Ted looked absurdly pleased at being called mister.
“Decker?”
“Right here.”
“I better see you,” I said. “Fifteen seconds.” Then, as an afterthought: “Philbrick?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got a shitty habit, you know it? I’ve noticed it on all those TV drive-safely pitches that you do. You breathe in people’s ears. You sound like a stallion in heat, Philbrick. That’s a shitty habit. You also sound like you’re reading off a teleprompter, even when you’re not. You ought to take care of stuff like that. You might save a life.”
Philbrick puffed and snorted thoughtfully.
“Screw, buddy,” he said, and the intercom clicked off.
Exactly twelve seconds later he came out the front door, striding stolidly along. When he got to the cars that had been driven onto the lawn, there was another conference. Philbrick gestured a lot.
Nobody said anything. Pat Fitzgerald was chewing a fingernail thoughtfully. Pig Pen had taken out another pencil and was studying it. And Sandra Cross was looking at me steadily. There seemed to be a kind of mist between us that made her glow.
“What about sex?” Carol said suddenly, and when everyone looked at her, she colored.
“Male,” Melvin said, and a couple of the jocks in the back of the room haw-hawed.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Carol looked very much as if she wished her mouth had been stitched closed. “I thought when someone started to act… well… you know, strangely…” She stopped in confusion, but Susan Brooks sprang to the ramparts.
“That’s right,” she said. “And you all ought to stop grinning. Everyone thinks sex is so dirty. That’s half what’s the matter with all of us. We worry about it.” She looked protectively at Carol.
“That’s what I meant,” Carol said. “Are you… well, did you have some bad experience?”
“Nothing since that time I went to bed with Mom,” I said blandly.
An expression of utter shock struck her face, and then she saw I was joking. Pig Pen snickered dolefully and went on looking at his pencil.
“No, really,” she said.
“Well,” I said, frowning. “I’ll tell about my sex life if you’ll tell about yours.”
“Oh…” She looked shocked again, but in a pleasant way.
Gracie Stanner laughed. “Cough up, Carol.” I had always gotten a murky impression that there was no love lost between those two girls, but now Grace seemed genuinely to be joking-as if some understood but never-mentioned inequality had been erased.
” 'Ray, 'ray,” Corky Herald said, grinning.
Carol was blushing furiously. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“Go on,” Don Lordi said. “It won’t hurt.”
“Everybody would tell,” Carol said. “I know the way bo… the way people talk around.”
“Secrets,” Mike Gavin whispered hoarsely, “give me more secrets.” Everybody laughed, but it was getting to be no laughing matter.
“You’re not being fair,” Susan Brooks said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Let’s drop it.”
“Oh… never mind,” Carol said. “I’ll talk. I’ll tell you something.”
It was my turn to be surprised. Everybody looked at her expectantly. I didn’t really know what they expected to hear-a bad case of penis envy, maybe, or Ten Nights with a Candle. I figured they were in for a disappointment, whatever it was. No whips, no chains, no night sweats. Small-town virgin, fresh, bright, pretty, and someday maybe she would blow Placerville and have a real life. Sometimes they change in college. Some of them discover existentialism and anomie and hash pipes. Sometimes they only join sororities and continue with the same sweet dream that began in junior high school, a dream so common to the pretty small-town virgins that it almost could have been cut from a Simplicity pattern, like a jumper or a Your Yummy Summer blouse or play skirt. There’s a whammy on bright girls and boys. If the bright ones have a twisted fiber, it shows. If they don’t, you can figure them as easily as square roots. Girls like Carol have a steady boyfriend and enjoy a little necking (but, as the Tubes say, “Don’t Touch Me There”), nothing overboard. It’s okay, I guess. You’d expect more, but, so sorry please, there just isn’t. Bright kids are like TV dinners. That’s all right. I don’t carry a big stick on that particular subject. Smart girls are just sort of dull.
And Carol Granger had that image. She went steady with Buck Thorne (the perfect American name). Buck was the center of the Placerville High Greyhounds, which had posted an 11-0 record the previous fall, a fact that Coach Bob “Stone Balls” Stoneham made much of at our frequent school-spirit assemblies.
Thorne was a good-natured shit who weighed in at a cool two-ten; not exactly the brightest thing on two feet (but college material, of course), and Carol probably had no trouble keeping him in line. I’ve noticed that pretty girls make the best lion tamers, too. Besides, I always had an idea that Buck Thorne thought the sexiest thing in the world was a quarterback sneak right up the middle.
“I’m a virgin,” Carol said defiantly, startling me up out of my thoughts. She crossed her legs as if to prove it symbolically, then abruptly uncrossed them. “And I don’t think it’s so bad, either. Being a virgin is like being bright.”
“It is?” Grace Stanner asked doubtfully.
“You have to work at it,” Carol said. “That’s what I meant, you have to work at it.” The idea seemed to please her. It scared the hell out of me.
“You mean Buck never…”
“Oh, he used to want to. I suppose he still does. But I made things pretty clear to him early in the game. And I’m not frigid or anything, or a puritan. It’s just that…”
She trailed off, searching.
“You wouldn’t want to get pregnant,” I said.
“No!” she said almost contemptuously. “I know all about that.” With something like shock I realized she was angry and upset because she was. Anger is a very difficult emotion for a programmed adolescent to handle. “I don’t live in books all the time. I read all about birth control in…” She bit her lip as the contradiction of what she was saying struck her.
“Well,” I said. I tapped the stock of the pistol lightly on the desk blotter. “This is serious, Carol. Very serious. I think a girl should know why she’s a virgin, don’t you?”
“
“Oh.” I nodded helpfully. Several girls were looking at her with interest.
“Because…”
Silence. Faintly, the sound of Jerry Kesserling using his whistle to direct traffic.
“Because…”
She looked around. Several of them flinched and looked down at their desks. Just then I would have given my house and lot, as the old farmers say, to know just how many virgins we had in here. “And you don’t all have to stare at me! I didn’t ask you to stare at me! I’m not going to talk about it! I don’t
She looked at me bitterly.
“People tear you down, that’s it. They grind you if you let them, just like Pig Pen said. They all want to pull you down to their level and make you dirty. Look at what they are doing to you, Charlie.”
I wasn’t sure they had done anything to me just yet, but I kept my mouth shut.
“I was walking along Congress Street in Portland just before Christmas last year. I was with Donna Taylor. We were buying Christmas presents. I’d just bought my sister a scarf in Porteus- Mitchell, and we were talking about it and laughing. Just silly stuff. We were giggling. It was about four o’clock and just starting to get dark. It was snowing. All the colored lights were on, and the shop windows were full of glitter and packages… pretty… and there was one of those Salvation Army Santa Clauses on the corner by Jones’s Book Shop. He was ringing his bell and smiling. I felt good. I felt really good. It was like the Christmas spirit, and all that. I was thinking about getting home and having hot chocolate with whipped cream on top of it. And then this old car drove by, and whoever was driving cranked his window down and yelled, ‘Hi, cunt!’”
Anne Lasky jumped. I have to admit that the word did sound awfully funny coming out of Carol Granger’s mouth.
“Just like that,” she said bitterly. “It was all wrecked. Spoiled. Like an apple you thought was good and then bit into a worm hole. ‘Hi, cunt.’ As if that was all there was, no person, just a huh-h- h…” Her mouth pulled down in a trembling, agonized grimace. “And that’s like being bright, too. They want to stuff things into your head until it’s all filled up. It’s a different hole, that’s all. That’s all.”
Sandra Cross’s eyes were half-closed, as if she dreamed. “You know,” she said. “I feel funny. I feel…”
I wanted to jump up and tell her to keep her mouth shut, tell her not to incriminate herself in this fool’s parade, but I couldn’t. Repeat, couldn’t. If I didn’t play by my rules, who would?
“I feel like this is all,” she said.
“Either all brains or all cunt,” Carol said with brittle good humor. “Doesn’t leave room for much else, does it?”
“Sometimes,” Sandra said, “I feel very empty.”
“I…” Carol began, and then looked at Sandra, startled. “You do?”
“Sure.” She looked thoughtfully out the broken windows. “I like to hang out clothes on windy days. Sometimes that’s all I feel like. A sheet on the line. You try to get interested in things… Politics, the school… I was on the Student Council last semester… but it’s not real, and it’s awfully dull. And there aren’t a lot of minorities or anything around here to fight for, or… well, you know. Important things. And so I let Ted do that to me.”
I looked carefully at Ted, who was looking at Sandra with his face frozen. A great blackness began to drizzle down on me. I felt my throat close.
“It wasn’t so hot,” Sandra said. “I don’t know what all the shouting’s about. It’s…” She looked at me, her eyes widening, but I could hardly see her. But I could see Ted. He was very clear. In fact, he seemed to be lit by a strange golden glow that stood out in the new clotted darkness like a halo, a supernormal aura.
I raised the pistol very carefully in both hands.
For a moment I thought about the inner caves of my body, the living machines that run on and on in the endless dark.
I was going to shoot him, but they shot me first.
CHAPTER 24
