And who, he wondered, had been stalking whom? He felt suddenly young and inexperienced.
“Well, come on,” she whispered. “What are you waiting for?”
She was no virgin. There wasn’t a virgin in the world who could move like that. She was no virgin, and after thirty seconds it no longer mattered a tinker’s dam that she wasn’t a virgin. Because she was the most tremendous bed-partner he’d ever held in his arms.
She tore him apart. She was a wild thing, grabbing him with a violence he’d never known before, squeezing him dry like a grape and flinging him away again. And it was over before it was barely begun, and he was lying beside her in the narrow bed, panting, the sweat cooling and drying on his belly and chest, as she leaned over him, kissing him, licking his face, stroking his chest.
He regained his wind slowly, and finally started, “You— you—”
Once again, she understood what he was trying to say. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she told him, smiling. “I checked on the calendar this afternoon. This is the safe time.”
There were voices downstairs!
“It’s my parents!” Her whisper in his ear was terrified.
He crawled off the bed and to his feet. He took one step toward the door, but he could hear them coming upstairs.
“They’ll look in here,” she was whispering. “They always look in to see if I’m asleep.”
His wildly searching eye fell on the luminous dial of her bedside clock. It was almost four-thirty in the morning. He should have been out of here long ago, instead of falling asleep like a dope.
“Down the fire escape,” she whispered urgently. “Hurry!”
“My clothes!”
“I’ll throw them down to you. Hurry, Vince, hurry!”
He had one leg over the windowsill before he realized he was stark naked. Then he remembered the car, still parked out in front of the house. “The car,” he whispered.
He saw the shock on her face, and thought fast. “Tell them,” he said, “tell them something went wrong with the starter, and I took a bus home, and I said I’d come back in the morning and fix it.”
She nodded. “All right. Now, hurry.” And she ran around the room, gathering up his clothes.
He went out the fire escape and down the wooden steps, rough against his bare feet. At the bottom step, he carefully lowered himself, until he was hanging by his outstretched hands, facing the street.
Clip-clop. A horse went by, pulling a milk wagon. The milkman stared at Vince, swinging back and forth, his toes three feet from the ground, completely nude. Vince stared at the milkman, and the horse calmly clip-clopped by, and Vince’s clothes went sailing down past his face.
He dropped to the ground, fumbled around until he had his clothes in a jumbled bundle in his arms, and ran for the backyard.
There was a shade tree in the backyard. Hidden by it, he hurriedly dressed, then climbed over the fence to the yard of the house on the next street, out to the street, and headed for the nearest bus stop.
“A week from now,” he grumbled to himself, as he walked along with his shoelaces flapping, “I’ll think this was funny as hell.”
Two
Everything, as a matter of fact, stank. Everything stank out loud, and in spades. And with everything stinking so thoroughly it was no wonder that he wasn’t laughing himself silly.
In a sense, you could blame everything on Betty. There she was, all pure virginal, and there he was, all ready and willing, the experienced hunter tracking down the soft-eyed doe, when all of a sudden his whole frame of reference was shattered. Betty the virgin had suddenly metamorphosed into Betty the old hand.
That got things going to a fine start.
When the family left two days later for the cabin on the lake he was not at all sorry to say a fond goodbye to the little town of Modnoc. He’d sprawled alone in the backseat of the car while his mother and father said stupid things to each other in the front seat, and he’d looked back at the town out of the rear window, thinking unpleasant thoughts about it.
As the sun goes out to sea, he thought, and as our boat sinks slowly in the west, we bid a fond adieu to the sleepy town of Modnoc, with its friendly huts and its rudely plastered natives.
The cruddy little cabin by the cruddy little lake looked a good deal better to him than it really was. The idea of staying in the same town with Betty made him feel little weak in the knees. Of course there was no reason for him to be ashamed of himself. As far as she was concerned, he was the conqueror, the only boy from Modnoc who had managed to get in her pants. From his point of view it was a little more complex. He’d been loaded for bear, and when you’re loaded for bear you can’t get too excited over blowing the tail off a squirrel.
So the cruddy little cabin by the cruddy little lake represented two things — an escape from Betty and a chance at new fields to conquer. There would certainly be girls at the lake, plenty of them, and girls away for the summer were girls removed from the soppy security of the parental abode. If a girl was ever going to take the plunge, she was going to take it on summer vacation.
And if anybody was ready to do the plunging for them, Vince was.
He felt like the Great White Hunter, and he was so pleased with the picture that the discomforts of the safari failed to bother him. He didn’t mind the lousy roads, or the creative stupidity of his father who insisted on driving a steady thirty-five every inch of the way. He didn’t mind the stomach-churning food at the hot dog stands where they stopped en route, he didn’t mind the senseless patter issuing from the front seat. He was the Great White Hunter on the trail of a pack of virgins. The little hardships of the chase didn’t bother him a bit.
When they finally got to the cabin it looked much better to him than it really was. A kitchen, furnished with colonial implements and quietly disintegrating. A bedroom for his parents. Another bedroom, incredibly small, for Vince. A living room that no one in his right mind would attempt to live in. The cabin was looking around for a president to be born in it, and anyone born there could certainly boast of humble origins.
But Vince didn’t care. He didn’t figure he’d be spending much time there. He’d be with girls, around girls, near girls, by the side of girls.
And, eventually, in girls.
But things weren’t working according to plan. Right now, for example, the afternoon was in the process of becoming evening. It was cool, with a breeze coming from the lake that was just a little too brisk to be perfect. The sun was gone and the moon was starting to rise. It was perfect weather for girl-hunting, and what was he doing?
He was sitting. Sitting quite alone by the side of the lake with nothing doing, nothing at all.
All because of that bitch, Rhonda.
The trouble with Rhonda was double trouble. She was impossible to touch and impossible to stay away from. The first day he saw her, which was the second day at the cabin, he knew she was going to be the one. She just had to be. She was perfect.
For one thing, she was different from any of the Modnoc girls. She was from New York City, and this made a big difference. Not just the way she talked, but the way she looked and the way she acted. She was far more mature, far more sophisticated.
And far more attractive.
Of course, if Vince himself had come from New York, he would have thought that Rhonda looked exactly like everyone else. She had dark hair and she wore it long, and the ponytail that hung to her waist looked just like the ponytail of every other girl who went to Bronx Science or Walden or Elizabeth Irwin or Music & Art or New Lincoln High School. She also wore sandals and dark-colored Bermuda shorts and very plain white blouses. She was in uniform, but of course Vince did not know this.