“Hurry up, will you?” she said.
“It’s not something you can hurry,” Jenny said. “You want a drag?”
“No.”
“Little goody two-shoes,” Jenny said from behind the closed door.
“I’m not,” Lissie said. “You know I’m not.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“I don’t want to become a fucking goddamn drug addict, okay?” Lissie said. “Will you please...?”
Behind the closed door, Jenny began laughing. A cloud of smoke was swirling up toward the ceiling. Lissie listened to the gentle laughter and thought again, She’s crazy, and suddenly the door to the stall opened.
“Here,” Jenny said, extending the joint to her. “Have a little toke.”
“No.”
“For me,” Jenny said.
“For you? What?”
“For our friendship.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No!”
“Fucking little goody two-shoes,” Jenny said. She was still wearing only her bra and panties, and Lissie suddenly remembered that the rest of her clothes were out there on the locker-room bench. If somebody came in and saw the clothes, they’d wonder...
“Come on, are you finished?” she said.
“Not till you try it,” Jenny said, and again extended the joint.
“Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
“Try it,” Jenny said.
“Why?”
“It won’t kill you.”
“Shit, all I...”
“Try it,” Jenny said.
“Shit, all right, give it to me. Let’s just... Jesus,” she said, and took the joint.
“Draw in deep on it,” Jenny said.
“I know how to do it.”
“Keep the smoke in.”
Lissie coughed.
“Take another hit.”
Lissie sucked on the joint again, swallowing the smoke, holding it back deep in her throat.
“One more toke,” Jenny said.
“I’m burning my fingers.”
“It’s down to the roach,” Jenny said. “Let’s light a fresh one.” She grinned suddenly. “Is it getting to you?”
“I feel...”
“Yeah?”
“A little woozy.”
“Mm, yeah, baby,” Jenny said, and reached for her handbag where it rested on the tiled floor near the toilet bowl.
When they came out onto the campus again at 4:00 P.M., a crowd of students was working its way over the hill from the hockey rink. They all seemed very tiny to Lissie, like little mechanical boy-and-girl dolls dressed in brightly colored teeny-weeny clothes, waving itty-bitty Henderson School pennants. One of the kids said, “We won, Liss!” and Lissie grinned at her foolishly and said, “Terrif,” and then floated beside Jenny through the labyrinthine path that separated the girls’ side of the campus from the boys’, noticing for the first time the thousands upon thousands of pine needles carpeting the forest floor, each separate pine needle clearly etched, noticing too the sculpted beauty of the rocks edging the path, each glistening facet of each rock, the pines standing in sharp silhouette against a sky more vibrantly blue than any she had ever seen. It took them forever to float through the forest, the path winding endlessly toward an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole opening at the farthest end of the forest... the world... the universe. When at last they got back to their room in Leavenworth Dorm, they closed and locked the door, and collapsed on their separate beds and repeated “Presbyterian Episcopalian” over and over again, giggling furiously all the while.
It was raining on Friday, March 14, the last day of their detention period. Their senior workload was light, they were both through with classes by midmorning, but they could not leave the campus till noon, at which time the Intermediate Discipline officially ended. They played a listless game of squash, dropped in on a choir practice to hear Francie Bowles — a friend of theirs from Ossining Dorm — and then began counting the hours. For reasons neither of them quite understood, and despite the fact that they’d been somewhat reckless about it during their disciplinary period, each of them felt it would be enormously dangerous to smoke anywhere on campus during this last day of their long incarceration.
The hours dragged.
They wandered over to the library to see if there were any boys they knew there, but Pee Wee Rawles was the only one who paid them any attention, and he was a terrifying creep who asked every girl he danced with if she’d like to have oral sex with him. At a little before twelve, they went back to the dorm to dress, both of them putting on blouses, skirts and heels, Jenny sweeping her long black hair up on top of her head in a sophisticated coiffe, and then putting on a pair of dangling gold earrings that had been a birthday present last year. They spent a goodly amount of time putting on eye liner and shadow, touched their lips with gloss and their cheeks with a faint blush of rouge, and were finally ready to go out on the town. Jenny was carrying four joints in her handbag. They signed out on the first-floor hall, did a little jig together out onto the sidewalk, and walked to the main gate where the taxi they’d called was waiting for them.
When the cabdriver saw them lighting up on the back seat, he asked, “Your parents allow you to smoke?”
“Oh, sure,” Jenny said, dragging on the joint.
“You sure?” the cabbie said.
“Positive,” Lissie said.
“Cigarettes are bad for you,” the cabbie said.
Mildly aglow after the grassy ride to the town’s only decent restaurant, giggling over the driver’s assumption that they’d been smoking cigarettes, they took a corner table in the almost deserted room, and each ordered a glass of white wine before lunch. The legal drinking age in Connecticut was twenty-one that year, but the law was rarely enforced except in package stores. Even there, a phony I.D. card was never looked at askance, and most of the Henderson kids had learned that restaurants in Shottsville wouldn’t ask for identification if you simply ordered a glass of wine and not any hard liquor. Drinking wasn’t a problem at Henderson, anyway. In fact, from what Lissie could gather — dancing at school mixers with boys from Choate or Kent or Taft — drinking wasn’t a problem anywhere. Marijuana was the big menace, marijuana was the Brown Gold Peril, marijuana was the evil weed the authorities everywhere were trying to stamp out before it polluted the young, which, of course, she knew was a lot of bullshit. If Lissie had to take a guess, she’d have said that 40 percent of the kids at Henderson were regularly smoking pot, with another 10 percent trying it every now and again. The only thing that amazed her was why she herself had waited so long.
Sipping at their wine, enjoying the supposition that they’d both looked old enough to be served without challenge, toasting their release from bondage, they looked over the menu, gave the waitress their order, and then began commiserating over the fact that they’d be separated from each other for eighteen whole days during the spring break.
“Be great if we could spend some time together,” Jenny said.
“Maybe I could come into New York for a few days,” Lissie said.
“No, I mean, you know, more than just a few days.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get in a car, just go drive someplace,” Jenny said.
“Yeah, that’d be great,” Lissie said. “Like where?”
“California,” Jenny said.
“Never make it to California and back in eighteen days,” Lissie said.
“Sure, we could.”