1. Wyatt ran the fastest of anyone in their grade. 

When she stood up to sharpen a pencil, he ran over to her desk, and ran back, leaving this note: “Dear Agnes, Will you go out with me? Sincerely, Wyatt”. 

They held hands at storytime and the teacher said, “Hands to yourself.” 

Recess kickball, a larger boy arguing, “But it’s in the rules! It’s in the rules! . . . You have to—” Wyatt argued, “Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh!” Agnes told him, “Wow, Wyatt: you are a great kickball player!” He blushed and didn’t answer and hurried over to his friends, insulting her. 

When Wyatt asked her to marry him, she said, “No,” and. 

                                                       Stared. 

                                    Wyatt ran away. 

2. Hilary, after a long, shaky diet, made the cheerleading squad. But Ryan, who was on the JV team, would flirt with Agnes when she came and met Hilary after practice, or came and watched games. Hilary got louder. 

The rules having been explained to her, Agnes started to comment on the strategy, to complain about the coach, intelligently, Ryan listening. He said, “You should coach our team.”

Because of lousy grades, especially math, Ryan was this close to getting kicked off. But Ryan whined geometry was too hard, the teacher didn’t like him, he would never do better no matter how hard he tried . . . so no point in doing his homework. Agnes took over. She made him eat lunch with her in the library. In the evening, he had to do 45 uninterrupted minutes of homework before she’d fool around. 

And on his next exam, he got a B. He told everybody, even people he didn’t know, even the Magic cards kids, adapting his touchdown dance and kissing Agnes. 

“This is a good note to end on, I think,” she said. “But I am so proud of you, Ryan.”

3. Travis, who played baseball—she and Travis fought. 

Fourteen times they broke up. And in between, she had some little flings, and learned things about herself. Travis knocked up Mirabelle, meanwhile.

He stopped talking to people. He had lunch by himself and avoided friends, snapping at them, he was actually doing his homework for once. He paid attention in class. When friends invited him to things, he said, “Maybe,” and went off alone. 

He asked to talk to Agnes after class. Finding an empty spot on the third floor, “I was wondering if you might consider giving me another shot.” After school, Hilary said, “Are. You. Kidding me.” 

Over the years—and through three pregnancies—Mirabelle, no matter how hard it got, kept herself very thin: she joined a gym, she forced herself to like salad, she ran even though she hated running. Their apartment, then their house, she kept always tidy, nicely decorated, she read to the kids each night, she collected an overflowing bookshelf of highlighted parenting books (plus a few dieting guides (and a couple of books on Buddhism)), she would be genuinely interested in his day, even when she knew he was cheating on her, enthusiastic / excited for him / happy for him when something good came up at work, and supportive when “an obstacle” (her word) arose, she tried silently listening, she tried offering suggestions, she tried things in between, she always locked the bathroom door and turned on the fan before crying, and once the kids had all moved out, he left her . . . She was in her house for several days, going through the last of the bagels, peanut butter, and yogurt, and ice cream—fuck salad—she went for a run. She ran her usual distance twice over and kept running, she stumbled going over a patch of gravel and skinned her legs and arms and face and lay there. The walk home was dull. Travis had offered to pay the kids’ college. Mirabelle took out her own loans, her parents helping a bit, too, and started her B.A. She graduated. She got her first job. 

4. Kyle showed her Kurosawa films—they’d watch them on his dad’s high-def projector in the basement, his dad (an adjunct at the J.C.) sometimes joining in. From the old man’s commentary, Agnes learned things she’d never have thought to think about. 

But in two months, Kyle’d run through all of Kurosawa’s films. He tried showing her Ozu films. He tried Bergman. She didn’t want to rewatch Kurosawa. He tried Tarkovski and Antonini. He tried Kubrick, he tried Buñuel. 

When prom came, Agnes and Hilary went together, and had fun not confirming whether or not they were “together”. Hilary disappeared when Agnes, flirting with a couple of shy boys who wouldn’t dance including Cody, made them uncomfortable, made them plainly want Agnes to leave / want Agnes to stay. 

(They’d go shopping and Hilary’d always ask her opinion. The outfits she wore on dates were the ones Agnes had said looked “really great on [her]!” “You’re so lucky,” she told Agnes, who didn’t know what it’s like!, who it was obvious had never had any pain.) 

Hilary came back inside after shivering on the balcony for more than half an hour, with a tarty eyebrow-raise that was new, talking too much and laughing at everything. 

5. “L.J.” stood for “Lawrence Junior”, but she liked to call him “Larry the Lawyer”. She was working at a health food store in the city, killing time, having dropped out of art school to travel, six months in Japan, parts of China. L.J. was a few years older than her, a couple inches shorter. He’d googled, “How to ask out the checkout girl without being obnoxious.” 

Before she moved in, his apartment was nearly empty: only a few pieces of furniture and an expensive stereo system, and, nicely displayed, his collection of Zappa CDs, LPs, posters and paraphernalia, The Real Frank Zappa Book by Frank Zappa (which he’d mostly read). When they decided to live together, he surprised her by getting the apartment across the hall: bigger, with a slightly less boring view, with an extra room to be her studio. He liked surprising her: flowers, trinkets, old books—though between L.J.’s long hours at the firm and Agnes’s inconsistent work schedule, plus her volunteering, and how L.J. hated to talk to her, was terrified whenever she was around, they could go whole weeks hardly seeing each other. He surprised her one year with a vacation to Japan, and though this time she came home the same as she had left, she’d enjoyed the trip. 

They went up north for Hilary’s umbral wedding and she showed him around her hometown. “We used to play baseball in that field, until they stopped letting me and Britni play because we were girls.” L.J. said, “Wow. I love it.” “That used to be an Asian restaurant that sold the best cupcakes for some reason. Hilary and I would go there after tests.” Smiling, L.J. said, “Delightful.” In the evening, they had dinner at a restaurant where the meals came scary fast and the waiters/waitresses were scary young—they were Wyatt’s kids, it was Wyatt’s restaurant. Wyatt, about a month after their high school graduation, had married a woman with tattoos and had started making babies. Their apartment was attached to the restaurant and they had a big screen TV and no health insurance. He had never lived outside of his hometown, had never flown in a plane, but his oldest was doing an internship in Washington D.C. and they might go see her—probably just “The Wife” and his kids would go, Wyatt would stay to take care of the restaurant. He was happy. 

He was only ever calm while she slept. He watched her sleep. She made him think of his Frank Zappa collection. He thought of nerds who dressed up like super heroes. He thought of an art collector, a rich guy, the kind of guy who cried at D’Orsay, who didn’t just buy fine prints, had to have the original, and when he had it in his hands, he’d say, over and over again, trying to convince himself, “This is the real, the actual one, the one they touched, that is their paint, that they mixed.” Past midnight, his staff gone home (the ones that go home) or asleep (the ones that live in the mansion), insomniac like L.J., steps through his gallery. “This is the real, the actual one.” He’s bought it. He’s bought biographies of the artist. He’s bought a t-shirt with Spider Man’s picture, his username is redsoxfan_927, he tells everyone why Zappa is the greatest musician of all time, it’s his “about me” standard answer: the first thing everybody knows about him—when someone thinks of L.J., they think of Zappa. He owns this painting that will never be his. Agnes went to the doctor one day and spent the rest of the afternoon walking, random city streets. She played her whole life back in her head, year by year, season by season. She came home to say goodbye. 

She was kind, she complimented him while breaking up with him, and L.J. said to himself, “That’s that,” and went out and found someone who did want to marry him. He died a grandfather. Agnes headed north, moved back in with her mother for a while, she visited/consoled Hilary sometimes, and she got a job at the closest grocery store. A few months later, her little Sylvie was born.

—June 2015