Christine - Stephen King [83]
Which was also his parents' attitude, if only he could have seen it. But then, I suppose he had to learn it somewhere.
Leigh came up, drops of rain gleaming in her hair. Her colour was high, her eyes sparkling with good health and good excitement. She exuded a. naive and untested sexuality that made me feet a little light-headed. Not that I was the main object of her attention; Arnie was.
'How did it end?' Arnie asked.
'Twenty-seven to eighteen,' she said, and then added gleefully, 'We destroyed them. Where were you two?'
'Just talking cars,' I said, and Arnie shot me an amused glance - at least his sense of humour hadn't disappeared with his common sense. And I thought there was some cause for hope in the way he looked at her. He was falling for her, head over heels. The tumble was slow right now, but it would almost surely speed up if things went right. I was really curious about how it had happened, the two of them getting together. Arnie's complexion had cleared up and he looked pretty good, but in a rather bookish, bespectacled sort of way. He wasn't the sort of guy you'd have expected Leigh Cabot to want to be with; you'd expect her to be hanging from the arm of the American high school version of Apollo.
People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.
'Just talking cars,' Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie's and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.
I liked that just fine.
18 ON THE BLEACHERS
O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches,
I must make amends
- Janis Joplin
I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first 6 weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were 'going together'. I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.
I hadn't seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had apparently gone back to Darnell's for more work - maybe that was part of the agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn't see the Fury, but I saw a lot of Leigh and Arnie and heard a lot about them ' They were a hot item of school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she saw in him, for heaven's sake; boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn't care about either of those things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought of their son's extreme case of first love.
One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the bleachers by the football field, as we had been Tanning to do on the day Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife - Repperton had indeed been expelled for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1-5, and Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.
My lunchbag wasn't as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1-5 was that we were now so far behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5-0-1) that it would be impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went over a cliff.
We sat in the mellow October sunshine - the time for the little spooks in their bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth's Darth Vader costumes wasn't far off