The Guest Book

 Short Story #4 for 2023 is due today in the Deadlines for Writers group. Prompt: paper. Exactly 1500 words. This is the story I submitted.  

The Guest Book

“I would have been there for you!”

I looked down at the guest book and what I’d written on the paper. I pondered my written words. What more could I say? Why had it come to this? The words blurred as my eyes filled with tears.

***

Last week I was sitting in my comfortable living room and strolling down memory lane. As I looked through old pictures from high school, I picked up a black and white photo taken at our Senior picnic. “Ah, Nicole Freeman,” I breathed. “We had a lot of fun together our Senior year. I wonder what she’s up to these days. I guess she and Chad are married. Probably have a house full of kids by now! How long has it been? I guess the last time I saw her was that time a few of years ago when I ran into her at the gas station while I was home from college for Spring break. So…..it’s been almost five years since I’ve seen her.”

As we had talked briefly that day, she said she was still dating Chad Lincoln and they were talking about getting married.  We’d both been in a hurry, standing there filling our gas tanks, so we couldn’t talk long. We promised to get together when I was home that summer, but somehow we never made the connection.

***

Back in the day, Nicole and Chad had been an established couple in our class. She and I didn’t usually run with the same crowd, but I was dating Chad’s good friend, Ashton for a while, and we double dated with them a lot. When Ashton and Chad were together, you could count on a lot of laughs and fun. Those two played off each other like a professional comedy team. The four of us laughed our way through a lot of movies and long drives together during those months. Nicole and I grew close as we spent so much time as girlfriends of those two popular jocks.  

One of my best high school memories was the Senior picnic, memorialized in the black and white photo I now held in my hand. That photo – eight years ago now! We four, Nicole and Chad, Ashton and I, had gone to the event together. Nicole and I had gone shopping that week to get new shoes for the occasion.  I picked her up that afternoon when she got off work at the Dairy Barn. It was my day off from my job at the local barbeque restaurant, and she got off early so we could make this shopping trip. We had driven to Gadsden because the mall there was larger. We grabbed a bite to eat in the food court before we began the hunt for the perfect sandals.

“Are these too strappy?” Nicole asked as she pranced toward me in the first shoe store we visited. She knew that I preferred more structure in my sandals and liked unusual colors, but she was modeling the kind of barely-there sandals with flat soles held on the feet with a few thin strips of white leather. They looked good on her narrow feet and flattered her long legs. After we looked in several other stores, I bought a pair of “mother Earth” style chunky tan sandals, and we ended up going back to the first store to buy the white strappy pair she had liked.

Later, when I dropped Nicole off at the Dairy Barn where she’d left her car, she called out, “Love you!” as she closed her car door and we both drove away. We had developed a relationship, independent of the original connecting link – our boyfriends.

On the day of the picnic, we spent the morning trying on each other’s best shorts and tops, making different combinations and critiquing how each one flattered (or didn’t) our best figure features.

“Absolutely not!” she said with great emphasis when I said that the red shorts made my behind look even bigger than I thought it was and drew unwanted attention to my short legs.  

“Easy for you to say,” I laughed. “That hiney of yours looks good in bright colors, but I think I’m going to stick with the navy blue!”

“Are you calling me fat!?” she demanded in mock horror. “If you think your hiney’s fat, then mine must be too. We wear the same size shorts, Anna!”

“But your long legs make your butt look smaller. My stubby little legs just draw attention to the size of my behind,” I explained.

By the day of the picnic, we had our shoes bought and our clothes picked out, so we turned to the big decisions to be made with makeup and hair. Nicole had a way with makeup and could do anything with hair, so she and I spent the rest of the early afternoon making those monumental decisions. We pooled our cosmetic supplies and tried endless combinations of eyeshadow, mascara, and lipstick, laughing hysterically at some awful choices before we finally got serious and applied flattering makeup for a casual afternoon and evening.

Next we tackled the hair. Nicole hoped to one day own her own hair salon, where she’d do all kinds of fancy updos for girls going to proms or being in weddings. She loved to practice, so we curled and straightened; we pinned hair up and then let it down; we put clips in and took clips out. Eventually we just brushed our hair thoroughly and put it up in messy buns on the tops of our heads, our go-to hairstyle. This was, after all, an informal occasion.

Late that afternoon, Chad and Ashton picked up Nicole first, and all three of them came into our house on the way to the picnic. My friends always loved my mom and dad, so they wanted to see them as well as me.

“Mr. Helton!”  boomed Chad, walking right past me when I opened the door. He shook hands vigorously with my dad before walking over to hug my mother. 

“Oh, Chad,” my dad loved to get the jump on Chad’s joke-telling. “What does it mean when life gives you melons?”

When Chad didn’t have an immediate come-back, Dad laughed out, “It means you might be dyslexic!” He laughed so long and hard at his own joke, we all just had to join in. Even Ashton, who had not yet become comfortable around my parents, laughed loudly.

Not to be outdone, Chad (who had a reputation as a jokester to uphold after all) followed that with, “Well, Mr. Helton, I guess you heard I got fired from the calendar factory, didn’t you?”

“Really?” my dad dutifully replied and waited for the punchline.

“Yeah,” said Chad, “It was really unfair! All I did was take a day off.”

They both laughed much harder than the joke deserved, but we all laughed along and began to feel lighter and in the mood for fun.

Ashton hung back, seeming to feel a little in Chad’s shadow, until we left my house to go on to the picnic, but then he loosened up, and the pair of them were in fine form the rest of the night. They kept the entire class entertained with their antics throughout the picnic. Nicole and I, as their girlfriends, basked in the reflected glory of Chad and Ashton’s popularity.

Nicole and I grew very close during those months of shared makeup sessions, shopping trips, and all the laughs with our best-friend boyfriends; so even when my romance with Ashton ended, Nicole and I remained friendly throughout the rest of the year and whenever we’d run into each other in town. We even had a couple of girls’ nights out together the summer before I left for college.  

***

As my reminiscences ended, I glanced one more time at the photo of Nicole, Chad, Ashton, and me at the Senior picnic. I replaced the picture in the album then picked up my laptop and logged on.

“Nicole Lincoln” I typed into the search bar. I thought she and Chad were probably married, so I used his surname. But, of all the results that came up, none seemed to be the right Nicole.

“Nicole Freeman” I tried. I really wanted to see what she’d been up to, where she was, if she still lived in town, if she had gone to beauty school and opened her own salon as she often talked of doing. I didn’t find any happy news about those things or anything else about her career or family.

My heart skipped a few beats when I found instead her obituary! Her death notice! Cold and factual. Words on a screen.

“Nicole Freeman, aged 26, was found dead Wednesday in a hotel room in Gadsden, a victim of an apparent suicide.”

***

Your obituary, Nicole! Your DEATH notice! Suicide! In some godforsaken, lonely hotel!

Why? Dammit! Why?

Why didn’t you call?

I would have been there for you!