In the lobby of the theater, I paused at the water fountain and glanced over my shoulder. They were right behind me after all. They kept walking, then stopped perhaps ten feet beyond the fountain, appearing to wait. I swallowed, stood, and approached them slowly.

Martin was reenacting a part from the movie where one guy had strangled another; he was performing the reenactment on John, who was sticking his tongue out and making his eyes bulge. “And then he’s like, ‘Now do you remember? Now do you remember?’ ” Martin said. John gagged noisily, and all three of the guys cracked up. I stood slightly farther away from them than they stood from each other, and tried to seem amused.

“You like that, Lee?” Cross said.

I didn’t know if he meant the whole movie, or the strangling in the movie, or Martin’s rendition of the strangling. “It was pretty good.”

“There were some nasty parts, huh?” John said, and I could tell, by the friendliness of his tone, that my presence was no big deal to him. We had never introduced ourselves, and it was apparent we were not going to now.

“I closed my eyes for the nasty parts,” I said. “The part by the dumpster-I think I missed most of it.”

“The dumpster scene was awesome,” Martin said. “You should go back and see the next showing right now.”

“You guys hungry?” Cross said. “I’m hungry.”

“I’m starving,” Martin said.

And then we were walking back through the parking lot-it had stopped raining, though the sky was still low and gray-to the sub shop, and I was still with them. It seemed fine that I was with them; it didn’t seem like they wondered why I didn’t leave them alone, or why I wasn’t with a group of girls. They all got subs and I got a pack of pretzels. At the table, they kept talking about the movie, repeating lines from it; Martin tried to do the strangling thing on Cross, but Cross laughed and shrugged Martin away. I decided that if Martin wanted to do it on me, I would let him, but he didn’t try.

The next place we went was a video arcade. Walking there, I thought that maybe this was where we’d part ways-I hardly knew how to play video games-but then it seemed like it would be weird and formal if I paused to disentangle myself from them. And the arcade had pinball; I knew how to play pinball. We all got quarters, and I stood before the bright, zinging machine, jamming them in whenever I lost a game.

I had just used the flippers to knock the ball all the way back when, beside me, someone said, “Not bad.”

I turned-it was Cross-and as I did, I heard the ball roll down the mouth of the machine. “Whoops,” I said. We both looked at the place where the ball had disappeared.

As my points audibly added up, he said, “You might be better at this than I am.”

“I might?”

“That’s not an insult.”

“I’m sure I’m better than you.” Impulsively, I said, “I’m a state champion.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“I was a prodigy,” I said. “I traveled around the country. But then I burned out.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s how I got into Ault. You know how they love it when you have a special talent?”

“I don’t believe you,” he said, but I knew he did, a little, or he wouldn’t have needed to say so.

“When I was nine, I was crowned Hoosier Pinball Princess,” I said. “My parents were so proud.” As I looked at him, I felt the corners of my mouth pulling up, and then he knocked my head with the palm of his hand, half tap and half rub, and said, “You’re so full of bullshit.”

“But you weren’t sure,” I said.

“I was sure.”

“No, you weren’t. I can tell. You weren’t.”

We grinned at each other. He was so handsome, I thought, and as soon as I thought it, the moment began to crack. Thinking of him as Cross, as part of Ault, was where I ran into problems. It was okay when we were just talking.

I was relieved when Martin came over. “You guys want some pizza?”

“You’re hungry?” I said. “Again?”

They got an extra-large, and this time I ate some, even though it had pepperoni on it and I hadn’t eaten pepperoni since Dede told me it was smoked with boar semen. Halfway through his fourth slice, Martin set it down on the paper plate and gripped his stomach. “Whose idea was this?” he said.

“It was Lee’s,” Cross said.

“It was not!” In my own voice, I could hear an insincere insistence, that girlish tone of flirtation.

“It was a bad idea, Lee,” Martin said. “A bad fucking idea.”

“You want some Tums, Marty?” John said. Then he said, “Does anyone know what time it is?” We all turned to look at the clock on the wall. It was five to six, and the bus back to school had left at five-thirty. “Fuck,” John said. “I’m already on Saturday detention for missing chapel twice this week.”

“Do we call Fletcher?” Martin asked.

“We can take a taxi,” Cross said. “It’s not a big deal.” The way he said it, how calm he was, made me wonder if he’d realized already that we’d missed the bus-if he’d realized it at the time even, and let it happen.

Cross was the one who called, from a pay phone, while the rest of us stood around. Martin was still moaning about how full he was, and John kept saying, “How the fuck did this happen?” I had less than five dollars left in my pocket, and it was a half-hour ride back to school. But no one else seemed concerned about money, and I said nothing.

“A taxi will meet us outside the movie theater,” Cross said after he’d hung up. When we walked back there, it was sprinkling outside, and the sky was dark. Waiting just inside the theater, no one spoke much, but it felt less like an awkward silence than a tired silence. Girls would still be talking to each other, I thought.

I had been in a taxi only one other time in my life, right after my mother gave birth to my brother Tim, and my brother Joseph and I rode to the hospital to meet up with our parents and see Tim for the first time. It was a sunny afternoon; I was ten years old, and Joseph was seven. For the whole ride, I imagined that the driver was going to kidnap us, and I pictured myself opening the door while the car was in motion, rolling out, and pulling Joseph with me. But then the driver delivered us to the hospital entrance and my father was waiting there to pay him.

In this taxi, I knew we would not be kidnapped-not just because I was less dumb than I’d been when I was ten but also because there were too many of us to kidnap, and Cross was too tall and strong. It was a maroon taxi. Martin got in the front seat, and John went around to the far side of the back seat, and then Cross opened the door closest to us and climbed in, and I followed him. I was surprised that he sat in the middle; at home, the boys I knew had been calling that the bitch seat since fourth grade.

The seats were blue Naugahyde, and inside the taxi it smelled like stale cigarette smoke and fake-pine air freshener. A cardboard tree hung from the rearview mirror. The radio was on low, set to a big-band station, and there was lots of static. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, and in the intervals between swishes, everything out the window turned blurry.

I had the same consciousness of Cross beside me that I’d had watching the movie, but this time, instead of feeling nervous about how to act when the movie ended, I felt sad because I knew the day was almost over. We would get back to school, and then what? It was hard to imagine that I could go from having no friends to being friends with Cross Sugarman. It was too great a leap. Besides, I had no proof that Cross truly liked me. He had been nice because I’d fainted. That was all. I didn’t want to be like Dede, presuming chumminess, using what someone gave you as an excuse to grasp for even more.

John leaned forward, peering at me from the other side of Cross. “You think biology will be hard?” he asked.

The test-over the course of the day, I had forgotten about it. “Probably,” I said. “I’ve hardly studied.”