Another Past Happening

Another Past Happening

As corny and clichéd as it may sound, it happened after our junior prom. It had been more than I year since I’d started going out with Ian and I was indisputably in love. And we were utterly unopposed. My parents had never really cared. After all, they hadn’t gotten married until I was six. And Ian wasn’t the girl. His parents were less concerned for him than they were for me, which was bizarre, or so I thought. They were convinced that I was going to end up pregnant or something. If I had been Ian, I might have been a little peeved, to be perfectly honest. They didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of faith in him.

And so after waking up and going to the beach with the rest of our graduating class, we went to go see Ian’s parents. If we had stayed away much longer, they would have become to worry.



That was what Ian’s parents did—they worried.

In a lot of ways, Ian’s parents parented me more than my own did. When we got there, I kissed
Mrs. McLellan on the cheek. “Hey, Mom,” I teased her. About nine months in, she said it was silly for me to call her Mrs. McLellan anymore. But by that point I had had the title drilled into my mind. Sometimes I could find it in me to call her Katie, but those occasions were few and far between. Mostly I just joked around with her. Mrs. McLellan was cool with that.

She ruffled my hairspray and sea water-encrusted hair. “Hey, baby,” she said. “How was your prom?” Now, I loved my mom, but she was not a glam and glitter and gossip sort of girl. Mrs. McLellan was always up to talk about the girly things that happened in my life. And she was a whiz at math. I had never quite understood that woman. But she did save my ass in algebra two and chemistry and physics and trig—basically half of my high school career.

Unfortunately, this once, I couldn’t exactly tell her the details. And so I gave her everything I could about the dancing, and Kay’s dress, and everyone at the beach through the night, sitting around a bonfire and talking and singing and dancing some more. And Ian went upstairs to take a shower.

That was one of the nicest things about being with Ian that wasn’t Ian himself. His house was a great place to hang out. They housed me when my parents went on vacation—let me stay in with Maura, Ian’s little sister, who was also incredibly cool, even though she was only in eighth grade when I was a senior. And they fed me an awful lot.

Similarly, that was one of the things I was going to miss the most. Surely I had hours at most—while Ian slept off his hangover—before the entire McLellan clan hated me. I would miss that, certainly. I would miss hanging out with Katie and Maura while they made some bizarre food that I would never even think of cooking, or getting bizarre lectures on the fluctuations of the stock market with Mr. McLellan, who had never suggested that I use anything but his last name—and I had never tried. Not that he wasn’t a friendly guy. He was definitely friendly, perhaps to a fault. But he was just a guy who commanded respect. Even when I was legally his daughter, I called him Mr. McLellan. Mrs. McLellan always made a funny face when I did, the kind that asked him to cut the girl some slack, but I didn’t want the slack. I liked some strict rules.

It was very different from the way I lived. I didn’t have any extended family. I only saw my grandparents a few times a year. Both of my parents were only children. We didn’t have family reunions. At the McLellan house, you showed up for dinner or barely lived to tell the tale. The only times I had dinner with Ian anywhere except for his house was when he’d made specific plans to come to meet my parents. The first time we had dinner out was the night of the prom. It was a strict situation, was the running was of McLellan house.

And I’d kind of enjoyed the discipline. After my laissez-faire parents, someone who worried if I wasn’t home at midnight, someone who asked about my science fair project, someone who was willing to drive me to visit a college when my mom couldn’t make it—having someone like that was nice. Not that I didn’t love my parents, but I would miss the whole thing where they paid attention.

Because it wasn’t like my mom and dad didn’t care. They just didn’t think to pay attention to things like my being home at midnight and my science fair projects and my needing to go to colleges before I applied to them.

So losing Ian was really a fourfold loss. And that stung quite a bit, if I was being honest with myself. This was crap.