He was an adult, wearing one of those black leather sports coats I’d only seen hustlers and dealers wear. But he looked more like an actor or a good-looking schoolteacher. His hair was dark and wavy, and from all the way across the deli, I could see his blue eyes, a pretty, light blue, hard to look away from. He saw us staring at him, but paid more attention to Rudy and Tom. He walked very slowly to get in line behind them.
Leitha nodded, like she’d just made up her mind about something. I remember thinking I was about to be entertained.
The cops got their lunch and sat in the next booth over. Leitha got up to throw most of her sandwich away. She never finished eating anything. The new guy waited for his order and didn’t seem to notice Leitha as she got a toothpick from the box, only a few inches from his hand. He drummed his fingers on the counter, slowly. Even I could tell he was pretending not to see her.
Leitha came back to her seat, biting her thumbnail, momentarily thwarted in her quest for attention, but I knew she’d find a way to get as much as she wanted.
I’d forgotten my root beer was empty, that only melting ice cubes remained. I sucked my straw, and it made a loud slurping sound. Leitha giggled. Arlo and the cops ignored us, but the new guy smiled without looking over. I checked Leitha’s face to see if she’d noticed. She grinned right at the new guy.
When Arlo got up to leave, he walked close by our booth. “Black jeans,” he mumbled, and he left through the glass doors. Leitha and I both noticed it. The new guy was wearing black jeans, too.
“Oh my god,” Leitha said and laughed. Everyone actively ignored us. I knew we were being annoying, and I felt embarrassed, which happened a lot when I was with Leitha. When the counter guy put the new guy’s sandwich into a paper bag, Leitha pulled on my hand as she got up. “Bye officers,” she said, smiling her most innocent smile.
“Bye bye,” Rudy said, smiling back. Tom waved, his mouth full of fries.
Out the door we went, into the too-early fall, through the little pile of leaves. The temperature had cooled, had become too chilly for the t-shirts we had on. Leitha stopped at the edge of the small, nearly empty parking lot. She leaned the side of her head against a telephone pole, looking pouty, like a model in a magazine.
“What are we doing?” I asked. I was still having fun.
The new guy came outside. In the sunlight, I could see that his leather coat was cracked and worn. He didn’t seem surprised to see us, and from the way he walked over, I wondered if Leitha had known him all along, and was pretending not to.
“Hello there,” she said. She looked him over from his black boots to his face in one quick sweep.
“Hello to you,” he said. “What are you girls up to today?” He sounded like he was from England.
“You’re British?” I asked.
He looked friendly when he smiled and tucked the paper bag under his black leather arm, but he didn’t answer.
“What are you?” Leitha asked, challenging him, maybe as punishment for smiling at me first. “English? Irish?”
“Pernicious,” he said. I remembered that word from a vocabulary test we had once, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it meant.
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