The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

Connie and Me

Connie found me in the parking lot by Gene’s pickup. Gene had gone to warm the truck up, and I was standing there with the empty tiara box under my arm.

“You didn’t say my name,” she said. “Up there. You could have.”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“I know. I didn’t believe you.” She pulled her coat tight. “I almost stayed home. I had my nightgown on at four o’clock. Then I thought, if I stay home, Marlys is going to stand up there and say she’s the one who was ashamed. And she isn’t the one who should be.”

“I am, though,” I said. “Some. I let it happen.”

“You were seventeen and Rodney was standing there,” Connie said. “I put him there on purpose. You remember that? I asked him to come to the library. I knew you’d be scared of him.”

I had not known that. All those years, I had thought Rodney just happened to be there.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose we both had something to say tonight.”

She nodded. She stood there a minute longer, and then she said, “Thank you for coming to my house first. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did.”

She hugged me. Connie Rasmussen hugged me in the parking lot of the high school, fifty years after the library. She smelled like hairspray and wool. Then she walked off toward Third Street in the dark with her hands in her pockets.

The Trophy Case

On Monday morning, Darlene called me.

“I want to give the yearbook back,” she said. “It’s yours.”

“Keep it.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. Vern and I were up till midnight Saturday talking. I don’t want it in my house. I don’t want it in yours either, not anymore. It’s been in somebody’s closet long enough.”

“Where then?”

“Where it belongs,” she said.

So that afternoon, Darlene and I drove to the school together. Vern came. Gene came. And Connie came, because Darlene had called her too, and Connie said yes.

Mr. Larson met us in the front hall by the trophy case. It was the old one, with the sliding glass and the little brass lock, full of wrestling trophies and a basketball signed by the 1988 team that went to state.

He unlocked it. He moved a few trophies over to make room. Darlene put the 1976 yearbook on the middle shelf, open to the back cover, with the green ledger sheet unfolded and laid flat on the page.

Then Connie reached into her purse and took out the old crown. The one from 1975, with most of its rhinestones gone and one bent prong. She set it down next to the yearbook.

“It goes with it,” she said. “It should be where people can see both.”

Mr. Larson wrote a little card for it that afternoon on the school’s card stock. He showed it to all four of us before he put it in the case, and all four of us said it was right. It does not say anybody stole anything. It just says what the count was, and who won.

The yearbook is still there. Open to the back. The pencil marks are faded, but you can read every one of them if you lean close to the glass. Bundles of five, the way my dad tallied bales.

Darlene, 132.