The Next Time You See Me (20 page)

And still she might have done nothing, if it hadn’t turned out that the young man at their helm was the good-looking blond who’d ignored her smile in the mirror over the bar all those weeks before. She spotted him not long after the older man started singing along to “Wichita Lineman” on the juke, because the blond was the loudest and rowdiest in the group, the kind of person who laughs not just because it’s funny but because he wants to be noticed laughing. “Woo!” he kept yelling, playing patty-cake on his thighs and stomping his feet, once turning the two gestures into a quick little dance that culminated with his slapping the soles of his cowboy boots in a nifty rhythm that ought to have had fiddle music accompanying it. Oh, he was a charmer, she saw, and without a doubt a grade-A asshole, too. She’d known his type. She’d bedded his type. And she’d enjoyed it, because Ronnie had her own capacity for cruelty, her own occasional whim to hurt. It was how she’d gotten her nose broken all those years ago: she’d hooked up with a guy like this one, she’d given him as good as she got from him, and in the end he’d settled the matter with his fists, his only advantage.

She walked over to the group, buzzing on the two rum-and-colas she’d downed at the bar, unable to stop herself. “Hey,” she said. “You can’t just leave him like this. How’s he going to get home?”

“Magic carpet ride,” said the black-haired one, snorting laughter. “Right, Sam?”

Sam—that was the blond one—swallowed the last inch of beer in his glass and slammed it on the bar. The older man didn’t even jerk; he was crooning along with the house band now, slurring and getting most of the words wrong, and two of the other guys in the group were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their faces. “Mind your own damn business,” Sam said, smiling broadly, but there was something in that smile that chilled Ronnie. The eyes behind it were utterly humorless.

“You fucking assholes,” Ronnie said. Her anger now was mixed up, despairing. She had dulled her humiliation at the Salamander with liquor, but it was nagging at her now, worming its way back into her conscious mind. “You’re a bunch of fucking pricks. Someone ought to call the cops on you.”

Sam grabbed her elbow and shoved her away from the group. Later, when his gang had left the bar and abandoned the older drunk man, she’d find the crescent-shaped imprint of his thumbnail on the soft flesh of her inner arm. “You say another word,” he whispered hotly into her ear, “and you’re going to get a surprise. Do you hear me, you ugly skank?”

Ronnie swallowed against a sob, and he shook her.

“I said, do you hear me?”

She nodded.

He let go and stepped back, grin back on his face. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. In another few moments, he and his group had slipped out the door. The older man didn’t even seem to notice.

4.

Chris, the manager at the Salamander, had threatened to call the sheriff on her. “Don’t, man,” Sonny had said, hand still covering his ear, the scar on his arm just visible where the cuff of his shirt tugged down. “Don’t, this is all me.”

“You’re damn right it is,” Ronnie said, but she was losing her sense of righteousness, faltering under the stares of the people she’d called friends for the last five years of her life. She could see in their eyes that they’d chosen Sonny, that they would have always chosen Sonny, that maybe none of them had ever even liked her. Annette Lochman was smirking a little, and Ronnie wondered if Sal had told her about them, those four times they’d slept together—five, it would have been, if he’d not been too drunk one night to get it up. Nearby, Danny Munford had his arms crossed, and the lights overhead were glinting off his glasses in a way that turned his eyes into silver coins. He’d given her a copy once of a story he’d written—a novel, he’d called it, though it only seemed about thirty or forty pages long, printed and bound with brass brads, so that you could flip the pages like a book—and Ronnie had unthinkingly tossed it into the backseat of her car. She hadn’t found it again until months later, running the quarter vacuum at Kip’s, and she’d trashed it along with the empty fast food containers and tattered sales bulletins, hardly registering the difference.

“You should let him call them,” the woman with Sonny said. She was pretty in a sullen way, close to Ronnie’s age or a bit older. The regular thing in Fort Campbell, maybe—it suddenly seemed unimportant. “I can’t believe she fucking did that.”

“Maybe I had it coming,” Sonny said, and Ronnie felt the needle of hot tears.

“The hell you did!” the woman said.

“Hush, now,” he said. “She’s on her way out. I’m going to show her ass to the door.”

A few people clapped. It was a short, even halfhearted display, but Ronnie knew she’d be hearing it for a long time.

They were out on the front steps before Ronnie registered the pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she noted dully that it would probably be the last time he ever touched her.

“Goddamn, woman,” Sonny said. “I ain’t never.”

“You got a lot of nerve bringing her here. I thought we had a truce about this place.”

He barked a laugh. “Truce? Is that what you call getting drilled in the parking lot by Sal Lochman?”

“That was years ago. You were in Kuwait.”

“Well, that other guy. The one from your town, that you work with.”

Ronnie had to think a minute. “You weren’t even here that night.”

“I could have been.”

“I knew that was your weekend on base.”

“Thoughtful.”

“At least I thought of you.”

He laughed again and gave her a little push. “Drive home safe, girl. It’s been fun.”

“Fuck you, Sonny.”

“I always liked you in that jacket.” The set of his mouth was soft.

She speared a tear with her knuckle before it could roll down her cheek. “Why did you bring her? Seriously, Sonny. Did I piss you off? Didn’t you want to see me tonight?”

He looked like he was at a loss. “Shit, honey, I just did,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. She wanted to go out for a drink and here seemed as good as anywhere.” He pulled his hand from his ear and looked at it thoughtfully. “I’m bleeding,” he said. “You made me bleed.”

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Ronnie said.

“No, you are.” He was still smiling, but Ronnie could tell that there was an edge of something else to his voice. “You’re the meanest woman I’ve ever known. Mean as an old bear.”

Ronnie snagged her keys out of her front pocket, started across the lot to the Camaro. She stuck her middle finger up in good-bye as she went.

“Been nice knowing you,” Sonny called after her.

Part Two

Chapter Thirteen

1.

On Friday, Mr. Wieland, Emily’s science teacher from seventh grade, approached Emily in the hall during class change. “How’re you feeling, kid?”

She looked around automatically for Christopher or Leanna, anyone from their group, and remembered that they were all still home today. Because of her. She’d been bumping up against that realization all morning, and it provoked in her a mix of relief and dread. Relief because she was free of them all for now. Dread because she knew that she wouldn’t be for long.

“I’m OK,” she said. She couldn’t believe he’d asked her that, right out in the hall where anybody could hear him. She hugged her books more tightly to her chest.

“Has Ms. Nicholas talked to you yet about entering the science fair this year? You took that tadpole project pretty far, and you know they have a cash prize if you place at regionals.”

Emily shifted her gaze between Mr. Wieland’s shoes, a scuffed pair of leather hiking boots, and the middle button of his plaid shirt. His shirt cuffs were rolled up on his forearms, his hands thrust deep into the loose hip pockets of his khakis. Her eyes darted for just a
second to his face—he was appraising her, friendly and paternal, and she felt a flicker of irritation. “Not yet,” she said.

“She will,” he said, “and you should. It’s a great opportunity, a great confidence builder. And money doesn’t hurt, does it? If you need any help, let me know. I’ve got a couple of new books that might give you some ideas.”

“Oh. OK,” Emily said.

Mr. Wieland looked at his watch. “Bell’s going to ring in another minute, so I ought to let you on your way. Don’t forget that Ms. Nicholas and I are both here to help. And there’s a little extra money in the budget this year for materials, so we could do some neat things.”

Emily nodded, adjusted her books from the left arm to the right, and started toward class. Mr. Wieland watched her go.

She was a strange, sad little thing. And as sorry as he felt for her, as wrong as it was for those kids to target her—those powerful and handsome kids with their rich parents and their easy lives—Ed Wieland couldn’t help but understand the reason, to feel, when Emily was around, something that pretended to be a small emotion, like distaste or amusement, but was actually more profound, too profound to name. Fear? It was
like
fear, a dark, slick thing in the pit of his stomach, a thing that muscled its way around on a silken underbelly, slow, deliberate. But
fear
wasn’t the right word, either. And when Ed sensed that crawling inside of him, when he registered in Emily’s presence how fully he wished to be somewhere else, he felt like a jerk. She was a girl, a smart, troubled girl, and he didn’t like to think that had he been Emily’s peer rather than her teacher, he’d have been one of the students pelting her with his lunch. But he wondered.

The bell rang, and he retreated to his classroom. He was liked at Roma Middle School. The students called him Mr. Wee, and the girls sometimes whispered to each other about how he was kind of cute for an old guy.

2.

Emily, following Boss into the woods, thought about Mr. Wieland’s suggestion. Tadpoles—what a joke. What a joke that she had cried over them. If he knew her current, secret project, he wouldn’t be trying to distract her with kid stuff. What had once been so important to her—decorating the project board with construction paper, making frames for the Polaroid pictures she took, neatly lettering headings such as “HYPOTHESIS” and “RESULTS”—seemed trivial now, even pathetic in the wake of the discoveries she was making in the woods.

Mr. Powell’s dog, Boss, wasn’t used to going for long walks on a leash, and he was big and gangly, at least eighty or ninety pounds. Emily didn’t walk him so much as let him walk her. They were a subject of recent amusement in the neighborhood: the girl and the dog, the dog almost as big as she was, stumbling around the streets and then disappearing, who knows where. Boss scampered with his head close to the ground and his silken ears waving around his snout, and the clumsy bones of his haunches angled up and down, machinelike, and his splayed paws landed heavily in the mud. He smelled pungent and alive, and his jowls were dripping in excitement: so much ground, so many scents, a world entire outside his master’s property. He didn’t move like an old dog anymore.

Emily, feet landing in hard stops to keep her from tipping over onto her face, grunted, “Boss, whoa,” and yanked on the leash. He held back a bit and she caught her breath. Her ankle, still a little tender from last week’s fall, hummed with a distant ache.

A week—she could hardly register that so much time had passed. On Saturday she had gone back to the woods, convinced after a restless night that the body wouldn’t be there—that it had never existed or (worse) that someone else had found it. But there it was, now in broad daylight, now partly exposed, and the exposed parts already looked different than they had the previous night. Darker. She had thought about her science project then, “the effects of ultraviolet
light,” and had carefully pulled another rock away from the body, exposing a portion of the upper left arm. Yes, she thought, heart trembling. It was different.

With the tadpole project, she’d kept a little spiral-bound notebook to record her findings. It was still in her room, tucked into the drawer of her bedside table: a log patterned with her neat print, observations such as “Beginning to sprout legs” under the heading “Control Group” and “Darker color, growth stunted” under “UV Group.” In two places, on a day when Emily had missed school because of a stomach bug, Christopher Shelton had tended the log for her. It was early in the project, and he’d marked “Swimming, no sign of change” under both headings. When Emily returned to school, she had run her fingers over Christopher’s notations, thrilled at the intimacy of it: his words in her notebook. The ballpoint pen he’d used left an impression on the paper.

She wasn’t writing her findings down in a notebook, but she began on Saturday to keep a mental log of what she was seeing, the subtle and not-so-subtle changes, and the control group was her own body, the taut, strong flesh she had always taken for granted. It seemed miraculous to her now: her plump forearm, its peach-hued ivory, the blond, fine hairs and tiny freckles. In class, while the teacher was lecturing or playing a video, she would put her arm on her desktop, delicate inside facing up, and she’d flex the tendons, observe the way a blue vein pulsed in the hollow of her inner elbow. Think, flex. Think, flex. The body, helpless to her will. But her awe had given way to something else, a sense of hopelessness. She wouldn’t call it depression. But she couldn’t look at her own arm now without imagining the arm of the body, the body that had been a person but was now an object of as much spirit as those UV-cooked tadpoles. What, she wondered for the first time, did it mean to live? What was she? An encasement of flesh and hot blood, a puppet, a collection of cells, an accident. Each day she promised herself that this was the last visit, the last time she’d “make sure” before going to her parents. Each day she stayed silent, easing her conscience with another promise.

After what had happened on Wednesday, she gave up on even the pretense of the promise. Watching Christopher and Leanna at the tennis courts—that thing he had let her do to him—disturbed and frightened her, and it hit her harder, in a way, than what happened moments later in the cafeteria, because she still wasn’t really letting herself think about that. She had to look at the memory in the way she’d looked at the body that first night in the woods; some instinctive order of her mind had cast a protective darkness over those events, making it easier to examine them with her peripheral vision than straight on. In her nightmares, she relived it all: the cruel glee on Christopher’s face, the chorus of shouts all around her, the dull impact of all that greasy, gelatinous food and the nauseating processed smells of it. In the waking day, it was something she brushed up against accidentally: when she saw a certain malicious humor in the eyes of a classmate and knew what the person was thinking, or at lunch, when she found herself reaching for a paper tray of salad or a margarine-soaked slice of garlic toast.