The Next Time You See Me (11 page)

“He’ll be on shift at Price,” Wyatt said. “You’ll have to call the main line and ask for him.”

“I’ll call now.” She patted his knee. “Don’t you worry.”

He did worry, though. Boss was an old dog, in worse shape physically than Wyatt. If his stupidity and weakness—his mistake—had caused something to happen to that dog, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

Are you living with yourself now?

He put his left hand over his heart out of habit, massaging, and waited for Sarah to return.

Chapter Six

1.

Christopher Shelton and Leanna Burke were an inevitable coupling, one that the eighth-grade class at Roma Middle School had been anticipating ever since Christopher moved to town the previous year. Christopher’s father was a chemical engineer at Spector Plastics and Die Cast. The transfer to Roma had been accompanied by a moving stipend and a modest pay bump, but the real advantage, he’d explained again and again to Christopher in the weeks preceding the family’s relocation, was in cost of living: they could live like royalty on a salary that would barely get them into a country club in Ann Arbor. Christopher had been doubtful, then morose, and his first weeks at the middle school were a misery. He’d hated the stupid, syrupy accents, the way that even the cooler kids still dressed themselves proudly in the silk shirts and Eastlands that had been considered dated in Ann Arbor two years ago.

Then, inexplicably, Christopher wasn’t unhappy anymore. He’d gone to a junior high of almost two thousand students before, a school where well-dressed children of relative privilege were the norm rather than the exception, and he’d drawn no special attention. In Roma, he was watched, emulated. When he wore K-Swiss sneakers to school in the fall, half a dozen of his classmates returned from Christmas break
in a pair. When, on Friday nights, he put in a Pearl Jam CD instead of Sir Mix-A-Lot or Tim McGraw or Salt-N-Pepa, his friends came to school shortly after showing off their own finds from the Sam Goody: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, the Melvins. He cultivated a reputation for smarts and ironic detachment. He liked to recline in his chair in class, slip his feet into the book basket under the desk in front of him, and look out the window as though he were daydreaming, as though he were above it all—but it was an act. When a teacher snapped at him with a question, trying to trick him, to get him to jolt in his seat—“And what do
you
think about that, Christopher? We’re all really keen to get your take”—he’d madden her by responding correctly and politely, barely shifting his eyes from the window. His classmates loved it. And his teachers hated it, or wanted to, but Christopher ultimately won most of them over, too, because he knew just how far to push them, knew when to let slip some hint at regret or gratitude. “Most people let me get away with murder,” he’d told Mrs. Hardoby, the social studies teacher, when she kept him after class to lecture him about
the importance of at least appearing engaged
. “I respect you for calling me out on my BS. I really do,” he’d said, and she’d beamed, perhaps even blushed a little, and Christopher had never had another moment’s trouble from her.

On the surface, Leanna Burke was the ultimate local; she was a fourth-generation Roman, her father a prominent attorney in town, the kind of guy who’d gotten rich on other people’s misfortunes, divorce and personal injury, mostly. He had an office on the square, and he dressed in the costume of a deeper southerner: seersucker and linen suits, bow ties, fine-woven straw Panamas—affectations he’d likely acquired during his undergraduate days at University of the South. There were two kinds of success stories in Roma: the ones who got away and the ones who stayed to exploit their own. Johnny Burke was the latter, and Leanna was her father’s daughter.

Christopher and Leanna had begun “going together” during Christmas break of seventh grade. Leanna’s dad had allowed her to host a boy-girl party in the basement of their home, which he’d had
built brand-new only a few years before: two and a half stories with an in-ground pool and tennis courts, three acres of land, a long, paved driveway lined in crepe myrtles. Where Christopher’s house (his mother’s full-time project) was antique, studied, and understated, Leanna’s house was delightfully gaudy, everything oversized and overwrought, a mishmash of periods and aesthetics, high-end and low. The dining room featured a giant crystal chandelier that had been imported from France, but the table underneath it was a too-shiny veneered cherry, the eight chairs upholstered in a black-and-green diamond print that looked like it belonged on a bad sweater. The flooring was wall-to-wall beige carpeting, linoleum in the kitchen and baths, but the electronics were all state-of-the-art: there was a fifty-inch big-screen TV in the family room, another in the basement, and the basement also housed four La-Z-Boy recliners lined up side to side—one for each of the Burkes—plus a wet bar, a full-sized refrigerator, and a microwave oven.

Leanna’s mother and father had agreed to stay upstairs until ten o’clock that night—rides home were expected by eleven—so time moved in that dark-paneled basement the way it does only for thirteen-year-olds. Relationships began and ended; alliances shifted; one girl spent the night in a corner alone, trying to hide the fact that she was crying. When the evening finally culminated in the obligatory game of spin-the-bottle—and already they were on the edge of being too old for it, of feeling embarrassed by the pretense—Christopher had known that somebody would contrive to pair him with Leanna, that the seventh grade wanted it as much as or more than the two of them did. And did he want it? He wasn’t sure. She was pretty, she intrigued him, but he wasn’t sure if he even liked her. She had this way of holding her face when someone like Emily Houchens walked by: lips drawn into a slight smirk, eyebrow tilted upward a trace, a look of amusement that hid something harder, like disgust, even anger.

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?”