I type:
Rhiannon,
I would appreciate it if you could come here. Thank you.
A
Two minutes later, a new email from her:
A,
I’ll be there at 5. Can’t wait to see what you look like today.
(Still not believing this.)
Rhiannon
My nerves are jangling with possibility. She’s had time to think about it, and that hasn’t turned her against me. It’s more than I could ask for. I am careful not to be too grateful, lest it be taken away.
The rest of the school day is unexceptional … except for a moment in seventh period. Mrs. French, the bio teacher, is hectoring a kid who hasn’t done his homework. It’s a lab assignment, and he’s come up blank.
“I don’t know what got into me,” the slacker says. “I must have been possessed by the devil!”
The rest of the class laughs, and even Mrs. French shakes her head.
“Yeah, I was possessed by the devil, too,” another guy says. “After I drank seven beers!”
“Okay, class,” Mrs. French intones. “Enough of that.”
It’s the way they say it—I know Nathan’s story must be spreading.
“Hey,” I say to Tom as we head to football practice, “did you hear about that kid in Monroeville who says he was possessed by the devil?”
“Dude,” he replies, “we were just talking about that yesterday. It was all over the news.”
“Yeah, I mean, did you hear anything more about it today?”
“What more is there to say? Kid got caught in a crazy lie, and now the religious crazies want to make him a poster child. I almost feel sorry for him.”
This, I think, is not good.
Our coach has to go to his wife’s Lamaze class, which he bitches about to us in detail, but it forces him to end practice early. I tell Tom that I’m going to make a Starbucks run, and he looks at me like I have been totally, irredeemably girlified. I was counting on his disgust, and am relieved to get it.
She’s not there when I arrive, so I get a small black coffee—pretty much the only thing I can afford—and sit and wait for her. It’s crowded, and I have to look brutish in order to keep the other chair at my table unoccupied.
Finally, about twenty minutes after five, she shows up. She scans the crowd and I wave. Even though I told her I was a football player, she’s still a little startled. She comes over anyway.
“Okay,” she says, sitting down. “Before we say another word, I want to see your phone.” I must look confused, because she adds, “I want to see every single call you’ve made in the past week, and every single call you received. If this isn’t some big joke, then you have nothing to hide.”
I hand over James’s phone, which she knows how to work better than I do.
After a few minutes of searching, she appears satisfied.
“Now, I quiz you,” she says, handing back the phone. “First, what was I wearing on the day that Justin took me to the beach?”
I try to picture it. I try to grab hold of those details. But they’ve already eluded me. I remember her, not what she was wearing.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do you remember what Justin was wearing?”