Read Online Missed Connections by Tan-ni Fan - Free Book Online

could see Sera and George staring at the CRV.
    "Something wrong?"
    "No, we just don't know where to put everybody," Sera said.
    "Not a problem. You, me, George, Stanny, right?"
    "No, we're going to be eight altogether. Maria, Emily, Jaime, and Letty on the way up, then we do a switcheroo and bring back Rab because he's going up with Charles and of course Charles and Constance are going on a honeymoon, and Emily's going back with Charles's sister because they're both going to Berkeley."
    "This car holds six, Mom."
    "Right. So would you be comfortable driving up? You can choose who to take. And since Rab lives near you, you can drive him back."
    "Sure, Mom, whatever." Rob said.
    Rob killed the two days before they left rambling around the town he'd grown up in. He took out Stanny's bike and stretched his muscles as he rode around the town seeing the places that once constituted his whole world. He'd already had the big double take during freshman year, a shock of alienation after sophomore year, and a bittersweet nostalgia in junior year when he saw that his favorite video store had been converted into a thrift store. This time it was all of those things and also something else. There was something about being finished with college that was even more irrevocable than being finished with high school, as if being in college had allowed him to not quite let go of every bit of his childhood at once, even though it had felt like he was losing every shred at the time.
    He carefully locked Stanny's bike at the middle school. He didn't need Stanny's ire from losing it. He walked around the back to the windbreak where his friends used to gather before school and race each other to class when the bell rang. He tried to remember the names of all his friends from that period. There were kind of a lot of them, and he'd never been all that close to any of them. He was the kind of person who was friendly with a lot of people, not the kind of person who had one very best friend. That was how he remembered it, anyway. There was his mother relating the legend of the True Best Friend from Preschool, but it always sounded like she was talking about some other kid.
    Case in point: he couldn't even picture all his buddies from middle school. They were a crowd of pleasant faces and mostly ordinary names. He came up with six, maybe seven. He had a feeling there was at least one he wasn't bringing up. There was just kind of a presence, a feeling of comfort and a paradoxical counter-feeling of—what? embarrassment? guilt? shame? Something awkward, anyway.
    Maybe he would run into somebody from that time and ask them to list off the old friends. Surely somebody who had stayed in town would remember better.

    Minor flashbacks, not really revelatory
    Rob thought that sometime in the two days he might run into someone from high school. But none of them were in evidence. He wasn't on a mission anyway.  He did feel the necessity to visit a particular burrito place and the burger place behind the high school. These trips turned into field trips for all his semi-siblings.
    The high school looked smaller, of course, but it also looked paler, more wind-whipped, and dirtier. He did not feel the need to make a pilgrimage to the site of his coming out (to himself at least). It was a hallway, passing between classes, musing about something he'd read in the newspaper, when the sight of some boy's Adam's applehad brought up the unexpected and unwanted image of licking it and he'd thought well, that's gross, but the guy is pretty cute. All the way to his next class he'd wondered about what that meant, and all through class—he couldn't remember which class, but he remembered looking around at the boys and the girls, evaluating them for his erotic or romantic interest, and by the end of class, he knew.
    By the end of the day he'd told three select people what he had figured out, though not the image that had brought him to wonder about it. By the end of the month, all