the cafeteria thrum. Her filed nails nicked away from sanded wood.
“You haven’t called anyone.” Her words were torpid.
My hand still hung elevated between us. It looked like a slap and she recoiled as if feeling the sting. Fury bloomed across her cheeks. Although I’d never been brave enough to attend one of her plays, something told me that these were not the exaggerated clownings of stage emotions, nor were they the controlled modicums of feeling she parceled out to teachers and friends. These were emotions, real ones created expressly for me, and they made her look, for a moment there, naked—a sight not exactly erotic, but nonetheless exciting. Her erect posture telescoped down, the encouraging angles of her face puddled, the youthful smoothness of her eyes and lips crimped into sour whorls. It was a horrific unmasking for sure, but for me “horrific” was a concept long since depreciated. Like the return of the boneyard blues, laughter spewed from my lips and got all over her.
“Fucker,” she said. “I’m glad you ended up in the shower.”
I only laughed harder.
“You know what? It was my idea. I told him you stunk.”
I wiped away tears with leather.
“I was glad Woody did what he did to Heidi, too.”
Reflected in her eyes was the hallway door and daylight behind me, an infinite and tempting channel. I exercised facial muscles to work out the soreness of hilarity and tried to refocus. It did not shock me that Celeste had been complicit in Woody’s persecutions—she had only been too prissy to dirty her hands—but I could muster little more than impatience. At the same time, her livid disfigurement rang inside me a note of caution. She was an enemy now, and there was no greater enemy to make than that of progress.
“Freak.” Her red lips shone. “I don’t need you, freak.”
“I have to go,” I said. I sniffed at the lunchtime odors and started away. There was a person of much greater importance I needed to see. When I reached the end of the hallway I looked over my shoulder. She looked good, even hunched in anger and panting with defeat. I nodded at her. “Hey, the Spring Fling—knock ’em dead.”
22.
“YOU KNOW WHO ELSE is missing fingertips,” Foley said, crashing into the chair across from me. After my months-long absence from the cafeteria, my appearance was a deliberate invitation. If I had learned one thing from the shower incident, it was that Foley had my back. He deserved my loyalty if he still wanted it.
I weighed my po’boy and didn’t respond until I could do so through a full mouth. “Who’s that?”
“Tony Iommi? Lead guitarist, Black Sabbath? You know that song ‘A Bit of Finger’? That’s about what happened to him. He lost the tips of his middle finger and his ring finger when he was seventeen.” He peeked at my hand, hidden beneath the Racism Sandwich. “Just like you.”
“Except I’m sixteen,” I said.
“Your birthday was last month.”
Tap tap tap: wood against lunch-tray plastic. The only calendar I used was the side of a sink, so I wasn’t surprised that I had forgotten it, but Foley’s ability to pluck this fact out of the air was impressive.
He shrugged it off. “You mentioned it once in gym. To tell you the truth, I’m a little jealous.” He held up the crooked finger that I had smashed in the locker room door. “When you broke this sucker that’s the first thing I thought—after they took me to the hospital, I mean. I thought, Damn, I’m livin’ Tony Iommi style.”
I set down the sandwich and we compared damages.
“It’s like destiny,” he said. “We almost have to start a band now.”
I smiled. “Joey Crotch and the Feces Foley Experience.”
He busied himself tucking away his blond hair to hide his delight. And that was that—broken fingers and months of silence were forgotten. Together we left Mere Reality and returned to our fantasy journeys to see Vorvolakas live. Of course, I had already been back to Chicago the night I had dug up my mother, but some details were best kept to oneself.
Lunch ended with one of Foley’s brutal assessments: “You smell like you washed your hair in shit.” Half of the things I was wearing had been peeled from sacks of rotting meat, so the news hardly rattled me. I twisted my lips and waited for the long-overdue invitation. Tap tap tap.
“My house, after school,” he said. “I’ll swing by your locker.”