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turned her head a little, but didn’t
look back. “Yup. Good,” she said.
    He watched her walk away for a moment,
then turned back around and headed off. John didn’t own a car, so he went to
the bus stop. It was a pleasant day out, summer already creeping in when it was
only the middle of April. He enjoyed his walk across the campus, because UMMS
was an extraordinarily beautiful place. Most of the large buildings were made
of stone, which were set in rolling fields of plush green. The walkways were
all freshly paved, and Missouri hardwood trees cast large areas of shade where
students took lunches and naps and played guitars or studied. The University
owned all the land surrounding the campus buildings as well, and there were
lovely Victorian houses that served as homes to professors, fraternity and
sorority houses and offices for the teachers and staff. So yeah, the walk
wasn’t so bad.
    John slowed as he passed a group of
freshman girls dancing on the lawn beneath an old oak tree, and felt the cell
phone stuck in the front pocket of his Levis vibrate against his leg. He
continued walking and fumbled the phone out of his pocket. When it was free, he
checked the caller ID on the screen to see who it was. The area code was 312.
He didn’t even know where that was, let alone anyone who lived there. Curious,
he hit the green answer button.
    “Hello?” he said.
    There was silence on the line, but he
thought he could hear someone breathing. He tried again. “Hello?”
    Still no answer. John sighed, about to
hang up. Then: Hello?
    The voice was small and hesitant, a
woman’s voice. John didn’t notice it, but he had stopped walking, and students
on their way home were swerving around him, a bit annoyed that he was standing
in the middle of the walkway. For several moments he just stood there, the
phone pressed to his ear and his mouth hanging open, unaware of how he, with
his pin-straight black hair that fell past his waist and his circle-shaped
glasses, must look. It was if he had seen a ghost…or heard one.
    “Hello?”
    That voice again, a little louder and
with more confidence. He swallowed hard. Someone walking past bumped his arm,
mumbled an apology that John didn’t hear, but the little push at least got him
walking again. His mind, however, was stuck. He had heard it twice, that voice.
He hadn’t imagined it.
    He forced a word through his lips, the
only one he could think of, because he was all of a sudden terrified that she
might hang up. “Jodie?” he asked. His voice came out in just a whisper, and he
hoped to God that she’d heard it, because he wasn’t sure he could speak again.
Saying her name felt strange, as he had not spoken it, nor heard it spoken, in
over six years. But it was familiar all the same. Very familiar. Sort of like a
precious thing that you lose in the house somewhere, and never find again until
years down the road when you are packing up to move to a new house. Yeah, kinda
like that.
    She had heard him. “ Yeah, Johnny,
it’s me,” her voice said, and John exited the sidewalk and plopped down on
a bench, unconcerned about missing the early bus home.
    “Jodie?” he repeated.
    He heard her giggle, just as she used to
do when they were younger, except her laugh was deeper now, throatier. He
wasn’t even sure how he had known that it was Jodie. But then again, how could
he not? Wasn’t this exactly the moment he had been waiting for for over six
years?
    “Yeah. How ya been, Johnny?”
    He heard himself answer, and thought
that his voice sounded odd giving his usual, knee-jerk response to this
question. “Good. How ’bout yourself?”
    Over the line, all the way to the mystic
land of 312 —wherever the hell that was—he thought he heard her sigh. “ I
been good,” she said, and paused. Then, “ I’m coming into town soon,
actually, and I was wondering if you might want to meet up… have a drink or
something?”
    His answer flew through his lips as
though rocket-fired,