Christine - Stephen King [70]
I was hit, knocked down, run over. I lay on the playing field, far behind the line of scrimmage, writhing, trying to get my breath back. I looked up and there, parked in the middle of the track field, behind the visitors' bleachers, was Christine. Once more she was sparkling and brand-new, as if she had rolled out of the showroom only an hour before.
Arnie was sitting on the roof, crosslegged like Buddha, looking at me expressionlessly. He hollered something at me, but the steady howl of the wind almost buried it. It sounded as if he said: Don't worry, Dennis. We'll take care of everything. So don't worry. All is cool.
Take care of what? I wondered as I lay there on the dream playing field (which my dreaming self had, for some reason, converted into Astro-Turf), struggling for breath with my jock digging cruelly into the fork of my thighs just below my testicles. Take care of what?
Of what?
No answer. Only the baleful shine of Christine's yellow headlamps and Arnie sitting serenely crosslegged on her roof in that steady, rushing wind.
The next day we got out there and did battle for good old Libertyville High again, It wasn't as bad as it had been in my dream - that Saturday no one got hurt, and for a brief while in the third quarter it even looked as though we might have a chance - but then the Philadelphia City quarterback got lucky with a couple of long passes - when things start to go wrong, everything goes wrong - and we lost again.
After the game, Coach Puffer just sat there on the bench. He wouldn't look at any of us. There were eleven games left on our schedule, but he was already a beaten man.
16 ENTER LEIGH, EXIT BUDDY
I'm not braggin, babe, so don't put me down,
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town,
When someone comes up to me he don't even try
Cause if she had a set of wings, man,
I know she could fly,
She's my little deuce coupe,
You don't know what I got
- The Beach Boys
It was, I am quite sure, the Tuesday after our loss to the Philadelphia City Dragons that things began moving again. That would have been the 26th of September.
Arnie and I had three classes together, and one of them was Topics in American History, a block course, period four. The first nine weeks were being taught by Mr Thompson, the head of the department. The subject of that first nine weeks was Two Hundred Years of Boom and Bust. Arnie called it a boing-boing-going-going class, because it was right before lunch and everybody's stomach seemed to be doing something interesting.
When the class was over that day, a girl came over to Arnie and asked him if he had the English assignment. He did. He dug it out of his notebook carefully, and while he did, this girl watched him seriously with her dark blue eyes, never taking them off his face. Her hair was a darkish blond, the colour of fresh honey - not the strained stuff, but honey the way it first comes from the comb - and held back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. Looking at her, my stomach did a happy little flip-flop. As she copied the assignment down, Arnie looked at her.
That wasn't the first time I had seen Leigh Cabot, of course; she had transferred from a town in Massachusetts to Libertyville three weeks ago, so she had been around. Somebody had told me her father worked for 3-M, the people who make Scotch tape.
It wasn't even the first time I had noticed her, because Leigh Cabot was, to put it with perfect simplicity, a beautiful girl. In a work of fiction, I've noticed that writers always invent a flaw here or a flaw there in the women and girls they make up, maybe