Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“So this is where it happened?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said. The spot where Billy had fallen had been smoothed out into a neat spiral. Not a single bloody grain of sand remained evident in the trap.

Nervous, I took my hand and pressed it on top of hers. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying. It didn’t seem as if there could be anything worth saying.

“You don’t seem that upset,” I said finally.

“It’s all just so… ” she began, and then stopped. “Unexpected.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean… my family, we — well, the y — see to it that nothing unexpected ever happens. No grade lower than an A-minus. No winter we don’t spend in Colorado. No summer we don’t go to the Outer Banks. My mother will host the Spring Leukemia Fund-raiser, and my father will say he’ll be home for our birthdays, only something will come up and he’ll send a savings bond instead.”

Though I’d have preferred a father who sent excuses and treasuries to not having one at all, I said, “That’s awful.”

“It’s not. It’s just expected. How can it be awful if it’s expected?”

“I guess.”

“Two days ago, Billy was going to go to Chapel Hill, like my father, and then Wharton, Stern, or Harvard, and then take over my father’s company someday. Everyone sitting in that ballroom knows that was the plan. Just like they all know that I was going to go to a liberal arts college and read some Emily Dickinson and talk about slants of light, join Alpha Gamma Pi, and then get a degree I’d never use because I’d be married to an econ major I met in my first semester. Then while he’d be at business school — Wharton, Stern, or Harvard — I’d start popping out babies and choosing window treatments. The expected treatments. The expected babies.”

She looked up at the wide black sky.

“But now?” I asked.

“Now Billy’s not going to be the next Littleford to go to Chapel Hill. He’ll be lucky if he can go to the bathroom. He’s not going to go to Wharton, or run the company. He can’t count to ten.”

“It’s terrible,” I said.

“It is terrible,” she agreed.

“So? Now you’ll go to Chapel Hill and Wharton and run the company? Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to do… ”—she turned her head to look at me—“ … What. Ever. I. Want.” She relished each syllable. The corners of her lips were just barely curling. Then she lay her head down on my shoulder.

“Billy told me once you snuck out here at night to practice.”

Face turning a deep red, I asked, “How did he know that?”

She shrugged. “You’re the best player on the team, and the only one whose dad doesn’t drag him out here every Saturday. Billy’s not an idiot. Well. He wasn’t an idiot.”

“Was that another joke?”

“Walter. What kind of monster do you take me for?” she said, batting her eyelashes.

I had to do it: “How come you never smile?” I asked.

“‘Smile.’” She repeated my word flatly. “That’s what they told me in every debutante class. For a year of Sundays. ‘Smile, Betsy! Smile! It’s your job to put everyone else at ease. Make them feel welcome.’” She shrugged, her bare shoulder nudging into mine. “My dad’s been on ‘a business trip in Dubai’ since I was ten; my mom’s miserable; my brother’s gay, and now brain damaged to boot. Put yourself at ease. Make yourself feel welcome. I’ll smile when there’s something worth smiling about.”

“Fair enough,” I said, trying hard not to laugh.

“Billy liked you,” she said after a minute. “I mean likes you. I mean, if he remembers who you are anymore, he probably still likes you. I think of all the guys he knew, Billy would have wanted me to go with you. When I told him you and that Spanish kid had been spying on us, he said that sounded just like you.”

“Spying… ”—I paused—“… with the utmost respect.”

She studied me a moment, and it seemed as though she were about to kiss me. Or, possibly, devour me. It turns out I was right on both counts. First she kissed me, and then came the devouring — the devouring of any hope I ever had of forgetting her, or that night, or Billy, or any of it.

• • •

Later we lay on the fairway watching the airplanes line up for landing. It was still cloudy and there were no stars, only airplanes. They were efficient machines — tons of perfectly sculpted steel and wire, each containing three hundred people, or more, a thousand feet up in the air, moving hundreds of miles an hour. But from where we lay it was impossible to believe: they seemed to just hover there, blinking lazily, like fireflies.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“I sort of thought that was obvious,” I said.

“No, I mean, me ,” she said. “ This me.”

And she did seem like somebody else, suddenly. Her tough, sweet front was gone. Her teeth were chattering, faintly.

“I do,” I said. I thought about Rodrigo’s theory that she was a robot, through and through. “I’d always hoped, I guess, that this was what you were like. On the inside.”

She said nothing, but the faint chatter of her teeth began to get louder. “Let’s go back,” I said finally.

“I don’t want to go back. If I go back, they’ll drag me out to the hospital.”

“I’ll hide you in the café. I can make you a Viennese hot chocolate.”

“Vell, can ve keep talkink about mein pater, Herr Freud?”

“Vhat better place?” I replied, scratching my imaginary goatee. “Ve’ve even got a little couch you can lie on.”

Her eyebrows lifted and her cheeks quaked, but she covered the erupting laugh by kissing me again.

We gathered up our things and walked down off the bunker. We crossed to the stream and stepped over the rocks that led into the sculpture garden. I climbed up on the dumpsters behind Ludwig’s and squeezed through the back window, so that I could unlock the side door for Betsy. And I was so deliriously happy that I did not even notice the two bodies entangled on the couch in the front, until I’d invited Betsy to sit on it.

“Well hello, Suzanne,” Betsy said flatly.

The half-naked girl scrambled to her feet and, glaring furtively at Betsy, yanked her dress up and extracted herself from the still-amorous Rodrigo.

“Get off me!” Suzanne shouted, as if he had been the one holding her down. Then, avoiding Betsy’s eye, Suzanne rushed away to the lobby doors, as Rodrigo went after her, calling out in Spanish.

When the door shut, Betsy and I just stood there, unsure of how to proceed.

“He’s a really nice guy,” I said lamely.

“Oh,” Betsy said. “Yes, I’m sure they’re going to have quite a future together.”

This stung, and she could tell — though I wasn’t entirely sure that she minded. Immediately, I wondered what our future would look like. Would we go on dates? Would I have to explain, eventually, to her mother that my name was not really Walter Hartright? That I had not even applied to Princeton?

“You said something about hot chocolate? Earlier?”

Eager to dismiss this line of thought, I went to the back and with the greatest possible care, made her a perfect hot chocolate. When I came out again I found her standing on top of one of the tables, looking at the golden portrait.

“Careful!” I whispered.

She did not seem even slightly concerned, and with her perfect posture I imagined that she could have done jumping jacks up there without falling.

“Come up,” she said, reaching down a hand for me.