Christine

That was when I started to get pissed off at him. I didn’t like it—I didn’t want to have an argument with Arnie, especially not now, when Leigh would be joining him in another moment—but I could feel somebody upstairs in the brain-room starting to pull those red switches, one by one.

“That’s probably true,” I said, controlling my voice. “But I’m not sure how much you know about people. Will Darnell gave you an improper sticker—if you got picked up he could lose his state inspection certificate. He gave you a dealer plate. Why did he do those things, Arnie?”

For the first time Arnie seemed defensive. “I told you. He knows I’m doing the work.”

“Don’t be a numbskull. That guy wouldn’t give a crippled crab a crutch unless there was something in it for him, and you know it.”

“Dennis, will you leave it alone, for God’s sake?”

“Man,” I said, stepping toward him, “I don’t give a fuck if you have a car. I just don’t want you in a bind over it. Sincerely.”

He looked at me uncertainly.

“I mean, what are we yelling at each other about? Because I looked underneath your car to see how the exhaust-pipe was hanging?”

But that hadn’t been all I was doing. Some… but not quite all. And I think we both knew it.

On the playing field, the final gun went off with a flat bang. A slight drizzle had started to come down, and it was getting cold. We turned toward the sound of the gun and saw Leigh coming toward us, carrying her pennant and Arnie’s. She waved. We waved back.

“Dennis, I can take care of myself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said simply. “I hope you can.” Suddenly I wanted to ask him how deep he was in with Darnell. And that was a question I couldn’t ask; that would bring on an even more bitter argument. Things would be said that could maybe never be repaired.

“I can,” he repeated. He touched his car, and the hard took in his eyes softened.

I felt a mixture of relief and dismay—the relief because we weren’t going to have a fight after all; we had both managed to avoid saying anything completely irreparable. But it also seemed to me that it wasn’t just one room of our friendship that had been closed off; it was a whole damn wing. He had rejected what I’d had to say with complete totality and had made the conditions for continuing the friendship pretty clear: everything will be okay as long as you do it my way.

Which was also his parents” attitude, if only he could have seen it. But then, I suppose he had to learn it somewhere.

Leigh came up, drops of rain gleaming in her hair. Her colour was high, her eyes sparkling with good health and good excitement. She exuded a. naive and untested sexuality that made me feet a little light-headed. Not that I was the main object of her attention; Arnie was.

“How did it end?” Arnie asked.

“Twenty-seven to eighteen,” she said, and then added gleefully, “We destroyed them. Where were you two?”

“Just talking cars,” I said, and Arnie shot me an amused glance—at least his sense of humour hadn’t disappeared with his common sense. And I thought there was some cause for hope in the way he looked at her. He was falling for her, head over heels. The tumble was slow right now, but it would almost surely speed up if things went right. I was really curious about how it had happened, the two of them getting together. Arnie’s complexion had cleared up and he looked pretty good, but in a rather bookish, bespectacled sort of way. He wasn’t the sort of guy you’d have expected Leigh Cabot to want to be with; you’d expect her to be hanging from the arm of the American high school version of Apollo.

People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.

“Just talking cars,” Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie’s and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.

I liked that just fine.

18 ON THE BLEACHERS

O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends…

— Janis Joplin

I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first 6 weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were “going together”. I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.