“And he’s handsome and self-effacing,” Jesse said.
“How did you know?”
“They’re always self-effacing and handsome.”
“All of them?”
“All the small-school heroes, it’s part of the heroism. The expectations of the town force it upon them.”
“Even the handsome?”
“Might be sort of circular. Probably wouldn’t be the town hero if he were ugly.”
“Even if he were just as good?” Lilly said.
“Maybe,” Jesse said.
“Well, that’s cynical.”
“Or observant.”
She smiled at him. “Being observant would make you cynical,” Lilly said. “Wouldn’t it.”
“You seem observant,” Jesse said.
“I try.”
“But you don’t seem cynical.”
“I’m in the hope business,” Lilly said.
“Education?”
“Yes.”
“You think you might be saving them?”
“I have to think so, or hope so,” Lilly said. “Otherwise what have I done with my life?”
Jesse sipped his iced tea and looked at her. Lilly’s eyes were almond shaped and dark brown, maybe black. Her skin was smooth. She wore quite a bit of makeup, but carefully.
“What about Billie?” Jesse said.
Lilly breathed deeply through her nose. It made her chest move.
“Billie Bishop,” she said.
Jesse was quiet. Lilly shook her head gently.
“Billie was…” She stopped to think about it. “Billie was our town pump,” she said.
“Don’t beat around the bush,” Jesse said.
“I know. It’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it?”
“We used to say it when I was a kid,” Jesse said.
“We all did,” Lilly said. “It says everything and nothing.”
Jesse nodded. There were potato chips with his sandwich. Jesse ate one.
“I’m more interested in everything,” he said.
“Yes.”
Jesse looked at the ocean. It was uninterrupted here, stretching to Spain. In Jesse’s imagination, the Atlantic was a gray ocean. The Pacific had been blue.
“Teachers hear things, and they gossip.”
“I’m shocked,” Jesse said.
Lilly smiled. “Billie,” she said, “was probably what we would have called, in less enlightened times, a nymphomaniac.”
Jesse smiled. “Not a bad thing in a woman,” he said.
Lilly looked at him thoughtfully.
“Sexuality is not a bad thing in a woman,” she said.
“It certainly isn’t.”
“But frequent indiscriminate sex probably is,” Lilly said. “However outmoded the phrase, it at least served to identify sexuality rooted in something wrong.”
“So does ‘town pump.’ “
“Yes.”
“And there’s something wrong with Billie?”
“I think so. A school principal knows very little about the souls of her students.”
Jesse nodded.
