its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye 'this burning classic of postwar adolescence'?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and homerooms, Christmas decorations were up.
Leigh Cabot was not up. She flunked an exam for the first time in her high school career and got a D on an executive typing drill. She could not seem to study, she found her mind wandering back, again and again, to Christine - to the green dashboard instruments that had become hateful, gloating cat's-eyes, watching her choke to death.
But for most, the last week of school before the Christmas break was a mellow period when offences which would have earned detention slips at other times of the year were excused, when hard-hearted teachers would sometimes actually throw a scale on an exam where everyone had done badly, when girls who had been bitter enemies made it up, and when boys who had scuffled repeatedly over real or imagined insults did the same. Perhaps more indicative of the mellow season than anything else was the fact that Miss Rat-Pack, the gorgon of Room 23 study hall, was seen to smile . . . not just once, but several times.
In the hospital, Dennis Guilder was moderately up - he had swapped his bedfast traction casts for walking casts. Physical therapy was no longer the torture it had been. He swung through corridors that had been strung with tinsel and decorated with first-, second-, and third-grade Christmas pictures, his crutches thump-thumping along, sometimes in time to the carols spilling merrily from the overhead speakers.
It was a caesura, a lull, an interlude, a period of quiet. During his seemingly endless walks up and down the hospital corridors, Dennis reflected that things could be worse - much, much worse.
Before too long, they were.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 36 BUDDY AND CHRISTINE
Well it's out there in the distance
And it's creeping up on me
I ain't got no resistance
Ain't nothing gonna set me free.
Even a man with one eye could see
Something bad is gonna happen to me . . .
- The Inmates
On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54-48 in the Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.
Buddy Repperton, however, was disappointed.
Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.
In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to have aged. Part of it was the beard. He looked less like Clint Eastwood and more like some hard-drinking young actor's version of Captain Ahab. Buddy had been doing a lot of drinking these last few weeks. He had been having dreams so terrible he could barely remember them. He awoke sweaty and trembling, feeling he had barely escaped some awful doom that ran dark and quiet.
The booze cut them off, though. Cut them right off at the fucking knees. Goddam right. Working nights and sleeping days, that's all it was.
He unrolled the window of his scuffed and dented Camaro, scooping in frigid air, and tossed out an empty bottle. He reached back over his shoulder and said, 'Another Molotov cocktail, mess-sewer.'
'Right on, Buddy,' Bobby Stanton said respectfully, and slapped another bottle of Texas Driver into Buddy's hand. Buddy had treated them to a case of the stuff - enough to paralyse the entire Egyptian Navy, he said - after the game.
He spun off the cap, steering momentarily with his elbows, and then gulped down half the bottle. He handed it to Richie and uttered a long, froggy belch. The Camaro's headlights cut Route 46, running northeast as straight as a string through rural Pennsylvania. Snow-covered fields lay dreaming on either