Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

After their class ended, the debutantes would line up in the narrow space between the café’s dumpsters, where their mothers couldn’t see them, and pass Camels carefully, so as not to fleck ash on their white rehearsal dresses. When they saw us looking they tossed cigarette butts at the window, but they couldn’t do anything too loudly or they’d risk blowing their cover. It was the end of 1993, and we knew we’d become adults inside of a new century — and there these girls were, being trained for the last one. Mostly they ignored us until Rodrigo tapped on the window to warn them that the mothers were calling for their checks and that they had better hurry back inside.

Some Sundays Rodrigo just looked and some Sundays he called out to Suzanne White, the tall girl from our school whom he swore he would marry. Together, he claimed, they would breed a superior race of half — Puerto Rican/half — Southern Belle babies. For my part, I slunk down, hoping that none of them would see me in my feathered cap and olive lederhosen, and pretending that I just happened to be passing my break reading The Woman in White near the window.

“We were supposed to read that for school or something?” Rodrigo would ask.

“Extra credit,” I’d lie.

The truth was that I liked to read — especially old books about eccentric heiresses and menacing counts and guys with names like Sir Percival Glyde, but I’d learned long ago that this was a preference best kept to myself.

“What is wrong with you?” Rodrigo would ask. “Don’t you want to look at these fine ladies?” He gave his cap a stylish slant and let one suspender fall off his shoulder, as if he wore this sort of thing especially for them.

“Sure,” I’d say, “I just don’t want them to look at me .”

“Well, how are they ever going to talk to you unless they know you’re looking?”

“I don’t want them to talk to me. They don’t want to talk to me. They don’t even want to talk to you .”

Rodrigo’s eyes would bug as if I’d just tried to convince him that the sun would burn out tomorrow. “Hell yes they want to talk to me.”

“We clean tables at an Austrian coffeehouse, in a city whose residents generally think Austria is where kangaroos come from. Come on. Your mother is a housekeeper and your father mows lawns.”

“My mom runs a cleaning service. My dad owns a landscaping company. We’re entrepreneurs, jerk.”

“But they’re debutantes ,” I’d remind him. “They’re going to go to Princeton and Duke and marry inbred trust-funders with yachts who play polo and shoot skeet.”

“That’s pretty funny, coming from Mr. Ten-Under-Par.”

Rodrigo liked to tease me for playing golf on the high school team. In truth, being on the team did my reputation more harm than good. I loved to play, but the other boys on the team all hated me, because I was better than them and because my mother was a flight attendant and didn’t belong to the Briar Creek Country Club like their mothers did. My father was a man she’d met seventeen years ago, during a layover in Newark. Together they’d gotten swept up in the heady, romantic winter of 1976.

“So, they marry Mr. Trust Fund,” Rodrigo would say, cracking open the window so the girls could hear. “But they’ll be home all day making sweet, sweet love to me!”

Suzanne would glare, and as the other girls pretended to be shocked, she’d flip her perfectly manicured middle finger straight up in the air, and smile.

Meanwhile, I’d angle one of the silver baking trays toward the window so that I could catch the reflection of Betsy Littleford, the only other girl there from our school. A silent blonde with ice blue eyes, Betsy Littleford never smiled. Not as far as I could remember. Not even all the way back to the fifth grade when I’d first seen her.

“That’s funny,” she’d say flatly whenever some teacher tried to coax even the slightest giggle from her with a joke in class. “That’s really very funny.”

Rodrigo called her “Stepford Betsy” and liked to theorize that inside she was just all Disney animatronics. He loudly speculated about someday finding out for himself, but I dreamed of simply someday making her smile. Just once.

And I’d never have done it if her brother hadn’t gotten his skull caved in during our match against Asheville late that fall.

It started on the seventh hole, when Mark White had sliced a shot deep into the woods, and both teams wound up shivering for ten minutes in the chilly November air, watching the golden leaves spiraling down from the trees, until the judges went in after him and caught him sipping a little airport bottle of vodka. Our team took a double penalty and Coach Holland angrily sent White to clean everyone’s clubs. When I, then, had the audacity to hit a beautiful two-hundred-and-ten-yard drive on the eighth hole, Mark dumped my golf clubs into a water hazard “by accident.” I didn’t really care. The other boys had Titleists and Mizunos; mine were just an odd mix of yard-sale finds, half rusted already at purchase. But while I quietly fished them out, the real trouble began.

Billy Littleford, our captain, enjoyed putting his friends in their places, especially Mark. Everyone in our school adored Billy — even me. In movies, the king of the school was always a tyrant, taking lunch money and breaking hearts with reckless abandon. But our king, Billy, was as kind as he was suave. He didn’t stand for anyone picking on either the quiet kids, like me, or the loudmouths like Rodrigo. Once, when I was short a dollar at the front of an impatient lunch line, and in front of everyone was about to put my burrito back under the warming lamps, Billy Littleford strolled up suddenly to spot me a five. “Thanks for getting me those cigarettes before the game on Saturday,” he said earnestly, though I’d done no such thing and he did not smoke. “I’ll pay you the rest by tomorrow, I promise.”

If Billy ruled our school, he did so benevolently, and for this he was beloved by teachers and classmates alike. Hence, Billy was forever able to charm his way out of whatever trouble he got himself into. That afternoon on the golf course, he’d seen Mark dump my clubs in the water. He waited until Mark was hovering near a sand trap, and then Billy tackled Mark headfirst into the sand, kissing him, deeply on the mouth.

“Oh, Mark, you’re such a stud!” he shouted. Both teams erupted in laughter.

When Mark began pushing him away, Billy clutched at his broken heart. “But Mark !” he cried. “You said we could finally tell people!” As Billy minced around in fake tears, even some of the judges were laughing.

Mark spat sand out and wiped at his eyes. Half blind, he grabbed a rake from the edge of the trap. We were supposed to use these rakes to smooth out the sand, like they were little Zen gardens; Mark tried to use his to smooth out Billy’s face. Billy dodged the swinging rake and began to bob and weave around the course like a cartoon boxer. Grinning boyishly at the laughing Asheville players, Billy did not realize he was weaving directly into the backswing of their teammate, who was warming up for the ninth hole. The boy from Asheville brought his 3-iron out of the swing, clean through an imaginary ball, and straight back down into the side of Billy’s head.

The following day, every newspaper left behind on the tables at Ludwig’s had run a photo of a grinning Billy at last year’s Homecoming Parade. The reports said he was at Wakefield North Hospital, in and out of consciousness, and the doctors’ prognosis was that he could lose half his IQ and that his motor skills would be greatly reduced, forever.

Even Rodrigo was upset about it. “They ought to throw that pendejo in jail,” he snapped at a photo of Mark White that had made the inside page, after the jump. Mark was Suzanne’s older brother, so Rodrigo didn’t like him much to begin with.