Period 8 - By Chris Crutcher Page 0,44
I’m lying, you’ll know it before I come around again.”
“You tell the truth whenever you can?”
“Yeah, like with important things. Like, I wouldn’t tell you how dorky it looks to wear dark nylon socks with those shorts.” He nods toward Wells’s feet.
Wells follows Paulie’s gaze and for the first time in the conversation, smiles.
“So your daughter would be relatively safe and you’d buy some good will with kids at school, which probably doesn’t matter to you one way or the other.”
“Relatively safe.”
“We’re teenagers, Mr. Wells. We live in risky times.”
Wells stares at Paulie. “You are one ballsy young man.”
“You almost have to be these days,” Paulie says.
Wells turns and the door closes. Paulie shuts his eyes as he hears him call to his daughter. “Mary, you have a visitor.”
Paulie touches the soaked shirt under his arm.
“You called my father a dork?” Mary is amazed; just a little too scared to think it’s funny, but close.
“Technically I didn’t call him that. I said the socks were dorky. He may have extrapolated from that.” Paulie is smiling, feeling triumphant. “He got even, though,” Paulie says.
“How?”
“He gave me one of those looks.”
“Yeah,” Mary says, “he can do that. At least you got to his sense of humor.”
“So, you’re on furlough. What do you want to do?”
“He didn’t give us a lot of time. Jeez, a ten thirty curfew on a Friday night. What other seventeen-year-old girl has that?”
“Probably the YFC girls,” Paulie says, “but most of theirs are probably self-imposed.”
Mary smiles. “I know a lot of those girls,” she says. “They believe in what they believe, but that doesn’t always translate into what they do.”
“Justin claims biology trumps everything.”
“Speaking of biology,” Mary says, placing a hand on Paulie’s thigh, “we could go—”
“Not gonna happen.”
“I want to give you something to thank you. . . .”
“Not gonna happen.”
“I want to.”
The picture of taking Mary to the secret room at the strip mall begins immediately to cloud Paulie’s judgment, but the thought of being with Mary in the same place he was with Hannah. . . . “Not gonna happen.”
“I’m not asking you to fall in love with me, Paulie. You’re not with anyone and neither am I. What’s the harm?”
“The harm isn’t anything I would know about until it happens to me,” Paulie says. “Look, I’ve got flash photos of Arney-fucking-Stack and Hannah going off in my head every hour on the hour, and I’ll tell you the truth, I’m hanging with you partly as a ‘fuck you’ to them. I’ll probably never know your reasons for needing a trophy boy, so let’s call this a relationship of mutual convenience and try to have some fun.”
Mary’s face flushes. “I just thought . . . .”
Paulie takes a deep breath. “Look, Mary, I don’t want to be mean. It doesn’t look good on me and it doesn’t feel good. But I’m tapped out for being a nice guy right now.”
Mary sits back. “Okay, I get that. So what do we do?”
“You bowl?” he asks.
“He told you to fuck off? Wow, that doesn’t sound like Paulie.” Arney grips the wheel and pushes back against the seat, pressing down on the accelerator.
“He was pissed,” Hannah says. “No more pissed than I was.”
“Did you tell him how you knew who it was?”
“Not really, I just told him it wasn’t who he thought it was.”
Arney says, “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. I didn’t mean to pour gas on the fire. You and Paulie were great. Half the guys I know wished they had a girlfriend like you.”
“You should have told me. Like I said, the one thing I can’t stand is to be lied to. And leaving stuff out is the same as lying.”
“Lying by omission.”
“Exactly. I don’t care what kind of a cool guy everyone thinks Paulie is, if he can’t be true to his word, I can’t be with him.”
“I know you’re right,” Arney says, “and no matter how cool he is, it isn’t cool to do that to the girl you’re with.” He’s quiet a moment, gazing out the windshield at the countryside moving rapidly past as they speed along the two-lane road miles outside of town. “He’s pretty pissed at me for hanging out with you now.”
“He should have thought about that.”
“Actually I told him that, not quite in those words. Guys who cheat always go with the impulse and then try to fix it. He should know that from watching his old man. Personally, I figured out a long time ago that bell