“You seemed to have everything under control.”
“Did I?” He looked pleased. “Well, that’s good. But I was scared. She’d talk to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that. She joined the chess club even though she wasn’t very good… but she’s getting better. I’m teaching her.”
I’ll bet you are, you dog, I thought, but didn’t quite dare say it—I still remembered the way he had blown up at me that same day at Hidden Hills. Besides, I wanted to hear this. I was pretty curious; captivating a girl as stunning as Leigh Cabot had been a real coup.
“So after a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me,” Arnie went on. “It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me than it would for some other guys—guys like you, Dennis.”
“Sure, I’m a smoothie,” I said. “What James Brown used to call “a sex machine.”
“No, you’re no sex machine, but you know about girls,” he said seriously. “You understand them. I was always just scared of them. Never knew what to say. Still don’t, I guess. Leigh’s different.
“I was afraid to ask her out.” He seemed to consider this. “I mean, she’s a beautiful girl, really beautiful. Don’t you think so, Dennis?”
“Yes. As far as I can tell, she’s the prettiest girl in school.”
He smiled, pleased. “I think so, too… but I thought, maybe it’s only because I love her that I think that way.”
I looked at my friend, hoping he wasn’t going to get into more trouble than he could handle. At that point, of course, I had no idea what trouble meant.
“Anyway, I heard these two guys talking one day in chem lab—Lenny Barongg and Ned Stroughman—and Ned was telling Lenny that he’d asked her out and she’d said no, but in a nice way… like maybe if he asked her again she might try it out. And I had this picture of her going steady with Ned by spring, and I started to feel really jealous. It’s ridiculous. I mean, she told him no and I’m feeling jealous, you dig what I’m saying?”
I smiled and nodded. Out on the field the cheerleaders were trying out some new routines. I didn’t think they would help our team very much, but it was pleasant to watch them. Their shadows puddled at their heels on the green grass in the bright noontime.
“The other thing that got me was that Ned didn’t sound pissed off or… or ashamed… or rejected, or anything like that. He tried for a date and got turned down, that was all. I decided I could do that, too. Still, when I called her up on the phone I was sweating all over. Man, that was bad. I kept imagining her laughing at me and saying something like, “Me go out with you, you little creep? You must be dreaming! I’m not that hard up yet!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t figure out why she didn’t.”
He poked me in the stomach. “Gut-noogies, Dennis! Make you puke!”
“Never mind,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”
He shrugged. “Not much else to tell. Her mother answered the phone when I called and said she’d get her. I heard the phone go clunking down on the table, and I almost hung up.” Arnie held up two fingers a quarter of an inch apart. “I came this close to hanging up. No shit.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, and I did—you worry about the laughter, you imagine the contempt to some degree or other, no matter if you’re a football player or some pimply little four-eyed runt—but I don’t think I could understand the degree to which Arnie must have felt it. What he had done had taken monumental courage. It’s a small thing, a date, but in our society there are all sorts of charged forces swirling behind that simple concept—I mean, there are kids who go all the way through high school and never get up enough courage to ask a girl for a date. Never once, in all four years. And that isn’t just one or two kids, it’s lots of them. And there are lots of sad girls who never get asked. It’s a shitty way to run things, when you stop to think about it. A lot of people get hurt. I could dimly imagine the naked terror Arnie must have felt, waiting for Leigh to come to the phone; the sense of dread amazement at the idea that he was not planning to ask just any girl out but the prettiest girl in school.
“She answered,” Arnie went on. “She said “Hello?” and, man, I couldn’t say anything. I tried and nothing came out but this little whistle of air. So she said “Hello, who is this?” like it might be some kind of practical joke, you know, and I thought, This is ridiculous. If I can talk to her in the hall, I should be able to talk to her on the goddam phone, all she can say is no, I mean slid can’t shoot me or anything if I ask her for a date. So I said hi, this is Arnie Cunningham, and she said hi, and blah-blah-blahdy-blah, bullshit-builshit-bullshit, and then I realized I didn’t even know where the hell I wanted to ask her to go, and we’re running out of things to say, pretty soon she’s going to hang up. So I asked her the first thing I could think of, would she want to go to the football game on Saturday. She said she’d love to go, right off like that, like she had just been waiting for me to ask her, you know?”
“Probably she was.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Arnie considered this, bemused.
The bell rang, signifying five minutes to period five. Arnie and I got up. The cheerleaders trotted off the field, their little skirts flipping saucily.
We climbed down the bleachers, tossed our lunchbags in one of the trash barrels painted with the school colours orange and black, talk about Halloween—and walked toward the school.
Arnie was still smiling, recalling the way it had worked itself out, that first time with Leigh. “Asking her to the game was sheer desperation.”
“Thank a lot,” I said. “That’s what I get for playing my heart out every Saturday afternoon, huh?”
“You know what I mean. Then, after she said she’d go with me, I had this really horrible thought and called you remember?”
Suddenly I did. He had called to ask me if that game was at home or away and had seemed absurdly crushed when I told him it was at Hidden Hills.
“So there I was, I’ve got a date with the prettiest girl in school, I’m crazy about her, and it turns out to be an away game and my car’s in Will’s garage.”
“You could have taken the bus.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t then. The bus always used to be full up a week before the game. I didn’t know so many people would stop coming to the games if the team started losing.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
“So I went to Will. I knew Christine could do it, but no way she was street-legal. I mean, I was desperate.”
How desperate? I wondered coldly and suddenly.
“And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if…” Arnie paused; seemed to consider. “And that’s the story of the big date,” he finished gracelessly.
And if…
But that wasn’t my business,
Be his eyes, my father had said.
But I pushed that away too.
We were walking past the smoking area now, deserted except for three guys and two girls, hurriedly finishing a joint. They had it in a makeshift matchbook roachclip, and the evocative odour of pot, so similar to the aroma of slowly burning autumn leaves, slipped into my nostrils.
“Seen Buddy Repperton around?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “And don’t want to. You?”
I had seen him once, hanging out at Vandenberg’s Happy Gas, an extra-barrel service station out on Route 22 in Monroeville. Don Vandenberg’s dad owned it, and the place had been on the ragged edge of going bust ever since the Arab oil embargo in ’73. Buddy hadn’t seen me; I was just cruising by.
“Not to talk to.”
“You mean he can talk?” Arnie said with a scorn that wasn’t like him. “What a shitter.”
I started. That word again. I thought about it, told myself what the fuck, and asked him where he had gotten that particular term.