Page 7 of All That Glitters
She nodded. “Yeah. Remember how I was the new girl from out of state with the frizzy pigtails and glasses that were too big for my face? The girls always picked on me at recess, and I spent most of my time hiding by the tetherball pole.”
Tony’s expression softened as the memory dawned in his eyes. “I remember that,” he said, the softness in his voice matching hers. “We let you join our club.”
Debbie smiled and gave a soft nod. “The Club Fort Kids,” she said. “You, Mark Henderson, and Kevin Peterson. You guys marched right over to me and invited me to join your club.” Sheturned back to him, her smile nostalgic and tender. “You were my knights in shining armor, all three of you. I think I fell a little in love with you guys that summer.”
The confession hung between them, as innocent and pure as the memory itself. Tony looked a little taken aback, a flush creeping up his neck.
“Do you ever hear from them anymore?” she asked quietly. “Mark or Kevin?”
He shook his head as they started walking again. “Not really. I mean, they both moved before we even got to eighth grade. We tried writing letters for a while, but…” He trailed off, the rest of the sentence unnecessary. They’d been kids. Life had happened. “It’s just you and me now. We’re the last ones standing.”
The words landed gently, like a sacred vow. She was the one who had stayed. The one who had become permanent.
“You think our old tree house is still there?” she said.
“The one with the pirate flag and sign that said, ‘no girls allowed’?”
She smiled. “I always thought that was cool you guys made an exception for me.”
“Someone had to be our mascot,” he laughed.
She playfully swatted his arm. “I was a full-fledged member, with the secret password and everything. And don’t you forget it.”
“You won’t let me.”
She gave a big nod. “Darn right. You think it’s still there?”
Tony shook his head. “No. My parents had me take it down when they sold the house and moved to Tennessee.”
“When was this?”
“Sophomore year.”
“When you came home for Christmas?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
She shook her head. “That’s sad. It feels like a door to my childhood just closed.”
“Mine too.”
They walked on for a little while longer along the moist sand at the water’s edge, a comfortable silence settling between them. It was something Debbie had always liked about the time she spent with Tony; there was never a need to fill the silence. They got to be just there with each other in the moment.
As they walked, her eyes traced across the nearby seawall, with the lights blinking on in the cottages along the boardwalk. It stirred even more nostalgic memories of the times she shared with him.
“Remember when we used to ditch school and drive your dad’s Honda out here?” she said, a smile lighting her face at the memory.
Tony grinned. “You’re getting nostalgic about sleeping in a car?”
“Yeah,” she said, a soft smile touching her lips. “Kinda. It beat sitting through calculus.”
“Does that nostalgia extend to push-starting the car in the morning after you killed the battery playing that terrible Spice Girls cassette on repeat all night?”
“We don’t talk about that part,” she grinned. “And for the record, that was a classic album.”
“Or,” he continued, warming to the topic, “taping newspaper over the passenger-side window with duct tape because you tried to kill a moth with your shoe and put your foot clean through the glass?”
“Feel free to stop anytime, Harding,” she said, shoving him lightly. But she was laughing, a real and helpless laugh. “It happened to be a really big moth! And you were the one who bought the cheap duct tape that peeled off every time we went over sixty.”
