The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

taken and gleaming
cobalt blue in the sun. In the space beneath the photo that most graduates
filled with inside jokes and cryptic memories, I was surprised to find that I’d
written only “I never drink when I fly,” a line I recognized immediately as
coming from the movie Superman , but
which I had absolutely zero memory of writing. I cringed. The quote looked
awkward, uncomfortable, even sad, especially in comparison to other people’s.
It couldn’t have really meant anything to me; it was probably just the first
thing that came to mind when I was filling out the form. It was profound only
in that it showed I had nothing more meaningful to say.
    To the right of my photo was Virginia Daniels, a good-looking
auburn-haired number with perfect eyebrows and pouty lips, and to the right of
her, there he was: A. Griffin Dean.
    His smile looked a little forced but it was a good,
professional picture. His hair was shorter than I ever saw it back then. A tie
hung loosely around the collar of his paisley shirt, over which he wore a solid
brown vest. Beneath his photo was an unpunctuated list of things I didn’t
understand, and that stabbed me with sadness. They must’ve been from the two
years I hadn’t been part of. Ah, but here was one I did recognize. It said
simply, Pantie-O’s —a reference
to the breakfast cereal with undergarment-shaped marshmallows we’d crafted from
an empty Cocoa Krispies box.
    I wondered, not for the first time and as always with a
mixture of loneliness and guilt, how much he’d thought of me during our second
half of college. Had he put that in there just for me, or were Pantie-O’s a
joke he let other people in on? Was it no longer just ours?
    I turned the page.
    The club photos were next—I hadn’t been in any of the
clubs—and then came the sports teams, the intramural baseball team being
the second and last photo I expected to be in. I was OK. I played
outfield—never liked hitting. I liked being far enough away to almost
just be a spectator like the rest of the crowd, but with the special potential,
unique among them, to at any moment appear out of nowhere and make a
game-winning catch. It barely mattered that I never did.
    After the teams were the general campus photos: the dining
hall (I could remember the plates clinking, the symphony of conversation, the
routine comfort of soft-serve ice cream eaten at circular tables with friends),
the library where I’d worked a couple semesters, the white-washed marble arches
of my dorm’s ancient lobby. These were places I didn’t have my own photos of. I
hadn’t seen them since graduation. It was almost a surprise to find they
existed outside my own brain.
    Stapled to the last page of the book was a manila envelope.
I ripped it free and pried back the brass fastener. The graduation supplement
was inside after all. It was nothing fancy, just a ten-page collage of photos
from graduation. Our class speaker—the CEO of a dot-com that had since
gone under—and our valedictorian; lots of people I didn’t know in blue
and green robes. But then out jumped someone I recognized: Griffin—and
there beside him, me. The photographer was more interested in a mortar board a
girl had decorated with elbow pasta, though, so we weren’t in focus. We were
off to the side. We were blurry.
    In my memory time had managed to make the end of our
friendship seem practically romantic, a tragedy out of Shakespeare or Dickens,
a tale of heartbreak and stiff upper lips. But this photo brought that shit
tumbling like a house of cards. There was nothing romantic about this photo at
all. It had no more relationship to romance than a dying soldier has to war
movies. We were standing side by side and there was enough glaring awkwardness
in our eyes to taint even the happiness in those of the main subject.
    I remembered seeing him, standing alone in the crowded lobby
of the ritzy theatre we graduated in. I remembered the shock of seeing his face
two years after we