a group of strangers that she was pregnant, but she knew that was just a fantasy. Even now, looking at his car, her heart was pounding so hard it was interfering with her breathing, and there was no way she could get up enough nerve to face him. Not now. Not yet.
She considered continuing down the sidewalk, pretending as though she hadn't noticed, ignoring him if he happened to walk out to his car at the exact moment she passed by, but she decided against it and opted for crossing the street and cutting down the alley that led to Union.
The alley was dark, the flanking buildings blocking out what was left of the late afternoon light. Her uneasiness returned. The shadows here made her nervous, and she hurried over the pitted, eroded asphalt toward the opposite end, not running, not wanting to make that concession to fear, but striding quickly, hoping that her anxiety did not show. She pretended as though it was only the normal physical dangers of the city that worried her, that she was afraid of gangs and muggers and derelicts and drug addicts, but that was not the case. She could spin it that way, rationalize it, but her nervousness was based on something less concrete, something ephemeral that she could not even put her finger on, and whether it was stress or hormones or another entirely unrelated cause, all she wanted was to get out of this alley and off the streets and back home.
The girl was waiting for her at the alley's end.
Laurie was almost to Union, about to step off the rough asphalt onto the sidewalk, when she saw movement in the shadowed darkness to her right, a flash of white that startled her and made her suck in her breath.
It was a girl of about ten or eleven, a thin waiflike child with dirty hair and face and even dirtier clothing:
a white party dress covered with smudges and handprints and mud-edged rips. Her physical appearance resembled that of someone who'd been beaten or abused, but there was no sense of victimization about her, no fear or hesitancy or the sort of emotional withdrawal that would be expected after such an attack. Indeed, the child seemed remarkably self-possessed, and she stepped in front of Laurie, looking up at her. 'Hello.'
'Hi,' Laurie said, and she wasn't aware of it until she'd spoken the word, but there was something old fashioned about the girl, an anachronistic formality evidenced by her 'Hello,' by her purposeful walk and self-assured bearing, that under other circumstances would probably be cute and charming but here, in the alley, seemed unnatural and more than a little disconcerting.
There was also something vaguely erotic about the child, something sensual in the way her hair fell over the left side of her face, the way she stood, hips out, bare legs slightly spread beneath her dirty dress.
What kinds of thoughts were these?
Laurie looked into the girl's face, saw raw beauty beneath the dirt and grime, saw a knowing, adult expression on those child's features, and she felt a strange and unfamiliar stirring within her, a feeling that was almost... sexual.
Sexual?
What the hell was wrong with her?
The girl smiled up at her slyly. 'Do you want to see my underwear?'
Laurie shook her head, backed away, but the girl was already lifting up her dirty dress, exposing clean white underpants beneath, and Laurie was looking. She didn't know what was going on here, but the tight cotton and clearly outlined private parts were somehow arousing, and she was unable to turn away.
The girl laughed, a high child's giggle that segued halfway through into a woman's throaty chuckle. She turned around in a circle, still holding up her dress, exposing her pantied buttocks.
Laurie was frightened more than anything else. She did not know what was happening, but she had the sense that she should, that she was supposed to know who this child was and why she was doing this.
The girl was once again facing her, and she smiled knowingly. 'Do you want to see my pussy?'
Laurie turned and ran.
She was almost to Union and could've walked around the girl and out to the street, but even the idea of running back through the shadowed alley and perhaps meeting up with Matt seemed preferable to moving any closer to the child and risking accidental contact.
She was out of breath when she reached the sidewalk, but she turned left and kept running, past Matt's unmoved car on the other side of the street, past businesses and houses, up the hill, not stopping until she was home.
She locked the doors, drew the drapes.
She dreamed that night of the girl, and in her dream the child was naked and in bed with her. She was kissing the girl on the lips, and those lips were soft and knowing, the girl's smooth body warm and deliciously sensual, the feel of her budding breasts achingly erotic.
Laurie had never been this aroused before, and though she became aware at some point that this was not real, that she was dreaming, she did not want it to end and she purposely tried to prolong the dream, to manipulate its specifics in order to draw it out. She was rubbing herself against the girl, feeling soft femininity between her legs, and she was wet, wetter than she had ever been in her life, her lubricating juices dripping down her thighs, smearing the skin between them. There was no penetration, but she was already reaching orgasm, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out, involuntary spasms wracking her body as wave after wave of pleasure coursed through her, spreading outward from between her legs.
When she awoke, her period had come.
Norton Fall had arrived early this year. It was the end of August and school had just started, but already the trees outside the classroom window were a red and yellow rainbow against the flat gray of the Iowa sky.
Norton Johnson hated to be inside on a day like today. It ran counter to every impulse in his body, and it was on days like this that he seriously considered taking the Board up on their offer and retiring.
There was no way he could retire, though. He turned back toward his class, stared out at the blank bored teenage faces before him. These kids needed him. They didn't know it, but they did. The other teachers in school might think of him as a dinosaur, a relic from an earlier age, but he knew that the only way these students would ever learn anything, the only way they would ever overcome the lax parenting and media overstimulation that was their world, was through someone who cared enough to hold their noses to the grindstone.
Straight teaching. That's what they needed. Lectures, note taking , reading, essays, tests. Not this 'cooperative learning,'
not the current fads of the current educational 'experts.'
He'd been here before. In the late sixties, early seventies.
When teachers had 'rapped' to their students.
When one of the English classrooms had had beanbag chairs and pillows instead of desks. When students had been allowed to design their own course curriculum and grade their own papers, giving themselves the scores they thought they deserved. He alone had resisted that foolishness, had insisted that there was nothing wrong with the tried and true methods of teaching to which he'd been subjected and that he'd been successfully using for years.
He'd been laughed at then, too. But those days had come. And they'd gone.
And he was still here.
The current educational fallacy was that facts and dates weren't important, that students were better off learning 'concepts' rather than information, and he was determined to wait out this trend as well, to remain at the school, to continue on as department chairman until this too had passed.
Still . . .
He looked wistfully out the window. The air probably smelled like fireplace smoke. The slight breeze rattling the trees was probably brisk and cold.
He forced himself to continue on with his lecture.
The fact was, as much as he hated to admit it, his mind wandered more often these days than it had in the past. He was not senile or unfocused or unable to concentrate. It was not that. It was simply that his priorities now were different. Intellectually, his work remained paramount, but emotionally his needs were shifting. He no longer received the same satisfaction from teaching as he had before. He sometimes found himself wanting to gratify simpler, more basic desires.
The verities of old age.
