People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.

“Just talking cars,” Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie’s and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.

I liked that just fine.

I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first 6 weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were “going together”. I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.

I hadn’t seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had apparently gone back to Darnell’s for more work—maybe that was part of the agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn’t see the Fury, but I saw a lot of Leigh and Arnie… and heard a lot about them. They were a hot item of school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she saw in him, for heaven’s sake; boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn’t care about either of those things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought of their son’s extreme case of first love.

One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the bleachers by the football field, as we had been Tanning to do on the day Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife—Repperton had indeed been expelled for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1–5, and Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.

My lunchbag wasn’t as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1–5 was that we were now so far behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5–0–1) that it would be impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went over a cliff.

We sat in the mellow October sunshine—the time for the little spooks in their bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth’s Darth Vader costumes wasn’t far off—munching and not saving too much. Arnie had a devilled egg and swapped it for one of my cold meatloaf sandwiches. Parents know very little about the secret lives of their children, I guess. Every Monday since first grade, Regina Cunningham had put a devilled egg in Arnie’s lunchbag, and every day after we had a meatloaf dinner (which was usually Sunday suppers), I had a cold meatloaf sandwich in mine. Now I have always hated cold meatloaf and Arnie has always hated devilled eggs, although I never saw him turn one down done any other way. And I’ve often wondered what our mothers would think if they knew how few of the hundreds of devilled eggs and dozens of cold meatloaf sandwiches that went into our respective lunch-sacks had actually been eaten by him for whom each was intended.

I got down to my cookies and Arnie got down to his fig-bars. He glanced over at me to make sure I was watching and then crammed all six fig-bars into his mouth at once and crunched down on them. His cheeks puffed out grotesquely.

“Oh, Jesus, what a gross-out!” I cried.

“Ung-ung-gooth-ung,” Arnie replied.

I started to poke my fingers at his sides, where he’s always been extremely ticklish, screaming “Side-noogies! Look out, Arnie, I got side-noogies onya!”

Arnie started to laugh, spraying out little wads of munched-up fig-bars. I know how obnoxious that must sound, but it was really funny.

“Quit it, Dennith!” Arnie said, his mouth still full of fig-bars.

“What was that? I can’t understand you, you fucking barbarian.” I kept poking my fingers at him, giving him what we used to call “side-noogies” when we were little kids (for some reason now lost in the sands of time), and he kept wiggling and twisting and laughing.

He swallowed mightily, then belched.

“You’re so fucking gross, Cunningham,” I said.

“I know.” He seemed really pleased by it. Probably was so far as I know, he’d never pulled the six-fig-bars-at-once trick in front of anyone else. If he had done it in front of his parents, I figure Regina would have had a kitty and Michael possibly a brain-haemorrhage.

“What’s the most you ever did?” I asked him.

“I did twelve once,” he said. “But I thought I was going to choke.”

I snorted laughter. “Have you done it for Leigh yet?”

“I’m holding it back for the prom,” he said. “I’ll give her a few side-noggies too.” We got laughing over that, and I realized how much I missed Arnie sometimes—I had football, student council, a new girlfriend who would (I hoped) consent to give me a hand-job before the drive-in season ended. I had little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted with herself. Still, it was fun trying.

Even with all of that going on, I had missed Arnie. First there had been Christine, now there was Leigh and Christine. In that order, I hoped.

“Where is she today?” I asked.

“Sick,” he said. “She got her period, and I guess it really hurts.”

I raised a set of mental eyebrows. If she was discussing her female problems with him, they were getting chummy indeed.

“How did you happen to ask her to the football game that day?” I asked. “The day we played Hidden Hills?”

He laughed. “The only football game I’ve been to since my sophomore year. We brought you luck, Dennis.”

“You just called her up and asked her to go?”

“I almost didn’t. That was the first date I ever had.” He glanced over at me shyly. “I don’t think I slept more than two hours the night before. After I called her up and she said she’d go with me, I was scared to death I’d make an asshole of myself, or that Buddy Repperton would show up and want to fight, or something else would happen.”

“You seemed to have everything under control.”

“Did I?” He looked pleased. “Well, that’s good. But I was scared. She’d talk to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that. She joined the chess club even though she wasn’t very good… but she’s getting better. I’m teaching her.”

I’ll bet you are, you dog, I thought, but didn’t quite dare say it—I still remembered the way he had blown up at me that same day at Hidden Hills. Besides, I wanted to hear this. I was pretty curious; captivating a girl as stunning as Leigh Cabot had been a real coup.

“So after a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me,” Arnie went on. “It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me than it would for some other guys—guys like you, Dennis.”

“Sure, I’m a smoothie,” I said. “What James Brown used to call “a sex machine.”

“No, you’re no sex machine, but you know about girls,” he said seriously. “You understand them. I was always just scared of them. Never knew what to say. Still don’t, I guess. Leigh’s different.

“I was afraid to ask her out.” He seemed to consider this. “I mean, she’s a beautiful girl, really beautiful. Don’t you think so, Dennis?”

“Yes. As far as I can tell, she’s the prettiest girl in school.”

He smiled, pleased. “I think so, too… but I thought, maybe it’s only because I love her that I think that way.”