TROUVAILLE ... l.danes (REWRITE)

chapter one; the past

MAYBE, IF THIS WAS A MOVIE 

nineteen-eighty-five

WANDERING BACK and forth over the porch of the pale-yellow house, the colour of lemon icing on one of Fran Weston's cupcakes, Lucas Danes wipes sweaty palms on his light-coloured Levi's. The red Ford Cortina that usually sits in the driveway is missing, but there's still enough hope fluttering in his chest to make him think it might be totally unrelated.

Seriously, what are the chances that she's already gone? He's guessing it's slim, but he was never really good at math.

One more round of pacing and he decides to knock. The courage comes from somewhere in his toes, already curling in his white sneakers at the thought of having to face Dr St James after what happened earlier that summer. Working in his Dad's store has actually given him a chance to hide away from most of the town, especially because his Dad never trusts him up front anyway. Too many girls just come in to ogle at you, he always says, even though it isn't true. But, who knows what goes through that old man's mind.

His fist raises, falters, inches away from the peeling creamy paint covering the wood. It'll need to be redone. His Dad will probably ask him to do it once Pamela gets to him, but maybe he can offer first, do it for free, anything to get Dr St James to like him again. To even so much as look at him.

His knuckles knock against the wood. There's a bruise on his thumb from when he was trying to show Mrs Dowager how to use one of the hammers in the store and missed the nail by a few inches. Even if it was broken, he couldn't have faced Dr St James before this.

Better to live with the pain, really.

Sometimes.

He shifts from foot to foot as he waits for the telltale creaking of the floorboards behind the door. It's a sound he'd grown comfortably accustomed to throughout his childhood, but for some reason, when he hears it now, something inside of him plummets. When did it get so cold out? Oh, wait, that's just the ice rolling down his back.

The door starts to swing inwards. His stomach is rolling. The hinges need oiling.

The shadow looms over him. He's not exactly a short guy, but nobody ever seems quite as tall as Dr St James. How tall is he anyway? Six-two? Six-three? Oh God, what if he's six-four? Lucas might as well turn on his heel now, go trudging back to his Dad's hardware store where he'll spend the rest of his life. That's all they do in places like this.

Nobody ever gets to leave.

Well... not nobody.

"Lucas?" Dr St James stares down at him through the half-moon glasses pinching the end of his nose. The house behind him is oddly quiet, unusual for the St James household, where Pamela St James always has some sort of sixties music playing in the background and her daughter is always trying to talk through the din.

The quiet grates his ears.

"I'm too late, aren't I?"

Dr St James' face falls. He tries to school it into indifference, but Lucas is watching him, and the emotions flash across his face as clearly as the end-of-summer sky rolling above them. Finally, he settles on sympathy, it etches itself into his features until Lucas can feel it piercing his chest.

It's not like he deserves any sympathy.

"I came here to tell her how I feel, and I left it too late. I knew I should have–"

"She left today." Dr St James checks his watch and gulps. "Two hours ago, she and her mom took the car." Lucas runs his finger along the seam of his jeans. He wonders if he could find the thread and start unravelling the perfect tailoring. It wouldn't feel any worse than whatever this is; the sinking of his heart, the churning of his stomach. He stopped feeling his toes the minute he saw Dr St James, but now his fingers have turned numb too.

He's always been just too late.

Dr St James doesn't explain why he didn't go with them, but Lucas can fill in the gaps. Mr Latimer died an hour ago, but everyone knows the sickness started taking him a few hours before. The man didn't have any family, just his doctor, just the rest of the town.

But, they were all too busy waving off Shelley St James.

"I'm going to see her tomorrow. If you want me to pass along a message."

"That's awful kind of you Dr St James, but I doubt she'd want to hear from me." He rubs the toes of one white sneaker against the other, watching the dirt start to flake off and onto the winding porch. Dr St James rests a bony-fingered hand on his shoulder and gives it a tight squeeze.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. This is what Lucas deserves after what he did to her. Fucking hell, what is wrong with him? He should be taking his Dad's motorcycle and driving it through to Harvard, stopping her in her tracks, telling her how he really feels.

This was never a joke.

Not to him, anyway.

What's the point anyway, she wouldn't listen.

"Thanks for telling me." Lucas tries to shake off Dr St James' hand as kindly as he can. He watches as it swings at the man's side, half-hoping he'd just slam the door in his face and give him an excuse to feel so bad.

Shelley St James has disappeared off to Harvard and he'll never see her again. Because as soon as you get out of this damn town, you never come back, not when you have a choice to turn your back on its white picket fences and streets named after fruit.

He doesn't hear the door close until he's halfway down Peach Street, kicking his feet against the sidewalk, trying desperately not to ruin every picture-perfect garden he passes on the way. The other St James household, where Shelley's cousin lives, has one-hundred different garden gnomes just sitting out in the open. Once upon a time, they'd dared each other to steal one and then laughed so hard when they tried that they got caught.

He grabs the closest one, pocketing it before he can ever get a look at it.

She's never coming back, anyway.

Someone calls out his name. Probably Jeff. He doesn't even turn to look, because something inside of him turns warm and gooey at the thought that maybe it was her all along shouting on him, waving at him across the street, ready to run into his arms as soon as he turned to look at her. But, it's quickly squashed by the knowledge that that's a long shot.

They have always been a long shot he thought he could make.

He was never really good at football.

The gnome falls out of his pocket when he finally reaches his Dad's store, only a few streets away at the opposite end of the town square. His Dad is too busy talking to a customer to even hear him come in, let alone hear the sound of a gnome cracking as soon as it hits the ground. He stares down at the scattered pieces.

If this was one of those depressing romance movies, it'd probably act as a metaphor or something.

Instead, it's just a bunch of silly, cracked pieces of a gnome that used to wear a top hat and had a monocle. That was always Shelley's favourite. And now, it's gone, just like she is. Huh, maybe it is a metaphor after all.

Funny how life always finds a way to kick him right in the nuts when he's least expecting it.

Maybe, if this was a movie, he'd get the girl in the end, after the gnome breaks and he glues it back together, years have passed, and they've both got jobs, and she decides that now is the perfect time to visit the small town she was raised in because her life is tumbling down the drain and what's better than the sweet taste of nostalgia to fix every problem in your life. Maybe he'd give her the gnome, and she'd cry, and finally, they'd get that kiss they'd been waiting for their whole lives.

Or maybe, Lucas has got to stop watching shitty movies with girls he doesn't even like.