The Days We'll Never Forget: Chapter One - Titch

Lately, it felt like I’d been spending all my Saturdays staring at the ceiling. Earphones in, music blaring, I seemed to spend all day in this state, trying to kick myself into doing something more productive. Do some homework. Work on my résumé so I could get a job. Call Beth and see if she was doing anything. Download some more music so I wasn’t just playing the same few songs on repeat, even. Anything would be an improvement on getting acquainted with the various shades of off-white the ceilings in my house were painted.

The weird thing was, during the week, I wasn’t like this, I didn’t think. I studied for a couple of hours, and I walked the dog and I got stuff done. Even Sundays were semi-productive, since I spent the afternoon doing all the weekend homework that I should have spaced over the two days. It was just Saturday that was the problem. And I had no idea why.

It wasn’t until I looked out the window on one particularly dismal Saturday in May that something clicked in me that this was a pretty shoddy way to spend my final year of high school. November was approaching at a scarily rapid rate and then I’d have exams, and then school would be over. It was a frightening thought.

At the start of the year, Beth had spoken a lot about wanting the year to be memorable. I’d laughed at her a bit, I remember, because we’d been told for so long about how stressful year twelve would be. I’ll bet it’ll be memorable, I told her, when she’d said that. But halfway through the year, I was coping. The prospect of my exams was as daunting as ever, but I was getting by. My grades were decent, and year twelve wasn’t feeling like the ferocious beast that some of my teachers and older friends had made it out to be. So on that overcast Saturday, I thought about Beth’s starry-eyed hopes for remembering this year, and then I picked up the phone.

“Since when do you call on a Saturday?” Beth asked as soon as she picked up.

“Hey to you too,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what I was wanting to accomplish by calling her.

“Sorry, Titch. I haven’t been up all that long. Too early for politeness.” The clock hanging above the doorway to my room said that it was one in the afternoon. Beth, she of the weekend sleep-ins till noon, had probably only just gotten up. Across the line, her voice sounded a bit groggier than usual.

“Eh, it’s all good.”

“Why are you calling, though?” she asked. “Isn’t today you slob day?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s kinda the point.”

Beth was silent for a moment. I could almost picture her biting her lip in thought, as she tried to work out what I meant. Although truthfully, I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant, either.

“What do you mean?” she said finally.

“I’m sick of Saturdays being my slob day, like you called it, I guess. I just…” I trailed off,

unable to think of what I was wanting to replace the whole lot of nothing I’d been spending half the weekend doing.

“Gotcha.” Beth’s voice was soft. “So what do you wanna do?”

“Something memorable, like you said at the start of the year.” The words felt strange to say, kind of like I was making a wish out loud. One of those desperate hopes for something in your life to change, even though common sense tells you it won’t work.

“Deal,” Beth said.

“So you got any ideas?” I asked, a sense of absurdness making me breathe out a quiet bark of laughter. Beth wasn’t the gloating type, but there was a certain irony in how quickly I’d dismissed her talk of making the this a year to remember only to hate how unmemorable my year had been so far, and I knew it wasn’t lost on her. But I was sick of doing nothing, and anything that would pull me out of this funk was worth looking a little foolish for. Well, pretty much anything.

“I might,” said Beth. “Have you had lunch yet?”

“I haven’t, no.” My timing wasn’t particularly precise on weekends. Lunch tended to happen anywhere between eleven and three, depending on when the thought of food occurred to me. It hadn’t yet today, so I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. At the thought of food, my stomach growled quietly. “You suggesting?”

“Meet me at the café in twenty?” Beth asked.

“Sounds good,” I said, swinging myself upright. Glancing around for my shoes, I added, “Zeke’s working today, right?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Beth’s boyfriend Zeke had worked at the café for about six months now, which had its good and bad sides. The free food he occasionally brought into school was a definite plus, but it did mean that going there usually meant third-wheeling with the pair of them. Which I didn’t always completely oppose, but since Martin and I had imploded, seeing the way they were together tended to remind me of how sucky I was at relationships. “So it’ll just be us. I promise.”

“Cool,” I said, my relief making me feel slightly guilty. I was used to hanging out with the pair of them together, but lately I’d been feeling the need to monopolise Beth more than usual. Which might have been easier if Zeke wasn’t such a goddamn nice guy.

“See you then,” Beth said. “And Titch?”

“Yeah?”

“Bring some money,” Beth said. “I’m sick of you free-loading. You’re buying your own lunch today, ‘kay?”

“Sure thing.” I laughed. “See you soon.”

She hung up, and I brought my phone down to my lap. Okay, I thought. I took a deep breath in

and turned to look in the mirror. As I caught my reflection’s eye, I nodded. Beth and I were going to make this a year worth remembering, something that amounted to more than homework and exams and a number at the end of it.

No more Saturdays staring at the ceiling for me.

***

The little café called Paris on Main was easily the cheesiest place in town. With more photos of the Eiffel Tower than you could count on both hands, the French theme had kind of been taken to a very tacky extreme. The very 1970s facade of the building was very far from Parisian in appearance, so I guess whoever designed the interior was trying to make up for it by trying to make everything as quintessentially French as possible. Every stereotype had been included. It was impressive, in a way.

If Zeke hadn’t worked there, I don’t think any of us would have ever set foot in Paris on Main. Aside from the decor, there was the crappy coffee, and the food was nothing special. It was fairly cheap though, and depending on the manager’s mood, Zeke could usually manage to get us a discount. For that reason, we seemed to spend a fair bit of time there after school.

The little bell in the doorway jingled as I stepped into the café, and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. Zeke stood behind the counter, wiping the bench down with a cloth. I could make out a few people in the back half of the café, and there were very possibly more hidden behind the counter, obscured by the hulking mass of the coffee machine, but aside from an old man reading a newspaper, the front section was pretty much empty.

“Titch!” Zeke exclaimed as he spotted me, his face breaking out into a wide smile that I couldn’t help but return.

“Heya,” I said. “How’s work going?”

He shrugged. “Huh, it’s going by. Usual Saturday morning. You meeting up with Beth, I’m guessing?”

“Yup.” I nodded. “Having lunch and working on plans for world domination.”

Zeke chuckled. “Fair enough.”

“She isn’t here then, I suppose,” I peered around the counter, looking for Beth’s bob of honey-coloured hair. I could recognise a couple of guys from school, but there was no sign of Beth.

“No,” Zeke said, his brows furrowing in what looked like he was trying to decide whether or not to say something. I wondered if they’d fought. It did happen from time to time, even if their relationship was one of the best I knew. Beth had been on the quiet side when I’d mentioned Zeke on the phone, I supposed, and Zeke’s expression right now was far more serious than the one he’d greeted me with.

I wasn’t sure if I should interfere. Maybe I’d talk to Beth about it when she arrived. “Well,” I said, “I’ll go and wait for her, I guess.”

I started to make my way towards the seats we usually took, next to the waist-high model of the Eiffel Tower, unravelling my scarf. It was starting to get cold outside, but inside the café the heating was cranked up.

“Um, Titch?” Zeke said hesitantly.

“What is it, Zeke?”

He toyed with the cloth in his hands and frowned, before saying, “Martin’s back there. Just so you know.”

“Ah.” I exhaled slowly.

“You should talk to him,” Zeke said, his voice gentle. He looked down and was suddenly fixatedly wiping the counter, an uncomfortable tension in his shoulders.

“You should know that’s not gonnahappen,” I said, sneaking a glance past Zeke to the group of guys who were sitting in the back part of the café. Sure enough, I could spot Martin among them, or at least the back of his head, now that I looked closer. He was nodding at something one of the other boys had said, and I hoped he hadn’t noticed me.

“Why not? It’s been what, three months now?” Zeke looked back up at me, directly in the eye. He continued to absently wipe the counter, saying bluntly, “You guys need to work your shit out.”

It was the kind of thing I’d expect Beth to say. I glowered at Zeke, and replied, “Or maybe we just need to all move on. Martin and I broke up. Not all of us can be like you and Beth. I just want to get on with my life.”

“Okay then.”

I sighed, kicking myself for my Martin-related cowardice. I suppose that Zeke had more reason for wanting us to work things out than most people, because he was friends with us both. Not that Zeke wasn’t friends with everyone, but still. I laid my palms against the bench, and tried to smile convincingly. “Uh-huh. But hey, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t confess the problems of my love-life to the local barkeep as he wipes down his bench. I’m fulfilling all my film noir dreams here.”

“I guess so.” Zeke’s tone was lighter than before, although I could still see a glimmer of concern in his expression. “But I’m afraid all I can offer you’s a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll take what I can get.” I shrugged. “I’m gonna go wait for Beth to get here.”

Zeke nodded, and I headed in the opposite direction to where Martin and the others were sitting. Taking a seat at the table that looked out the window onto the main street, I absently flipped through the copy of yesterday’s newspaper that had been left there, trying not to picture what would’ve happened if Zeke hadn’t told me about Martin, and I’d ran into him back there. I wondered whether he’d pretend to not see me, the way I ignored him, or whether he’d confront me.

Three months. I should have been past it by now.

I was still looking down at the newspaper when someone tapped on the window in front of me. I looked up to see Beth standing there, wide-eyed and beaming at me. In her hands, she clutched her beaten-up laptop. I returned her smile and waved, then she hurried into the café.

“Hey,” she said, leaning against the back of the chair next to mine. “Seat with a view today?”

“Yup.” I nodded, and before she could ask why, I changed the subject. “Why’ve you got your laptop? That seems a little… serious?”

“Yeah, well, I might’ve been looking into some stuff at the start of the year, and got a little carried away,” Beth said. “It’s not so much about me being organised as it is the fact that I got bored and then got carried away.”

“Okay.” In the nearly six years I’d known her, I’d watched Beth get carried away on several flights of fancy. She’d get an idea into her head and become enraptured by it, but these ideas never turned into anything concrete. Back in year seven, she had decided that being in a book club would be the ‘most wonderful thing ever’, and for a month she’d hounded me and others in our class to join up and make one. From what I’d seen, she never did put any thought into the logistics of the thing, she just loved the concept.

I’d assumed that her talk of making this year memorable was the same kind of thing. Idle dreams with no meat to them. Apparently not.

She sat down beside me and opened up her laptop. With the screen held towards her, she tapped away at a few keys, as she said, “I know it sounds pretty loser-ish, but at the start of the year, I kind of looked up all these lists of things to do before finishing high school. Like, a school bucket list kind of thing.”

“You did?” Beth hadn’t mentioned it at the time. I frowned at the thought of the kind of things that the lists contained. “Let me guess, they were all ‘kiss a stranger’ and ‘tell your crush how you feel’, weren’t they?”

Beth bit her lip, and pulled at the lock of hair that framed her face. “Well, yes. But they weren’t all that lame. Some stuff was kinda cool. So I made a list.”

She looked down at her computer screen, and it occurred to me that she was stalling showing me. She grimaced, just the smallest twitch of her mouth betraying her.

“Go on, Beth,” I prompted.

“If you don’t want to do these things, it’s okay,” Beth said. “I mean, we can just go into the city more often, or something. It’s a bit daggy, doing a bucket list, y’know.”

I reached for Beth’s wrist and took it. Somehow, her doubt and hesitance had renewed the spark of wanting to do something out of the ordinary that had drawn me out of my funk this morning, and I wanted to see the list. And I knew she wanted to show me, badly, or else she wouldn’t have been so uncertain.

“I’m keen if you are,” I told her. “So show me.”

“Okay.”

Beth took a deep breath, and turned her laptop around so I could see the screen. A document was open, the words arranged into a list. At the top of the page was the first item, and it read:

Sleep under the stars.