by Selina Barker
Janie had no idea how golf scoring worked, but figured she couldn’t lose if she was playing alone. The cosmic mini golf building was so far underground she wasn’t surprised they were going out of business. She loved playing golf here when she was young, but with all her siblings grown up nobody took her to the old places like this around town anymore. So today she was doing it herself. There was no way she was graduating high school before she played one last round of black light mini golf, got one last hotdog at Carl’s stand outside the courthouse, or swam one last lap at the community pool.
She was leaving her hometown in September and wouldn’t have time to come home anymore, like her older brothers and sisters, so she was making the most of tonight.
On her way out of mini golf she almost stepped on a penny, but swung her foot out wide to avoid it. It was heads side up. She couldn’t remember if that was good or bad luck. J.T., her eldest brother, used to collect them with her. They had so many that he once bought her a necklace with the money. Then he got banned from the jeweler’s for dumping a sack of pennies onto the counter. But when J.T. went away to school he changed so much she didn’t think he remembered that anymore. He never mentioned it even though she made sure to wear the necklace whenever he (rarely) came home. She swore she would visit more often than he did.
Then she saw something that she couldn’t believe. J.T. walking two blocks away. She could have sworn she saw him turn down Grant Street towards the high school. His bright blue hair gave him away instantly, except how could it be him when he was supposedly on the west coast in his last year of university? He pretty much never came home. And he certainly never came home to do anything except lie around the house eating and playing online games with his friends from school.
What if it was him, though – should she follow him? Confront him? Maybe he was just getting back…from a flight he booked without telling their parents…in the middle of the week…and instead of going straight home from the airport, he traveled uptown and stopped by their old high school first? Yes, that sounded totally real and possible.
Janie decided to pursue this possible J.T., after she decided that heads-up pennies were undoubtably bad luck. She had a horrible fizzy feeling in her stomach as she started to jog across the parking lot. It could have been the red soda she drank at ten o’clock this morning, she thought as she waited to cross the street. She had thought then that the mini-golf was going to be the biggest part of her day. But when she crossed the street and spotted J.T.’s blue head ducking into her high school, she knew she had been tragically mistaken.
What could a 24-year-old anthropology major want in a 75-year-old brick building so underfunded their textbooks were older than Janie? Maybe the age of the building didn’t actually matter, but it certainly wasn’t old enough for him to find any interesting fossils or whatever anthropologists did. And why was that her first idea of what he was doing there? She reached the school about a minute after him and slipped inside carefully, in case he was still in the foyer and saw her.
Wait, why was she the one sneaking around? She literally went to this school. She’d be there tomorrow. He was the one sneaking. So she yelled out for him, “J.T.? J.T.!” She felt like their mom looking in the fridge for her expensive yoghurt that mysteriously disappeared whenever her oldest son was around.
He poked his blue head around the corner.
“What? Janie? Why are you here right now!”
She looked at him like they weren’t both basically trespassing after school hours.
“Uh, I actually go here. Why are you even in this province right now?”
He returned her look of disgust, as brothers must. “I came for your graduation. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“Good surprise, genius-” she mocked him in a gooey, nasally voice, “-‘I’ll go to Janie’s school and walk around until she graduates, ooh, that’ll be so good’-”
“Are you dumb? I’m setting up a surprise here for when you graduate tomorrow. You’re literally dumb.” She looked past him, to the cafeteria. It was empty except for the same round tables as always.
“Cool setup, looks just like the regular cafeteria.”
He rolled his eyes at her sarcasm. “Okay now I don’t even want to do it because you’re so dumb. I hate you. Get out of here so I can do it.”
She did, as little sisters must, do what he asked. She was equally vexed and thrilled that he came back to see her graduate.
The next day after the ceremony in the auditorium, Janie and her friends gathered outside the cafeteria to talk and plan their last summer together. And that was when it caught her eye – the trophy case just inside the cafeteria. It never actually had any trophies in it – usually just the art teachers’ favourite students’ work or a poster promoting the prom. But on her graduating night, that case was filled to the top with pennies.
She never found out how he got them in there, but they filled her and all her friends’ backpacks and were nearly impossible to scoop off the floor after she opened the case and they all flooded into the hall. She supposed it was half surprise and half prank, but mostly she was just happy to know that J.T. remembered the old days, and it didn’t bother her so much then to leave town for school and see the mini golf place and some of their old haunts fade away while she was gone.
Even after she moved for school Janie always picked up the pennies she saw, heads or tails up, whatever, as long as someday she had enough to get him back.