See ya soon,
Diondra
Ben had not had a girlfriend, he hadn’t. Not a single person, including Ben, had ever said so. The name didn’t even sound familiar. At the bottom of the box was a stack of our school yearbooks, from 1975, when Ben started school, to 1990, when Diane sent me away the first time.
I opened the yearbook for 1984–1985, and scanned Ben’s class. No Diondra, but a photo of Ben that hurt: sloped shoulders, a loose half-mullet, and an Oxford shirt that he always wore on special occasions. I pictured him, back home, putting it on for Picture Day, practicing in the mirror how he’d smile. In September 1984 he was still wearing shirts my mom bought him, and by January he was an angry, black-haired kid accused of murder. I skimmed through the class above Ben’s, jerking occasionally as I hit Dianes and Dinas, but no Diondra. Then to the class above that, about to give up, when there she was, Diondra Wertzner. Worst name ever, and I pulled my finger over the row, expecting to find a lunchlady in the making, someone coarse and mustached, and instead found a pretty, plump-cheeked girl with a fountain of dark spiral curls. She had small features, which she overplayed with heavy makeup, but even in the photo she popped off the page. Something in the deep-set eyes, a daring, with her lips parted so you could see pointy puppy-teeth.
I pulled out the yearbook for the previous year, and she was gone. I pulled out the yearbook for the following year, and she was gone.
Ben Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
3:10 P.M.
Trey’s truck smelled like weed, sweat socks, and sweet wine cooler that Diondra had probably spilled. Diondra tended to pass out while still holding a bottle in her hand, it was her preferred way to drink, to do it til it knocked her out, that last sip nearby just in case. The truck was littered with old fast-food wrappers, fish hooks, a Penthouse, and, on the fuzzy mat at Ben’s feet, a crate of cartons labeled Mexican Jumping Beans, each box featuring a little bean wearing a sombrero, swooshes at its feet to make it look like it was bouncing.
“Try one,” Trey said, motioning at it.
“Nah, isn’t that supposed to be bugs or something?”
“Yeah, they’re like beetle larvae,” Trey said, and gave his jack-hammer laugh.
“Great, thanks, that’s cool.”
“Oh shit, man, I’m just fucking with you, lighten up.”
They pulled into a 7-Eleven, Trey waving to the Mexican guy behind the counter—now there’s a bean for you—loading Ben up with a case of Beast, some microwave nachos that Diondra always whined for, and a fistful of beef jerky, which Trey held in his hand like a bouquet.
The guy smiled at Trey, made an ululating Indian war sound. Trey crossed his arms in front of his chest and pretended to do a hat dance. “Just ring me up, José.” The guy didn’t say anything else, and Trey left him the change, which was a good three bucks. Ben kept thinking about that on the drive to Diondra’s. That most of this world was filled with people like Trey, who’d just leave behind three dollars without even thinking of it. Like Diondra. A few months back, at the very hot end of September, Diondra ended up having to babysit two of her cousins or step-half-cousins or something, and she and Ben had driven them to a water park near the Nebraska border. She’d been driving her mom’s Mustang for a month (she was bored with her own car) and the backseat was filled with things they’d brought, things it would never occur to Ben to own: three different kinds of sunscreen, beach towels, squirt bottles, rafts, inflatable rings, beach balls, pails. The kids were small, like six or seven years old, and they were jammed back there with all that crap, the inflatable rafts making a whoogee-whoogee sound every time they moved, and somewhere near Lebanon, the kids rolled down the window, giggling, the rafts making more and more noise, like they were climaxing in some air mattress mating ritual, and Ben realized what the kids were giggling about. They were scraping all the change Diondra left in the backseat, on the floor, in the crevices—she just tossed any change she had back there—and the kids were throwing it by the handful out the window so they could watch it scatter like sparks. And not just pennies, a lot of it was quarters.
Ben thought that was how you could tell the difference between most people. It wasn’t I’m a dog person and I’m a cat person or I’m a Chiefs fan and I’m a Broncos guy. It was whether you cared about quarters. To him, four quarters was a dollar. A stack of quarters was lunch. The amount of quarters those little shits threw out the window that day could have bought him half a pair of jeans. He kept asking the kids to stop, telling them it was dangerous, illegal, they could get a ticket, they needed to sit down and face forward. The kids laughed and Diondra howled—Ben won’t get his allowance this week if you keep taking his change—and he realized he’d been found out. He hadn’t been as quick-wristed as he’d thought: Diondra knew he scraped after her leftover coins. He felt like a girl whose dress just shot up in the wind. And he wondered what that said about her, seeing her boyfriend scrape around for change and saying nothing, did that make her nice? Or mean.