XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (19 page)

Scott’s face exploded with heat. He spun toward the table, head down, and pretended to fix himself a plate. “What did you do that for?” he hissed from the side of his mouth.

“Hey, I was doing you a favor. I thought there might be some takers.”

Scott started to shake his head, but from his new vantage he could see into what looked like a den, where several other Gamma pledges mingled. Alpha pledges were down there as well, one he recognized from his English class. And then his heart changed in tenor from the hard, humiliated thuds of only seconds ago, to a fresh, fast thumping.

Janis was down there.

He pushed up his glasses and zeroed in. Yes, she was sitting on the couch in a black dress, talking with another Alpha pledge. He watched the small movements of her head, her close-lipped smile, the way she palmed her drink in her lap, knees together. Scott wasn’t sure how he had missed her at first. Her red hair illuminated the room. To her left sat an empty couch seat.

There it is, Scott, your opening. Your opportunity.

“Hey, uh… wait here,” he told Sweet Pea. “I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t you worry,” Sweet Pea answered, fixating on a trio of young women chatting in front of him. “This puppy’s not going anywhere.”

Good.

He needed to concentrate, needed to focus. What he didn’t need was Sweet Pea making his entrance behind him and trumpeting that same horrifying declaration to all of the pledges. Scott edged his way along the refreshment table, then hesitated before the three carpeted steps.

Should he go to the restroom first? Check his face, his hair? Run some toothpaste around his mouth with a finger? Swish a little Signal? Adjust his tie and the tuck of his shirt?

Chill out. You were just in your own bathroom a half hour ago. You look fine, you smell good. If you screw around now, you’re going to miss another opportunity. That’s right,
another
one.

All semester, that’s how it had felt to Scott: one missed opportunity after another. The openings had been small, mostly. But they had been there, chances to step up beside Janis in the hallway and ask how her pledge period was going or what she thought of Fern’s latest book assignment or whether her electricity had gone out during the thunderstorm last night like at his house (already knowing that it had). Yes, small openings had existed where innocent queries like those, done often enough, would have led to familiarity by now. Friendship, even.

But no matter how much he had rehearsed them in his head, he had let each opportunity totter into the abyss, one by one.
Tomorrow,
he’d always told himself.
I’ll do it tomorrow.

Now, Scott stared at an opportunity that tomorrow—a hundred tomorrows—would never trump. This was the whole reason he’d pledged Gamma. This was His Moment. He drained the last of his Pepsi, crushed the ice between his teeth, and descended the white-carpeted steps.

The couch sat on the far side of the room, beside a mirrored fireplace. And for a moment, it seemed an impossible distance to Scott, as impossible as the distance separating their houses.

He dropped his empty cup in a planter and began fording the room. Pledges in formal wear eddied around him. Scott never shifted his gaze. His focus, his everything remained on Janis, on her smooth cascade of hair, on her muscular calves, on the unclaimed seat beside her. And the nearer Scott drew to that seat, the more certain he became that someone was going to appear from nowhere and plop blithely down. He tried to swim his limbs faster.

A Gamma pledge passed in front of the couch and paused. Sharp-dressing, smooth-talking Jeffrey Bateman. Disappointment guttered in Scott’s stomach like cold fire. Jeffrey pulled up the knees of his slacks and began to squat, but then raised his hand to someone and strode from the couch.

And then Scott was beside her.

He sat. Air hissed from the leather couch cushion, and he felt himself sinking. Soon, his eyes were level with his knees.

It just can’t be easy, can it?

He peeked over at Janis, who still faced the pledge to her right. For a moment, he was struck by the closeness of her hair, its smooth, almost glossy, sheen. Scott managed to scoot himself out of the hole and to the couch’s edge. He perched forward, an elbow propped on his knee, and angled himself so as to appear interested in whatever they were discussing.

“…so we’re going up there over winter break to tour the campuses,” the girl with the frizzy hair was saying to Janis. “My dad was a Blue Devil, so that’s his first choice for me, you know? But I sorta like Wake Forest.”

Janis
hmm
ed.

Scott
hmm
ed behind her, but it was too soft, a low note buried in the chatter around them. The girl’s rapidly blinking eyes never left Janis’s.

“They’re totally hard to get into, though. Dad says I should have some backups. You know, for just in case.” She went on to list the lesser schools she was considering, none of them familiar to Scott.

He
hmm
ed anyway.

That got no reaction either. And he was sliding backward, sinking into the cushion again. Scott leaned against the back of the couch to slide himself out. And his seat flipped open. The couch featured a recliner on the end, but Scott didn’t realize that, not at first. He believed he was overturning the whole damn thing. Someone screamed. He flailed an arm over to catch Janis, but his wrist jammed against the adjoining section of couch, which hadn’t moved. When he rattled to a rest, he was nearly flat, the tops of his penny loafers staring back at him.

Laughter rose around him. Scott pressed his calves against the leg rest with such force that he was bolted upright and nearly launched from the seat. For a moment, the room jittered in his vision. This second maneuver earned him more laughter, and Scott could feel the old shame exploding over his face like a devilish case of acne.

“All ri-i-ight!” Sweet Pea cried from the top of the steps. “Now
that’s
what I call a ten!”

The room cheered, and Scott realized then that the laughter hadn’t been cruel or demeaning, just fraternal. His throat convulsed around a chuckle. Sweet Pea gave him a thumbs-up. And just like that, the room fell into jumbled voices again, the baking spotlight off of him.

Then Scott remembered the scream. He turned to find Janis’s friend standing with one arm held out in front of her, looking from her black and white polka-dot dress to the cup, where whatever had sloshed out was still dripping from her fingers onto the glass coffee table.

“Oh, my god,” Scott stammered. “I-I’m so sorry.”

The girl glared at Scott, set the cup down, and ran off in search of a bathroom.

Scott turned to Janis. “I really didn’t mean to. Should I…?” He gestured to where the pledge had disappeared, not knowing how to complete the thought. He was waiting for Janis to curl her lip at him and go storming after her friend.

“Oh, she’ll get over it.” Janis waved her hand. “It’s just water.”

He exhaled. “Thank goodness.”

Janis smiled and laughed, which made Scott laugh, too. He stooped to straighten his pant legs and, when he sat up, found her head tilted toward his. He breathed the clean scent of her hair.

“Actually, I should be the one thanking you,” she whispered. “Debbie’s been obsessing about colleges for the last month, but tonight it was reaching a whole new level. I didn’t think she was ever going to shut up.”

“Always happy to be of service.” Scott winced at what he was about to say but said it anyway. “Need a conversation crashed? Call Scott Spruel. Should be getting those business cards printed up any day now.”

Janis giggled and leaned against him. It lasted only a moment, but for that whole moment, Scott’s senses swam.

She leaned away and looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, I was just thinking about you the other day.”

“Really?” He tried to appear calm even as his mind blew apart.

“Do you remember how we used to play in the woods? When we were kids?”

“Yeah, of course.”

You were the superior shark’s tooth hunter, I’ll admit, but
I
built the better forts.
He was pretty sure that would have gotten another laugh, maybe even another lean, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to sidetrack her from whatever she was about to reveal to him.

“That’s what I was thinking about,” she finished.

“Um… oh.”

“Do you ever go in there anymore?” she asked.

Only the time I went to spy on you while you were practicing against your garage door.

He shook his head. “Not lately.”

“No, me neither.”

She was looking off to his right, and Scott wondered if the house and the party had become as distant for her as it had for him. He watched her eyes, green eyes, he remembered now. You couldn’t see the green from a distance because it melded so cleanly with the chestnut spires of her irises. You could only see the green up close, face to face.

“It was our world in there, wasn’t it?” she asked, squinting slightly. “Back then?”

He nodded, not quite sure what she meant.

She asked, “Do you remember how, when you went in far enough, especially in the summer, you couldn’t even see the houses anymore? It was just the trees and creek and us, I guess. Whatever we were doing. Whatever we were imagining. The only time our parents ever came in after us was to call us home.”

“I remember.”

* * *

And Scott remembered because he was seeing it, experiencing it—an episode, anyway. He and Janis were walking along a towering oak that had recently fallen, giving them access to a part of the woods that sank into a low bog. They had always walked around the bog in the past. It smelled like toilet water, for one, and was next to impassable, for another. Plus, they imagined all kinds of creatures and dangers lurking inside, quicksand, not the least of them.

How old were they? Eight? Scott wasn’t sure. It was mid summer and they were pretending to be explorers—that much he did remember. As Janis stepped over a limb, she reached back for his hand to balance herself. She was maybe an inch taller than he, her cheeks splashed with bright freckles. And even though he was still aware of himself on the couch, he could hear the whine of mosquitoes and smell the stinging repellant his mother would spray over him in coats. And not only could he see Janis, the girl, he could
feel
her small hand inside his own.

“Whatever you do, don’t fall in.” She stopped on the other side of the limb to help him over, then pointed with a stick she was holding in her hand. “That’s where the water moccasins live.”

Scott squinted into the reedy water but couldn’t see anything.

“C’mon,” she said.

He followed her down the trunk and along a treacherous path of limbs and bifurcations. Squinting, they pushed through showers of branches whose narrow leaves were already browning and flittering into the water. She clambered ahead while he took more care, kneeling down whenever he began to totter. The tree seemed enormous, as if they could keep walking along it forever. He really did feel like an explorer, and the water world they traversed, though only a few hundred yards from their street, looked foreign to him and strange.

Soon, the limbs narrowed and shifted under their feet. Janis took him down a limb that dipped into the bog before emerging again. They got on both sides of the dip and squatted. The tips of Janis’s battered green Keds touched the brown water, but she didn’t seem to notice.

They were peering into an alien world, where little black beetles sped on the water’s surface in circles, like mercury squeezed out in drops. Long-legged insects skated past. And then they did see a snake, maybe even a water moccasin. It lay in a black coil at the bottom of the bog. Janis prodded it with her stick, and they watched it wriggle from sight, mud kicking up around it.

An alien world, yes. But best of all, it was
their
world, his and Janis’s. She had been right about that, and he felt himself nodding even as he remained immersed in the memory.

Janis swatted a mosquito on her arm, then stood up and looked around. Scott straightened his plastic glasses and followed her example. From their vantage, they could see the cement wall of the levee through the trees. It ran from Sixteenth Avenue around The Meadows on the far side of the creek. Janis had told him her father said it was for when the creek flooded, which happened most summers. It wasn’t to protect their neighborhood but the lower-lying ones around it.

“Hey, look,” Janis said. “If we jump down there, we’ll be past the swamp. We can follow the creek to the end of The Meadows.”

That seemed like a grand idea to Scott. The Meadows consisted of a single street with three shorter streets coming off of it, Janis’s street being the first one. The end of The Meadows, though modest in street distance, seemed really far away in woods distance. And they had never been that far in the woods before.

“All right,” he said.

They made their way toward the end of the oak tree’s branch and scampered down. The ground squished under the soles of their sneakers but soon became solid as they cleared the tall grass bordering the bog. They now looked out into more familiar woods of scrub oak and pine. The creek chuckled off to their left. Janis marched ahead, whacking saw palmettos with her stick as they passed. Scott did the same, imagining the palmettos were brigands come to steal their rations. Both of them had scratches on their legs, the ones suffered in earlier excursions already scabbed over. That always surprised Scott—they could bleed and heal without realizing their skin had been torn in the first place. It was part of the magic of the woods.

“Hey, is that Mrs. Thornton’s house?” Scott whispered.

He aimed his stick off to the right where color showed through the trees. The Thorntons lived four houses from the end of The Meadows. Mrs. Thornton had one of those old-fashioned bikes with a metal basket in front, and she rode it through the neighborhood like Miss Gulch from the
Wizard of Oz
. Her eyes stayed hidden behind brown sunglasses, lips pulled in as though she had just tasted something sour. She yelled at Scott once for “loitering” in front of her house on his clamp-on skates (he had fallen). Scott and Janis were sufficiently afraid of her that they skipped the end of The Meadows on Halloween, which was saying something.