Empire Falls

She could enjoy the same treats that the fleet and well balanced enjoyed. Just not with them .
    So, only after the phalanx of buses departed, crammed with their cargoes of Empire Falls’s Vandals and Huns, Goths and Visigoths, did the Lincoln pull into one of the spaces marked FOR SCHOOL BUSES ONLY . Though grateful to Mrs. Whiting for helping him learn to drive, Miles immediately understood the cost of the instruction. Now, in addition to any lunchtime kindnesses, he was required to spend another ten or fifteen minutes with Cindy after school, as they waited for her mother. Though both were juniors, they had different homerooms, so Miles, after the first wave of students had left, helped Cindy carry her things to the front entrance. In warm weather they sometimes waited outside, until they discovered they would have to endure less ridicule if they stayed indoors .
    Ridicule was nothing new to Cindy Whiting, of course. During grade school, her classmates’ cruel pantomimes of her lurching gait resembled that of the monster in the old Frankenstein movies, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. The Whiting Walk, they called it, and there were contests to judge whose rendition was best. During recess it was not unusual to see three or four boys practicing at the same time, stumbling into the slide or the swing set, bouncing off any objects at hand. The Whiting Walk was such soul-satisfying fun that it carried over into junior high, until the day a girl from the high school, Charlene Gardiner, who was there because her little brother had forgotten his lunch money, came upon a group of boys following the Whiting girl down the corridor, all of them doing their Whiting Walk. When Cindy turned around, they pretended awkward innocence. Seeing this, Charlene Gardiner had become furious and asked the boys in a tone of withering contempt whether they thought they’d ever grow up .
    Among the boys at the junior high there was no one whose disapproval carried greater weight than Charlene Gardiner’s, since she possessed the choicest set of melons in all of Empire Falls, no contest. One of the boys in the hall that day, Jimmy Minty, having seen her in a bikini at the lake the previous summer, had spent the whole fall semester recounting the experience of watching her bend over to pick up her tube of suntan lotion. To have your maturity questioned by Charlene Gardiner was definitely a scrotum shrinker, and from that moment on, the Whiting Walk became uncool and all its former practitioners were convinced that they had, as requested, grown up .
    Which perhaps explained why it came as such a tremendous relief that first spring afternoon when Cindy Whiting and Miles Roby were observed together as they waited for her mother to rescue them. Sure, it was still uncool to make fun of Cindy Whiting by herself, but as part of a couple she was again fair game, even though Miles was the ostensible object of this new derision. Boys who already had their driver’s license would roar out of the parking lot, honking their horns and leaning out their windows to shout sexual encouragement to him, as he sat there with Cindy Whiting on a stone bench gifted to the school by the class of ’43 .
    Even more satisfying was to moon them, though this happened only once because the mooners themselves were victimized by bad luck and poor timing. Their intention had been a limited, tactical strike against the two losers on the bench, but no sooner had they framed their pimply asses in the windows of a speeding car than Mr. Boniface emerged unexpectedly from the building, his attention drawn by the honking horn. The view he was treated to stopped him in his tracks, and he watched until the car careened around the corner and out of sight. The wiggling asses might have belonged to anyone, of course, but Mr. Boniface recognized the car and thus quickly identified and suspended the appropriate scholars. Their bad luck was exacerbated by the principal’s assumption that he was their intended target, a misapprehension they were hard-pressed to correct. There didn’t seem to be an adequate way of explaining that they hadn’t meant to moon him, but rather a crippled girl .
    Even waiting inside the building did not inoculate Miles and Cindy Whiting against ridicule, of course. One afternoon the entire varsity baseball team—trailed by a grinning Mr. Brown—trotted out of the locker room, chanting “Go, Roby, go! Go, Roby, go!” all the way out to