Christine

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 was 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 his lunch-sack, squashed flat. There was a large sneaker-print in the middle of it. Standing opposite him, in jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt that clung to every ripple and bulge of 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 hypnotised, 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?”

“Put down the knife and I will, you shitter,” Arnie said. His voice was perfectly calm. Shitter, where had I heard that word before? From George LeBay, hadn’t it been? Sure. It had been his brother’s word.

It apparently wasn’t a word Repperton cared for. He flushed and stepped closer to Arnie. Arnie circled away. I thought something was going to happen pretty quick maybe one of those things the call for stitches and leave a scar.

“You go get Casey now,” I told the nerdy-looking freshman, and he went. But I thought everything would probably go down before Mr Casey got back… unless I could maybe slow things down a little.

“Put down the knife, Repperton,” I said.