The Big Hit

by Jamie Bennett

  Knox reached to pick up the papers we had spread out, brushing against me. I didn’t move. “I’m hungry, too. We should go,” he said. He looked over at me from the corner of his eyes. “We could get dinner.”

  He meant the two of us, together. He was asking me to go with him! I felt a twist of excitement in my chest. “There’s that diner on Linden Avenue,” I suggested. I thought of his secret entrances into the library. “But it’s usually popular, so there will be people there. I don’t know if they would bother you.”

  “You can protect me.” For the first time since I’d met him down in the basement, Knox smiled. It was like a ray of sunshine in our murky corner of the library and my face lit up right back at him.

  I followed him as he wended through the stacks in a roundabout way, back to the stairs to the basement. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” he told me.

  “Oh.” I had been prepared to go with him out through the basement, but of course, why would I have to trail after him like a puppy? So I left through the front door of the library and walked to the employee parking lot, and there was a huge figure already standing there under a light. To make sure I got to my car all right, he said, and I heard the little accent that let me know that he wasn’t a local. I waved as I pulled out and a moment later, I saw him driving an old truck behind me. I knew it was Knox, because it looked like his shoulders filled the entire front seat.

  The diner wasn’t very crowded, but everyone there immediately swiveled to look when we came in. And stared with open mouths, some of them. It was very disconcerting to walk through the tables and booths with everyone gaping, and I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Knox was having the same reaction. His expression looked like the one he’d worn during his disaster of a TV interview: as if his face was carved from a big block of stone instead of being human. A scary death stare. We sat at a booth in the back, and gradually, heads stopped swiveling to look over at us.

  “Does that bother you? The staring?” I asked. I still felt so uncomfortable.

  “Yeah. I don’t like the attention. I’m more used to it, now, but I still don’t like it. When I first moved here, I didn’t want to go out. I barely left my condo.” He studied the menu as he spoke.

  I understood how that was, all too well. “That’s a hard way to live,” I commiserated. “It’s lonely, right? I know how that feels.”

  Now he looked up at me. “Do you?”

  “Well, I lived with my mom, and she had some issues. I did too. We didn’t get out very much,” I said, in the understatement of the year.

  “What does that mean?”

  The waitress came up to ask if we wanted something to drink and prevented my explanation, which I wasn’t sorry about. My whole story was hard for most people to understand. But when she left, Knox was still looking at me, waiting. “Why didn’t you get out very much?” he asked.

  “My mom was agoraphobic.” Among some other things. “That means that she was afraid of crowds, public places, even big open spaces, toward the end. She had panic attacks and didn’t leave the house we lived in for many years.”

  “Ever?”

  I shook my head. “Ever. She wouldn’t even go to the doctor to get help.” She had just stayed home, in the silence.

  “You couldn’t leave, because of her?”

  It would have been easier to lie and blame it all on my mom, but I couldn’t do that. “No, not just because of that. I had my own problems. I started having a lot of anxiety too, and I didn’t want to leave, either. It took a long time and a lot of work, therapists and medication and breathing exercises and meditation and all kinds of things, before I was ready to go to a place like this,” I explained, looking around the diner. “I know it sounds crazy. I get that.”

  All he said was, “You wouldn’t know it by looking at you.”

  “You wouldn’t know that I was crazy?” I felt my heart beat and my eyes prickle. I didn’t want to cry, because I really was better. I was out having dinner with someone, after spending a day going to school and working. I was living on my own, I was driving a car. I had imagined that I would have a life just like my mom’s: imprisoned in her house by her own mind, and so, so unhappy. But that wasn’t my future anymore.

  “I meant that you wouldn’t know that you had a problem like that. You look like…”

  I waited.

  “You look like an ad for happiness. You’re usually smiling, when you aren’t screaming in fear of me.” Then he smiled, too.

  “Am I?” I realized I was smiling right at that very moment. “I think it’s because I appreciate everything so much. I may give you a sugar rush when I say it, but I think that life, that everything, is just so…” I stopped and shrugged, not knowing how to express what I felt. “Life is special. Precious. I’m grateful for what I have, for my brother and his wife Julia, for Julia’s mom, for my job and school. I feel so lucky. Not that I don’t have my moments, like this morning when I couldn’t find my keys, but in general…” I stopped again. “You can throw up now.”

  He just took a sip of water and nodded slowly.

  “You don’t really scare me,” I said. “You said I was screaming in fear of you, but it was only because you startled me so much. The first time I saw you I thought—well, afterwards, I thought I had imagined you. But at the time, I thought you were from a book.”

  “Like I had stepped out of something on the shelves?” And he smiled again.

  “No, I didn’t mean a book that the college library would have! I read science fiction books for fun, and some of the characters can change forms, from people into animals. I thought you were like that. Just briefly, I thought it,” I said quickly. “Then I realized you were totally human. Because, of course, those books aren’t real.”

  “Here you go,” the waitress interrupted, setting down our drinks. She took out her pad for our orders. Knox picked his food very carefully, just like my brother did. He was probably following a pretty proscribed diet to keep his body ready for football. But I, who was not on a proscribed diet, ordered a lot less carefully, and got a BLT.

  “Tell me about the science fiction books you read where people turn into animals.”

  I realized that I really liked his voice. It ran and rumbled, like a bass guitar. And I had thought it was kind of gravelly, but the more he spoke, the more it sounded musical to my ears. I wanted him to talk more, so I started to tell him about my embarrassing reading habits to keep the conversation going.

  “They’re not straight-up science fiction books as much as, well, romantic science fiction. Ok, romance novels with a science fiction twist. The men in them have alter-egos. They can turn into animals and when they’re in their human forms, they still have some of the animals’ traits. They’re shape-shifters.”

  “You thought that I was a shape-shifter, standing in the Emelia Schaub College Library.” He tilted his head as he looked at me.

  “No! Of course not. Maybe just for a moment, a split second. Maybe I thought you were a wolf, a black timber wolf. Not even a split second, whatever would be less than that.” I took a sip of my lemonade. “Clearly, you’re human, but you do manage to come and go pretty stealthily.” I took a bigger sip, because my whole mouth felt dry.

  “Maybe I’m not all human. Maybe I am part wolf.” And then, very, very quietly, he howled.

  I spat lemonade on the table. “Oh, my God. Sorry!” I mopped up my dribble with napkins. “I think you make me jumpy. I’m really not scared of you, so I don’t know what it is. Maybe just that you’re famous. But I seriously know that you’re not part wolf!”

  I looked up to see if anyone else had seen my spitting incident, and sure enough, a man at another booth had his phone up, like he was taking a picture of us. Or filming? I whipped my head back around and hunched over in embarrassment.

  “What’s the matter?” Knox asked.

  “I think that guy is recording us,” I said softly, gesturing to him with a shrug of my shoulder. I put my hand up over th
e side of my face closest to that table.

  Knox leaned forward and glared. His face set in an absolute snarl, and if it had been directed at me, I would have peed in my pants like Solomon in the basement. I peeked back and caught the man putting away his phone, then picking up his bill and hurrying up to the cashier at the front.

  “I won’t let anyone bother you,” Knox told me quietly. The scary animal expression was gone, and he finished his glass of water in one swallow. “Tell me more about your books. The one you’re reading right now.”

  I ended up outlining the entire plot of He Who Howls Alone, which I had been reading for the past few nights. Usually, I finished a book in a single sitting, but Tatum had been calling me to talk a lot, mostly about how much trouble she was in. Apparently, the “tiny scratch” she had put on her dad’s car involved him having to replace the side door and one of the front panels, and on top of that, the neighbor had doorbell cam footage of that same car ripping up his yard. That was in addition to the damage done by the partygoers who were not supposed to have been over in the first place. Tatum’s dad was not happy about any of it, and she was confined to the house, like a teenager.

  I told Knox about that, too. “She really acts like a child at times,” I said. “I don’t know if I ever acted like that in my whole life.”

  “I didn’t. For sure.”

  “What were you like as a kid?” I asked. “Tell me about your family.”

  “Not much to tell.”

  I waited, but that was all he said. “Did you grow up with your parents?” I prodded a little.

  “No.”

  And again, that was it. Our food arrived, and I let it drop. I asked him questions about football for the rest of the meal, things I wondered about, like if they all had tiny microphones to talk to the coach in their helmets (no) and what they did if they really had to pee during a game. I didn’t feel comfortable saying “pee” yet to him so I said, “If you have to, you know, the bathroom…” and he got it (the answer was holding it until halftime, or just going anywhere, which made me stop eating momentarily, because yuck). Knox laughed, again.

  He walked me out to my car at the end of dinner. “I like your truck,” I told him.

  He looked over at me, like he was suspicious.

  “I do!” I protested. “It looks like you put a lot of good miles on it.”

  “I drove it up here from Oklahoma, pulling a trailer with every single thing I owned in it. It does have some good miles.” We stopped at my car. “I’d like to pay you for your time helping me with the paper, more than paying for your BLT.”

  “No. No, of course not. I was glad to help you, and I will again, if you need it.” I opened my car door. “Maybe I’ll see you again in the basement.”

  Knox looked at me, his face very still. “Maybe so.”

  I looked back. “Bye.” I didn’t want to leave, though. It just felt so open-ended and incomplete. I forced myself to get in the car, start it, and drive away.

  I’d spent a lot of time in therapy learning to rationally explore my thoughts and feelings so I could try to control them, so on the way home, I tried to figure out why I’d had the urge to stay in the restaurant parking lot. My best guess was that the evening hadn’t turned out like my expectations for it and I had been waiting for something else to happen. I was waiting for a scene like in one of the books I read, in which either A) Knox would have fallen in love with me, or B) he would have done a painful transformation into a wolf.

  I thought about sitting together in the library and smiling at each other over the table in our booth. The other reason I hadn’t wanted to leave the parking lot was that I’d had fun. I liked him, a lot. I would have taken option A, the non-wolf choice, if there had been a chance of that.

  ∞

  “Seriously, it’s fine. I promise!”

  I wasn’t sure. “Really?”

  “Would I lie to you?” Tatum asked, eyes big.

  I turned and stared at her, raising my eyebrows.

  “To others, yes. To you, no,” she assured me. “You’re my friend now, and I swear it! We’re totally allowed to use the weight room.”

  Tatum and I were outside of the Woodsmen football stadium and she was literally twisting my arm to get me to go in with her. I had mentioned in a text that I wanted to work out, and she had shown up at my house not too long later saying that she had the perfect place for us to go, not mentioning anything about the stadium until it loomed up by the side of the road and she was saying, “Here we are!”

  “My dad comes to the stadium to exercise all the time!” she insisted. “It’s like, a normal thing.”

  “Your dad is one of the owners of this team. You aren’t, and I’m certainly not!” We were closer to this giant building than I had ever been in person, parked in a separate lot that we had been able to access because Tatum had taken her dad’s car, again, and it had a special Woodsmen sticker attached to its windshield. And currently, we were walking toward an entrance that said “Authorized Personnel Only” on a sign above it, which we weren’t.

  “I’ve come with my dad too, a lot,” Tatum told me.

  “You’ve come to the gym here? Is it for everyone in the organization or something?” I couldn’t imagine how that would be right, that the multi-millionaire players would be pumping up next to just anyone, but I had no idea how football teams worked, and Tatum kept pulling me along.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” she was saying, kind of to herself. “Where are the men? Well, duh. The football team is full of them.”

  “Tatum!” I dug in my feet as much as I could on the asphalt and stopped our forward progress. “Are you absolutely sure that it’s ok for us to be here? Like, you’re positive?”

  “Yes!” she said indignantly. “Jeez!” She waved a card with her dad’s picture on it in front of a box on the side of the building and I heard the Authorized Personnel Only door unlock. As I followed her through, she said, “The worst that can happen is that they throw us out.”

  “Tatum!” I stopped again.

  She linked her arm through mine. “Daisy, relax! We’re only young once, right? At least, I’m still young,” she said, reconsidering me and my advanced age. “Don’t you want to have some fun?”

  Well, maybe I did. I needed to be doing something other than what I had been occupying myself with for the past few days: non-stop work and homework, and a lot of hanging out in the library basement. With bad results all around, because I had gotten a C on a quiz on Japanese aesthetics, I hadn’t come across the Pisanello portrait, and I hadn’t run into Knox once. I hadn’t seen him since I had pulled out of the restaurant parking lot last Tuesday night. No matter how many times I had run down to the basement for one thing or another, or walked through every aisle of the library putting away books, or tidied up the study carrels in the West Stacks, he hadn’t appeared.

  I firmly told myself that I was silly to look for him, that I had helped him and I was glad to have done so, and that I hadn’t just let Tatum pull me into Woodsmen Stadium in order to see him, even though that was where he worked. “It’s the off-season,” I reminded her and also myself. “The team won’t be here.”

  Tatum poked me in the stomach. “Oh, really? Then who is that?” she challenged me, peeking around my side to stare down the hallway. She immediately shimmied out of her coat and posed in her skimpy sports bra and low-hanging tights. I turned around, thinking that maybe…

  “Hello, ladies,” a big man said, walking towards us and smiling. He wasn’t the big man I had been looking for, though. “Is there cheerleading practice already? Are you two Woodsmen Dames?”

  “We are,” Tatum said, smiling back at the player I recognized from the picture on her father’s desk. He was the wide receiver who Tatum had said was hot. “We are Woodsmen Dames.” She was using an accent that sounded southern now, like Knox’s but so thick and syrupy, it made me wince. She raised her arms and shook invisible pompoms. “Go team! I’m Dixie
Belle Beauregard-Lee and this is my friend, Daisy McKenzie. Charmed.” Tatum shook her chest a little too, and held out her small hand to him. The football player took it, grinning widely.

  “Nico Williams,” he said. “It’s certainly a pleasure. Where are you from, Dixie Belle?”

  “I’m from South Carolina. A Tar Heel,” Tatum drawled smoothly.

  “I thought Tar Heels were from North Carolina.” He watched her.

  She just smiled and kept right on talking. I watched the two of them go back and forth like they were playing verbal ping pong and her story unfolded about life in South (or North) Carolina. The words “sweet tea,” “y’all,” and “magnolia” came up a lot. Maybe Tatum wasn’t concerned about lying, but it was making me so nervous I could barely stand still and listen.

  “Tell us about yourself, Nico,” she said, after wrapping up an anecdote about swimming in a bayou.

  “I’m a Georgia boy myself.”

  “Is that so?” Tatum asked. Her voice had gone up a little. Uh oh, I thought. He would for sure know that there were no bayous in South (North) Carolina.

  “That is so,” Nico answered. “You know what we say in Georgia about a woman like you?”

  Oh, crap. I put my hand out to Tatum to help steady her for the upcoming verbal blow. I saw her eyes widen just a little, like she was waiting for it, also.

  “We say that you’re as pretty as a peach,” he told her. Both Tatum and I smiled and I relaxed. Hard to believe that she was pulling this off. “And I would also say,” Nico continued, “that what’s coming out of your mouth is the worst imitation of a southern drawl that I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear.” He looked like he was trying not to laugh.

  The smile fell from Tatum’s lips. “It’s not an imitation,” she started to retort, and I elbowed her. This was not the time to dig herself in even deeper. “I could have been southern, if I had ever lived there,” she said grumpily, but in her actual voice, and he now he did laugh.