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“Not only that ... I dedicated the song to you.”
I could barely look at her when I said this. All of my insecurities about that night were flooding back to me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was about to reject me again. Would she tell me she actually knew all about it? And that she chose to leave anyway?
“What are you talking about?” I looked up to see a lightness in Darcy’s eyes. She was curious to hear about this. I could tell something was warming inside of her, and she was eager to understand the full story. With these few simple words, I was regaining her trust.
“It’s true. I’ll call up my buddy Justin if you want. Hell, you can probably ask anyone under the age of thirty in the town. I think everyone heard about it eventually!”
“Except me,” Darcy said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I had arranged it with the guys that I would kick off after the break. God, I was so nervous. I had barely performed in front of my parents, let alone a crowd of a few hundred people. But I wanted to do it. Mostly because I wanted you to know how I felt. I knew you were younger than me and that I was heading off to college, but even back then I felt a connection between us. Didn’t you feel it?”
“Of course I did. That’s why I was so hurt when you disappeared.”
“God, I should have made Liz come with us. I should have forced her to sit with you so you wouldn’t have been left all alone. I didn’t think of that!”
“Keep going with the story.”
“Sorry. So, I got up there, and I said something about how I had found someone special, and I wanted to dedicate the song to her. I didn’t use your name because I thought that might embarrass you too much. But I said that I came here with someone I cared about and that I was looking forward to getting to know our future together. And then I sang. You know the song “Summertime Séance”? I sang it that night.”
“The song from your first album?” She looked over, and I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to feel the connection that had come so naturally when we sat in the auditorium watching the kids perform a show onstage. But even though she was opening up to me, I knew she wasn’t quite ready. She still needed to put all the pieces together and then decide if she believed me.
“Yeah, it ended up being the first single for the Horizon. It was sort of the song that put us on the map.” I looked over at her and caught her eye. “I wrote it for you.”
“You’re lying,” she said, and it was the last reaction I expected.
“I’m not!” I found myself laughing as I tried to defend myself. “I wrote that song the summer after high school, right around the time I started realizing how much I enjoyed seeing you around the house when you were hanging with Liz. And around the time you started coming for burgers with my friends or tagging along for the movies. That song is about you.”
I could see Darcy thinking about this. I wondered if she was thinking through the lyrics of the song to find any clues. I knew if she listened again she would recognize all the small details of that summer when we were hanging out together.
“So, I dedicated the song to you, and I stood onstage with my guitar and sang that song. I don’t think anyone had even heard it yet, because I had only just written it. I was shaking like a leaf the entire time I sang that song!”
“That’s why you left,” she said, and we both nodded as we realized what a huge misunderstanding that night had been. A misunderstand we had been carrying with us for years. “And then when you came offstage, I wasn’t there!”
“Exactly,” I said, glad that Darcy understood this next part of the story. “I came offstage beaming, filled with pride that I had done that. And I was so excited to come find you. But also very nervous, because I didn’t know how you would react. It was still so early in our relationship. Plus you were younger than me, and I was about to head off to college. I was definitely a ball of nerves heading back into that crowd.”
“And I was nowhere to be found.”
Darcy’s voice sounded sad or perhaps disappointed that things had turned out this way. I didn’t want to rub salt in the wound, but I did want her to understand what I felt.
“I was devastated. I could only imagine that you had heard me say all those things and you left because you didn’t feel the same. It felt like a clear indication that you weren’t interested in any type of relationship.”
We sat quietly for a moment, both taking in the enormity of the assumptions we had both made that night.
“That’s why you said I abandoned you,” Darcy said. “You thought I just up and left.”
“Exactly. I was mortified. And the last thing I was going to do was call you on the phone or try to talk to you again after you so clearly rejected me. So, I spent the rest of the summer avoiding you. I think I even applied to work in the dining hall just so I could go to school early!”
“And I spent the summer avoiding you because I was sure you had ditched me at the concert. And then the next time we saw each other I remember you literally walked in the other direction!”
I laughed at this, but I didn’t discount her memory.
“I’m not surprised,” I chuckled. “I didn’t have very practiced social skills at that time. I probably wasn’t subtle.”
“You weren’t! I guess we ended up just reinforcing each other’s fears. I thought you didn’t like me, and you thought I had rejected you. And we both avoided any conversations about it.”
“We were teenagers!” I offered. “What do you expect?”
“I don’t know that it’s only a teenager problem,” Darcy said. She shifted on the blanket so she could turn her body to face me. “I’m still having trouble telling you what I’m feeling.”
