4: 4
4
My lung power was no joke.
For one instant the whole dining hall seemed to freeze, just a fraction of a second.
Then, all at once, every head turned toward us.
Stanley's face flushed a hot, angry red.
He glared at me with pure resentment.
"Dawn, Dawn Henson, what, what do you think you're doing?"
I said it right there, in front of everyone.
"What am I doing?"
"You're a grown man playing pitiful in front of a girl, tricking me out of my steak with a jar of stinking pickled radish. How do you even have the nerve?"
"If you want it, can't you buy it yourself?"
The chatter started up around us.
"Isn't that Stanley Dickerson, the campus heartthrob?"
"Didn't he always say he's poor but has too much backbone to ever live off a woman? So now he's turned into some kept boy?"
"Please. Big talk, and he's just a freeloader after all."
The comments kept coming, and every one of them cut deep.
Stanley looked like he wanted to shrink his head down into his neck.
Red-faced, he demanded, glaring at me with all that resentment,
"Dawn Henson, if you didn't want to treat me, fine, don't. Why humiliate me like this?"
"You did it on purpose, didn't you?"
I admitted it flat out.
"That's right. I did it on purpose."
Stanley was so wounded that tears actually spilled down his face.
"Dawn Henson, I hate you. I'll hate you for the rest of my life!"
He covered his face and ran out of the dining hall.
I hurried to remind him,
"Take your radish and pickles with you."
"Oh, and you borrow money from me every month. You owe me a hundred twenty-three thousand four hundred and five dollars now. Don't forget to pay it back."
Amid my shouting, Stanley fled as fast as he could.
The crowd around me broke up too.
But I knew perfectly well this was going to be the hottest gossip on campus for a while.
Just as I was feeling pleased with myself, thinking I'd gotten a bit of revenge for the original owner,
a few girls stepped up in front of me.
"Dawn Henson, you've really gone too far."
I looked up at the girls standing there.
Every one of them was a girl who was chasing after Stanley.
And the one in the white miniskirt was Tilda Simmons, the heroine, the love of Stanley's life.
"You know perfectly well Stanley's family is poor and he can't afford steak, that's why he came to you to treat him. How could you humiliate him in front of everyone like that?"
"Exactly. Baby Stanley is already having such a hard time, and he just wanted a bite to eat. Would it kill you to treat him? Why did you have to humiliate him?"
"How can you be so vicious to Baby Stanley?"
Faced with the whole group of them ganging up to accuse me,
I calmly asked back,
"Yeah, I did it on purpose. So what?"
The girls all froze.
None of them had expected me to answer like that.
For a moment it stuck in their throats.
It was the heroine, Tilda, who recovered fastest. She pointed at me and said,
"Dawn Henson, don't you think that's just vicious?"
"It's only one steak. Why couldn't you just treat him?"
"You know Stanley has a lot of pride. Humiliating him like this is the same as destroying him!"
I countered, perfectly calm,
"Easy for you to say. If it's so easy, why don't you treat him?"
Tilda put on her wounded look.
"I, I, I, my family doesn't give me much of an allowance. I can't afford it, or I definitely would have."
Of course she wouldn't.
All she ever did with Stanley was take. She never gave.
I looked at her and smiled. "You really feel that sorry for Stanley?"
"Funny, though. The way I remember it, for your last birthday you had him buy you a laptop."
"Oh, and last month, last month when you wanted a new bag, you had Stanley pay for it too, didn't you?"
"And last week, when you wanted to take your roommates out for karaoke, Stanley got stuck with the tab in the end, didn't he?"
