The Next Time You See Me (16 page)

Susanna lifted her coat over her head and ran.

Abby might have called after her. Susanna felt the call rather than heard it, the band too loud for a four-year-old’s voice to penetrate, and she hadn’t even made it to the parking lot before she hated herself, before she felt certain she’d done the wrong thing. Dale was there—Dale would go to their daughter—but this was the kind of moment that Abby would never forget, her mother running away from her, ignoring her. There would be years and years to make this up to her, years stacked one atop another like those mattresses in the fairy tale, and beneath it all the pea, the tiny bit that shouldn’t matter but does, the princess tossing and turning above it. Had Susanna ever forgotten the day at the van with Ronnie? Or the time she’d seen her drunken father, naked as Noah, passed out on the living room sofa?
He’s dead to me anyway,
she’d said to Dale, remembering the scrollwork of curly
hairs on her father’s soft inner thighs, the flaccid penis drooping, his scrotum bunched like moldy fruit.

She looked back once before rounding the corner and making the last dash to her car. Abby hadn’t moved. Her hand was still in place against the tower, the other lifted in good-bye, and Susanna was too ashamed to wave in reply, to let her daughter know she’d seen her.

Chapter Nine

1.

It was a cold night, the first of the season, and Christopher’s mother had insisted that they light the fireplace—the real one, not the gas logs in the recreation room that you could coax into flame with a switch—and drink hot cocoa. So he did as she asked, letting her fill his Telluride mug from the saucepan on the stove, letting her drop in a half dozen mini marshmallows, letting her steer him to the room in the house that he most hated, where he’d have to sit ramrod-straight on the sofa to balance his drink. This was the Sitting Room. He thought of it that way, as a formal destination, and it was: a place you planned to go to, or where your mother told you to go, and not a place where you happened to end up. He came into this room perhaps half a dozen times a year. It faced Main Street and the formal entryway, a pair of double doors so tall that Christopher couldn’t reach the lintel if he stood on tiptoe and stretched his middle finger as high as it would go. He didn’t even have a key to that door. Most days he entered the house through the utility room, grabbed a soda from the kitchen, and then went back out immediately to the guesthouse, where he’d been allowed to sleep since his thirteenth birthday. He had a twenty-six-inch color TV and a VCR out there—his parents’
hand-me-downs, but still—a Super Nintendo game station, a foosball table, and a new IBM computer with a dot-matrix printer. The walls were draped with banners that he’d printed out over summer break, when the novelty hadn’t yet worn out. The one hanging over his bed was five sheets of paper long and read
CHRISTOPHER’S PAD
in block letters. He’d found pictures of Corvettes in the clip art folder and used these to flank the legend.

She wanted him to speak first. He would
not
speak first.

“Well,” she said finally. She was sitting on the sofa opposite his, looking at the fire, legs pulled up catlike beneath her hip. The soft light of the flames made her face seem prettier than it really was. Younger. She was a fixture in his life, a neutral—at most, perhaps, a reflective surface. He checked her face to make sure that he was loved, forgiven, approved of, amusing; he checked to determine if he was in trouble. He paid attention only to the things she said that concerned him. He was the center of her life—he knew this, had not considered it could be otherwise—so most of what she said concerned him. And this was true not because he was a bad child or an unusually spoiled child, but because he was a child still.

“We could watch TV if we were in the rec room,” he said, filling the silence.

“Mmm.” She still looked at the fire, not at him. Her dark blond hair, smoothed behind an ear, glinted. “That’s true. And yet, here we are.”

He looked around as if to confirm the fact, miming surprise, thinking she might laugh.

“They’re going to suspend you, Chris,” she said. “What on earth do you have to say for yourself?”

He choked a little on the cocoa he’d just sipped, surprised that she’d unleashed on him so quickly.

“Well?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I guess I don’t have anything to say.”

Her face sagged into distress. “Why did you do that to that girl?
Was it—” She ran her thumb along the lip of her mug. “Did it go how the principal told me it did?”

Christopher remembered the instant when he’d looked down, as if from a distance, and watched his hand take up a wet, sloppy handful of his pasta. Then the memory shifted to sensation—the hard fling forward, the pull in his shoulder. Finally, a snapshot: the ropes of spaghetti spattering Emily’s shocked face. The act was in motion before Christopher could decide to do it. Which was not to say that he’d been possessed or out of control, that he hadn’t wanted to hurt Emily in that moment, because he had, and he’d felt good—damn good—when he did. For the instant. By the time Leanna had lobbed her chunk of garlic bread and Craig his chocolate pudding, and the cafeteria had erupted around them all in gleeful, frantic confusion, Christopher was already wishing that he hadn’t done it. He wished this as he threw the rest of his spaghetti, his own pudding and bread, his paper basket of iceberg lettuce and pink dressing—as he yelled “You freak!” and heard the word echoed by the kids around him. What power he had! He hadn’t known how much until that moment.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, and he meant it.

She exhaled. “Jesus. What a cruel thing. To think that I was just at school the other day defending you, saying how mature you are.”

He blew on his cocoa though it had already gotten cool.

“I mean it. I called your father at work this afternoon—”

Christopher gulped.

“—and told him everything. He didn’t care like I did. He said boys will be boys. And I can see you wanting to smirk over there—”

He shook his head emphatically.

“—but I’d save it if I were you, because he’s steamed about this suspension stuff. If it goes through, that’s just the beginning of what you’re going to suffer. Don’t think it’s going to be a week home playing video games and foosball.” She rubbed her eyes. “But he has Johnny Burke on it, so we’ll see. Though I’m not convinced that you should get off the hook for this one.”

He shifted. The wooden couch frame dug into his neck.

“I’d punish you myself if I thought it’d make a difference. But is that going to teach you to feel bad in your heart? Taking away your Nintendo? Moving you back in the house? You’ve made me sick with this, Christopher. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see you the same again.”

“Mom—” he started, but she made a curt gesture with her chin and he knew to close his mouth.

“Please go to your room and think about what you’ve done. I’m not coming in to take your computer. I’m not telling you what to do or not to do out there. But spare a thought for that girl you were mean to. Ask yourself how it felt to be her today. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” he said.

She made a shooing motion. “Go on, then.”

He did as she asked. He didn’t turn on the computer or the TV; he didn’t idly spin the knobs on his foosball table, as he sometimes did when he was daydreaming or thinking through one of his English papers. He lay on his bed, pushed his tennis shoes off, and stared at the ceiling.

Freak!

He remembered helping Emily in seventh grade with that stupid tadpole project. They had come in one morning to find them all dead, charred black by the UV lamp and floating, and she had started sniffling. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he’d told her, resting his hand briefly and unthinkingly on her shoulder. It was nothing—empty comfort—but he had set something into motion that day.

Freak!

The diamond of pale skin through the chain link, the gray-green eyes wide, the way she’d suddenly jerked back and run as if to go tell.

Freak!

Leanna, still crouched in front of him:
Oh my God, what was
that
about?

His eyes burned with sudden, hot tears, and though there was no one around to see him, he rolled over, hiding his face in a pillow.

2.

Sometime later, there was a knock at the door of his room.

“Come in,” he called, still lying down, expecting his mother. When his father entered heavily, stomping on the front mat as he slid out of his suit coat, Christopher scrambled to wipe his face and right himself, jumping to a stand at the foot of his bed. His father hardly ever came out here. He worked long days, usually a few hours throughout the weekend, too, and he spent a lot of his time at home holed up in what he called his “office,” though there wasn’t much official about it by Christopher’s estimation: a worn-in leather recliner, a small television, his books—he liked true crime stories, Tom Clancy, John Grisham—a dartboard. It was the only room in the house where he smoked, so it smelled of sweet tobacco, perhaps also a little of body odor, or laundry that needed washing. Dad’s Pad. It occurred to Christopher, watching his father survey this room as though he’d never been inside it before (he was rubbing his thumb over a medal, hanging from a thumbtack on the bulletin board, that Christopher had received for placing second in last year’s regional science fair), that he and his parents were like planets orbiting the sun: they were pulled toward the same center, but they lived in isolation from one another, their paths hardly crossing.

“I won’t stay long,” his father said. He sat at the computer desk, spinning in the chair and crossing his arms. Christopher could tell that he wasn’t angry—and that he wanted Christopher to know that he wasn’t. He was doing that jovial “dad” thing: shifting around, picking random stuff up, lifting his eyebrows occasionally with interest. He did a quick
ba dum dum
on the tops of his thighs.

“So,” he continued, “Mom’s pissed. You’ll have to work that out between the two of you. I’m just worried about this suspension business.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Eh. Lot of good that does me. You didn’t throw your fucking green beans in
my
face, did you?”

Christopher shook his head.

“I’m not saying it was a good thing to do, mind you. It wasn’t. I never did stuff like that to little girls when I was your age. But, you know, I get it. Peer pressure, your friends gang up on you, everyone’s working everybody else up. And it washes off, that’s the thing. It’s not like you hurt her.”

“I think I hurt her,” Christopher said hoarsely.

“Physically, son. This isn’t Phil Donahue. This isn’t about what the girl’s going to tell her shrink in ten years. It’s about whether or not a group of kids, really good kids, ought to get their records fucked up for doing one shitty prank. I say no. Leanna’s dad says no. We’ll see what happens.”

They were silent for a moment, his father still spinning back and forth in the chair, Christopher leaning slightly against his bed frame.

“You can’t go back tomorrow—the principal’s put his foot down on that. Maybe a second day, too. But two days won’t mean much, and it’s not like this is high school, at least, thank God. That’s when you have to worry about your GPA.”

His father was already thinking about college, making plans, getting all jacked up when Christopher didn’t score high enough on the PSATs to qualify for the National Merit program. Christopher suppressed the urge to roll his eyes.

“We’re fighting for you guys to spend the rest of next week in ALC instead of getting suspended. That’s more punishment to kids your age, anyway. You’d just be watching TV if you were home, and at least this way you can keep your mouth shut for a few days and really think about what you’ve done. And it’ll give that girl some time to readjust, too. And everybody can keep up with their studies, and nobody’s education suffers. That’s what Johnny’s working on.”

Christopher picked at a fingernail and nodded. He wasn’t sure how to feel. This was all good news, right? And no one from school had called about anything that happened at the tennis court, so Emily hadn’t even tattled. He didn’t know why she’d keep her mouth shut after what he and Leanna had done to her this afternoon, but she had. So far.

“Well? What do you have to say?”

“Thanks,” Christopher said. And, again, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” His father stood, leaned over to squeeze his shoulder. “Lesson learned. OK, get some sleep. I think Mom has a bunch of chores planned for you tomorrow.”

“All right,” he said.

“We’ll work it out.” He stopped at the door. “You and Leanna still a thing?”

Christopher shrugged, embarrassed. Then he nodded.

“She’s pretty, huh?”

“Yeah.”

His father cleared his throat. “You’re young to have a girlfriend. You don’t even have a car. You still get an allowance, for God’s sake.”

“We just hang out,” Christopher said.

“Yeah, I bet that’s all.” He put his coat over his arm. “Well, you be smart. And stick close to her until this blows over. Her dad’s the last person you want to piss off right now.”

“OK.”

“Night, Chris.”

“Night.” The door snicked closed softly.

It was cold in the room, so Christopher switched on the heater, almost enjoying the musty smell as the summer’s dust started to burn away. It was a winter smell, a Thanksgiving smell. The end of the year would be here in no time. He slid out of his clothes, considered brushing his teeth—shrugged, for no one’s benefit but his own, and decided not to—then slid between the cool bedclothes, shivering pleasantly. He was glad that his father wasn’t pissed, glad to not be going to school tomorrow. Glad, he had to admit to himself, for the promise of a day away from Leanna.

Still, he couldn’t help but drift to sleep remembering the tennis court, Leanna’s hot mouth on him, the thrill and shame of it. He moved his feet out of the pocket of sheet he’d warmed, flipped his pillow. The smooth cotton felt good against his neck. He was hard again, and then he was thinking about Emily’s face in the lunchroom, and
he swallowed against a sudden rise of nausea.
Tennis court,
he willed. The slow pull of the zipper, the grasp of cold fingers, Leanna’s hot mouth on him. The pull, the sense that he was being unraveled.