The next place we went was a video arcade. Walking there, I thought that maybe this was where we’d part ways-I hardly knew how to play video games-but then it seemed like it would be weird and formal if I paused to disentangle myself from them. And the arcade had pinball; I knew how to play pinball. We all got quarters, and I stood before the bright, zinging machine, jamming them in whenever I lost a game.
I had just used the flippers to knock the ball all the way back when, beside me, someone said, “Not bad.”
I turned-it was Cross-and as I did, I heard the ball roll down the mouth of the machine. “Whoops,” I said. We both looked at the place where the ball had disappeared.
As my points audibly added up, he said, “You might be better at this than I am.”
“I might?”
“That’s not an insult.”
“I’m sure I’m better than you.” Impulsively, I said, “I’m a state champion.”
He looked at me skeptically.
“I was a prodigy,” I said. “I traveled around the country. But then I burned out.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s how I got into Ault. You know how they love it when you have a special talent?”
“I don’t believe you,” he said, but I knew he did, a little, or he wouldn’t have needed to say so.
“When I was nine, I was crowned Hoosier Pinball Princess,” I said. “My parents were so proud.” As I looked at him, I felt the corners of my mouth pulling up, and then he knocked my head with the palm of his hand, half tap and half rub, and said, “You’re so full of bullshit.”
“But you weren’t sure,” I said.
“I was sure.”
“No, you weren’t. I can tell. You weren’t.”
We grinned at each other. He was so handsome, I thought, and as soon as I thought it, the moment began to crack. Thinking of him as Cross, as part of Ault, was where I ran into problems. It was okay when we were just talking.
I was relieved when Martin came over. “You guys want some pizza?”
“You’re hungry?” I said. “Again?”
They got an extra-large, and this time I ate some, even though it had pepperoni on it and I hadn’t eaten pepperoni since Dede told me it was smoked with boar semen. Halfway through his fourth slice, Martin set it down on the paper plate and gripped his stomach. “Whose idea was this?” he said.
“It was Lee’s,” Cross said.
“It was not!” In my own voice, I could hear an insincere insistence, that girlish tone of flirtation.
“It was a bad idea, Lee,” Martin said. “A bad fucking idea.”
“You want some Tums, Marty?” John said. Then he said, “Does anyone know what time it is?” We all turned to look at the clock on the wall. It was five to six, and the bus back to school had left at five-thirty. “Fuck,” John said. “I’m already on Saturday detention for missing chapel twice this week.”
“Do we call Fletcher?” Martin asked.
“We can take a taxi,” Cross said. “It’s not a big deal.” The way he said it, how calm he was, made me wonder if he’d realized already that we’d missed the bus-if he’d realized it at the time even, and let it happen.
Cross was the one who called, from a pay phone, while the rest of us stood around. Martin was still moaning about how full he was, and John kept saying, “How the fuck did this happen?” I had less than five dollars left in my pocket, and it was a half-hour ride back to school. But no one else seemed concerned about money, and I said nothing.
“A taxi will meet us outside the movie theater,” Cross said after he’d hung up. When we walked back there, it was sprinkling outside, and the sky was dark. Waiting just inside the theater, no one spoke much, but it felt less like an awkward silence than a tired silence. Girls would still be talking to each other, I thought.
I had been in a taxi only one other time in my life, right after my mother gave birth to my brother Tim, and my brother Joseph and I rode to the hospital to meet up with our parents and see Tim for the first time. It was a sunny afternoon; I was ten years old, and Joseph was seven. For the whole ride, I imagined that the driver was going to kidnap us, and I pictured myself opening the door while the car was in motion, rolling out, and pulling Joseph with me. But then the driver delivered us to the hospital entrance and my father was waiting there to pay him.
In this taxi, I knew we would not be kidnapped-not just because I was less dumb than I’d been when I was ten but also because there were too many of us to kidnap, and Cross was too tall and strong. It was a maroon taxi. Martin got in the front seat, and John went around to the far side of the back seat, and then Cross opened the door closest to us and climbed in, and I followed him. I was surprised that he sat in the middle; at home, the boys I knew had been calling that the bitch seat since fourth grade.
The seats were blue Naugahyde, and inside the taxi it smelled like stale cigarette smoke and fake-pine air freshener. A cardboard tree hung from the rearview mirror. The radio was on low, set to a big-band station, and there was lots of static. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, and in the intervals between swishes, everything out the window turned blurry.
I had the same consciousness of Cross beside me that I’d had watching the movie, but this time, instead of feeling nervous about how to act when the movie ended, I felt sad because I knew the day was almost over. We would get back to school, and then what? It was hard to imagine that I could go from having no friends to being friends with Cross Sugarman. It was too great a leap. Besides, I had no proof that Cross truly liked me. He had been nice because I’d fainted. That was all. I didn’t want to be like Dede, presuming chumminess, using what someone gave you as an excuse to grasp for even more.
John leaned forward, peering at me from the other side of Cross. “You think biology will be hard?” he asked.
The test-over the course of the day, I had forgotten about it. “Probably,” I said. “I’ve hardly studied.”
“I was planning to study last night, but when I heard it would be surprise holiday, I blew it off.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
“Surprise holiday is like this illusion.” John leaned back, and his voice sounded far away. “It makes you feel like you have all the time in the world, but before you know it, the day is over. They should give us surprise week.”
“You’d get so bored,” Cross said.
“Nah, I have a million things I could do.” John was still talking when Cross lifted his left arm. At first, I thought he was setting it on the seat behind my back, and I felt a bolt of anticipation in my chest; then I realized he was setting it on me. His hand cupped my shoulder, and there was the slightest pull, a pull toward him. I gave into it. My body fell against his: my leg pressed to his leg, my arm filling the hollow between us, the top of my head just below his collarbone. This development struck me as remarkable-there I was, with Cross’s arm around me, when Martin or John could have turned at any moment and seen-but it also seemed unsurprising. Sitting in the diner earlier in the day, I had thought how much I wanted to be touching Cross and now I was; I could feel the rise and fall of his chest. And we matched each other well, our bodies fit. I didn’t know enough then to realize that doesn’t always happen-that sometimes you cannot settle on an angle with the other person, your weight won’t balance, your bones poke.
Whenever Cross responded to John, his voice was perfectly placid. Once Cross said, “Okay, but when would spring break be?”-they were still talking about a whole week of surprise holidays-and they could have been at a table in the dining hall, shooting the shit after dinner. I decided that I liked this gulf between the normality of Cross’s tone and the abnormality of the situation; it made what was happening between us a secret.
He touched my hair, first so briefly that it felt accidental; then his fingers raked through and started over again, and every so often, he rubbed the back of my neck with his thumb. My whole body was hot liquid; I felt beholden to him, and painfully happy. From the radio came the sound of trumpets. The rain outside made everything soft, the roll of the tires over the road, the fuzzy traffic lights, and on Cross’s other side, John was talking and talking, and I wished that we could keep driving all night long and that for the whole ride, everything would stay just as it was in this moment.