Grace stepped back, her mouth half-open and moist, breathing rapidly and shallowly. She raised her hands, palms out, in a curiously dove-like gesture, and pushed her hair away from her cheeks. Irma looked up at her dumbly, unbelievingly. She struggled to her knees again, and for a moment I thought she was going to offer a prayer to Grace. Then she began to weep.
Grace looked at the class, then looked at me. Her breasts were very full, pushing at the soft fabric of her sweater.
'My mother fucks,' she said, 'and I love her.'
The applause started somewhere in the back, maybe with Mike Gavin or Nancy Caskin. But it started and spread until they were all applauding, all but Ted Jones and Susan Brooks. Susan looked too overwhelmed to applaud. She was looking at Gracie Stanner shiningly.
Irma knelt on the floor, her face in her hands. When the applause died (I had looked at Sandra Cross; she applauded very gently, as if in a dream), I said, 'Stand up, Irma. '
She looked at me wonderingly, her face streaked and shadowed and ravaged, as if she had been in a dream herself.
'Leave her alone,' Ted said, each word distinct.
'Shut up,' Harmon Jackson said. 'Charlie is doing all right.'
Ted turned around in his seat and looked at him. But Harmon did not drop his eyes, as he might have done at another place, another time. They were both on the Student Council together-where Ted, of course, had always been the power.
'Stand up, Irma,' I said gently.
'Are you going to shoot me?' she whispered.
'You said you were sorry.'
'She made me say it. '
'But I bet you are.'
Irma looked at me dumbly from beneath the madhouse of her toilet-paper-roll curls. 'I've always been sorry,' she said. 'That's what makes it s-s-s-so hard to s-say.'
'Do you forgive her?' I asked Grace.
'Huh?' Grace looked at me, a little dazed. 'Oh. Yeah. Sure.' She walked suddenly back to her seat and sat down, where she looked frowningly at her hands.
'Irma?' I said.
'What?' She was peering at me, doglike, truculent, fearful, pitiful.
'Do you have something you want to say?'
'I don't know.'
She stood up a little at a time. Her hands dangled strangely, as if she didn't know exactly what to do with them.
'I think you do. '
'You'll feel better when it's off your chest, Irma, ' Tanis Gannon said. 'I always do. '
'Leave her alone, fa Chrissake,' Dick Keene said from the back of the room.
'I don't want to be let alone,' Irma said suddenly. 'I want to say it.' She brushed back her hair defiantly. Her hands were not dove-like at all. 'I'm not pretty. No one likes me. I never had a date. Everything she said is true. There.' The words rushed out very fast, and she screwed up her face while she was saying them, as if she were taking nasty medicine.
'Take a little care of yourself, ' Tanis said. Then, looking embarrassed but still determined: 'You know, wash, shave your legs and, uh, armpits. Look nice. I'm no raving beauty, but I don't stay home
'I don't know how!'
Some of the boys were beginning to look uneasy, but the girls were leaning forward. They looked sympathetic now, all of them. They had that confessions-at-the-pajama-party look that every male seems to know and dread.
'Well . . . ' Tanis began. Then she stopped and shook her head. 'Come back here and sit down. '
Pat Fitzgerald snickered. 'Trade secrets?'
'That's right.'
'Some trade,' Corky Herald said. That got laughs. Irma Bates shuttled to the back of the room, where she, Tanis, Anne Lasky, and Susan Brooks started some sort of confabulation. Sylvia was talking softly with Grace, and Pig Pen's eyes were crawling avidly over both of them. Ted Jones was frowning at the air. George Yannick was carving something on the top of his desk and smoking a cigarette-he looked like any busy carpenter. Most of the other; were looking out the windows at the cops directing traffic and conferring in desperate-looking little huddles. I could pick out Don Grace, good old Tom Denver, and Jerry Kesserling, the traffic cop.
A bell went off suddenly with a loud bray, making all of us jump. It made the cops outside jump, too. A couple of them pulled their guns.
'Change-of-classes bell,' Harmon said.
I looked at the wall clock. It was 9:50. At 9:05 I had been sitting in my seat by the window, watching the squirrel. Now the squirrel was gone, good old Tom Denver was gone, and Mrs. Underwood was really gone. I
