The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  This note was on college-ruled paper, the cheap-looking kind with dark blue lines, and the only thing written on its outside, in carefully blocked pencil, was his first name. His heart suddenly beating hard, he pulled the paper open and spread it flat on his desktop to read it.

  Christopher,

  I am sorry that you are in trouble. I didn’t tell on you and I will not tell on you no matter what. I feel really bad about what happened and I hope your parents aren’t too mad.

  I know you must hate me but I need to show you something. It is about Mrs. Mitchell. Can you meet me after school? I will ride bus 5 and exit near the old hospital. You don’t have to talk to me on the bus. I can explain when we’re off the bus.

  Sincerely,

  Emily Louise Houchens

  Christopher swallowed hard and looked around. She must have slipped in here during lunch, in the twenty minutes he was allowed to eat silently in the old smoking lounge with a few of the other ALC students, though they had been segregated to separate tables and positioned with their backs to one another.

  He reread the note several times, flipped it over, read it again. What on earth did she want from him? What could Mrs. Mitchell have to do with it? He wondered if she was setting some kind of elaborate trap—trying to get him to confess to what had happened at the tennis courts. Maybe she was going to hide a tape recorder under her oversized flannel shirt, then go straight to Mrs. Mitchell with the evidence, get him kicked out of school for real.

  That was probably stupid. But what else could it be?

  If he went, he would get in trouble, even if it wasn’t a trap. He had strict orders from his mother to walk straight home from school: no Leanna, no Monty or Craig. Homework, dinner, more homework, and bed. Lights out by nine P.M. If he hopped on Bus 5 and went all the way across town to Harper Hill, he’d need another half hour or more to walk back to his house on Main Street. He wouldn’t finish being grounded in this lifetime.

  I am sorry that you are in trouble. Did she really mean that? He wasn’t sure if he should be grateful to her or angry. What kind of person went through what Christopher had put Emily through and apologized for it? What kind of person was he to have done what he did to her in the first place? He remembered what his mother had said about sparing a thought for the girl he was mean to, about feeling bad in his heart, and he did feel bad, he did. He felt like he deserved almost anything Emily wanted to put him through, even if it was a trap, even if he did get expelled. And if incurring more of his mother’s wrath was the worst of it—well, he was still getting off easy.

  He didn’t want to go. But maybe he owed her that much.

  Also, he was curious. I need to show you something. It is about Mrs. Mitchell. He couldn’t imagine what Emily was going to show him, why it would be on Harper Hill, or what it had to do with Mrs. Mitchell, but he had another two hours to think about it, to imagine the craziest things. Like, it was sort of a rough neighborhood; maybe Mrs. Mitchell bought drugs over there, and they could report her and get her fired. Or maybe Mrs. Mitchell lived over there, and Emily was going to show him her shitty house, and he’d be able to come back and tell Leanna and Monty about how bad it was.

  He tried going back to A Separate Peace, but he kept reading the same lines over and over again without being able to make sense of them. He could already feel the stares as he climbed up on the bus and hear the whispers as he exited after Emily. Maybe people would think that he was going to tease her, hurt her, make her pay for tattling on him. Maybe that was the explanation he would give to Leanna later, if circumstances unfolded in such a way as to make an explanation necessary.

  And was it possible that a small, small part of him—a part he would never be able to acknowledge—wanted to see Emily?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1.

  Emily hadn’t dared believe he would come, had spent the afternoon in an agony of dread and anticipation, but he was here, sitting several rows behind her—she dared not turn to look—and the bus was lumbering up Harper Hill, brakes whistling as it slowed to make the usual stop on Hyacinth, where a couple of siblings, fifth and sixth graders, always exited. Emily slid across the green vinyl seat, grasped the loop on top of her backpack, and rose, hoping that the shake in her legs wasn’t obvious. The bus driver, Mr. Washington, was usually too disinterested to follow the students’ comings and goings, though the middle schoolers were technically required to hand him a signed note from a parent if they planned to take something other than their usual bus, or get off at something other than their usual stop. But he had let Christopher board without even a question, and so she hoped that her good luck would hold out for a while yet.

  It had been, in its way, a day of luck: lucky that she had managed to slip in and out of Mrs. Mitchell’s storage closet unseen while Christopher was at the cafeteria, lucky that no one had missed her, lucky that Christopher had found the note (she hadn’t dared leave it in the open), lucky that he had been moved to follow its instructions. She hadn’t truly believed he’d come—well, not since last night, when she drafted the note and revised it. Then, the plan had seemed faintly possible. At three-thirty P.M. today, exiting her last class and waiting at the sidewalk for the buses to line up, it seemed hopeless. Worse than hopeless—foolish. More material for Christopher and Leanna to use against her.

  She swayed in the aisle as the bus lurched to a stop. The doors squealed open.

  Lining up behind Terry and Jeffrey Chappa, she pushed forward, hugging her backpack to her chest. “G’bye. Bye. Bye,” Mr. Washington was saying without energy. “See you in the morning. See you in the morning.” Her sneakers slapped cement, and the cold, damp air slapped her cheeks. She walked quickly toward the old hospital’s loading bay, which was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, and a single canvas sneaker grimed with dirt, its laces spread loose as if it had been blown open. Finally she stopped, caught her breath, and squeezed her eyes shut. The bus’s doors squealed again, and the engine revved. She could hear its procession up the hill and the silence in its wake. She realized she was terrified. Her mouth was so dry that she couldn’t even swallow at first; her tongue was like a chewed-up lump of biscuit at the back of her throat.

  “Emily.” There were footfalls behind her. A throat cleared. “Emily, I’m here.”

  She turned, caught his eyes briefly—just long enough to confirm she wasn’t imagining things—and then dropped her chin to stare at his shoes, her cheeks and neck hot. She swallowed again, trying to wet her tongue, and forced herself to meet his gaze, but the best she could do was to dart her eyes vaguely in the direction of his face, knowing that she probably looked like her brother: unfocused, confused. Creepy. Stop staring at me, creep, Christopher had said to her, and yet he was here, and the expression on his face was—well, not friendly, but gentle. There wasn’t the darkness in it she had seen on the day he caught her staring at him in class, or in those moments in the cafeteria just before he started pelting her with his food.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. Her voice was low but steady, and her heart lifted a tiny bit. If she could say that much, she could say the rest.

  Christopher tugged on the straps of his backpack as if he needed something to do with his hands. He looked around. “What’s up,” he said, making it sound less like a question than a statement. “I got your note.”

  “That’s good,” Emily said stupidly.

  He looked around again, as if checking for signs of an ambush, and leaned in. “You said it was about Mrs. Mitchell,” he whispered.

  “Right. Right, it is.”

  Emily watched him take in the broken glass, the abandoned hospital, the slumped front porches where animals probably nested behind the torn lattice. A Trans Am up on cinder blocks in someone’s side yard. “Does she live in this neighborhood? I mean, God. I’ve never even been over here.”

  Emily wasn’t sure what emotion she felt more strongly, anger or mortification, but she found herself snapping, “No, I live in this nei
ghborhood. My house is on the other side of the hill,” and the sharpness of her tone surprised her. Even Christopher felt it; the smile dropped from his face, and now he was the one to look down at his shoes, to shuffle in place.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “Is that where we’re going?” His mouth seemed to curl slightly with distaste. “Your house?”

  “No,” Emily said. She turned and started walking uphill. “It’s in the woods. We’re going to have to walk a bit.”

  She pressed forward even though he wasn’t following her, then finally stopped and turned. He was standing perhaps a dozen feet back, hands squeezed into the pockets on his jeans so that his wrists jutted out at an awkward angle. He looked nervous.

  “Are you coming?”

  “I think I need to know where we’re going,” he said. “I’m already going to be in trouble for not coming straight home. If I’m not back by the time it turns dark my mom’ll have a fit.”

  Emily retraced her steps and stopped a few feet from him. “I found a body,” she said. “In the woods.” She paused to register his reaction, feeling a thrill of satisfaction at the way he paled and how his lips slightly parted. A vein in his neck pulsed. “I think it might be Mrs. Mitchell’s missing sister.”

  She turned to walk again but he grabbed her shoulder. “Wait—wait,” he said. He licked his chapped lips and pulled his other hand out of a pocket to run it through his hair. It was a desperate, almost grown-up gesture. “You found a body? A person’s body?”

  “Yes,” Emily said.

  “In the woods over here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Emily, why didn’t you tell your parents? Why didn’t you get them to go to the police?”

  She had known he would ask this. It was surreal, forming her mouth around the words she had planned in her head over the weekend, finally testing the Christopher Shelton of real life against what the Christopher of her heart had told her would be true. “I was scared,” she said now, the words strong and clear because they were honest. But then she pressed on: “They’re still mad at me about what happened at the cafeteria on Wednesday. I’m not supposed to go in the woods, and I didn’t know how to say anything without making them madder at me.”

  “They’re mad at you about the food fight?” Christopher’s face twisted up with something like anguish, and Emily felt a bright trill of gratitude course through her. “But that . . . that wasn’t your fault.”

  Emily thought about how her mother had cried when she first saw her emerge from the cab in her food-stained clothes, how she’d washed Emily’s hair for her in the kitchen sink, prepared her favorite supper that night (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob), murmured reassurances to her throughout the evening (“Sweetheart, it won’t always be this way, I promise”). Emily thought about her father’s forced joviality. He had known that she wouldn’t have been able to tolerate his pity, and so he withheld it, acted as if nothing happened, and offered to take her to the library, or out for ice cream, or to Wal-Mart to get a new set of sneakers. “Love you, kiddo,” he’d said, kissing her good night. She could, even now, feel the press of his lips in the center of her forehead.

  “They can be hard on me,” she told Christopher vaguely. She averted her eyes, let him draw his own conclusions. It wasn’t an outright lie. There were days when it seemed to her that her parents were very hard with their nosy questions, their helpful advice. You’ve got to be normal sometimes, she could still hear her mother chiding. And her father, telling her to lay off the Debbie cakes. But she could see in Christopher’s eyes what he assumed, which is what she had hoped he would assume, and the flash of shame that passed over her features was so authentic—she didn’t know this—that it sold the lie, made it solid and irrefutable. No matter what followed this moment, Christopher believed her; he would remember bruises she had never borne, imagine hurts she had never suffered. He would attribute what happened in the coming hours and days to what he imagined Emily had suffered at the hands of a cruel mother and father, and it would help him to understand how she might be the way she was.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”

  She pinched her eyes tight in relief and nodded.

  They were close to the hill’s apex, Emily trying to mask her exertion by breathing through her nose, when Christopher touched her shoulder again. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  He licked his chapped lips again.

  “Why me? Why tell me? Why am I the one you’re—” His eyes widened and he swallowed. “The one you’re showing it to?”

  She wondered what she should tell him, how much she could admit to. Because you belong to me. Because you know me. “Because you owe me,” she said, which was part of the truth—or just enough of it to leave him satisfied.

  “Okay,” Christopher said. “Lead the way.”

  2.

  Christopher had never felt such a confusing and contradictory set of sensations as those he experienced on his walk into the woods with Emily. At the surface was a vibration, a kind of static charge—his pores had tightened, the little hairs all over his body had stiffened, and his jaws, while not chattering, exactly, were shivering against one another like plates in a dishwasher. Beneath that, it was harder to say. There was dread, a dread that made him want to turn tail and run—and fear, of both the body Emily had promised and Emily herself. Was he scared of her? Is that what all of his cruelty toward her—all of their cruelty—had amounted to? It was an easy answer, an answer that promised to release him from some of his guilt, but not good enough, he knew. He hadn’t forgotten that moment at the tennis courts. And now, too, mixed up in his fear and dread and curiosity was something like the excitement of those moments: a heady, uncomfortable anticipation that promised relief. What was wrong with him? Was he as weird—as much of a freak—as she was? He felt guilty for using the word freak again, even in his own mind, but none of this was normal. She should have gone to the police. Christopher would have to make her.

  “Are we getting close?” he asked. They had slid down from the roadway into a slimy pile of black leaves. The air was cold and damp and close; he wished he’d worn his knit cap and gloves. His nostrils filled with the musty scent of autumn decay and he sneezed into the crook of his elbow. He was, he’d said many times to his parents, allergic to Kentucky; last year he’d broken out in rashes in both fall and spring, and the fact that so far this year he’d only had watery eyes and heavy sinuses made him think, with some regret, that he must be acclimating. Or assimilating.

  “Yeah,” Emily said. Her cheeks were pink from the work of climbing the hill—pretty, almost. She pointed ahead at a dump site, where an old recliner and a dozen oozing bags of trash were huddled beneath a line of small trees, as if they’d been rolled downhill like bowling balls. Christopher’s heart started pounding, but then Emily said, “We have to go around that and then over just one more hill,” so it slowed again slightly. Emily knew this terrain, walked it like she owned it, and he thought he sensed some eagerness in her manner now, as if the thing she were about to show him were not a body but a stabled horse she loved, or the secret entrance to a private garden.

  The only sounds were their breathing and the crackle of leaves and branches underfoot. The light of the day was already gray. In another hour the sun would set; its low rays honeyed the crown of Emily’s head. The trees quivered in a slight chilling breeze, and a single red leaf spun down from above, landing neatly in his outstretched palm. There was a surreal quality to all of this, as if he’d entered Emily’s dreams. The feeling was a bit like déjà vu: he had been here before, walked this path, felt this same fear and anticipation. Maybe it was Emily’s manner, the way her self-consciousness had suddenly fallen away. She kept turning and catching his eye with a familiarity that assumed so much, too much—as if she knew him, as if he weren’t just some kid who had been briefly nice to her at school, and then briefly mean to her. At the top of the second hill she
reached back and grasped his hand, and he was so startled by the action that he didn’t resist her, didn’t know he had the right to. Her palm was warm against his icy one.

  “It’s just ahead,” she said. There was a tone of reverence in her voice.

  His heart had surpassed its previous rapid rhythm, and he flushed down to his fingertips. She was looking at another rise in the land, this one hollowed out from beneath by long-ago erosion. There was a large tree, black with death, its roots dangling down like talons, as if the tree were a giant claw poised to push off from the embankment and spring toward them. A barbwire fence made a ragged line just past the point where the land sloped away, circling the tree and turning at an angle to disappear from sight. Christopher could hear, faintly, the bleating or whinnying of some kind of animals, sheep or goats or mules. He’d grown up in the city and knew only as much about farm life as his childhood See ’n Say had taught him, and the alien sounds increased his sense of unreality.

  Emily tugged his hand. “Come on,” she said.

  They covered another dozen steps, and Christopher felt a sudden tension in Emily’s grasp—it tightened, and then she snatched her fingers away from his, making him feel a momentary sense of loss and helplessness. She hurried forward, stopped, head darting left and right. She made a sound, a sound almost like that of the unseen animals, a sob or a bleat, choked, primal. Before he could stop her she was on her knees and crawling through the leaves, pushing away stones and sticks, raking back dirt with her bare fingers. “It’s gone,” she said breathlessly, and when she turned, her eyes were wide and wild, and Christopher noticed for the first time how bluish the skin beneath them was, like dirty thumbprints. Tears started running down her cheeks, and her scurrying became more frantic, the sound of sorrow she emitted steadier and constant, just this creepy humming that he thought she must not have even known she was doing. He shuffled his feet and squeezed the handles of his backpack. His first thought was that she had gotten the place confused, and he started darting his own head around, casting his gaze, as though the body were something she had dropped and was in an obvious place she was just too hysterical to notice. His second thought, which intruded insidiously on the first, was that she was lying, putting on a show for attention. There was never a body. It was just something that Emily had come up with to get him out here, so that she could be alone with him, so that she could hold his hand. He wiped his fingers on his jeans and grimaced, backing away in quiet disbelief.