He smiled and said, “I have eye drops in my jacket pocket.”

That was when I knew he’d been telling me the truth. He really wasn’t going anywhere.

All of my fear melted away.

CHAPTER NINE

I got one hundred percent on my final exam the next day. Instead of rushing back to the cabin, we spent the weekend at school enjoying the year end festivities with our friends. We were all fully aware that this was our final hoorah. It was only a matter of days before life as we knew it would end and each of us would shove off in our different directions and make our own way in the world. It was ever present, this fact, lingering just below the surface, but no one said much about it. No one discussed their anxieties or sadness at the inevitable separation we’d all experience. We just talked and laughed and chased each other about the rugby pitch as usual. Then, the following Wednesday all of us… Alex, Oliver, Sandra, Lance, Merlyn and I, all received our A-Levels and set about preparing to go home.

I kept thinking that this was it. My last and final moment not only as a second form student, but as a child. It was my time of passage, I knew, the moment where I had nobody to answer to but myself. Everything I had worked all my life for, all those tests, all the studying and coursework and worry and aggravation...all of it accumulated into the moment that it all ended. I wouldn’t know if I had been accepted to Cardiff until August, so I pushed it out of my mind and tried to focus on the now, on the excitement that I should be feeling at having completed such a task as finishing secondary school. So many people didn’t make it and I had, with honors.

Then why, I wondered even then, wasn't I excited? Why wasn't I filled with a sense of accomplishment? Why wasn't I bursting with pride? Why did I feel nothing more than relief mixed with sadness, mixed with that horrible sense of regret I always felt, as if I could have done better, as if I should have done something different?

I didn't give myself time to give it any mind. I couldn't feel anything back then, not anything in any depth other than my strange emptiness and occasional bouts of sadness. Nothing but him, nothing but Oliver.

One the last day there, we left one by one. One by one, without truly understanding the magnitude of it at the time, we each left any life we had known before and began a journey from which we could never return.

“I can’t believe you’re all going!” Lucy howled, clinging to Oliver on the quad, “You’re leaving me here all alone!”

“All alone?” Alex asked incredulously, looking about the crowd, “You have a thousand friends at this school! You‘re Queen Bee of your class!”

“Not friends like you!” She choked back her tears and hugged Oliver tighter, “You’re more than friends! You’re my family! I’m going to be all alone! Ollie and Sil have moved away and now you’re leaving me, too, Xander! How am I supposed to come and see you?”

“We are family,” Ollie squished her to him and kissed the top of her head, “Which is why you’ll always see us!”

She howled.

Alex looked at me and shook his head, “Is she serious?”

I nodded. I had been aware that Lucy had been upset for weeks about us leaving Bennington. She hadn't pulled any punches letting me know. When she’d figured out that I wasn’t going to be living in the house with her and Dad anymore and that no one would be travelling one way or the other to visit all the time, she had sank into a deep funk. “It's not fair!” She'd told me in a fit one night, “We've always been together!”

“Lucy,” I tried to remain calm. Part of me really wanted nothing more than to tell her to grow up and remind her that there was a long, long time when we weren’t together, but it seemed cruel so I didn't. Instead, I took the logical route, “We're five years older than you! We had to go before you or we'd be in college until we were twenty-three! Besides, Ollie and I are married now and we have to have our own place. It's not like we won't ever see you.”

“I hate it!” She stomped her foot so hard her hair went in her face, “I absolutely hate it!”

Nothing I had said seemed to comfort her, so that last day on the quad I didn't even try.

“We’ll never leave you forever,” Alexander sounded annoyed, “You know you’ll see us from time to time.”

It only made her cry harder. “From time to time! I’ll be so lonely in Denbigh this summer!”

“Take the bloody train then, yeah?” Alex snapped. He'd had enough of her moaning, “You can come to Welshpool any time you like!”

“Really?” She blinked up at him. Her pale, round face was pure innocence. She was pretty even then, Lucy was. Lucy was always pretty, even when she was a baby, and she was pretty with tears streaming down her cheeks at twelve years old.

“Do you think my mum would turn you out?” Oliver asked gently.

“Would you come and see me?” Her eyes were wide, still fixed on Alex.

“Lucy,” Alexander’s shoulders slumped. The look of annoyance was swept away with another that said he couldn't believe she'd ask such a thing. He shook his head, “If you need me, you call my name and I’ll drop what I’m doing and rush to you. Don’t you know that by now?”

“You always expect people to know things without telling them,” She sniffed.

“Only clever people,” Alex teased.

Lucy giggled.

As much as I had wanted to leave Bennington since our marriage, the thought of walking out of those gates and never returning was very sad for me. After most people had already gone, the six of us Bennington kids gathered in a group on the quad for the last time to say our goodbyes to each other. It was surreal. I looked at the friends I had made since I had gotten there…the ones I had been close with like Sandra, Lance and Merlyn and the ones that had sort of flitted in and out of my life, like Meredith and Josh. Three years I had known all of them, but it seemed a lifetime. I could not even begin to measure the ways that all of us had changed in that time, nor was I able to fathom how we would change once we went our separate ways.

“Take care of yourself and of that giant oaf you married,” Merlyn told me in my ear as he gave me a very firm farewell hug. He was going to his parent’s cottage in France and needed to catch his plane, “I’ll miss seeing you both every day.” He held me at arm’s length and smiled broadly, “Take care of you, too!”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said sincerely, kissing his cheek, “We'll see you soon!” I turned to Lance, who was standing to my left, grinning, “Goodbye, Lancelot,” I gave him a good squeeze and bent to kiss his cheek as well, “I know you’ll do wonderful at Cambridge. Keep growing like you are and soon you’ll be tall as an oak!”

“Liar Silvia!” He chuckled. I watched the red spread across his cheeks about the kiss, “I’ll miss that about you!”

“I’ll stop the world and melt with you, Oliver Dickinson!” Merlyn wailed out the chorus to the song they were always quoting to each other. It had some private meaning I was never in on. He began walking away, “You see the difference and it’s getting better all the time!”

“There’s nothing you and I won’t do, Merlyn Pierce!” Oliver wailed back as Merlyn gave us all one final wave good bye. Ollie held his hand high above his head and bellowed, “I’ll stop the world and melt with you, Boyo!”

I hugged Sandra, the last to leave the quad, for a very long time. She was the hardest for me to leave. Oliver said nothing about it, but left us alone instead, going over to stand with Alexander.

I can honestly say that one of the most beautiful experiences of being a girl is finding a best friend. It took me fifteen years to find mine and it had happened at that school. In a number of ways it was a love affair with me and Sandy. From the very beginning we'd understood each other. I trusted her implicitly. I told her everything, things I'd never even told Oliver. She knew about my feelings for my dad, my ambitions, my sexual encounters. She knew my most intimate secrets and my greatest hopes and fears.