“Noreen something,” Todd answered. “Donovan. Noreen Donovan. She’s from Gadsden.”
I looked at Kelli. She was watching Todd carefully, as if she were evaluating him in some way, perhaps already considering, as I imagined it, what life might be like at his side.
“She’s a sophomore,” Todd added. “She seemed nice.”
“Why’d she move to Choctaw?” I asked.
“Because of what’s going on in Gadsden. Her daddy didn’t want to live there anymore.” Todd’s eyes swept over to Kelli. “You know, because of what the colored people are doing. The demonstrations.”
“I didn’t know there was that much going on in Gadsden,” I said. “It’s not in the paper.”
“They keep it out, Noreen says,” Todd told me. “But it’s pretty much a constant thing.”
Kelli leaned toward him. “What is?” she asked. “What exactly are they doing?”
“Setting up picket lines, mostly,” Todd answered. “At that little shopping center on the way in to town. You ever been to Gadsden?”
Kelli shook her head.
“Well, they have a little shopping center on the way in, near the Merita Bread place,” Todd said. “You know where I mean, don’t you, Ben? Where you can go in and buy bread right out of the oven, not even sliced yet.”
I nodded.
“Well, according to Noreen, there’s some kind of demonstration there just about every night.” Todd took his first bite of food and chewed it slowly. “That’s why Noreen’s daddy decided to move up here. To get away from it.” He shrugged. “They lived right near the shopping center, and I guess they were scared of what might happen.”
“But you said there hasn’t been any trouble,” I said.
“Not yet. But you never know what might happen in a situation like that.” He took a sip of milk. “There may be trouble here someday, too,” he said, lowering his voice. “The colored people haven’t been treated right, you know.” He glanced over at Kelli. “I mean, if I’d been treated the way they’ve been treated, I’d be demonstrating just like they are.”
Kelli said nothing, but she held her gaze on Todd with an unmistakable intensity that frightened and alarmed me.
Eddie Smathers came up a few seconds later, slapped Todd on the back and sat down beside him. He had become Todd’s constant sidekick by then, and his attitude was characteristically worshipful, his questions always tentative, as if seeking Todd’s answers so that he could agree with them.
“Going to the show this weekend?” Eddie asked.
Todd pulled his eyes away from Kelli and shrugged. “What’s on?”
Todd laughed. “Hot? With Sandra Dee? I doubt that.”
Eddie laughed with him. “Yeah. How could it be hot with Sandra Dee?” He nodded toward me and poked Todd in the ribs. “Of course, Ben sort of has a thing for Troy Donahue, right, Ben?”
I stared at him icily, but said nothing. Something was happening that I would not have thought possible only a few minutes before; my world was crumbling. In my mind, I cursed Mary Diehl for her inadequacies, for not doing or being whatever she had to do or be in order to keep Todd satisfied.
The bell sounded, signaling the end of lunch period, and we all rose from our seats to take our trays, dump them and go to class.
“Well, see you later, Ben,” Todd said as he got to his feet, Eddie in tow beside him. Then he looked at Kelli. “Nice talking to you,” he said, and, just as he pulled away, reached over and touched her shoulder, the tips of his long, slender fingers actually disappearing into her black hair.
Kelli and I dumped our trays, then walked out of the lunchroom and down the corridor toward Miss Carver’s classroom, a great bustle of students flowing in all directions around us.
“Todd’s going to ask you out,” I said as lightly as I could. “I could tell by the way he was talking to you.”
“No he’s not,” Kelli said, dismissing the idea.
I pretended to be joking with her. “Yeah, he is,” I insisted. “He’s probably going to ask you to go see
Kelli laughed. “Well, even if he did ask me, I wouldn’t go out with him.”
I stared at her, astonished. “You wouldn’t? You wouldn’t go out with Todd Jeffries? Why not?”
Kelli turned toward me, now so serious about what she was about to say that I knew it came from something in her past experience, something that lingered in her, like a warning. “Because right now he seems perfect,” Kelli told me, “and so it would just be a matter of time before I’d be disappointed in him.”
She stopped at her locker. She opened it, and drew out Willa Cather’s
“You really wouldn’t go out with him?” I asked doubtfully.
Kelli looked at me, surprised by the question. “Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because it’s hard to believe. All the girls want to go out with Todd.”
Kelli shrugged. “Well, it’s just that I think it’s better to start out with someone who’s not so great,” she said matter-of-factly, “but somebody who becomes great as you get to know him.”
In the vanity of the moment, it seemed like a formula devised with me in mind.
“You really feel that way?” I persisted.
She nodded, closed the door of her locker and headed down the corridor.
I walked along beside her, silent, but inexpressibly uplifted. It was as if I had suddenly grown taller and more handsome, discarded my glasses, become the equal of Todd Jeffries, a figure of consequence as he was, but for whom, unlike Todd, other glories still awaited.
It was an air of triumph that must have clung to me all that day. For after school, when Luke and I met in the parking lot, he noticed it immediately.
“You look, I don’t know … happy,” he said.
I nodded.
“So what happened? Did Mr. Arlington finally give you an A or something?”
“No,” I answered. “Nothing like that.”
“What then?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, Luke. I guess I just feel good for some reason, that’s all.”
He did not believe me. “There’s got to be a reason,” he insisted. He gave me a playful shove. “Come on, you can tell me. What is it, Ben?”
I couldn’t answer him exactly. Any more then than I can now, when, after I have been locked in a long silence, he will draw the old pipe from his lips and look at me worriedly, sensing some troubled part of me he cannot reach, the same chilling question in his eyes:
CHAPTER 10
SOMETIMES I WILL GLANCE INTO THE WINDOW OF A JEWELRY store and all the rings, in all their small velvet cases, will be Kelli’s ring, old and tarnished as she insisted it remain. Or I will place the delicate membrane of my stethoscope just beneath a woman’s breast, look up and it will be Kelli’s face peering at me, her heartbeat thundering in my ear. And sometimes, at the end of a sleepless night, Noreen will ease herself closer to me. I will draw her snugly beneath my arm, smile quietly, and pretend that I think of no one else, that Breakheart Hill no longer casts a shadow over the life we have together.
But Noreen knows better, and always has. She senses Kelli’s presence in a thousand small corners, and from time to time, confronts it outright. On the afternoon after Todd Jeffries’s funeral, for example, she sat down on the sofa in the living room and glanced out the window toward the dark line of impaling spires that is all Choctaw can offer as a skyline. “You know,” she said, “in a way I don’t think Todd ever got over Kelli Troy.”
I lowered myself into the chair opposite her. “I guess not,” I answered dully, pretending no interest in the question.
