and what I wore. He disapproved of my family and friends. One time he tried to correct the pronation of my right foot, asking, “What’s wrong with your foot?”
I looked down.
“It shouldn’t turn out like that.”
I saw what he meant, saw that my right foot ticked ever so slightly towards one o’clock.
“Seriously, it shouldn’t.”
I stamped away.
Trey called after me, “Can’t you at least try to straighten it?”
When he said things like this, I’d give it to him. I’d argue or make threats. I’d cry. Still, for some reason, I couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave.
I first encountered Trey on a church bus at age fifteen. This bus carried a crew of young Presbyterians and their nonbeliever friends like me from Orlando, Florida, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, ostensibly to ski. When I climbed onto the bus, all my friends were sitting with other people, so I sat in an empty seat midway up the aisle. Trey was already in the seat beside mine, his face turned to the window. That boy spoke not one word to me the entire drive to Tennessee. During the thirteen hours we sat side by side, Trey acknowledged my existence only once. While it was still light outside, he elbowed me and pointed at a car wreck. Then, at some point after dark, when everyone was asleep or, like me, listening to Walkmans, while Scott Helgarude and Scott Schrope were making out with girls from Winter Park High, Trey, arms folded, hands tucked into his armpits, closed his eyes and slept. As he did, his head tipped closer and closer to mine, until it found rest against my shoulder. The warmth and heft of his head against me made us feel intimate, which we were not. I didn’t even know his name.
After that trip, I didn’t exactly like Trey, yet any time circumstances brought us in proximity, I longed for him to notice me. These times, he rarely spoke to me. So, I ignored him right back. Then, about a year after the bus trip, I gave him a ride home from a party, and we ended up hooking up in his driveway. It was lame. Our teeth kept clacking when we kissed and I parried his countless attempts to get a hand into my pants. After he made for my zipper one time too many, I sat up and said, “I need to get home.”
Trey went off to a state university. I finished high school a year later, then stayed in town to work and attend college. After graduation, I wanted to move away, but had trouble finding work elsewhere. I traveled for a few months, then worked crap jobs in Orlando—including temping for a realtor named Elvis Pervis—while I sorted out what to do with myself. At Thanksgiving, I ran into Trey at a party. His kiss came out of nowhere. I didn’t have anything better scheduled, so we went back to the friend’s place where I was crashing and made out. It was a rerun of the grab-session from his driveway years before. Trey kept trying to shimmy my pants down. I kept keeping them on.
Not long after, he called long distance from the state where he was studying medicine. He called again a couple days later. By New Year, we’d turned into a thing, meeting in southern coastal towns, places I could take the train: Savannah, Charleston, St. Augustine. We camped at the beach or stayed in deplorable motels, dining on peanut butter and banana sandwiches or sharing breakfast for dinner at Waffle House. Before we parted, he’d say, “I’m not sure how long this is going to last. I really need to find someone more suitable.”
His mother concurred. She outlined her reasons in a letter. Trey showed it to me. Written longhand, it must have taken her an age to compose. Mother denounced my family, with all its substance misuse and divorce. She noted my issues with authority, and detailed a few other reasons I can’t remember, although they were probably true. Trey’s mother closed her missive with an indictment of what she considered my overall disregard for decorum, illustrated by the fact that I’d recently scratched an arrow and the words “GOD’S HOUSE” in wet cement on the sidewalk outside their gigantic Protestant church.
I probably should have bailed after Trey showed me that letter. I really should have bailed after we fought over the word “carny.” I’d used the word in a poem that, max, three people have ever read. In the poem, I refer to a carnival worker I sat next to riding the Hudson Line to visit my grandparents. I’m pretty sure this guy was on major hallucinogens. I could barely follow his thinking and then, by Tarrytown, he got really dark, started talking about animal sacrifice and other devil stuff. When Trey read the two-stanza poem, he went quiet. After a minute, he asked, “Why did you even speak to this person?”
I shrugged one shoulder.
Trey shook his head. He flicked the sheet and said, “Carny is not a word.”
I disagreed.
Trey insisted that it was not, but even if it were, which it definitely wasn’t, no decent person would use it.
I told him he was both wrong and a jerk.
The internet was just getting rolling then, so Trey consulted a dictionary. No carny. I pointed out that his volume might be unreliable since it looked to be about twenty years old. Eyes narrowed, he thundered upstairs and pounded on his housemates’ doors. Flapping my poem through the air, he asked the two of the three if they’d ever heard or used the word. Neither would admit to it, not even the one from Oklahoma.
Trey and I fought all night, me crying so fiercely that all the blood vessels around my eyes burst. Next morning, I looked like a red panda. Next morning, he would not speak to me.
So, why didn’t I walk—run—away? Problem was, Trey could be into me. He could be tender and affectionate. We were always touching; walked or drove places with our hands entwined. On our stolen weekends, we’d read in bed, propped against each other, snug as two pups in a litter. I’d share a line of knockout prose; Trey would explain something interesting from his textbook.
Many an afternoon, he’d succumb to sleep with his cheek against my heart. That night, in our booth at dinner he’d announce, “I think I want to date other people.”
Now, it seems obvious that I was captive to eerie, unconscious forces: my mother is critical, withholding, changeable. My father died when I was a child. And, admittedly, I gained otherwise-unattainable social capital by being with Trey, the someday-surgeon. Other bright news: our sex was pretty out of hand, possibly the best part of our relationship. Since we fought constantly, we basically only had breakup sex or makeup sex, two of the hottest kinds.
Inevitably, Trey broke up with me. Five days earlier, I had tried to end things, but he’d refused to accept it. Sucker that I was, I agreed to try again. The following weekend, Trey drove to my basement apartment and told me he was done. That night we lay in bed, chaste, whimpering, like siblings sent to bed without supper.
Even though I was often miserable in the relationship, after Trey dumped me, I was wrecked. I cried nonstop, even at work, and would get completely lost on my walk home from the subway or grocery store. My friend Nancy noticed this disproportionate response to the breakup. Nancy is ten years older than I. She is beautiful, a wingless angel, and one of the gentlest people I know. When I called her sobbing one day, Nancy said, “This sounds like it’s about more than Trey.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Nancy said, “Someday you’ll forget all about him. I promise.”
I didn’t believe her, but I did call a therapist at her suggestion. I even took antidepressants until I got out of the hole I’d fallen in. Gradually, I felt better. I went to Nancy’s place for loud, lengthy dinners with her fiancé. And I spent more time with my other friends. We went to movies, concerts, soccer matches. That winter Nancy married. She and I danced our faces off at the reception. After the band played their last song, I had to go in search of our shoes.
The following year, it was Nancy who assured me there was nothing wrong with the man I would eventually marry after I complained about him being weird.
“Weird, how?” she asked.
“Like, too nice.”
She only laughed. Maybe that’s why, when my sister said Trey’s name, Nancy’s heart-shaped face flashed in my mind. I craned my neck to get a clearer view of the man ambling up the Schropes’ front walk. He wore the surgical mask now.
No way.
It couldn’t be.
Mouth distended, I turned to my sister.
“It definitely is,” she said.
I had heard about Trey over the years: a fellowship, kids, an acrimonious divorce. I’d even seen an unfocused picture of him wearing a hat when he’d sent me a Friend Request a while back. Surely, I would know him on sight.
Mouth still gaping, I looked back at the old man just as, laughing, he turned sideways and dipped one shoulder, a gesture I recognized.
It was him.
But how?
His utter decrepitude would not compute.
Then.
It did.
And I was delighted.
Smiling, I faced my sister. “He looks so old.”
Shannon nodded. I shuddered, then looked back at Trey. He must have been clowning because Mr. and Mrs. Schrope had giant grins on their faces. I turned back to my sister, said, “Like a septuagenarian.”
She nodded again, then we got out of the car, Shannon carrying her own plant, one with fuchsia flowers. As we headed up the walk, Trey headed down. This was during Covid-19 weirdness, so he stepped onto the lawn to give us space.
Fastening my own mask, I said, “Oh, my God! Hey!”
I could tell by his eyes he was smiling. He asked, “How are you?”
My sister ushered me up the path. “Good,” I replied, taking a step. “You?” “I’m doing well.” He apologized again for blocking the driveway, then said, “I just stopped over to say hello before I leave town.”
I shrugged and took another step, turning so we could still face each other. I could only see the top third of Trey’s face. His green eyes glimmered.
When we were younger, I’d press my forehead against his while he slept and breathe in his out-breath. Now, standing six feet from him on the Schropes’ front walk, I didn’t know what else to say. I held up a hand, murmured, “See you later,” then followed my sister through the open front door.
Coley Gallagher has written about women’s soccer for US Soccer and the site Playing for 90. Her stories and essays have appeared in Mutha Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Green Mountains Review and the Evanston Roundtable. She is currently at work on an essay collection.