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to the oblivion of total repression. Damn him to hell, what right did he have to return from the dead by tenuous association with a cheap little drug store clerk to molest her now, at this precarious time, when she was poised on the verge of destruction and needed all her faculties for present trouble?

      He had been one of the facile boys. One of the complacent and arrogant little aristocrats of adolescence that rise like cream—or scum, as she thought of them—to the surface of the human volume of every high school. She had been pretty, and he had been, of course, irresistible. Or so he had considered himself, and in the beginning it had been fun. It had been great fun to watch his obvious advances against her indifference, to follow with a mild sadistic pleasure the progressive stages of his incredulity and disintegration as he found the indifference to be impregnable. Oh, Christ, it was really funny! A lonely, withdrawn girl of no position, however pretty, totally unimpressed by his attention! It was really quite impossible. It wasn’t supposed to be that way at all. She was supposed to melt, to submit, to acknowledge his charm with appropriate concessions. She was supposed to wet herself with joy. And it was fine fun for a while, before the fun was killed, to watch the formula of conquest reverse itself. To see him debased by a green and sappy passion. To see him watching her in revolting humility, groveling inwardly, pleading with dog’s eyes.

      She wondered how far she should permit the ridiculous business to go, and she decided that the limit should be imposed by her own stomach. So long, that is, as her perverse pleasure in his silly suffering was a larger factor than her revulsion. So she let it develop to its natural climax, and in the end it was she who suffered more. It was she who finally confronted for the first time, thanks to the catalyst of his fumbling aggression, a reality far more disturbing than a temporary glandular frustration.

      He had fallen into the practice of standing on a certain corner to watch her pass on her way home from school. She never looked at him directly, but she was acutely aware of him, and she relished the sharp turmoil of emotions his presence aroused—the confusion of contempt and curiosity and genuine animus. He worked so hard to achieve a studied casualness, as if it were the purest coincidence that he just happened to be at that spot evening after evening at the very time she would be passing it. And finally, as she had known he would, he made a move.

      It was this wet gray day in March with water dripping from the branches of trees and standing in little puddles on the sidewalk and in the street. In the air there was the lift, the raw promise, the damned lie of spring, and as she passed with a load of books under her arm, he fell in beside her and said, “Hello, Kathy.”

      She increased the cadence of her steps a bit. “Hello,” she said.

      “Let me carry your books, Kathy.”

      She felt his hands on them, and she clamped them more tightly against her side. “No, thanks. I can carry them.”

      “Oh, come on, Kathy. Don’t be like that.”

      He tugged at the books, and rather than make a foolish issue of it, she released them suddenly.

      “Oh, well. Go ahead and carry them if you want to.” She could sense at once the subtle change in his personality. Already, with such a nominal concession, his bruised ego began to recover, to reorganize itself along a line of dominance. She caught in the corner of her eye the change in his expression, the quick little lift of his chin, and her contempt for him swelled within her, assuming the proportions of exorbitant mockery. She speculated on the extent of his consternation if there were all of a sudden a contact of mental telepathy between them, and the thought prompted in her a wild urge to hilarious laughter.

      “You’re a funny girl, Kathy,” he said.

      “Am I?”

      “What I mean is, you don’t seem to mix much. Sometimes it seems as if you just don’t like anyone.”

      “Maybe I don’t.”

      “Not even me?”

      “Why should I make an exception of you?”

      “I don’t know. Anyhow, I like you. I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”

      “Do you?”

      “I just said so, didn’t I? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

      “Not particularly.”

      “You see what I mean? Why can’t you be nice to a guy?”

      “If you don’t like the way I am, you can give me my books and leave. Nobody’s holding you here.”

      Again from the corner of her eye, she saw the impact of her words on his ego, the swift collapse of the slight bloat that had developed as a result of his obtaining her books.

      He said quickly, “Let’s go over to Tinker’s for a coke. Would you like a coke, Kathy?”

      “No.”

      “Oh, come on. Give a guy a break, can’t you?”

      “Why should I?”

      “Well, damn it, just to see what it’s like. You could just try it once.”

      She hesitated. She was tempted to concede again, and she didn’t quite know why. Not, God knew, because she anticipated any pleasure from it. Except, perhaps, the pleasure of extending her manipulation of his emotions a little longer, of seeing him humbled and debased in the silly pursuit of something he’d never get. Of something that didn’t even exist, although there was no possible way for him to understand that. She herself hardly understood it yet.

      “All right,” she said. “If you want to buy me a coke, I guess I can drink it.”

      So they turned at the next corner and went down to Tinker’s. It was a small clapboard building with a flat roof. Inside, there were plywood booths around three walls, the fourth wall being reserved for the counter. There were stationary stools before the counter and a few tables with chairs scattered in the central area. There was also a garish juke-box of many colors with golden bubbles rising soundlessly through visible tubes. There was always a spinning platter, an amplified voice or the overwhelming collaboration of strings and reeds and brass and percussion, the flat five-cent can of what passed for music. Tinker’s was one of those places which, for no apparent earthly reason, catches on and hangs on and will not die. Its short orders were bad, its accommodations were inferior, its attitude was indifferent; but in spite of these things it was popular, a congregating place, and trade was brisk in dimes and quarters primarily.

      Kathy sat in a booth and sipped her coke and tried to avoid looking at the face of Kenny Renowski across from her. The juke-box blared, there was a heavy smell of greasy hamburger and onions in the stagnant air, and all around her were students she didn’t like engaged in an awkward mass flirtation with a function she abhorred. She choked on her coke and set the glass unemptied on the table of the booth.

      Standing, she said, “I’m leaving.”

      He also stood. “Already? Be a sport, Kathy, and stick around. We have lots of fun in this joint. Stick around, you’ll see.”

      “I don’t want to stick around. I want to leave. Thanks for the coke.”

      “Wait a minute. I’ll go with you, then.”

      “You don’t have to come. You can stay and have some of the fun you were talking about.”

      “Damn it, Kathy, I said I’d come, didn’t I? Why do you have to be so antagonistic about everything?”

      “I’m not antagonistic. I just don’t care whether yon come or stay. You can suit yourself.”

      He took hold of her arm and said desperately, “Don’t be like that, Kathy.”

      They were outside again by that time, and she wheeled to face him, jerking her arm furiously from the grip of his fingers.

      “That’s the second time you’ve said that. Please don’t say it again.”

      “What?”

      “That