"We want to hear it," says Emma, her bean sidhe voice carrying the weight of a commandment. She doesn't use her powers on the patrons often, but when she does, she sounds like that. She isn't forcing me to speak--I'd know it, if she were--but she may be forcing the cheerleaders to listen. I'll have to thank her for that, later. I'm starting to realize that I want to tell this story; that it's been waiting long enough to be told. Something about tonight...this is the right time to tell it.
I clear my throat, shifting on my seat, and begin to speak again. "Rose and Gary weren't the sort of couple that most people expected..."
***
Rose and Gary weren't the sort of couple that most people expected to find in Buckley...or the sort that most people approved of. Gary, it was generally accepted, had prospects. He was a member of the football team, and not the least skilled, either; his family had money enough that college wasn't out of the question, scholarship or no. They'd come out of lumber, like most of the old families in Buckley, but now they were in the business of real estate and land rentals, and there wasn't a speck of dirt on their hands. If Gary liked to mess around with cars, well, boys will be boys, and he'd grow out of that soon enough. If he liked to mess around with girls like Rose, on the other hand...
Gary's father swore the little tramp was just trying to get herself pregnant and land a husband who could take care of her and the screaming brats she'd be happy to weigh him down with. Gary's mother tended to think of Rose a little more charitably--she'd gone to school with Robert Marshall, before they both went on to the lives their place in society defined for them, and she remembered him as a kind boy, friendly, sweet, and willing enough to do what needed doing--but agreed with her husband on one thing, at the very least: their son could do better.
As for Gary himself, he listened patiently to the things his parents told him, met the girls his mother brought home for him, and then returned to the things he cared about: auto-shop, hanging out at Bronson's Diner, and dating the daughter of the night-shift waitress. Rose Marshall might not have money, and she might not come from the best family, but she had eyes he could look into for the rest of his life, and she knew how to fix a transmission, and he was pretty sure that he was a lot more than halfway to being in love with her.
Best of all, he was pretty sure she was halfway to being in love with him, too. Being with Rose made him happy in a way that almost nothing else did, or could. He was seventeen, and she was sixteen; in another six months, he'd be eighteen, and he could ask her to marry him. It didn't matter what his parents thought, or what her mother thought. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with Rose Marshall. He knew that, and that was all that he needed to know.
"Your radio's broken again."
Gary glanced toward Rose. The sun was glinting off her lemon-bleached hair like a halo, making her look even more like an angel than she usually did. (That was an image that would haunt him in the days and nights ahead, making sleep an impossible fantasy. But that was the future, and the future was another country.) "Just give it a thump. It'll start working again."
"I'm not sure I can handle all those big technical words," said Rose, and smacked the radio with the heel of her hand. Rock and roll blared into the car, turned up just a little too loud for the safety of their eardrums. She twisted the volume quickly down, and smiled. "Much better."
"What's the fun of something that works every time you try to turn it on?"
"I guess," allowed Rose, who had been on the receiving end of too many broken things to really share that point of view. Some of them didn't start up again when you hit them. Some of them required begging and tears and giving six months of saved-up babysitting money to your brother to pay off the electric bill. "So, tomorrow..."
"Tomorrow, huh? I was thinking I'd go see a movie. Maybe drive up to Ann Arbor for the afternoon." Rose made a face at him. Gary laughed. "Or I could pick you up at six for dinner, and we can go from there to the prom. If that's okay with you?"
"That's just about the bee's knees to me," said Rose, solemnly. She was smart enough to know what it was really costing Gary to take her to the prom, and still innocent enough to hope that his intentions were honorable ones. They might not be--no girl with two older brothers and no father to look out for her could be quite that blind--but as long as she could hope...
If this ended with the school year, if he said "It's been fun" and drove off to college in some big city like Detroit or Columbus, well, it would still have been worth it, every minute of it. Because he'd been good to her, and she liked it when he laughed, and there wasn't enough in Buckley that made her happy. If everything he'd been to her was a lie, well. She'd run that road when she came to it.