Christine (17 page)

16

Enter Leigh, Exit Buddy

It was, I am quite sure, the Tuesday after our loss to the Philadelphia City Dragons that things began moving again. That would have been the twenty-sixth of September.

Arnie and I had three classes together, and one of them was Topics in American History, a block course, period four. The first nine weeks were being taught by Mr. Thompson, the head of the department. The subject of that first nine weeks was Two Hundred Years of Boom and Bust. Arnie called it a boing-boing-going-going class, because it was right before lunch and everybody's stomach seemed to be doing something interesting.

When the class was over that day, a girl came over to Arnie and asked him if he had the English assignment. He did. He dug it out of his notebook carefully, and while he did, this girl watched him seriously with her dark blue eyes, never taking them off his face. Her hair was a darkish blond, the color of fresh honey—not the strained stuff, but honey the way it first comes from the comb—and held back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. Looking at her, my stomach did a happy little flip-flop. As she copied the assignment down, Arnie looked at her.

That wasn't the first time I had seen Leigh Cabot, of course; she had transferred from a town in Massachusetts to Libertyville three weeks ago, so she had been around. Somebody had told me her father worked for 3M, the people who make Scotch tape.

It wasn't even the first time I had noticed her, because Leigh Cabot was, to put it with perfect simplicity, a beautiful girl. In a work of fiction, I've noticed that writers always invent a flaw here or a flaw there in the women and girls they make up, maybe because they think real beauty is a stereotype or because they think a flaw or two makes the lady more realistic. So she'll be beautiful except her lower lip is too long, or in spite of the fact that her nose is a little too sharp, or maybe she's flat-chested. It's always something.

But Leigh Cabot was just beautiful, with no qualifications. Her skin was fair and perfect, usually with a touch of perfectly natural color. She stood about five feet eight, tall for a girl but not too tall, and her figure was lovely—firm, high breasts, a small waist that looked as if you could almost put your hands around it (anyway, you longed to try), nice hips, good legs. Beautiful face, sexy, smooth figure—artistically dull, I suppose, without a too-long lower lip or a sharp nose or a wrong bump or bulge anywhere (not even an endearing crooked tooth—she must have had a great orthodontist, too), but she sure didn't
feel
dull when you were looking at her.

A few guys had tried to date her and had been pleasantly turned down. It was assumed she was probably carrying a torch for some guy back in Andover or Braintree or wherever it was she had come from, and that she'd probably come around in time. Two of the classes I had with Arnie I also had with Leigh, and I had only been biding my time before making my own move.

Now, watching them steal glances at each other as Arnie found the assignment and she wrote it carefully down, I wondered if I was going to have a chance to make my move. Then I had to grin at myself. Arnie Cunningham, Ole Pizza-Face himself, and Leigh Cabot. That was totally ridiculous. That was—

Then the interior smile sort of dried up. I noticed for the third time—the definitive time—that Arnie's complexion was taking care of itself with almost stunning rapidity. The blemishes were gone. Some of them had left those small, pitted scars along his cheeks, true, but if a guy's face is a strong one, those pits don't seem to matter as much; in a crazy sort of way, they can even add character.

Leigh and Arnie studied each other surreptitiously and I studied Arnie surreptitiously, wondering exactly when and how this miracle had taken place. The sunlight slanted strongly through the windows of Mr. Thompson's room, delineating the lines of my friend's face clearly. He looked . . . older. As if he had beaten the blemishes and the acne not only by regular washing or the application of some special cream but by somehow turning the clock ahead about three years. He was wearing his hair differently, too—it was shorter, and the sideburns he had affected ever since he could grow them (that was since about eighteen months ago) were gone.

I thought back to that overcast afternoon when we had gone to see the Chuck Norris Kung-fu picture. That was the first time I had noticed an improvement, I decided. Right around the time he had bought the car. Maybe that was it Teenagers of the world, rejoice. Solve painful acne problems forever. Buy an old car and it will—

The interior grin, which had been surfacing once more, suddenly went sour.

Buy an old car and it will what? Change your head, your way of thinking, and thus change your metabolism? Liberate the real you? I seemed to hear Stukey James, our old high school math teacher, whispering his oft-repeated refrain in my own head:
If we follow this line of reasoning to the bitter end, ladies and gentlemen, where does it take us?

Where indeed?

“Thank you, Arnie,” Leigh said in her soft, clear voice. She had folded the assignment into her notebook.

“Sure,” he said.

Their eyes met then—they were looking at each other instead of just sneaking glances at each other—and even I could feel the spark jump.

“See you period six,” she said, and walked away, hips undulating gently under a green knitted skirt, hair swinging against the back of her sweater.

“What have you got with her period six?” I asked. I had a study hall that period—and one proctored by the formidable Miss Raypach, whom all the kids called Miss Rat-Pack . . . but never to her face, you can believe that.

“Calculus,” he said in this dreamy, syrupy voice that was so unlike his usual one that I got giggling. He looked around at me, brows drawing together. “What are you laughing at, Dennis?”

“Cal-Q-lussss,” I said. I rolled my eyes and flapped my hands and laughed harder.

He made as if to punch me. “You better watch it, Guilder,” he said.

“Off my case, potato-face.”

“They put you on varsity and look what happens to the fucking football team.”

Mr. Hodder, who teaches freshmen the finer points of grammar (and also how to jerk off, some wits said) happened to be passing by just then, and he frowned impressively at Arnie. “Watch your language in the halls,” he said, and passed onward, a briefcase in one hand and a hamburger from the hot-lunch line in the other.

Arnie had gone beet-red; he always does when a teacher speaks to him (it was such an automatic reaction that when we were in grammar school he would end up getting punished for things he hadn't done just because he
looked
guilty). It probably says something about the way Michael and Regina brought him up—I'm okay, you're okay, I'm a person, you're a person, we all respect each other to the hilt, and whenever anybody does anything wrong, you're going to get what amounts to an allergic guilt reaction. All part of growing up liberal in America, I guess.

“Watch your language, Cunningham,” I said. “You in a
heap
o trouble.”

Then he got laughing too. We walked down the echoing, banging hallway together. People rushed here and there or leaned up against their lockers, eating. You weren't supposed to eat in the hallways, but lots of people did.

“Did you bring your lunch?” I asked.

“Yeah, brown-bagging it.”

“Go get it. Let's eat out on the bleachers.”

“Aren't you sick of that football field by now?” Arnie asked. “If you'd spent much more time on your belly last Saturday, I think one of the custodians would have planted you.”

“I don't mind. We're playing away this week. And I want to get out of here.”

“All right, meet you out there.”

He walked away, and I went to my locker to get my lunch. I had four sandwiches, for starters. Since Coach Puffer had started his marathon practice sessions, it seemed as if I was always hungry.

I walked down the hall, thinking about Leigh Cabot and how it would pretty much stand everyone on their ear if they started going out together. High school society is very conservative, you know. No big lecture, but it is. The girls all wear the latest nutty fashions, the boys sometimes wear their hair most of the way down to their assholes, everyone is smoking a little dope or sniffing a little coke—but all of that is just the outward patina, the defense you put up while you try and figure out exactly what's happening with your life. It's like a mirror—what you use to reflect sunlight back into the eyes of teachers and parents, hoping to confuse them before they can confuse you even more than you already are. At heart, most high school kids are about as funky as a bunch of Republican bankers at a church social. There are girls who might have every album Black Sabbath ever made, but if Ozzy Osbourne went to their school and asked one of them for a date, that girl (and all of her friends) would laugh herself into a hemorrhage at the very idea.

With his acne and pimples gone, Arnie looked okay—in fact, he looked more than okay. But there wasn't a girl who had gone to school with him when his face was at its running worst that would go out with him, I guessed. They didn't really see him the way he was now; they saw a memory of him. But Leigh was different. Because she was a transfer, she had no idea of how really gross Arnie had looked his first three years at LHS. Of course she would if she got last year's
Libertonian
and took a look at the picture of the chess club, but oddly enough, that same Republican tendency would almost surely make her disregard it.
What's now is forever—
ask any Republican banker and he'll tell you that's just the way the world ought to run.

High school kids and Republican bankers . . . when you're little you take it for granted that everything changes constantly. When you're a grown-up, you take it for granted that things are going to change no matter how much you try to maintain the status quo (even Republican bankers know that—they may not like it, but they know it). It's only when you're a teenager that you talk about change constantly and believe in your heart that it never really happens.

I went outside with my gigantic bag lunch in one hand and angled across the parking lot toward the shop building. It is a long, barnlike structure with corrugated metal sides painted blue—not very different in design from Will Darnell's garage, but much neater. It houses the wood shop, the auto shop, and the graphic arts department. Supposedly the smoking area is around at the rear, but on nice days during the lunch break, there are usually shoppies lined up along both sides of the building with their motorcycle boots or their pointy-toed Cuban shitkickers cocked up against the building, smoking and talking to their girlfriends. Or feeling them up.

Today there was nobody at all along the right side of the building, and that should have told me something was up, but it didn't. I was lost in my own amusing thoughts about Arnie and Leigh and the psychology of the Modern American High School Student.

The real smoking area—the “designated” smoking area—is in a small cul-de-sac behind the auto shop. And beyond the shops, fifty or sixty yards away, is the football field, dominated with the big electric scoreboard with
GO GET THEM TERRIERS
emblazoned across the top.

There was a group of people just beyond the smoking area, twenty or thirty of them in a tight little circle. That pattern usually means a fight or what Arnie likes to call a “pushy-pushy”—two guys who aren't really mad enough to fight sort of shoving each other around and whacking each other on the shoulders and trying to protect their macho reputations.

I glanced that way, but with no real interest. I didn't want to watch a fight; I wanted to eat my lunch and find out if anything was going on between Arnie and Leigh Cabot. If there was a little something happening there, it might take his mind off his obsession with Christine. One thing for sure: Leigh Cabot didn't have any rust on her rocker panels.

Then some girl screamed and someone else yelled, “Hey, no! Put that away, man!” That sounded very much ungood. I changed direction to see what was going on.

I pushed my way through the crowd and saw Arnie in the circle, standing with his hands held out a little in front of him at chest level. He looked pale and scared, but not quite panicked. A little distance to his left was a lunch-sack, squashed flat. There was a large sneakerprint in the middle of it. Standing opposite him, in jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt that clung to every ripple and bulge on his chest, was Buddy Repperton. He had a switchblade knife in his right hand and he was moving it slowly back and forth in front of his face like a magician making mystic passes.

He was tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was long and black. He wore it tied back in a ponytail with a hank of rawhide. His face was heavy and stupid and mean-looking. He was smiling just a little. What I felt was an unmanning mixture of dismay and cold fear. He didn't look
just
stupid and mean; he looked crazy.

“Told you I was gonna getcha, man,” he said softly to Arnie. He tilted the knife and jabbed softly at the air with it in Arnie's direction. Arnie flinched back a little. The switchblade had an ivory handle with a little chrome button to flick out the blade set into it. The blade itself looked to be about eight inches long—it wasn't a knife at all, it was a fucking bayonet.

“Hey, Buddy, brand 'im!” Don Vandenberg yelled happily, and I felt my mouth go dry.

I looked around at the kid next to me, some nerdy freshman I didn't know. He looked absolutely hypnotized, all eyes. “Hey,” I said, and when he didn't look around I slammed my elbow into his side.
“Hey!
”

He jumped and looked around at me in terror.

“Go get Mr. Casey. He eats his lunch in the wood-shop office. Go get him right now.”

Repperton glanced at me, then glanced at Arnie. “Come on, Cunningham,” he said. “What do you say, you want to go for it?”