6
Her Name Was Lola
Alone in my room, sleep evades me. Even after talking everything through with Kami, my thoughts replay what happened earlier at Weller’s grocery store at an infuriating rate—over and over and over. The images of me falling into the cracker display are enough to have me screaming into my pillow with utter humiliation. It’s hours later, but I can still feel traces of the burning heat in my cheeks from being in Coy’s vicinity. “I’m such an idiot.” I bury my head under my soft blanket. “Such. An. Idiot.”
I hadn’t seen McCoy many times over the years, since that day he unknowingly left me brokenhearted at the end of his driveway. My heart had ached that day with the knowledge that he was leaving, and I had so much to say to him. Keaton stood beside me talking to McCoy, yet I myself couldn’t seem to form a sentence over the ringing in my ears or the way my mind was racing with the words I needed to say but couldn’t:
Don’t go.
I love you.
I’ll miss you…
I was stunned. He was moving away. This was really happening. Everyone probably thought I was suffering from heatstroke or something as I stood, silent and numb, battling my inner turmoil. I remember the guys both asking me repeatedly if I was all right, and all I could do was nod, and utter monosyllabic responses. If I’d opened my mouth to say anything more, I think I might have upchucked. Realization was hitting me in the stomach like a Mac truck: Coy was leaving Guelph for God knew how long and I wouldn’t be able to see, talk to, or even smell him like I had almost everyday since I was twelve-and-a-half years old.
I had been twenty-two that day; he and Keaton were twenty-three. It was a hot August Sunday, and McCoy was his usual dashingly handsome self. He wore green camouflage shorts, and a tight white V-neck T-shirt which gifted me with glimpses of the six-pack hiding beneath it as his shirt slipped up from time to time as he moved around his grey Ford Explorer. Shifting and stuffing boxes of books, bags of clothing, and small pieces of furniture, he worked to maximize the space so he could get the last few bits of his life into the back of his vehicle. After many months of waiting after graduating from teacher’s college, there hadn’t been any job openings in our Upper Grand School District; people weren’t retiring as early as they had in the past. Like so many other new teachers, McCoy was forced to apply to other boards hoping to find a job. He got one, so McCoy was moving to Brockville, Ontario. He’d accepted a position teaching Grade 10 English over five-and-a-half hours away. Away from me…
“Excited for you, man,” I heard Keaton saying beside me as he handed McCoy the last box.
“Me too. I’m going to miss this place, though,” Coy said, and I could feel his gaze shift from my brother to me. “You going to come visit me, East?” he asked, forcing me to turn my head to face him. It was like a sucker-punch to the gut. All the things I longed to say were at the tip of my tongue. But instead of allowing my verbal diarrhea to escape, I simply nodded my head “yes”, knowing I could never come visit him. Not when he was with someone else; I didn’t have the heart. Because not only was he leaving, he was taken. And she was off to the side, talking to her own family.
“I’ll come up next weekend, teach,” Keaton said proudly, drawing my attention. “I’ll see if I can drag this one with me.” He nudged my shoulder, and I flicked off his Blue Jays hat, earning me a chuckle from Coy.
“Great. Well, I better get going. I told the landlord we’d be there by five. Wait until you see this place, man. It’s nice,” Coy said excitedly…
Of course, that job and the move was great for him, but painful to me.
No longer would I see the boy I had grown to love sitting across our dinner table Sunday after Sunday. No longer would I get to check out the smooth skin of his toned abs when he’d play basketball with Keaton in our driveway two or three evenings a week. No longer would he corner me when the opportunity arose, to tease and flirt with me (intentionally or not). No longer would I have these little incidents to dissect and analyze. And dissecting and analyzing his and my relationship—and lack thereof—had been an absorbing pastime over the years.
Confusing.
Of all the words which could be used to describe my relationship with Coy, it’s “confusing”—maybe even “perplexing”—which describes it best. As we had gotten older, there had been a few incidents where we had both pushed and tested the boundaries. An awkward peck during a game of Spin the Bottle left me questioning if he’d done it because he really wanted to, just out of obligation, or to be cool in front of his friends. Or, like, on my sixteenth birthday, when he came to my celebration dinner armed with a gift of fresh daisies and some Pearl Jam vinyl—the Avocado album—the one album I hadn’t been able to find in any local record shops, the one I’d been going on and on about for months. There had also been a few stolen glances, and some accidental brushing against him when I could manage it. And then there was the one main “incident”—the biggest mindfuck of them all. An encounter that had me convinced that I had a chance with McCoy, that maybe it wasn’t all one-sided after all, a secret moment, which left me feeling that McCoy truly did see me as more than just a friend or as Keaton’s little sister. An incident I referred to in my head as The Out-of-Body Chips Encounter.
I had gone downstairs one night to grab more potato chips for our Labour Day party. It was late, he was down there on the phone. One thing led to another, and somehow I had ended up with my back against a wall.
“I was getting potato ch—” I’d whispered.
“Motherfuck, you’re beautiful…” he’d told me.
God, it’s all so vivid. Memories of McCoy standing so damn close as he whispered soft commands into my ear, melting me with those dirty words…
It was a night I allowed myself to revisit in times of desperation, times when I needed release.
Just the thought of his deep voice sends goosebumps now over my arms and neck. A familiar dampness pools between my legs, like it always does when I let my mind wander back to that night.
“Dammit, I can’t go there right now!” I scold myself, stopping my stroll down memory lane. I need to focus. There’s no way I can handle thinking about what happened that night, especially right now. Pissed for allowing myself to get sidetracked, I go back to doing what I do best where this man is concerned—analyzing everything.
Did I read too much into these little incidents over the years? Or was there a chance he’d actually felt something, too? Should I have put myself out there more? Could he have been mine, and not hers? Or was this just my brain’s desperate way of throwing my poor heart a bone?
“It must have been all in your head, East, or else he wouldn’t have moved away with her,” I tell myself, thinking about her. About Lola…
“You want me to grab the cooler bag, honey?” Lola asked McCoy in a high-pitched voice, breaking Keaton, Coy, and I from our conversation. We stood near the SUV with my parents who had come to say goodbye, along with McCoy’s father, who seemed in a rush, as always. Jason Graves was a tall man like his son, yet his blue eyes—so much like Coy’s—never radiated the same warmth and appeal. He just always looked aloof to me. Standing in a suit in the middle of the hot August day, he portrayed the impatience of a man late for a meeting, rather than a proud father who was there to see off his son. And his mother, Leanne, well, she was busy with a deposition and couldn’t make it. Thankfully, my parents were there and couldn’t stop telling McCoy how proud and excited they were for him.
As they stood talking, I was mulling over how exactly to say goodbye. I’d been contemplating telling him how I felt, what he meant to me. I was working up the nerve to pull him aside and spill years and years of beans, but once again—as always—I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He was leaving, and he was leaving with her. The owner of that sugary voice, who was wearing the smallest pair of jean shorts since Daisy Duke herself and a tight-fitting yellow halter. The echo of her voice chimed into my thoughts, reminding me he was taken…
Fucking Lola.
That interloper, who unknowingly delivered a piercing pang of pain to my heart that day while I stood by, forced to silently watch her and let her leave with my Coy.
Lola St. Claire. He’d met her at a party, and she was apparently the girl with whom he wanted to build a future. She was a tall blonde, with pretty blue eyes to match McCoy’s, and a sweet and bubbly personality that had me wanting to lunge at her in a mud fight (because I’m a lady, and I didn’t want either of us to really get hurt, after all. Not badly, anyway…). I simply wanted the two of us to prove which one of us wanted him more.
“Lola.” I cluck her name on my tongue, in the dark. I haven’t thought about her in years. I guess she could be considered his “unicorn”, if you were to poll the members of the “We Love McCoy” fan club, one I’m sure existed back in high school. You know, the group of girls that embarrassed themselves vying for his attention, the ones who all thought, given the chance, they could be the unicorn—the one girl who could make the player quit the game. Too bad for them, none of them ever pulled it off; then again, neither did I…
It seemed, however, that Lola had finally tamed the infamous McCoy Graves. I think we were all surprised when Coy started bringing her around to the house more and more. Particularly since he’d never been a one-woman man. Well, until Lola, the unibeast…I mean, unicorn.
“You need to stop this. Eastlyn. This isn’t good for your psyche,” I scold myself. Flicking my bedside light on, I reach for my copy of People magazine. Maybe I could get lost in other people’s drama instead? But flipping though the pages doesn’t work. My mind drifts back to the day he left me…
“That would be great, babe. It’s on the counter.” He smiled, giving her bum a squeeze, and, oh, how I wished it were my bum, my squeeze, and that I was his “babe”…
But rather than tell him any of that, I gave him an awkward smile and a soft mutter of a goodbye without getting too close, because there was no way I could hug him and then ever let him go. There I stood, waving from the foot of the driveway, watching in a pantomime-like state as my unrequited love and his Lola pulled out of the driveway to start a new life together.
God, I’d been pathetic, I just couldn’t help it. And I guess I still am pathetic, judging by my performance at the grocery store today.
“Fucking Lola.” I shook my head. I could never have competed with that—then again, you can’t compete when you don’t even put yourself in the running. I guess I’d always wonder how things might have been if Lola and I could’ve had that mud fight. But I was just too chicken to take the risk. I’d always been too chicken. McCoy’s relationship with Lola had vanquished any ideas I’d let myself have. I figured he mustn’t have felt anything for me after all, because wouldn’t he have said something if he did?
“Ugh. I hate this,” I mutter out loud, chastising myself for thinking about them, and him, and me, and us. Or rather, the us that wasn’t. Tossing my blankets on the floor, I make my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. Setting the glass on the coffee table, I grab the remote, hoping it will take my mind off all things McCoy-related.
“Get a grip, East. It was one sighting. One.” If this is how I react to a simple encounter in a grocery store, I’m sure you can imagine how pathetic my teen life was when I saw him almost daily. L-O-S-E-R.
Flipping through the channels, I stop on a rerun of Will and Grace. Sitting back, I watch Karen Walker and her awesome one-liners: “Oh, hey! Someone got flowers. Or, as I like to call them: poor people’s jewelry.” I giggle, trying to distract myself from thinking of my own love life and how virtually non-existent it’s been lately. Sure, I’ve dated and had meaningless sex like almost every other single woman out there, but over the years finding real love hasn’t exactly been easy. I sometimes wonder if it’s my own fault? Honestly, I’ve tried to move on from the silly crush I’d developed for McCoy. But for some reason, McCoy Graves is the one boy I’ve never been able to shake, leaving me waiting, pining, and wishing for more with him. The heart knows what it wants, and mine has always wanted Coy.
My poor heart, she just can never let him go. She’s always craved some kind of sign that he might be ready to admit he wanted me as much as I wanted him. A sign that only ever came in the form of a few yields in the road; ones which might make me stop, look, and wonder, but never a full-blown flashing green traffic light to indicate that, yes, he felt what I did.
I’ve sat and thought about McCoy and his effect on me on and off for years. I’ve wondered, and lurked him on Facebook, but not like this, not like tonight. I feel as if seeing him tonight has pulled up all the emotions I’ve done my best to repress. My mind is reeling with feelings, all rioting for answers to the questions the younger version of me wants to know all the whys to, now that I’ve seen him again.
Why are you back in Guelph?
Why did you leave me in the first place?
But, most of all, I want to know: Why I couldn’t have been your Lola? No, scratch that. Better yet, why couldn’t I have been your Eastlyn?
And that one really hurts.
After a few reruns of Will and Grace, I make my way back to my bedroom and tell myself it’s time that I actively start dating. Time to stop comparing every man to McCoy, the man who never wanted me the same way I’d wanted him. The man who’ll probably never want me. I mean, if he’d wanted me, he would have picked me, right?
Maybe it’s time to take a gamble on someone else? Maybe it’s time to let love win, and not McCoy Graves.