panel. . . the lights on it changed. They changed. They were. . . no, I won't go that far, but they looked like eyes.'
He laughed, a short bark in the cold air. In the house a curtain was pulled aside, someone looked out, and then the curtain dropped back again.
'If that hitchhiker . . . that Gottfried fellow . . . if he hadn't been there, I would have died, Arnie. I would have died.' She searched his eyes with her own and pushed ahead. Once, she told herself. I only have to say this once. 'You told me that you worked in the cafeteria at LHS your first three years. I've seen the Heimlich Manoeuvre poster on the door to the kitchen. You must have seen it too. But you didn't try that on me, Arnie. You were getting ready to clap me on the back. That doesn't work. I had a job in a restaurant back in Massachusetts, and the first thing they teach you, even before they teach you the Heimlich Manoeuvre, is that clapping a choking victim on the back doesn't work.'
'What are you saying?' he asked in a thin, out-of-breath voice.
She didn't answer; only looked at him. He met her gaze for only a moment, and then his eyes - angry, confused, almost haunted - shifted away.
'Leigh, people forget things. You're right, I should have used it. But if you had the course, you know you can use it on yourself.' Arnie laced his hands together into a fist with one thumb sticking up and pressed against his diaphragm to demonstrate. 'It's just that in the heat of the moment, people forget - '
'Yes, they do. And you seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.'
Arnie was shaking his head. 'You need time to think this over, Leigh. You need - '
'That is just what I don't need!' she said with a fierceness she wouldn't have believed she still had left in her. 'I never had a supernatural experience in my life - I never even believed in stuff like that - but now I wonder just what's going on and what's happening to you. They looked like eyes, Arnie. And later . . . afterward . . . there was a smell, A horrible, rotten smell.'
He recoiled.
'You know what I'm talking about.'
No. I don't have the slightest idea.'
'You just jumped as if the devil had twisted your ear.'
'You're imagining things,' Arnie said hotly. 'A lot of things.'
'That smell was there. And there are other things as well. Sometimes your radio won't get anything but that oldies station - '
Another flicker in his eyes, and a slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth.
'And sometimes when we're making out it just stalls, as if it didn't like it. As if the car didn't like it, Arnie.'
'You're upset,' he said with ominous flatness.
'Yes, I am upset I she said, beginning to cry. 'Aren't you?' The tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. I think this is the end of it for us, Arnie - I loved you, but I think it's over. I really think it is, and that makes me feel so sad, and so sorry. 'Your relationship with your parents has turned into a . . . an armed camp, you're running God knows what into New York and Vermont for that fat pig Will Darnell, and that car . . . that car . . . '
She could not say anything more. Her voice dissolved. She dropped her packages and bent blindly to pick them up. Exhausted and weeping, she succeeded in doing little more than stirring them around. He bent to help her and she pushed at him roughly. 'Leave them alone! I'll get them!'
He stood up, his face pale and set. His expression was one of wooden fury, but his eyes . . . oh, to Leigh his eyes seemed lost.
'All right,' he said, and now his voice roughened with his own tears. 'Good. Join up with the rest of them if you want. You just saddle up and ride right along with all those other shitters. Who gives a tin shit?' He drew in a shivering breath, and a single hurt sob escaped him before he could clap a gloved hand brutally over his mouth.
He began to walk backward toward the car; he reached out blindly behind himself for the Plymouth and Christine was there. 'Just as long as you know