Mr. Charleton thanks us all for doing the assignment. He doesn’t take our papers. Instead, he tells us to keep them and to continue updating them.
“I gotta tell you,” he says with a surprised look on his face. “This—was amazing. It gives me hope that youth is not necessarily wasted on the young.”
He lets us go half an hour early, and we all tell him good-bye as we leave. Before I take off, I ask him if I can give Lily her sheet back. He nods.
“Tell her I said thanks for being open and sharing. That took a lot of guts.”
“Sure,” I say taking the paper Lily wrote out. “Yeah, she seems to have a lot of those.”
When I walk out of the room, I remember that this is the final day of our summer class. At least for this particular group of people.
I suddenly have this awful thought.
Lily is gone, and I never even had a chance to tell her good-bye.
I won’t see her the rest of the summer and she’ll have her own life and she’ll go and forget about me.
I hear the song that Mr. Charleton was playing as we left the room, the main song from The Breakfast Club.
This is what’s going to happen. Lily is going to forget me, and then we’ll start school in the fall and she’ll be dating some football stud and will forget about me and my stupid, silly notions of living out a life in the eighties with my uncle’s records and my mother’s nightmares and—
“You lost?”
Lily is standing there by the doors of the school.
“Hey.”
“You look sad,” she says as she walks up to me.
“I thought you’d be gone.”
“Who’s gonna take me home?”
“I think you could get anybody you want to take you home,” I say.
“I want you to take me home.”
I nod and smile.
“But only for a short while, okay?” Lily adds, taking my hand. “’Cause it’s Friday, and I know what I want to do.”
“What?”
“I want to go back in time with you, Mr. Wrong-Decade-Boy.”
“You have a time travel machine?”
She stops and forces me to look at her up close. “I could take you to places that would blow your little mind, Mr. Buckley.”
I want to melt.
I mean, really, truly, that’s what I feel like doing, standing there like Play-Doh in front of her.
“Okay,” I say so weakly.
She just laughs, then puts a hand gently to my cheek. “You’re adorable, you know that?”
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Yes. I am now. Come on.”
We walk down the steps of the high school and get on my bike, and I know that Lily isn’t going away anytime soon.