The mall didn’t have the kind of girlish store that sells barrettes and cheap jewelry. My only option seemed to be the male counterpart to such a store-a place with a motorcycle in the window that had flames running up the back panels, and lots of leather clothing.
A guy in his late thirties, with a long ponytail and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, stood behind the counter. “Help you, miss?” he said.
“I’m just looking.” I needed a couple minutes, I thought. I walked to a rack of leather jackets and touched the shoulders. The jackets were very soft and had that deep, bitter smell.
“Help you?” the guy said, and I turned. But this time he was talking to Cross Sugarman, who stood in the entrance of the store looking around. As I turned back toward the jackets, I couldn’t keep from smirking. Cross’s presence didn’t matter to me; what was gratifying was that his absence would matter to Dede. Then I remembered how warmly Dede had acted when I’d told her I was getting my ears pierced, and I wondered if I should feel guilty for being spiteful.
I approached the counter. “I want to get my ears pierced.” I paused. “Please.”
“Piercing’s free,” the man said. “Earrings run from six ninety-nine up.”
He unlocked a door to the counter, pulled out a velvet tray of earrings, and slid it toward me. There were moons and crosses and skeleton heads, all in both silver and gold. I felt a twinge of loneliness; getting your ears pierced was an activity to do with another girl, with a friend, so she could help you choose. I pointed to a pair of silver balls, the plainest pair I saw.
“Sit there.” The man nodded his chin toward a stool on the outside of the counter. He came around, and I saw the piercing gun, a white plastic square-edged object that was mostly featureless, with a silver rod that would jump forward, through my ear.
“Do you ever miss?” I asked. I laughed, and my laugh came out high and nervous.
“No,” the man said.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.” He set the gun against my right earlobe.
I thought that if I had a friend, even if it were only Dede, I would squeeze her fingers. I felt a pinching sensation, and then a burn. “Ouch,” I said.
The man chuckled.
I wanted to stand and run from him. But if I ran, I’d have only one ear pierced. The idea that I was trapped made it difficult to breathe. I could feel the gun touching my left earlobe, the man’s fingers in my hair. He pulled back on the trigger, and I shuddered, my shoulders jerking up.
“What the hell!” The man curled his body around so we could see each other’s faces and glared down at me. “You want this done or not?”
“Sorry.” As I looked at him, the composition of his face began to dissolve. A glowing, pulsating greenish spot-like when you look at a lightbulb and then look away-covered the tip of his nose and part of one cheek. A wave broke in my stomach. “Oh my God,” I said softly.
He moved out of my line of vision and pressed the gun to my earlobe again. The green spot remained in the air where his face had been; it expanded outward, seething. I closed my eyes.
Afterward, I could hear, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt as if I were lying beside a railroad track and the wheels of a train were spinning next to my ears. The whole world was skidding past, everything that had ever happened flipping in circles, and I was responsible. “You know her?” said a gravelly voice, and another voice said, “I don’t know her name, but she’s in my class.”
“She on something?” said the gravelly voice. “What’s she on? Why aren’t you two in school?”
“We have the day off. Do you have a washcloth?”
“Sink’s in back.”
“If you get it, I’ll stay with her.”
I felt the wetness against my forehead before I felt my own body. Then I could see them, but I was being pulled between the spinning green world and the static world of their faces in front of me. “She’s coming out of it,” said the second voice. “Hey. Hey. What’s your name?”
I blinked. I tried to say Lee, but the noise that came out was more of a prolonged croak.
“You fainted.” It was Cross Sugarman-he was the person talking to me. “Are you diabetic?”
I couldn’t answer.
He turned and said to the ponytailed man, the one with the gravelly voice, “Do you have any candy or soda?”
“This ain’t a 7-Eleven.”
“Yeah, I realize that.” Cross looked back at me. “Are you diabetic?”
I swallowed. “No.”
“Do you want us to call an ambulance?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fainted before?”
“I don’t know.” My words emerged slowly. The spinning green world was gone entirely. I felt exhausted.
“What’s your name?”
“Lee.”
“And you go to Ault, right?”
I nodded.
“Me, too,” he said. “My name is Cross.”
It struck me, even at that moment, as modest of him to introduce himself. Of course I knew his name.
I tried to sit up-I’d been lying on the floor-and Cross leaned over and stuck his hands beneath my armpits.
“Easy,” he said. He turned to the man. “You don’t have any soda?”
“Restaurants are that way.” The guy jerked his head toward the entrance of the store.
When I was upright, Cross peered at my face. “What day is it?” he said.
“Surprise holiday,” I said.
He smiled. “Go like this.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. When I mimicked the gesture, a string of saliva clung to my knuckles. “We’ll find you something to eat,” he said.
We walked slowly toward the entrance of the store.
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t pay.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it.”
When we had stepped back into the bright humming light of the mall, he said, “Man, what a prick.” After about a minute, he nudged me. “Here.”
We turned into the diner, and a waitress led us to a booth where we sat facing each other. The reality of Cross before me was jarring: his tallness, his pale skin and cropped brown hair, his blue eyes, which seemed to contain both intelligence and boredom. I would not have imagined that Dede and I had similar taste, but Cross Sugarman was the best-looking boy I had ever sat so close to. And this fact was both thrilling and mortifying. It was as if I had, as in a dream, plucked him from his own world, the world of lacrosse games and sailboats and girls with long blond hair wearing sundresses, and pulled him into mine: a grimy restaurant in a depressed mall, on a rainy day. “Sorry,” I said. “For-I mean-I don’t know-”
“It’s no big deal.”
“But you’re being so nice to me.”
He looked away and made a kind of grumbling sigh, and I knew immediately that I had said the wrong thing.
When he looked back, he said, “This has or hasn’t happened to you before?”
“Once it did, a few years ago. After a soccer game when I was in sixth grade.”
“My sister faints,” he said.
The idea of Cross having a sister was intriguing. I wondered if she thought he was cute, or if she felt lucky to live in the same house he did.
“She fainted on a plane coming back from California. The flight attendants asked if she wanted the pilot to land the plane, but she told them no. I thought she should have told them yes.”
“Yikes,” I said. There was something in the mildness of Cross’s tone and expressions that made me unsure how to react to the things he said. Normally, you could tell just by observing people when you were supposed to nod, or laugh, or frown in sympathy. But Cross’s expressions were all so muted that I’d have thought he was hardly paying attention to what we were talking about. It was his eyes that made me know this wasn’t true-they were watchful, but not the way I imagined my own were; his was a disinterested, unself-conscious watchfulness.
The waitress appeared, and Cross ordered a vanilla milkshake. I opened the menu, and the quantity of words was overwhelming. I closed it. “I’ll have a vanilla milkshake, too,” I said. After the waitress left, I said, “I wonder if it’s bad for me to have dairy right now.”