“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.
Some people come into the world
As if down a bright green path,
In short sleeves and summer dress,
Looking straight ahead.
And some people come into the world
As if down a rain-dark alleyway,
Crouched beneath a black umbrella,
Glancing fearfully behind.
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 Wildcat,” I answered, speeding up slightly, as if I could get away from him that way.
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 boys as they idled not far away, smoking cigarettes and kicking lazily at the gravel earth.
One of them was Lyle Gates, and as I walked past, heading directly for my car, he glanced at me and waved.
“Ben, right?” he asked.
I stopped and turned toward him. “Yeah.”
“Ben Wade,” Gates said with a short, self-congratulatory laugh. “I never forget a name. You and Luke Duchamp were at Cuffy’s a few weeks back.” A cigarette dangled easily from the corner of his mouth. “So, you been gettin’ any?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.
Lyle grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about it. You’ll get married one day, and then you’ll be getting way too much. More than you want. Wearing it out.”
The other boys laughed. One of them blew a smoke ring into the clear late-afternoon air.
“I don’t think I could ever get enough,” Eddie Smathers squealed.
Lyle paid no attention to him. His gaze drifted up toward the school. “Old Man Avery will be looking down here pretty soon,” he said. “He’ll spot me and think, ‘Well, there’s Lyle Gates. What’s that troublemaking asshole up to?’ ”
Eddie laughed. “Hell, that’s better than him thinking you’re a pussy, right?”
Lyle shrugged. His eyes swept up toward the front of the school, the line of buses parked in front of it. “Well, seems like nothing much has changed around good old Choctaw High,” he said, his voice weary, bored, but glancing about nervously nonetheless, as if he were unable to settle on a fixed point.
“Well, we got a new girl,” Eddie chimed in quickly. “From up north.”
Lyle tossed his cigarette out into the lot, then lit another. “From up north, you said?”
Eddie nodded. “That’s right. She’s good-looking, too.”
Lyle grinned. “Shit, Eddie, you know I wouldn’t fuck a Yankee,” he said with a quick boyish wink.
Eddie’s eyes sparkled lustily. “You would this one.” He made an hourglass motion with his arms, then wiped his brow. “Whooee, she’s nice!”
Lyle drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. His shoulders fell slightly, as if a heavy weight had suddenly been lowered upon them. I could see a small purple tattoo on his upper arm, the figure of a woman, and underneath it, the name of the wife who’d already cast him off.
“Got to go,” he said. Then he walked away, a curl of white smoke trailing behind him, and disappeared into his car.
“I didn’t know you hung out with Lyle,” I said to Eddie.
Eddie shrugged. “Shit, I don’t hang out with him. We just shoot a game down at the pool hall once in a while.”
I glanced back toward Lyle. He sat silently in his car, his eyes lingering on the school with a forlorn wistfulness that seemed odd in one so young.