When she reached the door of the Chestnut Street Deli Barn and saw that bitch Lisa Bellow posing at the counter inside, Meredith nearly turned on her heel and headed home. Forget the soda. She didn’t need it. Yes, its promise had propelled her through that final problem on the algebra test. Yes, its promise had helped dispel the nagging disappointment that she had not had enough time to graph the asymptotes on that final problem and thus would at best only get half credit for it (and only if Mrs. Adolphson was feeling in an extremely generous mood). But it wasn’t like she was desperate for a soda, like going without one would kill her.
There was no one in the Deli Barn besides Lisa and the curly-haired guy who made the subs—“Sandwich Farmer,” his shirt proclaimed—so Meredith would have to say something upon entering in order to not look like a total whack job, and she didn’t particularly want to have to think up something to say to Lisa that was at once fiercely clever and totally nonchalant. She had done enough thinking today, thank you very much. Often after school she felt as if she’d just spent seven hours and fifteen minutes on stage, with two brief intermissions during which she sat on a stone-cold toilet in a tiny stall cursing herself for all the missed cues and blown lines. Now, after curtain, all she wanted from the remainder of the afternoon was a large root beer and a peaceful 1.19-mile walk home in the dwindling warmth of early October. But of course there was Lisa Bellow to screw things up, Lisa Bellow who had taken so much from Meredith already, Lisa Bellow, taking again, this time a root beer.
Lisa glanced up in the direction of the door and the girls’ eyes touched for a moment through the glass. There was nothing extraordinary in the eye contact, really only the merest shade of recognition, but now Meredith was trapped; a hasty retreat, witnessed by the enemy, would be just another heap of coal in the furnace that powered their operation, further proof that Lisa and her friends controlled not only the middle school itself, but also the quiet streets, small businesses, and suburban neighborhoods that lay just beyond it.
Meredith took an instant to gather herself then casually pushed open the jingling door—there were bells attached that looked like Christmas bells, though they were there year-round—and setting her head at a disinterested angle, muttered “hey” in the general direction of Lisa and the sandwich farmer. Then she went to the potato-chip rack and began studying the nutrition information on the back of a bag of Doritos while Lisa ordered her sandwiches.
Meredith thought back to the summer between third and fourth grade, approximately a hundred and seventy-five thousand years before, when she and Lisa Bellow had both taken tennis lessons with about thirty other grade school kids at the community park. This was long before anyone was a bitch—before anyone was anything, come to think of it—and one sweltering morning Lisa Bellow had been smacked in the face with a recklessly swung Venus Williams junior racquet and her bottom lip had burst open and the instructor told Meredith (who was close enough to the incident to receive a shower of Lisa’s blood on her white shorts) to take the injured girl to the Snak Shed for some ice. Meredith and Lisa wound up spending the remainder of the morning eating snow cones in the blissful rectangle of shade thrown by the Shed, watching all the other kids getting yelled at for sloppy footwork and poor follow-through. Meredith was 98 percent certain that Lisa had no recollection of this event, that she had blocked it out, or perhaps even rewritten it with Meredith in the role of the clingy flunky sent for ice. But Meredith was sure there had been no flunky on that day, because she recalled vividly the surprise she’d felt when Lisa Bellow, her fingers green with lime snow-cone syrup, had brushed a wayward strand of hair from her face and said, “This is the best day of my whole summer.”
Not that it mattered what she’d said, what either of them had said or done, what either of them remembered. They’d been babies then, nine years old, and nothing that happened when you were nine counted for anything anymore. You certainly couldn’t collect on it now. Not that she would have wanted to anyway.
Lisa was ordering two sandwiches. One was turkey and provolone with light mayonnaise and the other a foot-long club with pickles and green peppers and extra onions. Meredith guessed that the sandwich with all the onions was for the boy in the picture in Lisa’s locker, the tan boy on the beach with the Frisbee. Lisa was probably headed to his place right now. He’d probably texted her—pick me up a sandwich—on his way home from the high school. A girlfriend and a sandwich delivery service in one! His parents at work, his man cave thick with the funk of Phoenix-scented Axe body spray (she knew this smell well, from her own bathroom), the boy with the Frisbee would devour his sandwich right before he climbed on top of Lisa and stuck his thick oniony tongue halfway down her throat.
“Just one stripe of mayo,” Lisa was telling the sandwich farmer. Meredith noticed that she had her iPhone in her hand. It was the newest iPhone, naturally, and the biggest, large enough to contain Lisa’s large life. Meredith’s phone was Evan’s hand-me-down and the screen had been cracked for over a month, ever since she’d dropped it out the car window while trying to take a picture of a rainbow. Lisa was wearing the usual uniform: black leggings and a white, cold-shoulder peasant top, its straps just barely wide enough to pass the school district’s two-finger rule.
“Not a big glob,” Lisa said. “Just one little stripe.”
Meredith had had this exact exchange with various sandwich farmers before, but she was sure she hadn’t sounded so nasty when she said it, like it was this guy’s entire purpose in life to measure out mayonnaise, like this was what he’d gone to school for, to differentiate between a stripe and a glob to make this eighth-grade bitch the perfect sandwich.
The front door jingled open and Meredith turned and saw a man stride purposefully into the Deli Barn. The man had on a black ski mask—not the kind with the eyeholes cut out, but the kind that only covered the bottom half of his face, so she could see his dark eyes and pale blond eyebrows. He wore a gray hoodie that was too long—it went nearly to his thighs—and jeans and big brown hiking boots. The door closed behind him and the Christmas bells rang for a moment in Meredith’s mind even after they were still. The man was holding a gun.