Christine

by Steven King

  Mr. Casey walked back to where Buddy Repperton, Moochie Welch, and Don Vandenberg stood in a shuffling, angry line. Don hadn’t been joking; he had been speaking for all of them. They really did feel picked on.

  “This is cute, isn’t it?” Mr. Casey said finally. “Three on two. That the way you like to do things, Buddy? Those odds don’t seem stacked enough for you.”

  Buddy looked up, threw Casey a smoldering, ugly glance, and then dropped his eyes again. “They started it. Those guys.”

  “That’s not true—” Arnie began.

  “Shut up, Cuntface,” Buddy said. He started to add something, but before he could get it out, Mr. Casey grabbed him and threw him up against the back wall of the shop. There was a tin sign there which read SMOKING HERE ONLY. Mr. Casey began to slam Buddy Repperton against that sign, and every time he did it, the sign jangled, like dramatic punctuation. He handled Repperton the way you or I might have handled a great big ragdoll. I guess he had muscles somewhere, all right.

  “You want to shut your big mouth,” he said, and slammed Buddy against the sign. “You want to shut your mouth or clean up your mouth. Because I don’t have to listen to that stuff coming from you, Buddy.”

  He let go of Repperton’s shirt. It had pulled out of his jeans, showing his white, untanned belly. He looked back at Arnie. “What were you saying?”

  “I came past the smoking area on my way out to the bleachers to eat my lunch,” Arnie said. “Repperton was smoking with his friends there. He came over and knocked my lunchbag out of my hand and then stepped on it. He squashed it.” He seemed about to say something more, struggled with it, and swallowed it again. “That started the fight.”

  But I wasn’t going to leave it at that. I’m no stoolie or tattletale, not under ordinary circumstances, but Repperton had apparently decided that more than a good beating was required to avenge himself for getting kicked out of Darnell’s. He could have punched a hole in Arnie’s intestines, maybe killed him.

  “Mr. Casey,” I said.

  He looked at me. Behind him, Buddy Repperton’s green eyes flashed at me balefully—a warning. Keep your mouth shut, this is between us. Even a year before, some twisted sense of pride might have forced me to go along him and play the game, but not now.

  “What is it, Dennis?”

  “He’s had it in for Arnie since the summer. He’s got a knife, and he looked like he was planning to stick it in.”

  Arnie was looking at me, his gray eyes opaque and unreadable. I thought about him calling Repperton a shitter—LeBay’s word—and felt a prickle of goosebumps on my back.

  “You fucking liar!” Repperton cried dramatically. “I ain’t got no knife!”

  Casey looked at him without saying anything. Vandenberg and Welch looked extremely uncomfortable now—scared. Their possible punishment for this little scuffle had progressed beyond detention, which they were used to, and suspension, which they had experienced, toward the outer limits of expulsion.

  I only had to say one more word. I thought about it. I almost didn’t. But it had been Arnie, and Arnie was my friend, and inside where it mattered, I didn’t just think he had meant to stick Arnie with that blade; I knew it. I said the word.

  “It’s a switchblade.”

  Now Repperton’s eyes did not just flash; they blazed, promising hellfire, damnation, and a long period of traction. “That’s bullshit, Mr. Casey,” he said hoarsely. “He’s lying. I swear to God.”

  Mr. Casey still said nothing. He looked slowly at Arnie.

  “Cunningham,” he said. “Did Repperton here pull a knife on you?”

  Arnie wouldn’t answer at first. Then in a low voice that was little more than a sigh, he said, “Yeah.”

  Now Repperton’s blazing glance was for both of us.

  Casey turned to Moochie Welch and Don Vandenberg. All at once I could see that his method of handling this had changed; he had begun to move slowly and carefully, as if testing the footing beneath carefully each time he moved a step forward. Mr. Casey had already grasped the consequences.

  “Was there a knife involved?” he asked them.

  Moochie and Vandenberg looked at their feet and would not answer. That was answer enough.

  “Turn out your pockets, Buddy,” Mr. Casey said.

  “Fuck I will!” Buddy said. His voice went shrill. “You can’t make me!”

  “If you mean I don’t have the authority, you’re wrong,” Mr. Casey said. “If you mean I can’t turn your pockets out for myself if I decide to try it, that’s also wrong. But—”

  “Yeah, try it, try it,” Buddy shouted at him. “I’ll knock you through that wall, you little bald fuck!”

  My stomach was rolling helplessly. I hated stuff like this, ugly confrontation scenes, and this was the worst one I’d ever been a part of.

  But Mr. Casey had things under control, and he never deviated from his course.

  “But I’m not going to do it,” he finished. “You’re going to turn out your pockets yourself.”

  “Fat fucking chance,” Buddy said. He was standing against the back wall of the shop so that the bulge in his hip pocket wouldn’t show. His shirttail hung in two wrinkled flaps over the crotch of his jeans. His eyes darted here and there like the eyes of an animal brought to bay.

  Mr. Casey glanced at Moochie and Don Vandenberg. “You two boys go up to the office and stay there until I come up,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere else; you’ve got enough trouble without that.”

  They walked away slowly, close together, as if for protection. Moochie threw one glance back. In the main building, the bell went off. People started to stream back inside, some of them giving us curious glances. We had missed lunch. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  Mr. Casey turned his attention back to Buddy.

  “You’re on school grounds right now,” he said. “You should thank God you are, because if you do have a knife, Buddy, and if you pulled it, that’s assault with a deadly weapon. They send you to prison for that.”

  “Prove it, prove it!” Buddy shouted. His cheeks were flaming, his breath coming in quick, nervous little gasps.

  “If you don’t turn out your pockets right now, I’m going to write a dismissal slip on you. Then I’m going to call the cops, and the minute you step outside the main gate, they’ll grab you. You see the bind you’re in?” He looked grimly at Buddy. “We keep our own house here,” he said. “But if I have to write you a dismissal, Buddy, your ass belongs to them. Of course if you have no knife, you’re okay. But if you do and they find it…”

  There was a moment of silence. The four of us stood in tableau. I didn’t think he was going to do it; he would take his dismissal and try to ditch the knife somewhere quickly. Then he must have realized that the cops would hunt for it and probably find it, because he pulled the knife out of his back pocket and threw it down on the tarmac. It landed on the go-button. The blade popped out and winked wickedly in the afternoon sunlight, eight inches of chromed steel.

  Arnie looked at it and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.

  “Go up to the office, Buddy,” Mr. Casey said quietly. “Wait until I get up there.”

  “Screw the office!” Buddy cried. His voice was thin and hysterical with anger. Hair had fallen across his forehead again, and he flipped it back. “I’m getting out of this fucking pigsty.”

  “Yes, all right, fine,” Mr. Casey said, with no more inflection or excitement in his voice than he would have shown if Buddy had offered him a cup of coffee. I knew then that Buddy was all finished at Libertyville High. No detention or three-day vacation; his parents would be receiving the stiff blue expulsion form in the mail—the form would explain why their son was being expelled and would inform them of their rights and legal options in the matter.

  Buddy looked at Arnie and me—and he smiled. “I’ll fix you,” he said. “I’ll get even. You’ll wish you were never fucking born.” He kicked the knife away, spinning and flashing. It came to rest
on the edge of the hottop, and Buddy walked off, the cleats on the heels of his motorcycle boots clicking and scraping.

  Mr. Casey looked at us; his face was sad and tired. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Arnie replied.

  “Do you boys want dismissal slips? I’ll write them for you if you feel you’d like to go home for the rest of the day.”

  I glanced at Arnie, who was brushing off his shirt. He shook his head.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said.

  “All right. Just late slips then.”

  We went into Mr. Casey’s room and he wrote us late slips for our next class, which happened to be one we shared together—Advanced Physics. Coming into the physics lab, a lot of people looked at us curiously, and there was some whispering behind hands.

  The afternoon absence slip circulated at the end of period six. I checked it and saw the names Repperton, Vandenberg, and Welch, each with a (D) after his name. I thought that Arnie and I would be called to the office at the end of school to tell Ms. Lothrop, the discipline officer, what had happened. But we weren’t.

  I looked for Arnie after school, thinking we’d ride home together and talk it over a little, but I was wrong about that too. He’d already left for Darnell’s Garage to work on Christine.

  17

  Christine on the Street Again

  I didn’t get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day he had bought her that Christine was out on the street.

  The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest school-activity bus ride I’ve ever been on. We might have been going to the guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1-2, was only slightly better than ours, didn’t cheer anybody up much. Coach Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be suffering from a hangover.

  Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids who had signed up as “rooters” (“rooters,” dear God! if we hadn’t all been through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars, most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP EM TERRIERS bumper stickers—beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember from your own high school days.

  But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn’t even full—in a winning year if you didn’t sign up for the second bus by Tuesday, you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus was Christine.

  I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.

  Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was downright stunned—and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.

  “Arnie,” I said. “Hey, man!”

  “Hi, Dennis,” he said a little shyly.

  I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer from Massachusetts. How in God’s name did that happen?

  “How are you?”

  “Good,” he said. “Do you know Leigh Cabot?”

  “From class,” I said. “Hi, Leigh.”

  “Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?”

  I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. “It’s all been fixed. Bet your ass off.”

  Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and giggled.

  “We’re going to try, but I don’t know,” I said.

  “We’ll root you on to victory,” Arnie said. “I can see it in tomorrow’s paper now—Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record.”

  “Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that’s more likely,” I said. “How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?”

  “More room on the bleachers for those of us that did,” Leigh said. She took Arnie’s arm—surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep—it seems to me that a lot of really beautiful girls are one or the other—but she was neither.

  “How’s the rolling iron?” I asked, and walked over to the car.

  “Not too bad.” He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.

  The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so that it didn’t look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old, rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in the windshield was totally gone.

  “You replaced the windshield,” I said.

  Arnie nodded.

  “And the hood.”

  The hood was clean; brand-spanking new, in sharp contrast to the rust-flecked sides. It was a deep fire-engine red. Sharp-looking. Arnie touched it possessively, and the touch turned into a caress.

  “Yeah. I put that on myself.”

  Something about that jagged on me. He had done it all himself, hadn’t he?

  “You said you were going to turn it into a showpiece,” I said. “I think I’m starting to believe you.” I walked around to the driver’s side. The upholstery on the insides of the doors and floor was still dirty and scuffed up, but now the front seat cover had been replaced as well as the back one.

  “It’s going to be beautiful,” Leigh said, but there was a flat note in her voice—it wasn’t as naturally bright and effervescent as it had been when we were talking about the game—and that made me glance at her. A glance was all it took. She didn’t like Christine. I realized it just like that, completely and absolutely, as if I had plucked one of her brainwaves out of the air. She would try to like the car because she liked Arnie. But… she wasn’t ever going to really like it.

  “So you got it street-legal,” I said.

  “Well…” Arnie looked uncomfortable. “It isn’t. Quite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The horn doesn’t work, and sometimes the taillights go out when I step on the brake. It’s a dead short somewhere, I think, but so far I haven’t been able to chase it out.”

  I glanced at the new windshield—there was a new inspection sticker on it. Arnie followed my glance and managed to look both embarrassed and a bit truculent at the same time. “Will gave me my sticker. He knows it’s ninety percent there.” And besides, I thought, you had this hot date, right?

  “It’s not dangerous, is it?” Leigh asked, addressing the question somewhere between Arnie and me. Her brow had creased slightly—I think maybe she sensed a sudden cold current between Arnie and me.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. When you ride with Arnie you’re riding with the original Old Creeping Jesus anyway.”

  That broke the odd little pocket of tension that had built up. From the playing field there was a discordant shriek of brass, and then the band instructor’s voice, carrying to us, thin but perfectly clear under the low sky: “Again, please! This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool! Again, please!”

  The three of us looked at each other. Arnie and I started to laugh, and after a moment Leigh joined in. Looking at her, I felt that momentary jealousy again. I wanted nothing but the best for my friend Arnie, but she was really something—seventeen going on eighteen, gorgeous, perfect, healthy, alive to everything in her world
. Roseanne was beautiful in her way, but Leigh made Roseanne look like a tree-sloth taking a nap.

  Was that when I started to want her? When I started to want my best friend’s girl? Yeah, I suppose it was. But I swear to you, I never would have put a move on her if things had happened differently. I just don’t think they were meant to happen differently. Or maybe I just have to feel that way.

  “We better go, Arnie, or we won’t get a good seat in the visitors’ bleachers,” Leigh said with ladylike sarcasm.

  Arnie smiled. She was still holding his arm lightly, and he looked rather bowled over by it all. Why not? If it had been me, having my first experience with a live girl, and one as pretty as Leigh, I would have been three-quarters to being in love with her already. I wished him nothing but well with her. I guess I want you to believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else I have to tell you from here on out. If anyone deserved a little happiness, it was Arnie.

  The rest of the team had gone into the visitors’ dressing rooms at the back of the gymnasium of the school, and now Coach Puffer poked his head out

  “Do you think you could favor us with your presence, Mr. Guilder?” he called. “I know it’s a lot to ask, and I hope you’ll forgive me if you had something more important to do, but if you don’t, would you get your tail down into this locker room?”

  I muttered to Arnie and Leigh, “This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool,” and trotted toward the building.

  I walked toward the dressing rooms—Coach had popped back inside—and Arnie and Leigh started across to the bleachers. Halfway to the doors I stopped and went back to Christine. Late to suit up or not, I approached her in a circle; that absurd prejudice against walking in front of the car still held.

  On the rear end I saw a Pennsylvania dealer plate held on with a spring. I flipped it down and saw a Dymo tape stuck to the back side: THIS PLATE PROPERTY OF DARNELL’S GARAGE, LIBBERTYVILLE, PA.

  I let the plate snap back and stood up, frowning. Darnell had given him a sticker while his car was still a ways from being street-legal; Darnell had loaned him a dealer plate so he could use the car to bring Leigh to the game. Also, he had stopped being “Darnell” to Arnie; today he had called him “Will.” Interesting, but not very comforting.