CHAPTER FIVE: Locker Sixteen
It isn’t a romance just yet, Dante had told his new friend. But the rest of that week gave cause to let.
Monday morning he arrived at school to find Sunny seated pertly on his desk, green eyes dancing, bare legs swinging. Sunny’s own desk was occupied by another girl. She sat in the chair, so while speaking to Sunny she had to look up. She seemed to be in the middle of some piece of gossip or other. Her mouth moved a hundred miles a minute; her hands waved. Yet whatever story she was telling interested Sunny only just. So it appeared to Dante. As before when he’d caught her with her friends, she was smiling, nodding, but not talking. That changed when she noticed Dante. As he approached the desk she whirled on him with a shark grin, cutting her friend off mid-sentence, and sang:
“What a perfectly beautiful morning!”
Dante smiled. He couldn’t think of a better way to describe it.
She introduced him to the friend the way a buyer might talk about being interested in a new car. “Dante this is Stacey. Stacey, Dante. He’s tall and might be strong enough. I’ll keep you posted.”
A girl with hair black as Sunny’s was red told Dante hello. She looked highly amused. Charmed even. “He does look much tougher than last year’s catch.”
“I can’t imagine him being weaker. Go sit down now. I’ll see you at lunch.”
And as a stray cat gets chased from capricious doors, Stacey scurried off. Dante had time to notice that her smile had fallen, and lay shattered under the desk.
“What about you?” Sunny asked Dante, slipping to her feet. “Am I going to see you at lunch?”
Mr. Wolfe had come into the room. His arms were crossed in a severe way that meant it was almost time to get quiet.
“Yes,” Dante replied.
Sunny frowned. It didn’t seem to be enough for her. “Uh-huh. And where am I sitting?” Her posture was that of a sassy brat: one knee bent slightly, hands on hips, face tilted.
“Well…you can sit with me if you like.”
Silence. Dante noticed her freckles beginning to flare.
“Class?” Mister Wolfe called. “Please be seated.”
It was as if Sunny hadn’t heard. Her green eyes never left Dante. “If I like?” her lips writhed. “Am I sitting with you or not?”
“Yes,” Dante coughed, “please.”
“Don’t ask me, Dante. Tell me.”
“Sit down everyone,” came Mister Wolfe’s voice again.
And again Sunny ignored him. Dante glanced over her to see that most of the other kids hadn’t. Chairs squeaked with the myriad placement of butts. Loud talking softened to low muttering. The day was about to begin.
“Look at me, Mister,” Sunny commanded.
Dante did.
“Good boy. Now. Tell me. Where am I eating lunch today?”
∞
“And did you tell her?” Donati asked, days later after Dante recounted this scene.
“Not in a forceful enough way, I don’t think,” Dante answered.
“So she didn’t eat lunch with you?”
“No. Not on that day.”
“I see. But she provided another opportunity.”
“She did. I messed that up, too.”
∞
The week passed slowly. It was a most miserable time for Dante. On Tuesday morning he smiled and greeted Sunny hello. She would not smile back, or even acknowledge his presence. Bare legs crossed beneath her desk, she flipped through a history book, pretending to care about homework. Yesterday she blew off lunch with him, though he’d told her to be there. Well…almost. His command (for want of a better word) had been something more forceful than a question, at least. Yet she decided to eat with her friends anyway. From his table across the cafeteria he’d recognized Stacey, who also wouldn’t look at him. Dante imagined Sunny had commanded (properly) her friends not to pay the slightest bit of attention him.
The rest of that Tuesday went the same way—no lunch date, no words. Nothing. Not even a moment of eye contact. This too on Wednesday. In fact on Wednesday morning she raised her hand and asked Mr. Wolfe for a change of seats.
“This weird boy keeps bothering me,” she said, nodding toward Dante.
“Is that a fact?” the homeroom teacher asked, after everyone had stopped laughing.
Beet red, Dante began to bluster silly denials, which were cut off by Sunny.
“Yes he does, Mr. Wolfe. He keeps whispering that he wants to kiss me.”
At this the whole class went up like a Roman candle. Anyone not laughing hard enough to fall out of their chair was forced to help those who had. Even Mr. Wolfe thought it funny. Grinning, he chose to let the Bedlam die down its own, which took several minutes, all of which felt like sheer torture to Dante. Never in his life had he been the object of such spectacle, of such humiliating fixation. News of the incident soon spread throughout the entire school, so by Friday he was a minor celebrity, perhaps even a major one. On Thursday kids began addressing him as “Kiss Me” instead of Dante, and the name stuck.
Hi, Kiss Me! they sang as he fought with his locker door, which had begun to jam again worse than ever. Kiss Me! they called at lunch, while Dante stared miserably at his egg salad sandwich. Seeya tomorrow, Kiss Me! they shouted at the end of the day.
It was horrible, quite horrible. Or it might have been, except that on Friday afternoon, Sunny decided to talk to him again, this time in a decidedly more amiable fashion.
Classes were over. The weekend beckoned with open arms. Amidst a clamorous fury of eager seventh graders, Dante trudged to his locker. He talked to no one, saw no one. His eyes were on his shoes, so all he saw were those and what seemed like a million pairs of others, swarming to get outside.
“Kiss Me!” he heard someone cry.
“Hey, Kiss Me! Seeya Monday!” another yelled.
Dante did his best to tune them out. His mind went to the homework pile on tap for the weekend. Thirty long division problems for math. A reading assignment for English (Contents Of A Dead Man’s Pocket). There was even a health task for the boys, doled out by their gym coach: fifty push-ups. Twenty for the girls.
“Kiss Me! Look everybody, there’s Kiss Me!”
Go away, Dante thought.
At last he came to his locker. His hand dialed the combination. And of course, it would not open. Groaning inwardly at the thought of yet another fracas with faulty property, Dante tried it again. It did no good. The locker was jammed. Again.
“Hello, Kiss Me,” someone behind him sang.
Dante froze. His heart skipped a beat. The voice was familiar—high-pitched, pretty, yet cool and fiendish all the same. A pink knife with painted flower on the handle.
He turned around and there stood Sunny, her brow arched, her grin predatory. She was dressed in her usual style: black boots, pink knee-length skirt, blue classic blouse with short sleeves.
“H-Hello, Sunny,” Dante forced himself to say.
“Having fun with that locker?” the girl asked.
Dante glanced at the black dial. “Well, it’s…it’s stuck.”
“Sure it is.” Sunny tilted her head. “Hey, aren’t you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Stop lying.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
Dante watched the girl’s eyes suddenly narrow into slits. “Well I’m mad at you. Not telling me to sit with you for lunch. Do you like me or not?” And before Dante’s astonished gaze she twirled around on one leg, fanning the pink skirt out like a ballerina’s.
“I do,” he said.
“Then you’re going to need to be stronger, Dante. A lot stronger. I have standards.”
Just then one of the other students noticed them talking. A short, stocky boy with blond hair. “Woo-hoo!” the boy chimed from across the hall. “Hey everyone, it looks like Kiss Me still wants to be with Sunny!”
Sunny turned to look at him. But before she did, Dante noticed her face flood to near poisonous levels of hatred. The boy must have seen it too, for the grin melted from his face almost instantly.
“What?” he said, trying to sound tough.
“We’re having a conversation here,” Sunny told him. “Do you mind?”
By this time some of the other students had stopped to watch the confrontation—boys and girls of different shapes and sizes. Dante felt himself flush with embarrassment…until it became apparent none of the onlookers looked amused. No one looked ready to laugh. Instead, Dante noticed, they were rather like the boy who now stood in Sunny’s crosshairs: afraid.
“Well, well, well,” the boy managed to say, sounding weaker by the moment. “Sunny likes Kiss Me, too. How nice.”
“Yeah,” Sunny said. “Maybe she does.”
A large black spider crawled out of the boy’s bag. It bit him on the hand, making him scream. All of the girls who saw it screamed too, while the boys yelped and gaped.
Sunny watched the antics for only a moment before losing her temper completely. “Break it up!” she shrieked. “Go home, all of you!”
No one needed to be told twice. Dante watched the kids scatter as if the spider—which disappeared suddenly as it had appeared—might soon crawl onto one of them. The stocky blond boy was clutching his hand. Tears drenched his puffy cheeks. “What did you do!” he yelled at Sunny. “What did you do!”
“I didn’t do anything, idiot, it was a spider. You might want to have nurse Renson look at that hand.”
Leaving his bag on the floor, the stocky boy ran off. Now it was literally just Dante and Sunny in the hall. They had the entire wing to themselves.
“Where were we?” Sunny asked, not sounding as if she had the patience for any more games.
Dante didn’t know what words he might speak to defuse the ticking time bomb standing before him. The silence of the hall felt thick and creeping ever closer. He looked at Sunny’s freckles. Her green eyes. Her red hair. She was fierce and frightening and really quite beautiful.
“My locker,” he said. “But it’s okay. I can just tell the principal—“
“You can open it right now,” Sunny snapped. “But you need motivation, that’s obvious.” Her face relaxed—a little—to let a devious smile curl the corners of her lips. “Imagine a girl trapped inside, Dante. She’s trapped inside and has to hold her breath, because the locker is full of water. Could you get it open then?”
This bizarre spillage of words confused him utterly. Blinking, Dante said: “I—I would certainly hope so.”
“Me too. I like swimming, Dante, but every so often I need to come up for air. All girls do.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“If I were trapped in here”—she tapped the locker with a tiny fist—“holding my breath, could you get me out? Tell me,” she demanded, before he could splutter something absurd.
And with all the courage he could manage, Dante somehow told her: “Yes.”
Sunny took a step closer. Her voice lowered to a near whisper as she said: “I’m going to get a niccce, deeeep breath for you, Dante. Deepest I can. Then I’m going to wait.”
“Uh…”
“While I’m waiting I want you to open that locker. Don’t let me run out of air.”
“All right.”
“You’d better be more confident than you sound,” she told him.
She was now standing close enough to share the smell of a girl: perfume, shampoo, baby powder. He could hear her high, sweet, pretty breath as she gasped in and out, getting her lungs ready.
Her eye went to the locker. “How stuck is it today?”
“I’ve already tried it twice. It’s being stubborn.”
Sunny breathed in again—hahhhhhhh! Her slim chest rose high. Then she let the breath out—phew! “All right,” she said, “next one’s it. Put your hand on the dial.”
Dante did.
“Your hand is shaking,” she observed. “Relax, Dante. Be a man.” She then tilted her head back. “Ready?” she said at the ceiling.
“Ready,” Dante, still shaking, replied.
“HAAAUUUUHHH!” Sunny gasped. When her chest was quite full, she looked at Dante and smiled.
Immediately he set to work. He cranked the dial right, left, then right again, making certain to stop on all the correct numbers. His hand fumbled to the latch, pulled.
The locker stayed shut.
Taking a deep breath of his own, Dante tried again. Right, left, right. Now the latch. Come on , latch, he thought, how about a break?
But no. Once more the latch simply would not move.
Next to him, Sunny let out a tiny moan. She was getting uncomfortable. Starting to feel some tightness, some pressure. Dante looked and saw that her lips were pursed. Arching a brow, she pointed to the locker. Get back to work, mister.
In the middle of the third try she let out a longer moan. “Mmmnnnn!”
It caused Dante to lose his concentration and start over with the dial. Even so, the latch remained stubborn.
A desperate hand tapped his arm. Sunny’s eyes were wide. Her freckled cheeks were puffed. Frantically, she pointed to her chest. The lungs inside were just about spent.
“Nn! Gnn!”
Dante’s fifth try didn’t even come close. He was yet to even finish dialing the combination when Sunny drowned. Out of breath and still far from the surface, she drowned. A hard, heavy gasp signaled her defeat—or rather, Dante’s.
“PHEW! WHEW!” she heaved. Needing support, she grabbed his shoulder. “You did that…on purpose!”
“No!” Dante said, appalled. “No way!”
“You just had to let the damsel perish in a watery grave!”
“Never!”
Sunny looked up…and smiled. “Shame on you. That really hurt.”
“I’m sorry!”
“I should have told you my personal best is only about thirty seconds. After that”—she snapped her fingers—“hey, the girl’s gotta have air. Phew!”
Dante edged closer so she could lean on him some more. “Are you all right?” Then he kicked the locker—BAM! “Stupid thing.”
“Yeah!” Sunny cheered. “Beat that hunk of metal!”
“Seriously, Sunny, are you all right?”
“Phew! Of course I’m all right! I wasn’t…you know…underwater for real. Thankfully,” he heard her mutter as an afterthought.
Dante looked at his locker. “I guess the school needs to replace this thing.”
“Nah,” Sunny said. “I bet now because you kicked it, it’ll open. Try it.”
Shrugging, Dante dialed his combination. No way did he think it would open. Nor did it matter, considering the girl inside was already dead. Still, when he pulled the handle, the door popped and swung wide, revealing his coat, his books. His gym bag. A dirty mirror. A pack of Black Jack chewing gum.
Sunny gave him a pat on the back. “See? It just took a little toughness. I knew it was in you.”
“Monday it’ll get stuck again,” Dante said.
Her response was adamant. “No it won’t. You showed it who’s boss.” In the next moment she was standing on tip-toe to kiss his cheek. “You also found out how long the totally great, totally awesome Sunset Desdemona can hold her breath. Don’t tell anyone else.”
Dante couldn’t respond. The kiss had set his heart into hysterics. A fireworks show lit the firmament of his brain, rendering blindness upon all rational thought.
“It’ll be just our secret, okay?” she whispered.
“Yes. Yes. No problem.”
“I gotta go. My dad’s probably waiting outside. But maybe next week I’ll let you walk me home.” She grinned. “If you’re a good boy. Bye!”
With that, she skipped off, leaving him as last actor of the stage. Not wishing to abandon the privilege too soon, Dante remained, placing his books down slowly on purpose, straightening his hair in the mirror. Then he closed the locker door. An utterly silent hallway, devoid of expression, regarded him. All of the classroom doors were shut and locked.
Weird. Shouldn’t there be some teachers doing gradework yet?
Apparently not.
He stood for another minute, enjoying the quiet. “Time to go,” he told himself. “Time to go.”
And still thinking of Sunny, he went home.