thing. I went in and tickled her until she said she was going to puke. I said go ahead and puke, it's your bed, and tickled her some more. Then she put on her 'please don't kid me Dennis because this is something terribly important' expression and got all solemn and asked me if it was really true you could light farts. One of her girlfriends, Carolyn Shambliss, said it was, but Carolyn lied about almost everything.
I told her to ask Milton Dodd, her dorky-looking boyfriend. Then Elaine really did get mad and tried to hit me and asked me why do you always have to be so awful, Dennis? So I told her yes, it was true you could light farts, and advised her not to try it, and then I gave her a hug (which I rarely did anymore - it made me uncomfortable since she started to get boobs, and so did the tickling, to tell the truth) and then I went to bed.
And undressing, I thought, The day didn't end so bad, after all. There are people around here who think I'm a human being, and they think Arnie is, as well, I'll get him to come over tomorrow or Sunday and we'll just hang out, watch the Phillies on TV, maybe, or play some dumb board-game, Careers or Life or maybe that old standby, Clue, and get rid of the weirdness. Get feeling decent again.
So I went to bed with everything straight in my mind, and I should have gone right to sleep, but I didn't. Because it wasn't straight, and I knew it. Things get started, and sometimes you don't know what the hell they are.
Engines. That's something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don't know what the fuck they are or what they're supposed to do. There are clues, but that's all. The drug thing is like that, and the booze thing, and the sex thing, and sometimes other stuff too - a summer job that generates a new interest, a trip, a course in school. Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that's really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside.
Engines.
Big ones. Like the 382s they used to put in those old cars. Like Christine.
I lay there in the dark, twisting and turning until the sheet was pulled out and all balled up and messy, and I thought about LeBay saying, Her name is Christine. And somehow, Arnie had picked up on that. When we were little kids we had scooters and then bikes, and I named mine but Arnie never named his - he said names were for dogs and cats and guppies. But that was then and this was now. Now he was calling that Plymouth Christine, and, what was somehow worse, it was always 'her' and 'she' instead of 'it'.
I didn't like it, and I didn't know why.
And even my own father had spoken of it as if, instead of buying an old junker, Arnie had gotten married. But it wasn't like that. Not at all. Was it?
Stop the car, Dennis. Go back. . . . I want to look at her again.
Simple as that.
No consideration at all, and that wasn't like Arnie, who usually thought things out so carefully - his life had made him all too painfully aware of what happened to guys like him when they went off half-cocked and did something (gasp!) on impulse. But this time he had been like a man who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning.
It had been . . . well . . . like love at first sight.
Never mind, I thought. We'll start over again. Tomorrow we'll start over. We'll get some perspective on this.
And so finally I went to sleep. And dreamed.
The whining spin of a starter in darkness.
Silence.
The starter, whining again.
The engineered, missed, then caught.
An engine running in darkness.
Then headlights came on, high beams, old-fashioned twin beams, spearing me like a bug on glass.