Arnie looked at it and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.
“Go up to the office, Buddy,” Mr Casey said quietly. “Wait until I get up there.”
“Screw the office!” Buddy cried. His voice was thin and hysterical with anger. Hair had fallen across his forehead again, and he flipped it back. “I’m getting out of this fucking pigsty.”
“Yes, all right, fine,” Mr Casey said, with no more inflection or excitement in his voice than he would have shown if Buddy had offered him a cup of coffee. I knew then that Buddy was all finished at Libertyville High. No detention or three-day vacation; his parents would be receiving the stiff blue expulsion form in the mail—the form would explain why their son was being expelled and would inform them of their rights and legal options in the matter.
Buddy looked at Arnie and me—and he smiled. “I’ll fix you,” he said. “I’ll get even. You’ll wish you were never fucking born.” He kicked the knife away, spinning and flashing. It came to rest on the edge of the hottop, and Buddy walked off, the cleats on the heels of his motorcycle boots clicking and scraping.
Mr Casey looked at us; his face was sad and tired. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Arnie replied.
“Do you boys want dismissal slips? I’ll write them for you if you feet you’d like to go home for the rest of the day.” I glanced at Arnie, who was brushing off his shirt. He shook his head.
“No, that’s okay,” I said.
“All right. Just late slips then.
We went into Mr Casey’s room and he wrote us late slips for our next class, which happened to be one we shared together—Advanced Physics. Coming into the physics lab, a lot of people looked at us curiously, and there was some whispering behind hands.
The afternoon absence slip circulated at the end of period six. I checked it and saw the names Repperton, Vandenberg, and Welch, each with a (D) after his name. I thought that Arnie and I would be called to the office at the end of school to tell Ms Lothrop, the discipline officer, what had happened. But we weren’t.
I looked for Arnie after school, thinking we’d ride home together and talk it over a little, but I was wrong about that too. He’d already left for Darnell’s Garage to work on Christine.
17
CHRISTINE ON THE STREET AGAIN
I got a 1966 cherry-red Mustang Ford
She got a 380 horsepower overload,
You know she’s way too powerful
To be crawling on these Interstate roads.
I didn’t get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day be had bought her that Christine was out on the street.
The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest school-activity bus ride I’ve ever been on. We might have been going to the guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1–2, was only slightly better than ours, didn’t cheer anybody up much. Coach Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be suffering from a hangover.
Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids who had signed up as “rooters” (“rooters”, dear God! if we hadn’t all been through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars, most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP EM TERRIERS bumper stickers—beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember from your own high school days.
But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn’t even full—in a winning year if you didn’t sign up for the second bus by Tuesday, you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus today was Christine.
I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.
Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was downright stunned—and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.
“Arnie,” I said. “Hey, man!”
“Hi, Dennis,” he said a little shyly.
I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer from Massachusetts. How in God’s name did that happen?
“How are you?”
“Good,” he said, “Do you know Leigh Cabot?
“From class,” I said. “Hi, Leigh.”
“Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?”
I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. “It’s all been fixed. Bet your ass off.”
Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and giggled.
“We’re going to try, but I don’t know,” I said.
“We’ll root you on to victory,” Arnie said. “I can see it in tomorrow’s paper now—Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record.”
“Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that’s more likely,” I said. “How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?”
“More room on the bleachers for those of us that did,” Leigh said. She took Arnie’s arm—surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep—it seems to me that a lot of really beautiful girls are one or the other—but she was neither.
“How’s the rolling iron?” I asked, and walked over to the car.
“Not too bad.” He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.
The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so that it didn’t look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old, rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in the windscreen was tot ally gone.
“You replaced the windscreen,” I said.
Arnie nodded.
“And the bonnet.”
The bonnet was clean; brand-spanking new, in sharp contrast to the rust-flecked sides. It was a deep fire-engine red. Sharp-looking. Arnie touched it possessively, and the touch turned into a caress.
“Yeah. I put that on myself.
Something about that jagged on me. He had done it all himself, hadn’t he?
“You said you were going to turn it into a showpiece,” I said. “I think I’m starting to believe you.” I walked around to the driver’s side. The upholstery on the insides of the doors and floor was still dirty and scuffed up, but now the front seat cover had been replaced as well as the back one.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” Leigh said, but there was a flat note in her voice—it wasn’t as naturally bright and effervescent as it had been when we were talking about the game—and that made me glance at her. A glance was all it took. She didn’t like Christine. I realized it just like that completely and absolutely, as if I had plucked one of her brainwaves out of the air. She would try to like the car because she liked Arnie. But… she wasn’t ever going to really like it.
“So you got it street-legal,” I said.