But, drawn with her into the closet after her spin of the RC bottle had landed more or less in his direction, he didn’t care. She smelled grown-up. Not like watermelon or cotton candy, the pink smells her girlfriends drowned themselves in, but spicy, like cinnamon and cloves. Red smells, he’d thought. She’d kissed him as if she’d kissed before, taking the lead, pulling his bottom lip between her teeth very delicately, letting him taste the tip of her tongue. When he hardened, she hadn’t shifted or pulled away. She’d left her hips planted firmly against his. So that was his first night as Leanna’s boyfriend, quivering in her heat and her smell, groin aching against her flat stomach, and he’d thought, that night, that it was probably only a matter of weeks before she’d let him do more. He wasn’t thinking about sex, exactly—but he wasn’t not thinking about sex.
That was almost a year ago now.
The compression of time that had allowed them to couple so quickly and easily that night in her basement was now agonizing, every week an eternity, every moment invested one that bound him that much more to her, even as he resented her for starting, stopping, giving, withholding. She strung him along with promises that almost always went unfulfilled—give me another month, give me until eighth grade, wait until my parents are on vacation—and with surprises that he hadn’t anticipated: the night, for instance, when she’d shoved her hand down into the waistband of his shorts, gripping him, or when she’d let him, just the once, touch her bare breast. Dear God, it had made him crazy: the silk of her skin there, the Braille of nipple, the scolding press of underwire against the back of his hand. He wanted her, he resented her, he feared her—this last perhaps most. She was playing him brilliantly, and he wasn’t even sure why. He thought that perhaps she just liked having control over him—that if they weren’t a couple, the eighth-grade couple, then they were rivals, struggling forces of old and new. By kissing him, and occasionally—unpredictably—more, she kept him in her sights. By not having sex with him, she kept him in his place. He saw this, but he was helpless to do anything but surrender to it. This is what led up to the morning of the food war.
2.
Roma Middle School students didn’t have a playground or a recess, exactly, but Coach Guthrie usually let them spend the last twenty minutes of PE in “free activity.” This is when he’d open the equipment closet and the gym’s outer door, instruct the class to keep the noise down, and then retire to his office with a can of Mr. Pibb and the latest Sports Illustrated. Some of the kids would play a quick game of HORSE in the gymnasium, some would find a quiet spot in the bleachers to nap. Others wandered out to the tennis courts and the football field, not to play, but to stroll and talk, sneak cigarettes. Christopher and Leanna spent this time as they spent all of the time they shared outside of the sharp gaze of an adult: tucked into some out-of-the-way corner, making out.
They were outside today because they thought everyone else was indoors. It was chilly, in the low fifties, and most people hadn’t thought to bring their coats with them to PE. Neither had Christopher and Leanna, but that hardly mattered. She grabbed his hand the way she always did when Coach Guthrie disappeared into his office, gave him a Significant Look—she’d worn that look so many times now that it was practically a parody of such a look—and pulled him, casting glances back along the line of her extended arm as though she were guiding a pony, to the gym’s outside entrance. He gave her no argument. They ended up at the tennis court because there was a green canvas windbreak woven into the chain link; from the outside you were obscured, but from inside, if close enough to the weaving of the fence, you could usually spot someone coming in plenty of time to jump to a stand and tame down your mussed hair. It was a good hideout, one they’d used several times.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Leanna murmured against his neck as they pressed themselves into the fence, huddling and groping now as much for warmth as for pleasure. She said things like that a lot. Tell me what you’re thinking. Or, Look at us right now. Once, embarrassingly, I’m aching for you. She must have heard this stuff on television.
“I’m thinking that I’m freezing my ass off,” Christopher said. He burrowed his fingers into the hem of Leanna’s sweater until he reached bare flesh, satisfied when she winced and sucked in her stomach.
She pulled back and looked at him. God, she was pretty. She had dark eyes and brows, a faint dusting of freckles against her nose because her mother let her use the tanning bed once a week. Her pink lips were plump and flanked by dimples. He liked the way her wavy, dark blond hair was tucked behind her small ears, which stuck out, adorably, just a bit too much.
“You want to go back in?” Her voice, as always, was double-edged: accommodating, flinty.
“Do you?”
When she responded by grabbing his belt buckle, harshly, his first instinct was to push her away, his first thought that she aimed to hurt him. That lasted just a second. Then he watched, heart suddenly jackhammering, as she pulled the tongue of his belt loose, worked the button of his jeans free of its loop, drew down his copper zipper—it rasped against his erection, making him shiver—and then crouched down, smiling up at him. Every action was achingly slow, deliberate.
“Leanna—”
Her hand, cold as his own must have been, slipped into the front flap of his boxers. He jerked against her, feeling the throb down there echoing across his body, and he clenched his eyes shut, gasping, only to jerk again as the cold turned all at once to wet heat. He felt as though he were being unraveled from the inside out and he threaded his fingers into the chain link behind him.
He was close when he chanced to open his eyes and thought he saw a pair staring back at him. He tried to make a sound of warning and felt Leanna nodding against him, her pace picking up, and he squinted, breath hitching, then felt himself start to convulse down there—he couldn’t stop it—and he grabbed Leanna’s hair and held her steady, needing to stop the ache, however good it was, and it was then, in the weakness of release, that he realized for sure who had caught them, who had seen it all. He jerked himself free and scrambled to zip his blue jeans closed again.
“Oh my God,” Leanna said. She was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, face thunderous. “What was that about?”
His hands were shaking too badly to work the tongue of his belt back through the buckle. His fingers were numb. “Someone saw,” he whispered breathlessly.
She stood, liquid, cool as lemonade. “Where?”
He pointed. There was a rustling, a high-pitched sound that might have been a gasp. A shadow moved across the windbreak on the far end of the court.
Leanna sprinted after.
It happened very fast. Leanna, gazelle-like on those long, pretty legs, outpaced him, and when he caught up, shirttail finally tucked back into his trousers, he found exactly what he’d feared he would: Emily Houchens, jacketed arms clasped tightly across her chest, and Leanna blocking her entrance back to the gym.
“What the hell,” Leanna said, not bothering with a mask of niceness. “What the hell, Emily.”
Emily was looking off to the left and rocking nervously on her heels. It was—and Christopher felt guilty for thinking this—a stance he associated with her retarded brother, whom he’d seen a couple of times at the grocery store. If she wasn’t always on the honor roll, Leanna had once told him, I’d think she was retarded, too.
“Well?” Leanna smiled in mock exasperation, turning to Christopher and fluttering her hands in a Would you get a load of this? kind of way. “What the hell? You like to spy on people?”
Emily shook her head emphatically.
“Because this is just weird,” Leanna said. She was pacing now, her own arms crossed against the cold. Her short sweater had ridden up a bit in the back, exposing a mouth-shaped band of golden flesh and the scalloped edge of her underwear. She stopped. “Are you going to tell?”
Christopher looked at Emily carefully, but she didn’t move. She didn’t speak or nod. “Emily.” He tried a voice t
hat was gentler than Leanna’s. He knew she liked him. He’d been good to her, in the past. And if he’d called her a weirdo or a creep or something in class the other day, well, that couldn’t be helped now. What was he supposed to have done? Her eyes had been on him, frank and adoring, her mouth drooping open a little—she was that unaware of herself, that spellbound. The whole class had been watching, waiting for him to react.
“Emily,” Christopher said now, “are you going to tell? Please don’t, OK?”
Her eyes met his. They were gray-green, kind of pretty. It rattled him, having those eyes on him again. He had recognized them immediately through the diamond of chain link.
Leanna followed his lead. “Please, Emily? You could sit with us at lunch today—or all week. Or whatever you want.”
Christopher almost snorted. That was incentive?
“You could . . .” Leanna stopped, looking at him pleadingly.
Emily was waiting.
He went to her, touched her arm, left it there. “Remember Mr. Wieland’s class? I helped you that semester, right? With your project.”
She looked down at his hand on her arm, her upper lip twitching. He withdrew it. A cold wind whistled around the corner of the school building, rattling the pea gravel outside of the back entrance to the gym. It seemed to Christopher that they were all holding their breath.
And then the bell signaling the end of the period sounded. “Emily,” Leanna said again, but Emily was leaving, bustling to the door with her arms still tight against her chest. She was limping a little, Christopher noticed, favoring the left ankle.
“Oh, no,” Leanna said, her voice breaking. “She’s telling. I know she is. Stop her, Chris, make her stop.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, no,” Leanna repeated. They went inside.
3.
Emily hadn’t blabbed between the gymnasium and the cafeteria. Christopher followed Leanna through the lunch line, holding his tray out for servings of food that he would have had trouble stomaching even had he been downright hungry. The salad was a few leaves of iceberg lettuce, carrot shreds, and exactly two radish slices, which were positioned side by side like blank eyes. The spaghetti was overcooked to stickiness, and a sheen of grease floated on the top of the meat sauce.
“I could kill her,” Leanna was muttering ahead of him. “Where does she get off? And what now? She holds it over our heads?”
“Shh,” Christopher hissed.
Leanna pushed her wavy hair out of her face with a puff, handing the lunch lady her ID card and two dollar bills. “What kind of person just—just watches like that?” Her voice had dropped into a hoarse whisper that was louder than her regular speaking voice. “She likes you, so she was probably into it—”
“Shut up! Jeez.” His tray of food was rattling. He took a seat quickly at their regular table, dropping it with a clatter. He couldn’t believe what they’d done, that it had happened less than a half hour ago. Half an hour ago, he’d gotten off at the tennis court. Leanna had gotten him off.
She was clammed up, red-faced with anger, when Craig Wilson slid into the bench across from them.
“What’s up?” he said, jamming his fork into his pile of spaghetti. He pulled it straight to his mouth, leaning over to bite off the strands. His hair, which he wore gelled into spikes in the front, glinted under the cafeteria’s fluorescents.
Then Maggie Stevenson came, sitting next to Leanna so that they could link arms. They whispered to each other, giggled, and Maggie’s wide-set eyes got wider. Christopher felt his neck flush with heat.
The rest of their group was joining them. Monty Higgins grabbed Christopher’s shoulder for balance as he folded his long legs over the bench and under the table. Anita Page, Monty’s girlfriend, was complaining loudly about the C she’d gotten in Mrs. Mitchell’s class, as if hoping that Mrs. Mitchell, who was chaperoning lunch today, might overhear her. Under other circumstances Christopher might have joined her—Mrs. Mitchell was his least favorite teacher at RMS—but he could see that Emily had just approached the cash register, and Leanna was tensing up beside him. He could feel her arm harden against his.
“I swear to God—” she said, and he nudged her side with his elbow.
Emily was coming toward them now, her face unreadable. His heart resumed its jackhammering from the tennis courts, not only because Emily had seen him and could choose to tell on him, but simply because Emily had seen him, had seen that moment of his weakness and exposure, and what if Leanna was right? Was she into it? Was that why she’d watched? So she’d watched him, she’d seen him as she was never supposed to, but the thought he’d been trying to suppress ever since—the thought, true as it was, that he couldn’t quite make sense of—was this: he’d watched her, too. He’d seen her eyes, recognized them, and finished anyway.
His stomach clenched around the two bites of spaghetti he’d managed to swallow.
Emily stopped in the aisle beside him. She was looking to the left away from them, and he could see the tremor in her hands supporting the tray.
“Your girlfriend’s here, Chris,” Craig said loudly. The table tittered.
Emily hesitated.
“Emily?” Leanna’s voice was tight. “Are you sitting with us?”
Maggie Stevenson made a face of exaggerated disgust. “Is she sitting with us?” she said, eyebrows drawn into a peak. “God, I hope not.”
Emily’s eyes darted to Christopher’s, then away again. She shifted her weight between her feet.
“I invited her to,” Leanna said. She scooted away from Christopher, toward Maggie, clearing an empty space on the bench. “Here, Emily,” she said, patting the seat. It was, Christopher thought, the way she called her dog when she was trying to get him to hop up beside her on the couch. “Sit here.”
The table—their crowd—was very quiet now. And the quiet was spreading to the nearby tables as other students picked up on what was going on and turned to see, fascinated, what would have possessed Emily Houchens to approach the popular kids, to stand there until Leanna Burke invited her to join them. Emily: dressed today in her regular costume of ill-fitting stonewashed jeans; oversized flannel shirt; canvas Wal-Mart knockoff sneakers; brown, limp hair stopping at her shoulders as though it had gotten there and simply given up, lost steam. Was it an elaborate prank? Why else would golden Leanna Burke be shifting to accommodate Emily Houchens?
And why would Emily hesitate?
Christopher knew what he had to do. He had only to say, “Come on, Emily,” and pat the seat as Leanna had done, and she’d accept the invitation. She’d slide into the gap they’d made for her, eat her lunch in nervous silence, and Leanna would keep inviting her back until enough time had passed to make moot the issue of what Emily had seen at the tennis court. With every silent day Emily would have less of a hold on them; every moment she kept her mouth shut made her a coconspirator. By next week, Leanna would be emboldened enough to tell Emily, politely or otherwise, to find another set of lunch companions, and she’d write the whole thing off to her friends as an experiment, an act of charity, a way to pass the time. Christopher knew all this. He knew how easy it could be, how necessary it was. He would be in huge trouble if this got to the principal, and Christopher didn’t want to even guess how his parents would react.
Emily was watching him, waiting. The space between Leanna and himself felt cavernous, like something he could fall into.
Come on, Emily. Sit with us. That’s all it would take.
He shifted, putting his leg into the space Leanna had cleared, pretending to stretch. “No room here,” he said loudly, and Craig spat laughter.
“Christopher,” Leanna was pleading, but he couldn’t stop now.
Christopher turned. “Craig, you’ve got room over there. Can Emily sit with you?”
“Aw, no, man—” Craig was grinning, spreading his legs wide to take up more space. “Monty?”
“You can sit here,” Monty said, patting his lap. “Don’t
know what these guys are so shy about. Come here, sexy.”
Emily did an about-face, moving so quickly that Christopher barely registered her expression of dismay. She had made it to an almost empty nearby table—its occupants were pulling away from her as though she carried something contagious—when he called out, “Emily! Hey, Emily!”
She turned, not knowing that the spaghetti was already in his hand. That night, as Christopher tallied up the many ways he’d wronged Emily, he decided that this moment, more than the ones that preceded and followed it, was worst. She had turned, he knew now, with a look of relieved expectation on her face. She’d believed, after everything, that he might still do right by her, that he’d call out, Just kidding, come back here. And she would have come, too.
There was something in the lunchroom in that moment: a manic charge that Christopher was emitting and getting reflected back at him. He felt delight, horror, incredulity—he felt his peers feeling these things, and beaming at him, giving him the strength to do something that they could never have initiated themselves—and then his arm launched forward.
Chapter Seven
1.
The Next Time You See Me Page 9
