Christine

“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 car 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 defence 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 haemorrhage 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 for ever—ask any Republican banker and he’ll tell you that’s just the way the world ought to run.