The Other New Girl by LB Gschwandtner

Author:LB Gschwandtner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

The Car Ride

IT WAS SORT OF LIKE WHAT I EXPECTED AND THEN AGAIN IT wasn’t. Mr. Brownell and his wife drove five of us to Philadelphia in a school van. We were an odd assortment.

There was Dieter, the German exchange student, who’d gotten into a shouting match with Benny Newman, a Jewish boy from Long Island. The shouting turned ugly and caught Wes in the middle.

It happened one day at the track right after Wes had finished his extra laps. I was walking out to meet him so we could talk a little before he had to go shower before supper. Most of the track team had already left and the coach was on his way to the gym. Wes was drinking some water when we both heard shouting coming from near the bleachers. The shouting got uglier, Dieter said that Benny was typical of his race. That sent Benny into a rage and he took a swing at Dieter, hitting him in the nose, which started to bleed. By then Wes dropped the water and ran over to where they were yelling at each other. Benny called Dieter a fucking Nazi bastard and Dieter punched Benny, his knuckles making contact with Benny’s left cheekbone just below the eye. Before Wes could stop them, fists were flying and they fell to the ground pounding each other.

I had never seen a fistfight before and the thing that sickened me, besides seeing blood flying, was the sound the fists made when they hit bone. It was like a crack and a thud at the same time. It made my stomach turn over but Wes started to pull Benny off of Dieter, who was the smaller of the two. A couple of other boys from the track team piled on and finally got them apart. They were both bruised up but it didn’t stop them from screaming at each other while they were restrained by the boys.

“Hey, you guys,” Wes admonished them, “you’re going to get into big trouble if you don’t cool it.” He led Benny away, talking to him in a soothing voice. I heard phrases like, “I know he’s a little prick.” And “Don’t let him get to you, man.” I don’t know what the other boys were saying to Dieter but in the car driving to Philly I thought about that day.

Dieter could come across annoyingly arrogant at times and Benny was pretty hotheaded. It wasn’t a surprise that they’d gotten into it. In those days there were still people, like some of my father’s relatives who wouldn’t buy a German car.

The girl who always talked about her missionary parents at Meeting for Worship sat in the middle row of the van with me. Her name was China Noice, named for her parents’ first missionary posting. We all knew that because she’d slipped it into one of her Meeting soliloquies. In the car she talked about “the poor” as if they were personal friends of hers and she was going to spend the holiday with them.

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