. . . she of the pink nylon scarf and the arrogant Nordic cheekbones. But that never happened. Leigh Cabot is Leigh Ackerman now; she's in Taos, New Mexico, married to an IBM customer service rep. She sells Amway in her spare time. She had two little girls, identical twins, so I guess she probably doesn't have all that much spare time. I keep up on her doings after a fashion; my affection for the lady never really faded. We trade cards at Christmas, and I also send her a card on her birthday because she never forgets mine. That sort of thing. There are times when it seems a lot longer than four years.
What happened to us? I don't really know. We went together for two years, slept together (very satisfactorily), went to school together (Drew), and were friends with each other. Her father shut up about our crazy story after my father talked with him, although he always regarded me after that as something of a dubious person. I think that both he and Mrs Cabot were relieved when Leigh and I went our separate ways.
I could feel it when we started to drift apart, and it hurt me - it hurt a lot. I craved her in a way you continue to crave some substance on which you have no more physical dependency . . . candy, tobacco, Coca-Cola. I carried a torch for her, but I'm afraid I carried it self-consciously and dropped it with an almost unseemly haste.
And maybe I do know what happened. What happened that night in Darnell's Garage was a secret between us, and of course lovers need their secrets . . . but this wasn't a good one to have. It was something cold and unnatural, something that smacked of madness and worse than madness; it smacked of the grave, There were nights after love when we would lie together in bed, naked, belly to belly, and that thing would be between us: Roland D. LeBay's face. I would be kissing her mouth or her breasts or her belly, warm with rising passion, and I would suddenly hear his voice: That's about the finest smell in the world . . . except for pussy. And I would freeze, my passion all steam and ashes.
There were times, God knows, when I could see it in her face as well. The lovers don't always live happily ever after, even when they've done what seemed right as well as they could do it. That's something else it took four years to learn.
So we drifted apart. A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes. And although I did love her, all the kisses, all the endearments, all the walks arm-in-arm through blowing October leaves . . . none of those things could quite measure up to that magnificently simple act of tying her scarf around my arm.
Leigh left college to be married, and then it was goodbye Drew and hello Taos. I went to her wedding with hardly a qualm. Nice fellow. Drove a Honda Civic. No problems there.
I never had to worry about making the football squad. Drew doesn't even have a football squad. Instead, I took an extra class each semester and went to summer school for two years, in the time when I would have been sweating under the August sun, hitting the tackling dummies, if things had happened differently. As a result, I graduated early - three semesters early, in fact.
If you met me on the street, you wouldn't notice a limp, but if you walked with me four or five miles (I do at least three miles every day as a matter of course; that physical therapy stuff sticks), you'd notice me starting to pull to the right a little bit.
My left leg aches on rainy days. And on snowy nights.
And some times when I have my nightmares - they are not so frequent now - I wake up, sweating and clutching at that leg, where there is still a hard bulge of flesh above the knee. But all my worries about wheelchairs, braces, and built-up heels proved thankfully hollow. And I never liked football that well anyway.
Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham were buried in a family plot in the Libertyville Heights cemetery - no one went out to the gravesite but members of the family: Regina's people from Ligonier, some of Michael's people from New Hampshire and New