Andrew Klavan - The truth of the matter

I went on sitting there, just sort of gazing up at them stupidly. My buddies. They’d been snarking like this at each other for years now. Josh’s geekiness could push the needle on the annoying meter into the red sometimes, but he was really smart and we all liked him anyway. And Miler-he was just a regular guy now, but he practically had “I will be a gazillionaire businessman one day” flashing in big lights over his head.

What would it be like never to see them again? Not just because we’d gone off to college where we could communicate online and meet up on vacations and so on. But never to see your best friends again at all? Or talk to them at all? Or even be able to tell them the truth about yourself? To tell them you weren’t the bad guy you were supposed to be?

Everyone who loves you will go to his grave believing you betrayed your country.

“Uh, hello? Earth to Starship Charlie,” Josh said.

I blinked. I realized I’d been sitting there staring at them. I tried to think of something funny to say-something that sounded normal. “Oh, sorry. What you were saying was so interesting I guess I dozed off.”

It was lame, but it was the best I could come up with. I gathered my books and shoved them into my backpack. Slung the backpack over my arm as I got up and joined Josh and Miler.

“It’s hard to communicate when you’re wrapped in a cloud of loooove,” said Josh, singing the last word as if it were opera.

“Or maybe it’s just hard to communicate with a member of a subhuman species who can’t get within ten feet of a girl without melting into a pile of quivering mucus,” Miler said.

“How can you tell when Josh melts into a pile of quivering mucus?” I asked. “I mean, what’s the difference?”

“Good question,” said Miler.

“Har har,” said Josh, but he smiled nervously because-well, because he always smiled nervously.

Miler and I bumped fists and laughed. My heart felt as if it were made of lead.

The three of us walked outside into the crisp, cool air. We strolled together across the grass toward the cafeteria, nodding or waving every three steps or so at someone we knew.

I heard Waterman speaking again: We want to rush the case to trial as quickly as we can and basically railroad you into prison for murder.

Prison, I thought. What would it be like to be in prison for murder? Would they be able to protect me from the real murderers all around me or would I be on my own? I could just imagine my mother coming to see me on visiting day…

“You all right?” said Miler.

I blinked at him, coming out of my thoughts. “What?”

“You just groaned. Are you sick or something?”

“Oh… no, I was just… I just remembered I forgot to study for my calculus quiz,” I lied.

“No big deal. You didn’t want to go to college anyway. You can always work at Burger Prince. Of course, if you want to move up to Burger King, you will need a BA.”

As we reached the door of the cafeteria, there was a burst of laughter and we nearly bumped into three people coming outside. It was two younger students-and Mr. Sherman. They’d obviously been joking about something together.

“Hey, guys, how’s it going?” said Mr. Sherman, slapping Miler on the shoulder.

Josh and Miler said it was going okay, but all I could do was stand there and stare. Mr. Sherman was a youthful-looking guy, trim and fit with a friendly smile. I’d had him for history two years in a row. Was it really possible he was the one who stabbed Alex Hauser in the chest? Was it possible he was a member of a group dedicated to terrorizing and killing Americans?

“What’s the matter, Charlie?” he said with a grin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No… hey, Mr. Sherman…,” I answered quickly, but my voice trailed off. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Sherman gave me kind of a strange look-but then he was moving off across the quad, followed by his two students. I heard the sound of their laughter fading as they moved away.

I was still watching them go as Josh, Miler, and I stepped into the cafeteria.

I’d never really thought much about the cafeteria before. You don’t, you know. It’s just the cafeteria. You go there, you eat your lunch, so what? But now, it struck me- how familiar it was. How reliable the smells of it were. Hamburgers Monday, mac-’n’-cheese on Wednesday… The food was-well, it was no better than it is at anybody else’s school cafeteria and we were always making jokes about it-like,

How can you tell the difference between rubber and a Spring Hill High hamburger?

You can swallow rubber.

And the colored plastic chairs were uncomfortable and there were all kinds of annoying high school social rituals like this kid won’t sit with that kid, and the popular girls always sit over there and giggle about the popular guys, and the sad-sack guys always sit over there and make snarky jokes about the popular girls, and so on…

But it’s strange about this stuff. When you might be about to lose something forever, you begin to think about it in a different way. This cafeteria-with its so-so food and uncomfortable chairs and all the general social stupidity that could keep you awake nights if you thought about it too long-this cafeteria had been a huge part of my life. We’d had some big laughs in this place-me and Josh and Miler and Rick. Like the time Josh was telling some stupid story and gesturing wildly with his milk carton and the milk flew out and hit Mr. Cummings smack in the face. And we’d had some big drama here too, like the time I faced down Mike Hurtleman because he’d dumped Owen Parker in the garbage can headfirst. This is where I was sitting at lunch one day not too long ago when Beth first came up to me, when I first worked up the courage to ask her if I could call her and she wrote her phone number down on my arm…

I mean, look, I don’t mean to get all sentimental about it. It was just the school cafeteria. I didn’t want to marry it or anything. But what would it be like when I was eating my meals in a cafeteria in prison and instead of sitting with people who dump kids in garbage cans or write phone numbers on your arm, I was surrounded by guys who would happily cut your throat?

“Dude!”

I blinked. I looked at Miler. “What?”

“It’s just a calculus quiz,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You groaned again.”

“Oh… forget it,” I told him. “I’m just…” But I didn’t know what I was just doing.

“Anyway,” Josh chimed in, “there’s the steamy-dreamy love of your vaguely embarrassing life.”

I blinked again and saw Beth waving to me from a table across the room. She was there with Mindy and Jen, a couple of her friends.

“So if you sit with the girls,” Josh said, “does that, like, make you a girl too?”

“Go on,” said Miler. “Have fun. If you need me, I’ll be over here trying to explain to Josh what girls are.”

I was walking across the cafeteria toward Beth when suddenly I had the weirdest experience. It was almost like a hallucination. I had this powerful, powerful sense that I wasn’t here in the cafeteria at all, that I was somewhere else, in the woods somewhere, lying on my side in a pile of leaves, twisting on the ground in pain and trying to pull myself out of it because there were bad men hunting me, because I had to keep running, keep trying to escape…

I shook my head and the vision was gone. I thought: That was weird. All this emotion and indecision must be starting to get to me. Then I continued walking across the room to Beth.

“Aren’t you going to get anything to eat?” she asked as I sat down across from her.

I muttered something about how I’d had a snack earlier. The truth was, with that lump in my throat, I didn’t think I could eat anything. I didn’t want to eat anything. I just wanted to sit there. I just wanted to look at her. I just wanted to be with her. Because I might never have a chance to be with her again.