The Big Rewind by Libby Cudmore Read Free Book Online

guilty coming in late. I flicked on the light, and he ran to his bowl and sat there waiting even though he had plenty of food. I poured in a little more just to appease him and went into my room. I’d do Philip’s laundry tomorrow.
    Back in college, I made friends with Reese, a genuine Jersey boy with black hair and thick lips and bottomless eyes who now lived in Portland and reviewed video games for a living. But back then, he lived in the corner suite on my dorm floor, and it was in that room, watching Sealab 2021, that I started to get over my freshman-year breakup with William, who had dumped me by getting engaged to someone else when he transferred to Dartmouth. Reese was many things—brutally funny, an early adopter of low-fi indie music, and always in the mood to order a pizza—but he wasn’t good at dealing with a crying girl he’d met just over a month ago. In an effort to cheer me up, he put the Mr. T Experience’s “The Boyfriend Box” on a mix he made me, titled Hardcore Pining, possibly in hopes that it would help me get over William. Instead, it had prompted me to compile every token of lost love—all the letters, stuffed animals, bad poetry, and mix CDs—in one place. They weren’t organized with any nostalgia,as KitKat’s mix tapes and track lists were; everything was shoved in there like cursed pirate treasure. The box had traveled, unopened, with me every time I moved. As long as it was there, I didn’t have to think about it—like it was the Dorian Gray picture of my heart.
    I put on the Blondie T-shirt and checkered flannel lounge pants that served as my pajamas and wrestled the box out of the closet. Seeing all of KitKat’s old tapes had awoken my own anxieties about my romantic past, the boys I’d left behind, the ones who’d broken my heart.
    Taking a deep breath, I pulled off the lid. Just one item, I told myself. Just one thing to satisfy your curiosity.
    I pulled out a CD from Jeremy, titled Bright Lights, Little City, the track-list collage like a soccer mom’s scrapbook page—red sequins along the outer edge of the paper, torn-up scraps of sheet music, all surrounding a backstage picture of us in too much makeup with overexuberant grins and demon-red eyes reflecting the shoddy flash of a disposable camera. The curtain must have just come down. There is no moment so happy as the end of the opening-night show, the relief that, despite hell week and sore throats, tongue-twister lines and terrifying solos, it had all come together in two glorious hours of song and dance.
    Jeremy and I had dated very briefly in our freshman year of high school, during that strange vortex of stage time when you’re spending every minute together and it develops somehow into love. The show was Annie; he was Rooster and I was Lily St. Regis. I should have been Miss Hannigan and he should have been Daddy Warbucks, but those roles—surprise, surprise—both went to upperclassmen. On opening night, during “Easy Street,” he’d slapped me on the ass just after my solo and kissed me for the first time during intermission.
    He made me this CD just after the show ended and three weeks before our monthlong love affair ended. He didn’t date anyone else for a while, so we’d stayed friendly until the divergences of class schedules and new social groups drifted us apart.He went on to play Billy Crocker in our sophomore production of Anything Goes while I was stuck as one of the Angels; then he was Curly in Oklahoma! while I was Ado Annie Carnes. Senior year, he played Danny Zuko in Grease . I skipped out because I’d always thought the eponymous line in “You’re the One That I Want,” which the director added in over the curtain call, was the musical equivalent of cockroaches skittering up your arm. After graduation, Jeremy was accepted into the musical-theater program at Carnegie Mellon and, as far as I