The Next Time You See Me (30 page)

For once, though, he would take the easy way out and just give her what she wanted. He opened the battered paperback copy of
A Separate Peace
he’d been issued in October, planning to comb through it for some quotes he could use to pad his essay, when a square of paper fell heavily to his desktop. It was a carefully folded note, he saw—the kind with the little corner piece tucked in to lock it closed.
Leanna,
he thought at first, but how the heck could she have gotten
this to him from the ALC trailer? When would she have done it? Also, Leanna’s notes were usually on pink or purple paper and decorated with her silver paint pen. She must have spent ten times the effort making the note look fancy than she did on its contents, which were hardly ever anything interesting, nothing she couldn’t have told him in a few seconds during class change:
See u in gym class, XXXOOO,
or
Mr. Grimly was stupid today right?
He always pitched them into the wastebasket right after glancing at them, though he knew that Leanna saved every scrap of paper Christopher had ever given to her, even the ticket stub from the time his dad had driven them to Bowling Green to see
Jurassic Park
. He knew because she had shown him where she stored them, in a cardboard cigar box that she had decorated with contact paper, ribbon, and Lisa Frank stickers.
Leanna + Christopher,
she had etched across its top in puff-paint script.

This note was on college-ruled paper, the cheap-looking kind with dark blue lines, and the only thing written on its outside, in carefully blocked pencil, was his first name. His heart suddenly beating hard, he pulled the paper open and spread it flat on his desktop to read it.

Christopher,

I am sorry that you are in trouble. I didn’t tell on you and I will not tell on you no matter what. I feel really bad about what happened and I hope your parents aren’t too mad.

I know you must hate me but I need to show you something. It is about Mrs. Mitchell. Can you meet me after school? I will ride bus 5 and exit near the old hospital. You don’t have to talk to me on the bus. I can explain when we’re off the bus.

Sincerely,

Emily Louise Houchens

Christopher swallowed hard and looked around. She must have slipped in here during lunch, in the twenty minutes he was allowed to eat silently in the old smoking lounge with a few of the other ALC
students, though they had been segregated to separate tables and positioned with their backs to one another.

He reread the note several times, flipped it over, read it again. What on earth did she want from him? What could Mrs. Mitchell have to do with it? He wondered if she was setting some kind of elaborate trap—trying to get him to confess to what had happened at the tennis courts. Maybe she was going to hide a tape recorder under her oversized flannel shirt, then go straight to Mrs. Mitchell with the evidence, get him kicked out of school for real.

That was probably stupid. But what else could it be?

If he went, he would get in trouble, even if it wasn’t a trap. He had strict orders from his mother to walk straight home from school: no Leanna, no Monty or Craig. Homework, dinner, more homework, and bed. Lights out by nine
P.M
. If he hopped on Bus 5 and went all the way across town to Harper Hill, he’d need another half hour or more to walk back to his house on Main Street. He wouldn’t finish being grounded in this lifetime.

I am sorry that you are in trouble
. Did she really mean that? He wasn’t sure if he should be grateful to her or angry. What kind of person went through what Christopher had put Emily through and apologized for it? What kind of person was he to have done what he did to her in the first place? He remembered what his mother had said about sparing a thought for the girl he was mean to, about feeling bad in his heart, and he did feel bad, he did. He felt like he deserved almost anything Emily wanted to put him through, even if it was a trap, even if he did get expelled. And if incurring more of his mother’s wrath was the worst of it—well, he was still getting off easy.

He didn’t want to go. But maybe he owed her that much.

Also, he was curious.
I need to show you something. It is about Mrs. Mitchell.
He couldn’t imagine what Emily was going to show him, why it would be on Harper Hill, or what it had to do with Mrs. Mitchell, but he had another two hours to think about it, to imagine the craziest things. Like, it was sort of a rough neighborhood; maybe Mrs. Mitchell bought drugs over there, and they could report her and
get her fired. Or maybe Mrs. Mitchell
lived
over there, and Emily was going to show him her shitty house, and he’d be able to come back and tell Leanna and Monty about how bad it was.

He tried going back to
A Separate Peace,
but he kept reading the same lines over and over again without being able to make sense of them. He could already feel the stares as he climbed up on the bus and hear the whispers as he exited after Emily. Maybe people would think that he was going to tease her, hurt her, make her pay for tattling on him. Maybe that was the explanation he would give to Leanna later, if circumstances unfolded in such a way as to make an explanation necessary.

And was it possible that a small, small part of him—a part he would never be able to acknowledge—
wanted
to see Emily?

Chapter Twenty-One

1.

Emily hadn’t dared believe he would come, had spent the afternoon in an agony of dread and anticipation, but he was here, sitting several rows behind her—she dared not turn to look—and the bus was lumbering up Harper Hill, brakes whistling as it slowed to make the usual stop on Hyacinth, where a couple of siblings, fifth and sixth graders, always exited. Emily slid across the green vinyl seat, grasped the loop on top of her backpack, and rose, hoping that the shake in her legs wasn’t obvious. The bus driver, Mr. Washington, was usually too disinterested to follow the students’ comings and goings, though the middle schoolers were technically required to hand him a signed note from a parent if they planned to take something other than their usual bus, or get off at something other than their usual stop. But he had let Christopher board without even a question, and so she hoped that her good luck would hold out for a while yet.

It had been, in its way, a day of luck: lucky that she had managed to slip in and out of Mrs. Mitchell’s storage closet unseen while Christopher was at the cafeteria, lucky that no one had missed her, lucky that Christopher had found the note (she hadn’t dared leave it in the open), lucky that he had been moved to follow its instructions. She hadn’t truly believed he’d come—well, not since last night, when
she drafted the note and revised it. Then, the plan had seemed faintly possible. At three-thirty
P.M.
today, exiting her last class and waiting at the sidewalk for the buses to line up, it seemed hopeless. Worse than hopeless—foolish. More material for Christopher and Leanna to use against her.

She swayed in the aisle as the bus lurched to a stop. The doors squealed open.

Lining up behind Terry and Jeffrey Chappa, she pushed forward, hugging her backpack to her chest. “G’bye. Bye. Bye,” Mr. Washington was saying without energy. “See you in the morning. See you in the morning.” Her sneakers slapped cement, and the cold, damp air slapped her cheeks. She walked quickly toward the old hospital’s loading bay, which was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, and a single canvas sneaker grimed with dirt, its laces spread loose as if it had been blown open. Finally she stopped, caught her breath, and squeezed her eyes shut. The bus’s doors squealed again, and the engine revved. She could hear its procession up the hill and the silence in its wake. She realized she was terrified. Her mouth was so dry that she couldn’t even swallow at first; her tongue was like a chewed-up lump of biscuit at the back of her throat.

“Emily.” There were footfalls behind her. A throat cleared. “Emily, I’m here.”

She turned, caught his eyes briefly—just long enough to confirm she wasn’t imagining things—and then dropped her chin to stare at his shoes, her cheeks and neck hot. She swallowed again, trying to wet her tongue, and forced herself to meet his gaze, but the best she could do was to dart her eyes vaguely in the direction of his face, knowing that she probably looked like her brother: unfocused, confused. Creepy.
Stop staring at me, creep,
Christopher had said to her, and yet he was here, and the expression on his face was—well, not friendly, but gentle. There wasn’t the darkness in it she had seen on the day he caught her staring at him in class, or in those moments in the cafeteria just before he started pelting her with his food.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. Her voice was low but steady, and
her heart lifted a tiny bit. If she could say that much, she could say the rest.

Christopher tugged on the straps of his backpack as if he needed something to do with his hands. He looked around. “What’s up,” he said, making it sound less like a question than a statement. “I got your note.”

“That’s good,” Emily said stupidly.

He looked around again, as if checking for signs of an ambush, and leaned in. “You said it was about Mrs. Mitchell,” he whispered.

“Right. Right, it is.”

Emily watched him take in the broken glass, the abandoned hospital, the slumped front porches where animals probably nested behind the torn lattice. A Trans Am up on cinder blocks in someone’s side yard. “Does she
live
in this neighborhood? I mean, God. I’ve never even been over here.”

Emily wasn’t sure what emotion she felt more strongly, anger or mortification, but she found herself snapping, “No,
I
live in this neighborhood. My house is on the other side of the hill,” and the sharpness of her tone surprised her. Even Christopher felt it; the smile dropped from his face, and now he was the one to look down at his shoes, to shuffle in place.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “Is that where we’re going?” His mouth seemed to curl slightly with distaste. “Your house?”

“No,” Emily said. She turned and started walking uphill. “It’s in the woods. We’re going to have to walk a bit.”

She pressed forward even though he wasn’t following her, then finally stopped and turned. He was standing perhaps a dozen feet back, hands squeezed into the pockets on his jeans so that his wrists jutted out at an awkward angle. He looked nervous.

“Are you coming?”

“I think I need to know where we’re going,” he said. “I’m already going to be in trouble for not coming straight home. If I’m not back by the time it turns dark my mom’ll have a fit.”

Emily retraced her steps and stopped a few feet from him. “I
found a body,” she said. “In the woods.” She paused to register his reaction, feeling a thrill of satisfaction at the way he paled and how his lips slightly parted. A vein in his neck pulsed. “I think it might be Mrs. Mitchell’s missing sister.”

She turned to walk again but he grabbed her shoulder. “Wait—wait,” he said. He licked his chapped lips and pulled his other hand out of a pocket to run it through his hair. It was a desperate, almost grown-up gesture. “You found a body? A person’s body?”

“Yes,” Emily said.

“In the woods over here?”

“Yes.”

“Emily, why didn’t you tell your parents? Why didn’t you get them to go to the police?”

She had known he would ask this. It was surreal, forming her mouth around the words she had planned in her head over the weekend, finally testing the Christopher Shelton of real life against what the Christopher of her heart had told her would be true. “I was scared,” she said now, the words strong and clear because they were honest. But then she pressed on: “They’re still mad at me about what happened at the cafeteria on Wednesday. I’m not supposed to go in the woods, and I didn’t know how to say anything without making them madder at me.”

“They’re mad at you about the food fight?” Christopher’s face twisted up with something like anguish, and Emily felt a bright trill of gratitude course through her. “But that . . . that wasn’t your fault.”

Emily thought about how her mother had cried when she first saw her emerge from the cab in her food-stained clothes, how she’d washed Emily’s hair for her in the kitchen sink, prepared her favorite supper that night (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob), murmured reassurances to her throughout the evening (“Sweetheart, it won’t always be this way, I promise”). Emily thought about her father’s forced joviality. He had known that she wouldn’t have been able to tolerate his pity, and so he withheld it, acted as if nothing
happened, and offered to take her to the library, or out for ice cream, or to Wal-Mart to get a new set of sneakers. “Love you, kiddo,” he’d said, kissing her good night. She could, even now, feel the press of his lips in the center of her forehead.

“They can be hard on me,” she told Christopher vaguely. She averted her eyes, let him draw his own conclusions. It wasn’t an outright lie. There were days when it seemed to her that her parents
were
very hard with their nosy questions, their helpful advice.
You’ve got to be normal sometimes,
she could still hear her mother chiding. And her father, telling her to
lay off the Debbie cakes.
But she could see in Christopher’s eyes what he assumed, which is what she had hoped he would assume, and the flash of shame that passed over her features was so authentic—she didn’t know this—that it sold the lie, made it solid and irrefutable. No matter what followed this moment, Christopher believed her; he would remember bruises she had never borne, imagine hurts she had never suffered. He would attribute what happened in the coming hours and days to what he imagined Emily had suffered at the hands of a cruel mother and father, and it would help him to understand how she might be the way she was.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”