you know.”
She looked at me as if I was a total drip. “Are you saying, she asked, “that the idea of firebombing Arnie’s car is okay, but you’ve got moral scruples about breaking some glass?”
“No,” I said. “But who’s going to get close enough to her to break the glass with a hammer, Leigh? You?”
She looked at me, biting at her soft lower lip. She said nothing.
The next idea had been mine. Dynamite.
Leigh thought about it and shook her head.
“I could get it without too much sweat, I think,” I said. I still saw Brad Jeffries from time to time, and Brad still worked for Penn-DOT, and Penn-DOT had enough dynamite to put Three Rivers Stadium on the moon. I thought that maybe I could borrow the right key without Brad knowing I had borrowed it—he had a way of getting tanked up when the Penguins were on the tube. Borrow the key to the explosives shed during the third period of one game, I thought, and return it to his ring in the third period of another. The chance that he would be wanting explosives in January, and thus realize his key was missing, was small indeed. It was a deception, another betrayal—but it was a way to end things.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?” To me, dynamite seemed to offer the kind of utter finality the situation demanded.
“Because Arnie keeps it parked in his driveway now. Do you really want to send shrapnel flying all over a suburban neighbourhood? Risking a piece of flying glass cutting off some little kid’s head?”
I winced. I hadn’t thought of that, but now that she mentioned it, the image seemed sharp and clear and hideous. And that got me thinking about other things. Lighting a bundle of dynamite with your cigarillo and then tossing it overhand at the object you wanted to destroy… that might look okay on the Saturday afternoon Westerns they showed on channel 22, but in real life there were blasting caps and contact points to deal with. Still, I held onto the idea as long as I could.
“If we did it at night?”
“Still pretty dangerous,” she said. “And you know it, too.
It’s all over your face.”
A long, long pause.
“What about the crusher at Darnell’s? “she asked finally.
“Same basic objection as before,” I said. “Who gets to drive her down there? You, me, or Arnie?”
And that was where matters stood.
“What was it today?” I asked her.
“He wanted me to go out with him tonight,” she said. “Bowling this time.” In previous days it had been the movies, out for dinner, over to watch TV at his house, proposed study-dates. Christine figured in all of them as the mode of transport. “He’s getting ugly about it, and I’m running out of excuses. If we’re going to do something, we ought to do it soon.”
I nodded. Failure to find a satisfactory method was one thing. The other thing holding us back had been my leg. Now the cast was off, and although I was on stern doctor’s orders to use my crutches, I had tested the left leg without them. There was some pain, but not as much as I had feared.
Those things, yeah—but mostly there had been us. Discovering each other. And although it’s going to sound stinking, r guess I ought to add something else, if this thing is going to stay straight (and I promised myself when I began to tell the tale that I’d stop if I found I couldn’t get it straight or keep it straight). The spice of danger had added something to what I felt for her—and, I think, to what she felt for me. He was my best friend, but there was still a dirty, senseless attraction in the idea that we were seeing each other behind his back. I felt that each time I drew her into my arms, each time my hand slipped over the firm swelling of her breasts. The sneaking around. Can you tell me why that should have an attraction? But it did. For the first time in my life, I had fallen for a girl. I had slipped before, but this time I had taken the grand head-over-heels tumble. And I loved it. I loved her. That constant sense of betrayal, though… that was a snakelike thing, both a shame and a crazy sort of goad. We could tell each other (and we did) that we were keeping our mouths shut to protect our families and ourselves.
That was true.
But it wasn’t all, Leigh, was it? No. It wasn’t all.
In one way, nothing worse could have happened. Love slows down reaction time; it mutes the sense of danger. My conversation with George LeBay was twelve long days in the past, and thinking about the things he had said—and worse, the things he had suggested—no longer raised the hair on the back of my neck.
The same was true—or not true—of the few times I talked with Arnie or glimpsed him in the halls. In a strange way, we seemed to be back in September and October again, when we had grown apart simply because Arnie was so busy. When we did talk he seemed pleasant enough, although the grey eyes behind his specs were cool. I waited for a wailing Regina or a distraught Michael to call me on the phone with the news that Arnie had finally stopped toying with them and had given up the idea of college in the fall for certain.
That didn’t happen, and it was from Motormouth himself—our guidance counsellor—that I heard Arnie had taken home a lot of literature on the University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and Penn State. Those were the schools Leigh was most interested in. I knew it, and Arnie knew it—too.
Two nights earlier, I had happened to overhear my mother and my sister Ellie in the kitchen.
“Why doesn’t Arnie ever come over anymore, Mom?” Ellie asked. “Did he and Dennis have a fight?”
“No, honey,” my mother answered. “I don’t think so. But when friends get older… sometimes they grow apart.”
“That’s never going to happen to me,” Ellie said, with all the awesome conviction of the just-turned- fifteen.
I sat in the other room, wondering if maybe that was really all it was—hallucination brought on by my long stay in the hospital, as LeBay had suggested, and a simple growing-apart, a developing space between two childhood friends. I could see a certain logic to it, even down to my fixation on Christine, the wedge that had come between us,
It ignored the hard facts, but it was comfortable. To believe such a thing would allow Leigh and me to pursue our ordinary lives—to get involved in school activities, to do a little extra cramming for the Scholastic Achievement Tests in March, and, of course, to jump into each other’s arms as soon as her parents or mine left the room. To neck like what we were, which was a couple of horny teenagers totally infatuated with each other.
Those things lulled me… lulled us both. We had been careful—as careful, in fact, as adulterers instead of a couple of kids—but today the cast had come off, today I had been able to use the keys to my Duster again instead of just looking at them, and on an impulse I had called Leigh up and asked her if she’d like to go out to the world- famous Colonel’s with me for a little of his world-famous Crunchy Style. She had been delighted.
So maybe you see how our attention waned, how we became the smallest bit indiscreet. We sat in the parking lot, the Duster’s engine running so we could have some heat, and we talked about putting an end to that old and infinitely clever she-monster like a couple of children playing cowboys.
Neither of us saw Christine when she pulled up behind us.
“He’s buckling down for a long siege, if that’s what it takes,” I said.
“What?”
“The colleges he applied to. Hasn’t it hit you yet?”
“I guess not,” she said, mystified.
“They’re the schools you’re most interested in,” I said patiently.
She looked at me. I looked back, trying to smile, not making it.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go over it one more time. Molotov cocktails are out. Dynamite looks risky, but in a pinch—”
Leigh’s harsh gasp stopped me right there—that, and the expression of startled horror on her face. She was staring out through the windscreen, eyes wide, mouth open. I turned in that direction, and what I saw was so stunning that for a moment I was immobilized too.
Arnie was standing in front of my Duster.
He had parked directly behind us and gone in to get his chicken without realizing who it was, and why should he? It was nearly dark, and one splashed and muddy four-year-old Duster looks pretty much like another.
