Billy stood at the bus stop, shivering and cursing the cold. It would have been bearable if he had worn a proper coat, but he insisted on wearing the jacket. Every year, members of the football team got the nylon jackets with their names and numbers embroidered on them. Some of the team had given up wearing them by the second week of December, but Billy was determined to wear his as long as possible.
It didn’t do much to keep out this wind, however, and Billy turned up the volume on his Walkman in the hopes of distracting himself. He was listening to the R.E.M. tape that his sister had forgotten in her room when she went back to college. He wasn’t supposed to go in there, but nobody was around and he was bored. That tape and the Judas Priest t-shirt his brother had left made Billy feel more like a high school student than all the kids who were listening to the Bangles and wearing Guess jeans.
Not that everyone who wore Guess jeans and listened to the Bangles was that bad. Melissa Godfrey wore Guess jeans. The image of Melissa Godfrey wearing Guess jeans was seared on his brain, the exposed buttons on the front making it all but impossible to lift his head to meet her eyes. Why she stopped to talk, Billy would never know. She asked if he was in to Judas Priest.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
He’d never actually heard a song by Judas Priest.
“Did you get the t-shirt at a concert or something?” Melissa asked.
“Nah.”
“Well, where did it come from?” She was getting kind of intrusive.
“I don’t know, really,” was the best Billy could muster.
Melissa’s friends, other cheerleaders, got impatient and started to drag her down the hall. “See you later,” she half said as the phalanx of teased hair enveloped her.
Billy knew he had blown it. He was sure he could do better if they had another conversation, but doubted that would ever happen. She seemed so far out of his league that they must have been playing two different sports. He figured that the only reason she talked to him was because of his jacket. Being on the football team somehow made him visible.
Wearing the jacket made him part of something in the halls as well, just as surely as the headphones separated him. Billy wasn’t entirely sure which he preferred since those football guys were kind of dicks, but he really wanted to talk with Melisssa again. Standing in the gloom of a late December pre-dawn morning, he saw the strobe light on top of the bus before he saw the actual bus. The light pulsed to the rhythm of “Seven Chinese Brothers,” the last song on that side of the tape. Michael Stipe sang again and again, “She will return.”