Chapter 17

If I really want to find you on Facebook, no number of privacy settings is going to stop me.⁷ So it was with Francesca Marcelo. It required a lot of searching and no finding, and then searching for her friends and friends of friends from high school, friending them, then scrolling through their friends for the Fs. Eventually, I found her: Francesca Marcelo.

I messaged her about, you know, hanging out sometime while we were both home for Christmas. She was game. That’s how I found myself standing on her porch on December 26, knocking on her front door and watching that stairway for her to come down, feeling much like I had a decade before when I’d come to pick her up for our golf course date. She appeared at the top of the stairway, and as she walked down I reviewed the script I had created in my mind, the script for our conversation that would lead to all my questions being answered.

But here’s the problem with scripts. They work great in movies. In life? Not so much. Life is too complicated. As soon as you involve other human beings and their unwieldy free wills, you can kiss your precious script good-bye.

She opened the door. Her hair was cut pixie short, and her clothes were even more earthy and hempy than they were back in high school. For a second I was not even sure it was her. But then I looked at those hazel eyes.

“Francesca Marcelo!” I said, smiling.

“Josh Sundquist!”

She wrapped her arms around my neck, and I put one forearm-crutch-attached hand around her waist while I kept my weight on the other crutch for balance.

“Come on in.”

She led me downstairs to the basement to play a game of pool. I hoped, I wondered, if maybe she felt the same pent-up tension I did, the same lingering years-old interest that kept festering, kept saying It’s possible! We could be together! We should be together!

I racked the balls and pushed them into the front of the triangle before lifting it away. I let her break. I didn’t want to beat her too badly.

Francesca and I caught up on biographical information: college, graduation, current employment status, and the like. She asked me about my job as a motivational speaker. Bingo. That was the opening line in my script. She was following it perfectly.

“You remember back the first time we ever hung out,” I began. “When my artificial leg malfunctioned on the golf course?”

She smiled. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I actually tell that story in my speeches.”

“About me?”

“Well, it’s mostly about my leg, but yeah, it’s about you, too.”

I couldn’t read her expression, couldn’t determine whether she was pleased or dismayed with this revelation. I pressed forward, offering, “People really like it.”

“That’s good,” she said noncommittally.

It was my turn in our game of pool, and I was lining up my shot. But I stood upright before taking it in order to pause the game while we proceeded into the dramatic climax of my script.

“In fact,” I said, “people always come up to me after my speeches and say, ‘What happened to you and Francesca?’ And I’m never quite sure what to tell them.” Here was the punch line. I looked straight across the pool table into her eyes to deliver it with maximum feeling. “What happened to us, Francesca?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What did happen to us?”

I froze. This was not part of the script. She was supposed to answer the question, not deflect it back to me. I wanted her to tell me exactly what went wrong, why she didn’t like me. Or to tell me that she did like me and for all these years, she’d been wishing our hanging out had turned into an actual relationship.

But instead of giving me an answer, she had turned the question around. That caught me off guard. I didn’t have the answer. That’s why I had asked her, after all.

I felt like we’d gone back in time ten years, returning to that golf course. I was falling in slow motion, down, down, down, landing on my back beside the tee, the foot of my artificial leg turned at an anatomically impossible angle. I looked up at her in shock and confusion and embarrassment, for a moment frozen there on the grass, unsure of what to say next. That’s how I felt again, a decade later, in her basement. Caught in the headlights. She had asked me a question, but I was too scared to try to answer, almost like I knew exactly what had happened to us but was afraid to admit it to myself.

“Um, I don’t know,” I said.

She nodded slowly, almost sagely. And then she changed the subject, leaving me to wonder about that nod: Was she nodding to agree with the fact that I didn’t know? As in, You certainly don’t know, do you? You still don’t get it, and you probably never will. Or was she nodding to show that she didn’t know, either?

The nod was frustratingly ambiguous but the message clear: This was a question I would somehow have to answer for myself.