Nina, hearing my name broke off what she was doing, leaving smoke curling from the bong. She saw the dumbfounded look on my face as I stared at her. She held my stare for a moment and then burst out into hysterical laughter, expelling a large cloud of fragrant smoke from her mouth and nose. Tracy and Cindy instantly joined her in hysterics. They were pointing at me as they doubled over in laughter.
They laughed for nearly three minutes as I stood in the doorway and simply stared. I could not believe that they had actually gotten Nina stoned. I could not believe that she'd gone along with it. What were they thinking?
When their giggles and chortles dried up I walked over to them. Nina started to say something and then burst into laughter again. Cindy joined her.
"You got her stoned?" I asked Tracy, who was the only one not laughing. "And you had her cut school?"
"We didn't have her do anything." Tracy told me, picking up a baggie and loading another hit into the bong. "She asked us if we had any pot. She wanted to try it. It seems all those stories you told her about smoking out made her curious." She giggled, jerking a thumb towards Nina. "As you can see, she seems to like it. Why didn't you ever smoke any with her?"
"I didn't think she'd want to." I said, watching Nina's face. She would start to calm down a little and then would look at me and burst into fresh laughter.
"I guess you were wrong." Tracy said, handing me the bong and a lighter. "I think there's a lot of things about Nina that you don't know."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Later." She answered. "Have a hit."
Oh well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I flicked the bic and put my mouth to the bong.
Cindy and Nina both left shortly before Dad arrived home from work. I worried about the two of them on the snowy roads with a stoned driver at the wheel. I wouldn't stop them from leaving but I made them promise to put on their seatbelts. I knew Nina would and I also knew the chances of them being in a fatal crash were slim. Most fatal accidents occurred during the summer months, when the weather was clear and when the drivers could barrel along at suicidal speed. During snowy weather everyone drove slow. While there were more accidents, they tended to be minor. You simply couldn't generate enough kinetic energy to kill during a snowstorm. If Cindy got in an accident it would probably be a fender-bender. But then nothing is absolute so I worried.
After dinner and dishes, while the household began to wind down for bed I found my way to Tracy's room once again. Outside the wind was still howling against the windows, making the storm-shutters rattle and bang. They would have cancelled school the next day except for the fact that it was Saturday.
Tracy was lying on her bed, reading the latest (for that time) Stephen King book. She was wearing her standard pajamas, a long T-shirt.
"What's up?" She asked as I tapped on the frame of her door.
"Can I come in?" I asked.
"Sure." She nodded, setting the book down and sitting up.
"Earlier today," I started. "While we were smoking out."
"Yeah." She nodded. "Wasn't that some killer shit? I was droning all through dinner. Do you want to smoke some more? I still have a little left."
"No," I said, shaking my head. And then I amended. "Well, maybe tomorrow. But anyway, while we were smoking you said that there's a lot of things I didn't know about Nina."
"Yeah?" Tracy smiled a little.
"What did you mean by that?" I asked.
She gave me a very adult look. "You really don't know, do you?" She asked.
"Don't know what?" I asked.
She took a deep breath. "Nina's in love with you Billy."
"What?!"
"Not just infatuation, not just attraction, not just puppy-love, whatever the fuck that is, but love. L-O-V-E. The big one. The ultimate like. She's head over heels in love with you little brother."
I was stunned into silence for a moment. Finally I said, "Did she tell you this?"
"No." Tracy said. "She doesn't have to. It's pretty plain to everyone who talks to her. I've known it ever since I started getting her to talk to me.
She thinks you're the shit." She shrugged. "God knows why."
"Wait a minute." I said, trying to deny it. "I think you're mistaken. We're good friends, we like to talk to each other, I can see how you would think…"
"I'm not mistaken Billy." Tracy said firmly. "You can accept it or not accept it. I'm just supplying information for you. She is in love with you. No doubt about it. And she's terribly afraid that you don't love her, that you'll never be interested in her, that you'll break her heart someday."
"What? How…"
"Because I'm a girl." Tracy answered before I could finish asking. "We know these things. She knows you could hurt her bad and she also knows she is powerless to prevent that if you decided to do it. She loves being around you but she wants more. She's not getting more but she stays around because of the hope that someday she will. She'll stay as long as the slimmest hope remains of that. The only way you'll get her to stop loving you is to destroy her hope completely. She may or may not recover from that. She's kind of a fragile girl, as you may have noticed, and I tend to think that maybe she wouldn't.
"I'm not telling you all of this to scare you or anything. I just want you to know what you're dealing with here. She loves you. You are God to her. So you need to tread carefully with her because you're playin' with her fuckin' emotions. Do you understand?"
"No." I shook my head. "I do not." I became angry. Here I was a thirty-two, almost thirty-three year old and a seventeen-year-old girl was telling me about love? What the hell did she know about it? She was probably reading all kinds of things into Nina's conversations based on the romance novels that she obsessively read all the time. "Nina and I are friends. No more than that. That's all we'll ever be. She likes me, she enjoys my company, but she doesn't love me. I used to tease her in grammar school for Christ sake! You've got your signals crossed."
She picked up her book again. "Believe what you want Billy." She told me, dismissing me in a non-verbal way. "But I'm not wrong about this."
Winter went on. I got straight A's again in the first semester of school. Second semester began with Nina and I in three classes together. We continued to study together a few times a week. I always watched her carefully, listened to her words carefully when I was with her. She liked to be around me, that was for sure, as I liked to be around her. She valued my opinion as I valued hers. She joked with me, revealing a quick and witty sense of humor beneath her shyness, a sense of humor that I knew that no one but me ever saw. We enjoyed being together. We were friends, very good friends, best friends even. But love? I thought not.
On February 10 of that year, 1983, I went down to the department of motor vehicles with my Dad after school. I took the written test, passing with 100 percent. I then climbed in Dad's Dodge Diplomat with a crusty old driving tester and took my driver's license test. The instructor was impressed with my abilities, stating that she'd rarely seen a new driver that operated a motor vehicle so well. She gave me a ninety-six on the exam, marking me down a point because I hadn't parallel parked terribly well, something I'd never mastered. I returned to the DMV office and had my picture taken. I was now a licensed driver.
As I drove my Dad home that day he congratulated me and gave me a brief lecture on safe driving. Doing his fatherly duty you understand. When he was finished I turned to him.
"I'd like to get a job Dad." I told him.
"A job?" He asked, looking at me.
"Yeah." I nodded. "I want to start making my own money. You know, so I can buy my own car and start putting money away for college. Stuff like that."
"Well that's admirable Bill." He told me, taken aback a bit. "I certainly am not going to stop you."