Period 8 - By Chris Crutcher Page 0,9
says we could eat it by ourselves and brag about it. That doesn’t work so he goes Eddie Haskell on my mom, but she watches Leave it to Beaver reruns, too, so no go. We were playing around later in my room and he accidentally knocked it against the wall and it broke. After I stopped bawling and threatening to kill him it was, you know, what the hell, we might as well eat it. We unwrapped it and he took a big ol’ chunk and . . . I don’t know, there was this look on his face like . . . he’d known he’d get it all along.”
Logs shakes his head. “It stuck with you. That was a long time ago.”
“Well, I’ve seen that look a few times since.” He doesn’t mention he saw it recently, just before he fucked up.
“Listen, I gotta get out of here before somebody has to slap my chest with the shockers,” Logs says. “Catch you tomorrow.”
“Later.”
Hannah hits “Save” on her Word document, sets her laptop to the side of the bed, and wanders downstairs to the kitchen for a snack. Her arms and shoulders are tight from her afternoon workout at the gym on the ergonomic rowing machine, even though she’s in perfect condition for this time of year. She cranked it extra-hard today, her anger at Paulie and the dumb-ass guys in Period 8 and the faceless girl Paulie cheated with driving her. If she could find that girl, there would be a short, loud, threatening meeting of the minds.
Maybe all’s fair in love and war, she thinks, but chicks have to have solidarity, or guys will . . . well, look what guys will do. The refrigerator light spills into the darkened kitchen as she removes the carton of milk and a half loaf of wheat bread and lays them on the granite counter. She leaves the refrigerator door open long enough to dig the peanut butter jar from a corner of the cupboard, open it, and spread the contents thickly onto the bread. She pours a glass of milk, returns the bread and milk to the fridge, and eats in pitch-dark.
She fumes, alternating between thoughts of screwing every guy friend Paulie ever had and kicking the ass of every girl who ever stole another girl’s boyfriend. It’s going to be one of those nights: forty-five minutes of fitful sleep followed by sledgehammer wake-up and thoughts of grave malice, then chest-crushing loss. It’s easy to appear tough in public, more difficult to pull it off in the silence of loneliness. Paulie was a soul mate. And he was hot. She loved watching him pull his dripping body onto the dock when the water warmed enough that he got rid of that stupid wetsuit. She loved eating pizza and talking about sports and what a drag high school was getting to be and going off to college and taking chances. There are just no other guys like Paulie. She misses him desperately, but she will miss him because she is not going back to that. All his talk about not being like his dad. . . .
For the past two years, as soon as the water turned warm enough, Hannah would bring her single scull to the lake with Paulie and Mr. Logs and guide them the mile and a half across, the two of them swimming on either side. Then she would throw out abbreviated water-ski ropes that attached to the sides of her scull and pull them back while Paulie whined “Are we there yet?” or counted like a coxswain, or in some other way annoyed her. On good days they’d do it twice.
Later the three would go for pizza, or if Mr. Logs begged off, she and Paulie would take a pizza to a makeshift “apartment” that doubled as storage space above a vacant storefront at a strip mall near Paulie’s house. If a small Wonder Woman refrigerator magnet was not placed discreetly over the keyhole, they would use their key, put Wonder Woman in her place to remind any of the six other key holders it was first-come, first-serve, and slip inside.
In the dim, warm safety of that space, to the music-of-choice emanating from the iPod dock, or a favorite movie on the 23-inch flat screen the shareholders had thrown in matching dollars on, Hannah could let down and be Hannah.
“I cheated” ended all that.
She pulls on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, slips her feet