He was surprised to find that his interest in Penelope Daneam had not abated. He had half thought that his first day attraction to her was the result of her resemblance to the girl in his dream, but as he heard her talk in class, as he eavesdropped on her conversations with the friend seated next to her, as she grew into a person of her own, distinct from his mental image, he found that his interest had increased. She too seemed intelligent, far more aware of events and ideas than the girls he’d known in Arizona, and that impressed him. What’s more, she appeared to be approachable. She was gorgeous, of course, no doubt about that, but she did not seem as far out of his league as he had initially thought. She was not in the least standoffish or stuck up. There was an easiness to her manner, an unaffectedness obvious even within the confinements of the classroom. She seemed like a real person, not a phony.
She also did not seem like a lesbian.
The problem was that he didn’t know how to go about meeting her. In class, he imagined what he would do if she accidentally dropped her books and he picked them up, their eyes meeting, but he knew that sort of thing happened only in film or fiction and wasn’t a feasible possibility. He could, and did, however, move his seat closer to hers each day, changing and exchanging desks. In this class the teacher did not insist on a seating chart, allowing students to sit wherever they pleased, and this was an opportunity he was determined to take advantage of. He was not sure what he would say to her when he finally reached the adjoining desk, not sure of how he would initiate a conversation, but he would deal with that problem when he came to it.
That would be Friday, according to his calculations.
Luckily, Kevin continued to move forward through the seating ranks with him. It was always easier to bring a third party into an existing conversation than to start a conversation cold with someone you’d never talked to before.
Kevin bought a Coke and a burrito at the cafeteria, and Dion purchased a hot dog and milk. The two of them bat tied their way against the stream of traffic, and sat on a low wall next to the vending machines, watching the passersby.
Kevin took a bite of his burrito. He shook his head, “Do you realize,”
he said, “that every one of those girls has a pussy? Every one of them.”
Dion followed his gaze, saw a well-endowed girl wearing a tight T-shirt and formfitting jeans.
“Between each of those legs is a hungry hole, ready for dick.” He grinned. “It’s a wonderful world.”
Dion nodded. Yesterday, Kevin had called women’s bodies a “life-support system for the vagina.” Kevin’s macho comments were funny, but Dion wasn’t sure if they were simply public posturing or reflections of his real attitude, and it was something that bothered him, that made him slightly uncomfortable.
The two of them watched the girls pass by. Dion’s eyes were caught by the sight of Penelope, carrying a brown sack lunch, buying a carton of orange juice from one of the machines. Kevin saw who he was staring at and laughed. “I knew it. The siren’s song of Lesbos.”
Dion reddened, but was determined to appear nonchalant. “So tell me something about her.”
“Tell you what?”
“Anything.”
“Well, she’s a lesbian. But I told you that, right?” He pretended to think. “Let me see. She lives with a bunch of other lesbians at the Daneam Sisters Winery. They’re all related somehow, her aunts or something. You can’t buy the wine in stores. It’s strictly a mail-order business. Sold to other lesbians, I believe.”
“Be serious.”
“I am. At least about the winery. The references to sexual preferences are my own editorializing.”
Dion felt his chances slipping away. “So she’s rich?”
Kevin nodded. “Nice work if you can get it.”
The two of them watched Penelope take her juice carton out of the drawer and disappear into the crowd. “Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “There are plenty of other beavers in the valley.”
Dion forced himself to smile. “Yeah.”
Kevin offered Dion a ride home with one of his friends after school, but Dion declined and said he’d rather walk. Kevin and his friend took off in a squeal of burnt Mustang tires that left twin skid marks on the lighter black of the faded asphalt.
Dion walked down the tree-lined street. He usually avoided most forms of exercise—he was by no means a jock and he truly hated PE—but he’d always enjoyed walking. It offered him a chance to move about in the open air, to think without concentrating. He glanced around at the quiet residential neighborhood as he walked. He liked their house, liked the school, liked the people he’d met, and Napa itself seemed to be a pleasant enough town, but there was still something about living here that made him slightly uncomfortable, a lingering residue from that initial reaction. It wasn’t anything as obvious or specific as a street that seemed sinister or a building that gave him the creeps. No, the feeling he got was more subtle, more generalized, and seemed to apply to the entire Napa Valley. There was a heaviness here, an indefinable sense of unease which he had never experienced in Mesa. It was not something that he felt would affect his day-to-day living, but it was persistent, a hum of white noise underlying everything. He could live with it, though. He could ignore it most of the time.
Most of the time.
He stopped walking. He was supposed to turn right at this corner, but in front of him the street continued onward, heading straight toward a grassy section of hill.
The hill.
He stood, staring. The view before him seemed somehow familiar and somehow unpleasant, and he felt cold suddenly, chilled.
He forced himself to look away and hurriedly turned down the cross street toward home. It was probably psychological, he reasoned. A
reaction to the pulling up and transplanting of his roots. Yeah. That was it. That had to be it. He would no doubt get over it soon, once he’d fully adjusted to his new surroundings.
He hurried forward, not looking to his left, not looking toward the hill.
His mom was not home when he arrived, but Dion was not worried. She wasn’t scheduled to get off work today until five. Besides, he’d been keeping a close eye on her, and was surprised to see that she actually seemed to like her job and to get along well with her coworkers. As she described each day’s events over dinner the past two nights, the behavior of the other loan officers in the bank, the customers, he’d listened carefully, trying to read between the lines, to ascertain the truth behind the facts. But her attitude of professional objectivity seemed real, not feigned, and he quickly decided that she wasn’t attracted to anyone in the bank. That was a good sign. At her last two jobs, in Mesa and Chandler, she’d been inviting people over for what she called “a little get-together” even before the first week was out.
Maybe she really had turned over a new leaf.
He walked into the kitchen, took out a bag of Doritos, poured some salsa into a bowl. He walked into the living room, picked up the remote control, turned on MTV, but was quickly bored by the sameness of the music and the videos. He flipped around the cable channels, but there was nothing on, and he turned the set off. After he finished eating, he would put on the stereo, listen to music, and do his math homework. He had to have twenty algebra problems solved by tomorrow. His mom would be home soon after that.
Dion finished his snack, finished his math, read the front page and entertainment sections of today’s paper, and glanced through a two-week-old Time they’d brought from Arizona.
When his mom hadn’t come home by six and still hadn’t called, he found himself worrying. He turned off the stereo and turned on the TV, settling into the couch to watch the national news. It was strangely comforting to watch the news, though the majority of the stories concerned murders, disasters, and other tragic events. It was a stupid attitude, he knew, an ignorant, uneducated attitude, but he found it reassuring to see the incidents of the day categorized, dissected, and discussed on national television. It made him feel that no matter ho
w chaotic the world seemed, someone was on top of things and doing something about them, though he knew, intellectually, that was probably not the case.
The first commercial break passed, and then the second and the third, and then it was six-thirty. He stood up and looked out the window.
Already the sky was getting dark, the orange color of dusk dimming into the bluish purple of evening.
She couldn’t be starting again, could she? Not so soon after her last job. Not after promising him she’d change.
He almost hoped that she’d been in an accident instead.
No.
He pushed that thought from his mind.
Dion sat down again to watch the local news. He tried to remain optimistic, to tell himself that she’d merely stayed after work and forgotten to call, but he didn’t believe any such thing.
He just hoped that she had enough sense not to bring the guy home.
He was in the kitchen and was about to make himself dinner—macaroni and cheese or one of the frozen dinners in the freezer—when he heard the familiar sound of the Pinto’s brakes in the driveway. He wanted to go out front, to peek through the living room window, to see what was going on, but he remained in the kitchen, rooted in place. His muscles were tense, his palms sweaty.
He heard the front door open. “I’m home!”
He stepped through the doorway into the living room, and felt relief flood through him as he saw that his mother was alone. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her briefcase in the entryway.
She was not drunk, but she had obviously been drinking. Her voice was louder than usual, happier and more vivacious, and her movements were loose, expansive. “I met the greatest people!” she said.
The worry returned. “Mom …”
“No, I’m serious. I think even you’d like them.”
“Who are they?”
“Well, I met them at happy hour—”
Dion took a deep breath. “Happy hour? Mom, you said—”
“Don’t worry. A couple of people from work decided to go there after they got off, and they asked me if I wanted to go. But when we were there we met these people who—”
“Male or female?”
She stared at him, understanding dawning in her expression.
Dion shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “You said you were going to change,” he reminded her gently.
Her mood shifted. “I have,” she said angrily. “And don’t give me that accusing look. People at work asked me to go. What was I supposed to do, say no?”
“Yes.”
“And ruin my chances for advancement?” She pushed past him into the kitchen. “Sit down,” she ordered. “I’m making dinner.”
“That’s okay—” Dion began.
“I’m making dinner!”
He knew it was useless to argue. He watched her take out a pot from beneath the sink, slam it down on the counter. Sighing, he walked out to the living room. He watched TV as outside the night darkened and inside the kitchen his mother swore loudly to herself, banging spoon against pan as she made their meal.
On Friday, Mr. Holbrook greeted them with a pop quiz. Immediately after the bell rang, announcing the start of class, the Mythology teacher told the class to put all books under the desks and to take out pencils and paper.
“Number from one through twenty-five,” he said, “leaving two lines between each number.” He stood up from his chair and walked over to the blackboard, turning his back on the class and picking up a stubby piece of white chalk. “You are to copy down each question and write the answer on the line immediately beneath it.”
“Fucker,” Kevin whispered, holding up a middle finger.
Dion stifled a laugh.
The teacher began writing on the board. “You may begin.”
There was a rustle of papers, a sighing of seats as the students settled in to do their work. Dion was already trying to figure out what grades he would have to get on the paper and the regularly scheduled tests to balance out the F he’d get today. He rubbed his pencil sideways on the desktop to sharpen it. At least Holbrook could have warned them ahead of time, told them he would be popping quizzes on them throughout the semester. The teacher had given them an outline of the course, had told them which pages in which book were supposed to have been read by which date, but he had said nothing about quizzes. At least he could have had the decency and courtesy to explain to them how his class was run, how grades were determined.
Of course, looking back on it now, Dion recalled that the teacher had said several times, “I expect you to keep up with your reading.” He realized now that that cryptic warning had been a foreshadowing of things to come.
Unfortunately, he had not read a word of the assigned text. He did not study that way. Never had. He had always worked better under pressure, cramming at the last moment, force-feeding his brain with information.
He always completed questions and turn-in assignments on time, but the reading he left to the very end.
Now he was going to pay for it.
What made it even worse was that this was the day he had finally completed his sneaky maneuvers, had unobtrusively slid into the empty seat next to Penelope.
Things were not going well.
Dion dutifully copied the questions written by Mr. Holbrook on the board. He did not know the answers to any of them, was only vaguely familiar with some of the terms after hearing them in class, and he simply wrote down on the paper whatever single-word answers came into his head. He turned the paper over, putting down his pencil, to signal that he was finished.
When everyone had completed the test, the teacher faced the class. “All right,” he said. “Please exchange papers with the person seated next to you.”
The person seated next to him. That meant either Penelope or Kevin. He looked to his left, saw Kevin exchanging his paper with a short, boy on the other side of him. Dion looked at Penelope, forced himself to smile, handed her his reaper. She handed him hers. He stared down at the writing. Her letters were light, formed with almost calligraphic precision, definitely feminine.
“Question one,” the teacher announced. “Zeus.”
Dion went down the paper, marking plus signs next to answers which were correct, minus signs next to those which were incorrect, just as the instructor had explained. Penelope had gotten two wrong, for an A-minus.
He was right. She was smart.
Of course, that meant nothing now. They exchanged papers and Penelope handed back his quiz. He did not meet her eyes, did not look at his score. He had blown it. She probably thought he was a dim-witted jerk.
His chances of getting to know her had probably shrunk from fair to zilch. He glanced miserably at Kevin, then looked down at the paper in his hand.
He blinked.
He’d gotten a perfect score.
He had not missed a single question.
As always, the cafeteria was crowded, and he and Kevin sat on top of one of the round plastic tables in the adjacent eating area outside as they waited for the lines to die down.
“You really know your mythology,” Kevin said, running a hand deliberately through his hair. Like Dion, he too had not studied, planning to wait until the week before the test to crack the books, but unlike Dion he had missed nearly a fourth of the questions, putting him in the low-B range if the teacher graded on the curve.
Dion shrugged self-consciously. “Not really,” he said. “I guessed. I was just lucky.”
“On multiple-choice tests you can guess and be lucky. On short-answer tests you can guess only if you have knowledge to begin with, if you have some names to choose from. I mean, shit, you were the only one to get a perfect score in the whole class.”
It was true, but Dion did not know why it was true or how. He was embarrassed, and he said nothing. He found himself glancing down at the tabletop to read the graffiti penciled on the faded plastic. He looked up as a skinny blond kid in a black heavy metal T-shirt walked belliger
ently up to them, frowning. “What do you think this is? A pussy convention? You’re sitting on my table.”
Kevin calmly raised his middle finger.
“You think that’s cute, Harte?”
“Not quite as cute as your mama’s titties, but it’ll do for now.”
“Get off.”
“Fuck you.”
“Your ass, Harte.” The kid left, scowling, his own middle finger raised aggressively.
Dion said nothing. He had been silent during the verbal exchange, half afraid that the newcomer might try to pick a fight with one of them or, even worse, return with his bigger, tougher friends, but he let none of his feelings show. Kevin seemed to know how to handle this guy, or at least acted as though he did, and Dion trusted that his new friend knew who could be pushed and how far, knew when to speak out and when to shut up.
At least he hoped so.
“Guy’s a needledick,” Kevin said, as if reading his thoughts. “Don’t worry about him. All talk and no show.”
Dion nodded as if that was what he had suspected all along.
“Hey,” Kevin said. “Check it out.” He nodded toward the cafeteria lines.
Making their way between the tables toward the open double doors were Penelope and a short black-haired girl with thick glasses. “Here’s your opportunity, bud.”
Dion jumped off the table. “You come with me.”
Kevin snorted. “Hell, no. This is your move. You go over there and talk to her alone. I’ll still be here when she shoots you down.”
Penelope and her friend were at the back of one of the lines, and Dion knew that if he didn’t move now, someone else would take the spot behind her. He quickly zigzagged through the crowd of teeming students.
He was in luck. He got in line behind her just as a group of cheerleaders got in line behind him. It had all happened so fast, he had moved without thinking, and now he didn’t know what to do. His hands were sweaty, his stomach churning. He didn’t want to tap on Penelope’s shoulder to get her attention or to speak to her before she noticed his presence, so he simply readied himself in case she turned around, trying to relax and put on a show of comfortable ease he did not feel.
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