eyeliner pencil, all of which I immediately threw out and eventually replaced with those remnants of myself that Sheriff Stone would later find in the same cramped room—a guide to medical schools in the United States, a copy of A
It had become my habit to work on the
I was probably doing exactly that the afternoon I heard a soft knock, then watched as the door swung open slowly. She stood in a dense shadow, backlit by the harsh light of the outer corridor, but I recognized her instantly.
“Hi,” I said, then for some reason took off my glasses and began rubbing the lenses with my shirttail.
“Hi.”
I returned the glasses to my eyes. “Are you looking for somebody?” I asked.
“You,” Kelli said.
“Me?”
“Miss Carver said you’d be down here. That’s why I came down. To bring you this.” She drew a piece of folded paper from the pocket of her skirt. “It’s a poem. Do you publish poems in the
“I publish just about anything in it,” I told her with a small, sour laugh.
She looked at me sternly, as if in disapproval. “You mean, whether it’s any good or not?”
I gave her a worldly shrug. “Well, I don’t have a lot to choose from,” I explained. “You know, just typical high school stuff. Choctaw High. Rah. Rah. Rah.”
My answer did not appear to satisfy her, but she said nothing else. Instead, she simply handed me the paper.
“It’s just a few lines. If you don’t like it, you can tell me.”
She had crowned me with an unexpected authority, and I remember briefly reveling in it. “Okay,” I said. “But no matter what, it’s probably better than most of the stuff I get in.” I glanced toward the paper. “You want me to read it now?”
“No,” Kelli answered decisively. “Later.”
“Okay.”
She lingered a moment longer, perhaps reluctant to leave her poem behind. “Well, I have to get to the bus,” she said finally. She stepped away from the door, out into the full light of the corridor and stood facing me. “I guess you’ll let me know.”
“Tomorrow,” I told her, my hand involuntarily jerking up, as if reaching for her as she fled away, “I’ll read it tonight and talk to you tomorrow.”
She nodded briskly, turned and headed down the corridor.
I rose immediately, stepped into the hallway and looked after her.
She was already several yards away by then, her figure disappearing up the stairs at the far end of the hallway.
I returned to my desk, unfolded the paper she’d given me and read what she’d written, my eyes following the lines in a room that still gave off the sense of Allison Cryer’s tenure there, and with it, all that through countless generations had felt safe and warm.
The poem was as she had described it, only a few lines, but as I read it again, and then a third time, I felt its sense of dread as if it had been whispered into my ear rather than written out and handed to me on a small sheet of plain white paper. There was something mysterious in its message, something hinted at but otherwise concealed, and thinking literally—which was the only way I could think in those days—I wanted to know about the “rain-dark alleyway” she’d written of, and which I immediately pictured in all its grim urban detail. Something had happened to Kelli Troy, I felt sure, something she had narrowly survived, and which had given her a sense of vulnerability that was darker and more mysterious than the common fears of other people. More than anything, her poem had made her seem less remote, and in that way approachable.
And so I approached her the very next day. She was standing with Sheila Cameron, who was the undisputed leader of the Turtle Grove crowd, that group of teenage girls who lived in Turtle Grove, Choctaw’s only wealthy section.
“Hi, Ben,” Sheila said as I walked up to them. Her voice was more of a chirp, bright and friendly, and her face was as open as her manner. She was not the vain monster she might have been, considering her looks and her father’s money and the fact that she was dating a “college man.” Her face seemed fixed in a cheerful smile. It is not at all the face I now occasionally glimpse ahead of me in a grocery line, hidden behind dark glasses, its brittle features frozen in a mask of profound dismay.
“Hi, Sheila,” I said, then looked at Kelli. “Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked her, indicating that I wanted to speak to her in private.
We walked a few feet down the hall and stopped.
“I read your poem,” I told her immediately. “I liked it a lot.”
Kelli smiled quietly, her dark eyes still. “I wrote a few things at my old school,” she said.
It seemed a perfect opportunity to declare my singularity. “You came from Baltimore, right? I heard you say that in class.”
“Yes.”
“That must have been great, living up there. I mean, compared to Choctaw, which is so small.” I shrugged. “Boring, too. I can’t wait to get out.”
She regarded me silently for a moment, adding nothing until she finally straightened herself slightly and said, “Well, I better get to class.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “But, listen, if you ever have something else, something you’ve written, I’d really like to see it.”
“Okay,” Kelli said. And with that, she was gone.
After school, as I made my way outside, Luke came up beside me and gave me a friendly punch on the arm. “I heard you were having a little heart-to-heart with Kelli Troy,” he said playfully.
I looked at him sternly. “Sheila Cameron has a big mouth.”
“So what were you talking to Kelli about?” Luke asked.
“Just something she wrote for the
We continued on, past the long line of yellow buses that stretched the length of the school’s driveway. At the end of the driveway, Luke dropped away. “I told Betty Ann I’d meet her outside the gym,” he said.
My father had turned the ’57 Chevy over to me the week before. It sat in a patch of shade at the far end of the lot. Eddie Smathers had parked his bright red Ford Fairlane next to it, and I could see Eddie and a few other
