Andrew Klavan - The last thing I remember

I shut the hatch door as Alex reached me. He stuck out his fist. I touched it with mine by way of hello. Alex smiled with one corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a friendly smile, not really. It was that nasty smile guys wear when they’re planning to start trouble but they don’t want to give you an excuse to say so.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said. “How’s it working for you?”

“Pretty good, pretty good. How you doing, Alex?”

“Excellent, excellent. Guess you’re still doing your karate, huh?” And then suddenly, he let out a loud karate shout and jumped into a sort of mock fighting position. It was meant to startle me, meant to make me jump and look stupid. Which I guess I did a little. Not much, but enough so Alex could laugh at me and the two punks with him could laugh too. “Charlie here is a black belt,” Alex said to the others.

The crew-cut guy said, “Pretty tough guy, huh,” as if he thought that was funny.

I didn’t like the feel of this at all. I hadn’t seen Alex in a long time. I could tell he’d changed a lot. But I didn’t think he’d do anything crazy like start a fight with me or anything. I mean, why would he?

Then Alex said: “Hey. I heard something funny today.”

“Oh yeah?” I said warily.

“Yeah. Really funny. You wanna hear?”

I shrugged. “Sure. What’s so funny?”

“It’s just a funny rumor I heard about you.”

“About me?”

Crew-cut Guy snickered nastily. I was beginning not to like Crew-cut Guy.

“About me?” Alex echoed. He made a face-a sort of stupid face to suggest I was acting stupid, pretending not to know something I really did know. “Yeah,” he said then in a friendly voice that was not very friendly, “about you,” and he poked me in the shoulder hard enough so it hurt. I stared at him. It really was as if he was a totally different person. Not the Alex I knew at all. “I heard a story about you that was really hilarious. That you were going out with Beth Summers.”

I felt something inside me then. It was like an icy hand had taken hold of a piece of me and twisted it. Was it possible Alex had been waiting for me out here? He probably knew when my karate lesson was. I hadn’t changed my schedule in years. Was it possible he’d brought his friends here so he could confront me about Beth? Could he have already heard about my conversation with her in the cafeteria? Sure he could. Alex still knew people in my school. They could’ve seen me with Beth and called him. Had it made him angry enough to come out here with a couple of punks to try to start a fight with me?

“Is that right?” he said. “You going out with Beth?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I might sometime, maybe. Why? You have a problem with that?”

Alex made an elaborate gesture of indifference. “No. I don’t have a problem with that. Why would I have a problem? Hey-” He gave an ugly laugh and sort of backhanded my shoulder in the same spot where he’d poked me. “Hey, I hope you get more out of her than I did. I mean, she’s kind of an uptight little stick, if you ask me.”

Now the Bible says you’re not supposed to keep anger in your heart, and I hoped I wouldn’t keep it, but it was there now, all right. In fact, so much anger flared up in me when he said that about Beth that I almost felt my fist was going to shoot up and knock Alex across the parking lot before I could stop it. But I did stop it. You can’t hit a guy for what he says, even if it stinks. So I just answered him-quietly, you know-working hard to keep my voice steady.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I didn’t ask you, did I? And now I’m going home.”

I started to move away. Crew-cut Guy reached out to grab me. The way I was feeling just then, this was not a good idea on the part of Crew-cut Guy.

“Hey, where you going…?” he said-or started to say. Because before he could finish, I took a step back away from him, turning as I did. At the same time, I put my hands up on guard. I didn’t exactly slap his hand away. I just sort of gently deflected it with the back of my hand at the same time I slipped out of his reach. Crew-cut Guy’s grabbing fingers went right past me and caught hold of nothing but empty air.

It was a good move. With that one turning step I’d maneuvered myself past all three of them. I’d gotten away from the back of the Explorer so they couldn’t corner me against it.

I lowered my hands now. I didn’t want them up in fighting position. I didn’t want to provoke Crew-cut Guy to take a swing at me because if he did, I might have to hurt him, and I didn’t want to hurt him-well, all right, I did want to hurt him, but I wasn’t going to. Anyway, I could get my hands up fast enough if I needed them.

“You guys have a good night,” I said quietly.

For a second it looked like Crew-cut Guy was going to come after me. The anger was raging in his eyes, and he made a move. But Alex held him back, pressing the back of his hand against his chest. He was looking at me, Alex was, and kind of half-smiling, a strange smile, almost as if he admired me.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told Crew-cut Guy, holding him there without taking his eyes off me. “He’d put you in the hospital.”

I could see Crew-cut Guy was angry about that, but he held back. I was grateful to Alex for stopping him. I saluted him with one finger to my head.

“Why don’t you give me a call sometime?” I said. “We could talk. Privately.”

I walked around the side of the car. I yanked the driver’s door open while Alex’s two friends glared at me. I slid in behind the wheel and shut the door.

The anger was still hot in me. In fact, it was worse now-now that I was away from them and didn’t have to worry about doing something violent and stupid. Now the anger closed my throat and made my stomach clutch. It was a rotten feeling.

I jammed my key into the ignition and twisted it hard, turning the engine over. I grabbed hold of the gearshift, ready to throw the big car into reverse.

Just then, the passenger door opened and Alex slid into the seat beside me.

“All right,” he said. “You wanna talk? Let’s talk. Drive somewhere.”

Argument With Alex in the car beside me, I drove out of the parking lot, the Explorer’s tires bouncing hard over the exit ramp and out onto the road. I guess-being as angry as I was-I was driving a little too fast. I had to ease down on the brake, bring the big car under control-and bring myself under control too. I took a deep breath and forced myself to loosen my jaw, which was clenched together like a bear trap.

Alex didn’t say anything as I drove out over Route

109, past the other big mall in town. The silence hung there between us. I was the one who broke it.

“I like your friends,” I said. Only the way I said it, it meant the opposite.

“They’re okay.”

“Oh yeah, they’re great. The kind of guys who’ll always be around when you need them.”

“Hey, they’re my friends, all right?”

That almost set me off. I almost started yelling at him right then and there: about Beth, about the punks he hung out with, about everything. But somehow I managed to swallow it all and keep my mouth shut. I mean, Alex had gotten into the car. He wanted to talk to me. That had to be a good sign, right? It wouldn’t do any good if I just got on his case.

“Yeah, fine,” was all I said finally.

Alex jammed a hand into his tracksuit pocket. He brought out a pack of cigarettes.

“Hey, look…” I said.

“Oh, what?” he snapped back. “Are you my mother now or something?”

“It’s my mom’s car, all right? No smoking. You want a cigarette, we’ll park somewhere, you can shove the whole pack in your mouth and set your face on fire for all I care.”