The Next Time You See Me (12 page)

Christopher looked at Emily carefully, but she didn’t move. She didn’t speak or nod. “Emily.” He tried a voice that 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.

Susanna was sipping a can of Slim-Fast and pretending to listen to her partner that day for cafeteria duty, Nathan Guthrie, who was on a tirade about state physical fitness mandates, when there was a scream and a crash over in the eighth-grade section. She was on her feet before Nathan could even furrow his forehead, and though the students had now erupted with shouting and laughter, some even standing on the benches to get a better look at the action, Susanna could spot the epicenter of the disturbance almost instantly: by the windows, where the popular crowd gathered. Here a knot of students had formed, and Susanna worked her way over, calling, “Knock it off! Take your seats!” and getting ignored by practically everyone.

She had to elbow her way through the circle of gathered students before she could see what had happened, and when she finally broke the barrier of bodies, pushing Monty Higgins to the side with a sharp exhalation of breath and getting ready to yell at the lot of them, she stopped in her tracks. Everyone fell quiet around her, and the quiet made its way to the back of the room as quickly as the shouting had, the quiet somehow worse than the noise had been. She’d expected to find a couple of boys hitting one another or wrestling on the floor, but there were no boys. There was only the figure of a girl, down on
her knees with her hands covering her head as though the principal had called a tornado drill, battered with food from today’s lunch line. It was all there: the soupy spaghetti with ground beef, the tossed salad and Thousand Island dressing, chocolate pudding. A piece of garlic bread clung to the filth on her back like a tick. “What is this?” Susanna said helplessly, and the girl lifted her head at the sound of her voice. It was Emily Houchens, her eyes huge and unblinking, and Susanna felt a chill race through her until the girl suddenly broke with sobbing, and then there was no chill, only heartbreak and horror.

“Who did this?” Susanna said, turning to each face in the circle, but it was obvious who had done it; they’d all done it. They’d picked this poor girl out for some reason and pelted her with their uneaten lunches, and those who hadn’t done the throwing had stood on their seats and watched, screaming with laughter. She walked from student to student, forcing eye contact, jabbing the shoulders of the ones who were biting back smirks. She reached Christopher Shelton, finally, and he had the good sense to look at his feet in apparent remorse—but Susanna recognized the taunt in his arched eyebrow, noted how he crossed his arms behind his back and bobbed on his toes a little, as though he were holding back laughter. “Is this funny to you?” she said, and he shook his head vigorously left and right.

Nathan finally joined her, puffing up into coach mode and pointing his thick forefinger. “I want to know who started this,” he yelled, and the students bristled more under his demand than they had Susanna’s. They liked him. They feared him. The smirks slipped from their faces now, she noticed enviously, and a couple even flushed.

“Well?” He circled the students as Susanna had, and she yielded to him, ashamed of herself. Her role in this was painfully clear. She went to the nearest napkin dispenser and pulled out a thick wad, then approached Emily, trying not to let the disgust she felt show on her face. She placed her low-heeled dress shoes carefully between streaks of tomato sauce, gathered her skirt a bit with her free hand, and stooped next to Emily, who was still leaking tears but no longer sobbing.

“I’m just going to try to clean some of this off,” she whispered. Emily didn’t say anything or look at her. So Susanna took one of the napkins in her hand and started using it, awkwardly, to pull strands of spaghetti off of the girl’s shoulders and hair, sick at the cheerfully bland smells of canned pasta and sweet instant pudding. She threw the first soiled napkin on the floor—she wasn’t the janitor, she would
not
start sweeping this mess up—and then tried, best she could, to sop up the bigger smears of filth, feeling exposed, as though these students were witnessing her in an act of intimacy. There were other teachers on the scene now, and then Wally Burton with his shouted promises of detention and restricted cafeteria privileges, and Susanna thought she heard a few sobs that weren’t Emily’s, and that softened her a little, made her think of Abby. But these weren’t children. They were eighth graders a semester away from high school. Teenagers.

“May I go to the bathroom?” Emily said hoarsely, startling Susanna.

“Of course you can,” she said. She fished in her pocket for her keys, removing one from the ring. “Use the teachers’ lounge. I’ll come find you when I’m done here.”

The students pulled away as Emily passed, their faces a mix of disgust and guilt and a dazed sort of confusion, as though they were under a spell.