Not Exactly a Love Story (21 page)

“From now on,” he said, “we go shopping together on the weekend, and we make sure we buy enough to get through a week and then some.”

I headed downstairs to make sure they knew I was home. Just
seeing
me would probably calm things down. I went into the kitchen with a carefully bland expression in place. Just looking for snacks, that was my mission. It did create a lull
in the, uh, conversation. Mom looked embarrassed, Mr. B still looked determined. Probably the man was just hungry.

“I’m not ordering in,” Mr. B said. “I’ll eat whatever’s in the house tonight, but I’m not going out or ordering in.”

Mom stood there and stared at Mr. B. I knew what was on her mind. She wanted him to say, “All right, let’s go out, both of us being tired and hungry, and we’ll work this out when we’re feeling more relaxed.” She wanted him to say, “I know this is working out differently than you thought it would, and I don’t want you to be unhappy.” Mom expected him to say that because it’s the kind of thing Dad would have said.

12:00. Patsy picked up with, “Still mad at me?”

“I was mad?”

“You think I can’t tell when you’re mad?”

“Are you sure about who was mad last? I’ve lost track.”

“Let’s just have a serious conversation, okay?”

“We’ve had those.”

“Don’t try to sound like this has nothing to do with you. I tell you things I don’t tell anyone else.”

I knew right then where this was going. “You know my secrets too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, and knowing who I am won’t make it the same, either. It will just be different, and maybe not in such a good way.”

Silence.

Finally she said, “I know it’s hard to talk about feelings. Face to face, I mean. Especially for you, right?”

All right, I’ll bite. “Why for me?”

“Isn’t that the point of these calls?”

I didn’t like her tone. And why was I the one with problems, anyway? I wasn’t making a confidante of an obscene caller. “You mean we can talk because we’re speaking anonymously?”

“You’re speaking anonymously, Salvatore,” she said. “You know who I am.”

“Suppose you know me,” I said. “Suppose I drop a card into your locker tomorrow. And then you find out who I am, who I really am. And you’re sadly disappointed. How do you think we’re both going to feel about that?”

“Suppose I find out who you are and I’m not disappointed in you. What then?”

“Not possible. Sometimes you’re disappointed in me now.”

“Okay, it’s a point.” I heard that little tapping thing going on. When she spoke again, it was with a fair amount of excitement in her voice. “You know, you’ve got something. But it’s not that you’re afraid you’re— It’s that you think you look good to me now, the you that I see every day at school—and that I’ll know this dark and secret thing about you once I do know who you are. That’s it. That’s how you’re afraid you’ll be a disappointment.”

Actually I didn’t think that was it. Vinnie Gold already knew that wasn’t it. I was willing to talk about it, though. “Okay, so let’s say I’m out there, looking perfect to you. What then?”

“No one looks perfect to me, Sergio. Even perfect people have gaping holes in their underwear. The minute you get close to them, you get a glimpse of the underwear.” She sighed, and added, “That would be just about everybody I know.”

“All right,” I said, a little breathlessly. “Hypothetically. You have this guy with holey underwear.”

“Yeah?”

“What kind of guy is he?”

“Someone who won’t say, I asked this girl out. Where does she get nerve to be sad or crabby, or maybe interested in anything besides me.”

“What are you going to do for this hypothetical guy?”

“I … I guess I can accept him, just take him the way he is. It’s what I’m asking for, isn’t it?”

“Suppose you’ve already had that chance? Suppose you looked me over and found me wanting?”

“I’d say you never let me get to know you, not the way I know you now,” she said. “Guys—no, not just guys,” she corrected herself. “We all try to look just a little bit better than our real self. You only let me see you as you really are because we’re on the phone, because I can’t match your false face to your true identity.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Wrong, how?”

“Suppose this is my false face. What if I’m just talking a good game now, while you can’t see me for who I really am—that loser who passes you in the hallway at school. Maybe being an obscene caller is the best I can aspire to.”

“I guess you could have a mask for these talks,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I can handle it.”

“Handle what?”

“That maybe it’s not just that you’re somebody I’ve always overlooked. Maybe you’re somebody I wanted to overlook.”

“So you can accept anything? Absolutely anything?”

“I think so,” she said confidently. “I know the worst.”

“What’s the worst?”

“You make obscene phone calls.” There was just the hint of a doubt in her voice now.

“There’s something wrong here,” I said. “You’re assuming that because you know that, the rest of me can only be better.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I could be a cripple.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s crippled, Sebastiano,” she said, abandoning the philosophical approach.

“I could be excruciatingly poor, wearing hand-me-down jeans and never getting a decent haircut.”

She made a sound under her breath, but she replied, “I don’t know anyone like that, either.”

“No one?”

“No.” Trace of impatience.

“I think I might be disappointed in you.”

She hung up.

Okay, so I was still mad.

Taking my time, I ran four slow laps as Mr. B put the football
team through a torturous session on some new equipment. Basically, the equipment looked like a section of a brick wall, and they rammed into it, leading with a shoulder. They looked surprisingly enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Thursday’s day off stretched Biff’s suspension through Friday. He watched the team take their punishment from a place high on the bleachers, clearly suffering from deprivation. I broke to do some stretching, silently congratulating myself for looking like a runner. For being one.

Biff stomped his way off the bleachers. He made the whole structure shake, and made a fair amount of noise too. I got the feeling he was admiring his style, much the way I’d been admiring mine.

No comparison, I said to myself with a little smile. That
was when I noticed Patsy. She was standing just inside the school doors, staring out at me. Or Biff.

I left the track, heading her way. My feelings about her were mixed—confused, even—but I’d be cool. I raised a hand only moments ahead of the football team’s arrival at the same spot, a herd of great cattle, manageable only when forced into single file. They swept me past her by about ten feet, I don’t know how I avoided being trampled. I didn’t know how she did.

If she did. When I looked back, she’d gone.

She could go three ways from there, including up to the next floor. I decided to let her go for the moment. I got to my locker about thirty seconds ahead of Biff, who was half a dozen lockers away.

He passed me, making quite a point of ignoring me. I mean, if he’d just gone about his business and all, he would’ve been ignoring me. But he made a point of it. Stashing his stuff in his locker. Hopping around, doing warm-ups. Sighing and grunting like he was exerting himself tremendously. Letting me know he’d completely forgotten I was there.

Not that anybody was as aware of him as I was. There were guys yodeling into their lockers and snapping towels at each other. There was the usual foot traffic to and from the showers, a lot of horsing around. Biff was all but invisible to nearly everyone.

I stretched—long, simple stretches that were almost a meditation. I changed clothes slowly. Cold-syrup slow. I made it a test of endurance to move so slowly, even my
breathing was slow. Finally he shut his locker and headed off for a class.

I wasn’t far behind, making it to my class as the bell rang.

The funny thing, the slowness stayed with me. I was slow with a slothlike gracefulness that I associated with dancing.

The girls had gotten this idea to wear pink or red for Valentine’s Day. Most of them were carrying heart-shaped boxes of candy, some of them carried more than one.

Twice I saw guys slipping envelopes through the slots in a locker, and there was such a frenzy of card-giving that I got a couple. Nothing serious, kind of joke cards. It was fun, really, and now and then I felt a wistful twinge. I wished I’d brought a card for Patsy.

Daniel nodded when I sat down at the table in the cafeteria. I nodded back. “You join the track team?” he asked me.

“I’m going to try for it.”

“I run on Forest Avenue most mornings. We could run together.”

I asked him, “You’re on the track team?”

He grinned. “I’m going to try for it.”

I hesitated, then said, “I’ve seen you talking to Patsy.”

“I know Patsy pretty well,” he said, blushing. “She has this friend, Melanie—”

“Melanie’s cute,” I said. “Forest Ave., huh?”

* * *

I stayed after school to give Mr. B a hand with three filing cabinets he wanted to move out of his office. He helped me get his oversized desk out of the way. Because he’d had the football team slamming into their fake walls that afternoon, I ended up moving the cabinets myself.

I shifted half the contents of each file drawer to a cardboard box, carrying the box and then the half-emptied drawer to a bench in the locker room. Then shoved the considerably lighter filing cabinet through the locker room to a closet. Finally I put the drawers back and stuffed the rest of the files back in. First cabinet down.

The files were pretty interesting. Brown Bunny’s hoody guy? Likely to be another Albert Einstein. He’s not in advanced classes because he won’t do homework. Not that I could just settle in and read, but the occasional glance at what I was moving made for some lively thought.

After an hour of shifting and lugging and sliding, I was tired. It was a helluva time for Biff to come along. “Hey, turd.”

I stopped pushing the last filing cabinet and leaned wearily against it. I had the feeling he’d said something to me once already, something I hardly heard over the scrape of metal against the floor. The shifty look in his eyes made me suspect that he’d turned to look over his shoulder before he called out again. No one else was around.

“You think you got nothing to worry about, huh? Cozying
up to your stepdaddy?” He closed the distance between us. “Moving his shit around.”

I didn’t open my mouth. But I was thinking, practice must be about to end. This hallway would be full of life in a minute or two.

“You think somebody’s gonna come along and save your ass? Forget it, they’re all still on the field. You better say something, turd.”

The first real blow came fast, so that I didn’t have a chance to be ready for it. It caught me just under the ribs, solid enough to fold me over. It’s always surprising when someone with Biff’s bulk moves quickly.

The next one was where you’d expect, but he didn’t put any weight behind it. It was practically like he chucked me under the chin, but it brought me back up enough to face him.

I tasted blood.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he said to himself. For my benefit, he added, “We don’t want to leave any marks, do we?”

I gathered he’d learned something from suspension.

He landed one in my chest, good enough to slam me into the corner of a filing cabinet, which caught me under the shoulder blade. I shifted away, into a row of lockers, revisited by the wave of self-loathing I’d felt after the mugging. I’d hoped never to feel that kind of disgust again, at least not for myself. I tried to recall some of the moves I’d learned from those self-defense books.

Frankly, I had abandoned the books once I figured out
they didn’t offer much in the way of an immediate solution. Now I had the expectation of violence, and none of the moves.

The other picture that came to mind, Patsy standing outside my door, waiting to hear why I fought with him the first time. If I hated myself now, how was I going to feel when I had to face her again? As if the thought had sprung into my eyes, Biff addressed that very subject.

“You shouldn’t get any ideas, living next door to my girl the way you do. You shouldn’t think she’ll fall for your smarts.”

It really hadn’t occurred to me that she liked to see evidence of intelligence. I mean, what other choice of boyfriend had I seen her make? But clearly, Biff felt threatened.

“I don’t believe she is your girlfriend.”

“You won’t hold her attention for long, Gold, but I don’t want you distracting her.”

I felt the first flare of real anger, going off like fireworks. It felt good. Hot, colorful, good. He hit me in the shoulder, slamming me into the lockers.

“You know what I think?” he said, pushing his face into mine.

“Give me a minute. I’ll get it,” I said conversationally. This was not courage speaking, not even false bravado. This was suicidal. “I doubt that you do enough of it to come up with anything terribly original.”