“Just casually. We talk.”
“Isn’t he with what’s her face?”
“Laura, yeah. She’s cool.”
“So…”
“I said. It’s just casual.”
“Would you go out with him if he asked you?”
“He’s not going to ask me.”
“I can actually sort of see it,” Jeannie said. “You and him together.”
“You haven’t seen the way he is with Laura.”
“You know what I mean, though. You’re going to be with someone, sometime. And, Jesus—Tanner Evans? I can really almost see it.”
So, now, suddenly, could Becky. She had only to picture it as it would appear to people like Jeannie, as a crowning confirmation of her status, a punishing lesson to every lesser boy who’d imagined he could date her, and the thought became lodged in her head. Why, after all, had Tanner challenged her to try Crossroads? Wasn’t this evidence of interest in her? Even his teasing—maybe especially his teasing—was evidence.
From Clem’s involvement with the group, she knew enough to dress down for it, but she wasn’t Jeannie’s keeper. When Jeannie picked her up, in the silver Mustang her parents had given her, she was wearing dress slacks, an expensive brocade vest, and a lot of makeup. Becky felt sorry for her, but she didn’t mind having an overdressed friend to feel cooler than. The Crossroads meeting room was shockingly crowded with people she knew the names of, had given many a congenial smile to in classrooms and hallways, and would never have dreamed of seeing socially. In a far corner was a tangle of bodies like a collapsed game of Twister with her brother Perry at the bottom of it, fighting a battle of tickles with a fat girl in bib overalls, his face red with happiness, quite a bizarre sight. Becky and Jeannie sat down with two former friends from Lifton Central. One of them, Kim Perkins, a cheerleader who’d strayed into promiscuity and drugs, gave Becky a welcoming hug and petted her head as if it were she, not Kim, who had strayed. Kim tried to hug Jeannie as well, but Jeannie raised a hand to ward her off.
And so it went. Downstairs, in the function hall, Becky opened herself to the activities because Jeannie couldn’t. When people taped a sheet of newsprint to their back and wrote messages on other backs with felt-tip pens, Becky scrawled Looking forward to getting to know you! Becky on back after back, stopping only to be scrawled upon, while Jeannie, looking miserable in her dress slacks, stood to the side and frowned at her pen as if its workings were a mystery. The group then formed a circle of crosshatched bodies, everyone’s head resting on their neighbor’s belly. There was no obvious point to the exercise except to start laughing as a group and feel your head bouncing on a laughing belly and another head bouncing on yours, but to Becky, positioned between two boys she’d never spoken to, it seemed strange that she’d spent her life surrounded by bellies, all of them as familiar to their owners as her own belly was to her, all of them potentially touchable, and yet they were almost never touched. Strange that a possibility constantly present was so seldom acted on. She was sorry when the exercise ended.
“We’re going to break into groups of six,” Rick Ambrose said. “I want each of us in the group to talk about something we’ve done that was wrong. Something we’re ashamed of. And then I want each of us to talk about something we’ve done that we’re proud of. The point here is to listen, all right? Really listen. We’ll meet back here at nine.”
Not wanting to be in a group where she knew nobody, Becky pounced on the one Kim Perkins was forming and left Jeannie to fend for herself. A friend of Perry’s, David Goya, tried to join Kim’s group, but Rick Ambrose stepped in front of him and blocked him out. Becky hadn’t expected that Ambrose himself would participate in the exercise. She and the others followed him upstairs and sat down in the hallway outside her father’s office. At the sight of her father’s name on the door, her chest constricted with the consequence of what she was doing to him. She’d had every right to try Crossroads, but a betrayal was a betrayal.
Rick Ambrose was smaller than he loomed in her parents’ demonology. He was like a little black-mustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves. Following his own instructions, he listened intently while a tough kid Becky had known only by face told the story of breaking windows at Lifton Central with a slingshot after he’d gotten a D-minus in physical science, Kim Perkins the story of having sex with a summer-camp counselor whose girlfriend was the counselor in her cabin.