“What was you doing under the table?”
I bent back down and came up with a pen that he had dropped and handed it to him.
I had learned that in a mute existence, an action often took the place of an answer.
In this case, an action took the place of a bold-faced lie.
I was picking up your pen, Corey. See? Here you go.
He smiled at me. “Thanks! Tell me if you see that picture.”
I took the picture out again when he left. I could imagine the person behind the camera saying, “Hey, over here.”
And instead of James putting his arm around Corey’s shoulders, he took him by surprise with a playful headlock. Everybody laughs and the camera flashes. Even Corey, though if any other guy had put him in a headlock like this, it would be an act of humiliation, an affront to his manhood.
But not with James. This was a picture that Corey kept and apparently liked enough to come back for when he realized he had lost it.
And now I had stolen it.
I let my eyes sink deep into the sunshine of James’s smile and marveled over his effect on people.
THREE
That day after school, I opened my locker and took ten one-dollar bills out of the spaghetti sauce jar where I kept all my found money. On my way home, I detoured down Main Street and walked into Greeley’s Mini-Mart.
In those days, Walgreens had yet to find its way to Glass, and Greeley’s was where you went when you didn’t have the time to run to four different places for everything you needed. The selection was small and a little overpriced, but usually it did in a pinch.
And it especially did if you were Cora, because Mr. Greeley, the owner, was a friend. They had met in the bar about a week or two after his wife, Hattie Mae Greeley, passed from a stroke, and he had been coming round to the house on the second Tuesday of every month ever since. He had confessed to Cora that second Tuesdays had historical significance. After their children had grown and moved out, Hattie Mae had moved into another room and informed him that he could only visit her on the second Tuesday of every month.
This was on account of Mrs. Greeley having an appointment at the Perfect Cut on the second Wednesday of every month, so if Mr. Greeley messed up her perm with all his moving and sweating on top of her, she didn’t mind so much.
Cora told me this on one of the rare nights that she had come home drunk but without a man. Somehow, this always put her in the storytelling mood. And I suppose I was easy to talk to, seeing as how I never said anything back.
Cora told me Mr. Greeley had broken down crying after the first time they did the do, then thanked her for helping him remember his dead wife.
I’m sure that Cora had comforted him, took him in her arms and whispered words in his ear that made his tears taste like brown sugar. The secret of Cora’s many friendships was that she was always nice. The first time.
But in the retelling of the story, she had snorted and said, “Lord know if he really wanted to remember that witch, he should have chose himself a ugly woman to lay down with.”
Still, if we came into Greeley’s when not too many people were there to see, Cora could count on a significant discount. She’d give me the list and exchange sweet talk with Mr. Greeley while I worked my way down the narrow aisles, picking up soap and detergent and all the other necessaries that Cora didn’t like to think about until she absolutely had to.
The day after I stole the Polaroid, I walked past all the essential aisles, making my way to the fifth aisle where the books, office supplies, wrapping paper, and stationery were sold.
I stopped in front of two large scrapbooks. One had holographic rainbows on it and the other was a simple, elegant brown.
This was bad, because while one reflected how James made me feel on the inside, the other reflected who James actually was.