I was taking all that in, the way you can in the midst of a lot of other things feel some strange impulse you don’t act on, while other things are in motion.
Then I realized the large woman at the end of the aisle was Opal Ringer’s mother, the one who’d just done tongues. People passing by her were thanking her for dancing in the spirit, and she was nodding, saying, “Oh, praise the Lord,” but she was looking straight at me.
I looked behind me and then back at her, and she kept nodding, as if to say yes, it was me she was waiting for. All smiles.
We came closer and she reached out for me. She cried, “Bud! You’ve come home! Oh, thank Jesus!”
On the way home, Seal made me promise that I’d take Opal Ringer to something—a movie, a picnic at the beach, something special, Seal said, “So I can still look Arnelle in the eye after we get Diane-Young on It’s Up to You.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” I said.
I remember Bud used to call her Seal Slavedriver sometimes, because she never gave up on an idea she got.
The afternoon we drove down to Central High to pick up Diane-Young and take her to meet my father, Seal slammed her elbow into my side.
“We’ve come to the bridge,” she said. “There’s Opal.”
“I don’t even know her,” I complained.
“That’s why I want you to introduce yourself,” Seal said. “Now.”
Five
OPAL RINGER
I GUESS WHEN YOU’VE got money, you can do anything. I’ve known that to be true. How else would Diane-Young Cheek get herself transferred over to Central High, after she jumped out the gym window of Seaville High?
I remember her when she first showed up at Central, right in the middle of March, like doesn’t everybody start new in a school in dead winter? Changing schools didn’t stop the talk. But she was there one morning, limping down our halls on her crutch, just like anyone whose daddy owned CheckCheek Security, Inc., would go to Central.
She was this short, little, tough-talking tomboy, with wild brown hair that looked like big crows had made a nest on top of her head. Sitting on all that hair was a green cap, with CAT on it in gold, she wore with the peak in back. She had these bright-pink prescription glasses in silver frames, and silver braces all up and down her top and bottom teeth. She always wore corduroy Levi’s and hooded sweat shirts, and big lace-up boots she called “shit kickers.” She always had her radio/cassette over the opposite shoulder from the one with the crutch under it; top ten would blare from it and she’d chew gum in time with the music. You could always find her in the john, between classes, chain-smoking her More cigarettes, telling everyone to just call her D. Y. She said it to their backs because no one at Central knew what to make of her, much less what to say to her. She didn’t fit anyone’s picture of a rich kid, so some decided she was just a crazy, sent down to Central instead of off to Loony Tunes Hospital.
Her daddy pulled some strings to get her there, we all knew that. Maybe her daddy figured poor kids wouldn’t be so mean, and she’d fit right in with us. What her daddy didn’t know was kids are kids. Nice kids are nice kids and mean ones are mean ones, and someone like her was a target for anyone with Satan’s meanness in his blood.
She was two grades ahead of me, so it was a while before I really met up with her. I might never have met up with her at all, if Bobby John hadn’t taken to her, and spent most of what was left of his senior year being her protector. (The last girl Bobby John took up with was Selma Smetter, who was all the way in the other direction, a girlie girl who wore dresses all the time because she liked to, and used up all the school’s toilet paper covering the seats good before she sat on them. She plugged her ears if she heard cussing, and sang solos at The Hand until she ran off with a bus driver bringing in Nassau County people for a healing. On her wedding day Bobby John got drunk the one and only time in his life, tore all her pictures in half, and put them in the garbage.)
Bobby John was the only one at Central, or anywhere else far as I knew, who ever called her D. Y. They took shop together, and she made him some kind of dumb-looking footstool he took to his bedroom and treated like it was treasure. He pulled it out from under his bed once a week, sprayed it with Pledge and polished it, and never put his feet on it.
Lunchtimes they ate together in the cafeteria. He’d trade her his Twinkles for her real chocolate éclairs from Fancyfoods. When she couldn’t stand having her locker next to Ripper Blades’, the school bully, Bobby John let her move her stuff into his locker.
Ripper Blades was one of the ringleaders of the group who called her names when she went by: Die Young Cheek was one name, Why Die?, Di-Dike, and Pink Eye.
She told Bobby John Central High was still better than Seaville, because she didn’t really know the kids. She didn’t have to walk in their direction when school was out, or ever meet up with any of them around Ocean Avenue where she lived. She said she never wanted to see the Seaville crowd again in her life, because she knew too much about all of them.
Bobby John said she didn’t know about all of
