I mean, look, I don’t mean to get all sentimental about it. It was just the school cafeteria. I didn’t want to marry it or anything. But what would it be like when I was eating my meals in a cafeteria in prison and instead of sitting with people who dump kids in garbage cans or write phone numbers on your arm, I was surrounded by guys who would happily cut your throat?
“Dude!”
I blinked. I looked at Miler. “What?”
“It’s just a calculus quiz,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You groaned again.”
“Oh… forget it,” I told him. “I’m just…” But I didn’t know what I was just doing.
“Anyway,” Josh chimed in, “there’s the steamy-dreamy love of your vaguely embarrassing life.”
I blinked again and saw Beth waving to me from a table across the room. She was there with Mindy and Jen, a couple of her friends.
“So if you sit with the girls,” Josh said, “does that, like, make you a girl too?”
“Go on,” said Miler. “Have fun. If you need me, I’ll be over here trying to explain to Josh what girls are.”
I was walking across the cafeteria toward Beth when suddenly I had the weirdest experience. It was almost like a hallucination. I had this powerful, powerful sense that I wasn’t here in the cafeteria at all, that I was somewhere else, in the woods somewhere, lying on my side in a pile of leaves, twisting on the ground in pain and trying to pull myself out of it because there were bad men hunting me, because I had to keep running, keep trying to escape…
I shook my head and the vision was gone. I thought: That was weird. All this emotion and indecision must be starting to get to me. Then I continued walking across the room to Beth.
“Aren’t you going to get anything to eat?” she asked as I sat down across from her.
I muttered something about how I’d had a snack earlier. The truth was, with that lump in my throat, I didn’t think I could eat anything. I didn’t want to eat anything. I just wanted to sit there. I just wanted to look at her. I just wanted to be with her. Because I might never have a chance to be with her again.
I sat down. Mindy and Jen started talking to each other, obviously trying to give Beth and me some time for conversation. I tried to think of something to say, something ordinary and cheerful. But my voice kept trailing off, and I guess I kept sitting there for long seconds just kind of gazing at Beth.
“Are you okay?” Beth asked me.
And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just…” And then my voice trailed off again.
And then, just like that, I thought to myself: I’m not going to do it. I mean, I don’t have to do it. No one can make me do it. All I have to do is say no and Waterman goes away, right? The whole thing goes away just like that. They can find someone else to frame for murder. They can send someone else to prison to have his throat cut. Someone else’s mother can sit on the other side of the prison glass, sobbing. Let someone else leave his life and his friends and his girlfriend behind forever. It’s probably all baloney anyway. I mean, Sherman-a terrorist murderer? No way. Maybe this Waterman is just some nutcase who goes around pretending to work for the government…
As I went on thinking these things, the sadness began to lift from me. It really was as if someone had taken this huge boulder off my back. I began to feel practically lighthearted. Why had I been torturing myself like this? Just because some guy named Waterman showed up and proposed this insane plan didn’t mean I had to agree to it. It wasn’t written in stone or anything. All I had to do was say no, and the whole thing would go away.
I reached out across the table and Beth reached out and we held hands. A surge of feeling for her went through me. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt certain she had been created especially for me, that we had been created especially to find each other and be together.
This is good, I thought. This is what really matters in life. I’m not giving this up for anyone.
And with that, my sadness was gone completely. I was happy, in fact. In fact, I felt great.
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, I was in the karate dojo. For a second, I felt confused. How had I gotten here? Wasn’t I in the forest somewhere…? lying on my side writhing in pain…? people searching for me…?
No. No, now I remembered. I was back in Spring Hill. I’d gone home after school. I did my homework. I borrowed my mom’s car to drive to my karate lesson…
Now I and my sometime-karate-partner Peter Williams were moving together back and forth across the dojo carpeting. We were doing a paired kata, a kind of mock fight where I would move through one memorized series of punches and blocks and he would go through a complementary series so that every time I punched, he deflected it and struck back and then I deflected his punch and struck back and so on.
Sensei Mike moved along beside us, watching us, calling out instructions: “That foot should be right between his feet, Charlie. You’re not close enough. You can’t reach him with that punch. Come on, pay attention, West; you know better than that.”
I was making a lot of mistakes. I knew the material really well and I was trying to keep up, but my mind just kept going back to my next planned meeting with Waterman-tonight. I kept thinking: I’ll just tell him no, that’s all. All I have to do is say no and things’ll be back to normal.
But at the same time I was also thinking about my friend Alex. Stabbed in the chest, dying in the park, whispering my name with his final breaths. What if it really had been Sherman who’d killed him? What if he really was part of a terrorist organization out to attack America? How could things ever go back to being normal now that I’d heard what Waterman had to say? Once you know something, you can’t un-know it.
“All right, chuckleheads, that’s enough,” said Sensei Mike. “Williams, bow out and hit the changing room. West, stay here and tell me what’s on your mind and why you’re messing up so badly-and it better be something really, really important-like your shoes are on fire or something.”
“No, no, it’s nothing, Mike,” I muttered. I didn’t like to lie to him, but I’d promised Waterman I wouldn’t tell anyone what he’d said. Government secret and all that. I stood there in my karate gi, my head down. I was still breathing hard from the exercise. “I’m just… distracted, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mike. I could tell he didn’t believe me. Mike had this amazing ability to figure out pretty much everything that was on your mind just by watching your karate practice.
For a second, I stood there, not really knowing what to say, not wanting to lie any more than I had to, unable to tell the truth. Then, the words sort of just came out of me: “Hey, Mike, can I ask you a question?”
“No. And don’t ever try it again.”
I rolled my eyes.
Mike pulled his mustache down over his mouth with one hand, hiding a smile. “Go ahead, chucklehead. What question?”
I hesitated. Mike never talked much about being in the Army or what he did in the War on Terror. He never told anyone how the president gave him a medal for running to an armored truck under fire, getting hold of a big.50-caliber gun, and fighting off more than a hundred Taliban to save his fellow soldiers. He never told anyone about getting hit by a bullet that day and having to have a piece of titanium put in his leg where the bone used to be. But I’d looked him up on the Internet and found out all about it.