5
THE CLASS gave me a greeting that they had rehearsed, and Mrs. Graham pointed out a seat for me at the back of the room. I made my way to the seat in a euphoric state, for Mrs. Graham had made me feel secure, even confident. I sat down and stretched myself out nearly straight so that I could keep my feet on the floor and my elbows on the desk top. Mrs. Graham had the boys and girls stand, one at a time, and introduce themselves. Three of them, three girls, were to play particularly memorable roles in my life.
The first was Veronica McCall. She stood slowly when her turn came, placed one foot in the aisle, brought the other out to meet it, turned, tossed her head to clear her straight, dark hair from in front of her left eye, and then pushed it aside with a flip of her hand for good measure. She laughed and shrugged as if to say, “Isn’t it amusing that we all have hair, but only mine falls in this odd and alluring way in front of my eye, only mine is this fine, this straight, this dark?”
She said, “Well, hello there!” and she rippled her fingers through the air. She reversed the set of steps that had brought her to her feet and slid herself into her seat. As she sat, her dress tightened across her bottom and along her legs, and I obtained a photographically precise and durable impression of the outline of her underpants.
The second was Lily O’Grady. She had hair of a color that my mother referred to as “dirty blond,” though her use of dirty in this way may have been only partly a description of color. Lily called herself Spike. She was the class bully. She led a gang of crewcut and muscular boys named Biff, Studs, Chuck, and Knuckles. I never quite figured out which of the boys in the gang was which except for Biff, who had a scar down the side of his left cheek. It was said that Biff got this scar when Spike fought him for the leadership of the gang. (Quite a few years later, at a reunion of my class at Babbington High, I asked Biff whether that was, in fact, how he had gotten the scar. “Heck, no,” he said. “It was a very democratic gang. We elected the leader by secret ballot. I got the scar while Spike and I were counting the votes.”)
Spike stood slowly. She was chewing gum, and the muscles along her jaw and at her temples rippled impressively. She looked me up and down. Her head bobbed as if her neck were a coil spring. Finally, she dropped her jaw, pulled her lower lip in over her teeth, and shook her head once, in a gesture that told me, to my enormous relief, that she considered me beneath consideration. “Hi, Pete!” she shouted, though I was only a couple of feet away from her. She started to sit down, but a thought occurred to her, and she got to her feet again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not so hard. I’ve been here a few weeks already, and I understand almost everything. Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be okay.” She gave me a wink. I resolved to keep my mouth as shut as possible.
The third was Clarissa Bud, who made my heart ache as soon as she raised her eyes toward mine. She was small and fragile, with skin as pale and smooth as moonlight on the Bolotomy. She moved as if she were moving through water instead of air: she rose to her feet as if she were allowing herself to float upward. Her eyes were enormous, wide and surprised. Though the weather was mild, she had on her desk a white fur muff, on which she rested her left hand, rubbing the fur between her thumb and forefinger, drawing from the muff the kind of comfort that I got from clutching my camera. Clarissa seemed so frightened and retiring that she made me feel strong and bold. She was, Mrs. Graham pointed out, also new to the classroom, and in fact new to Babbington, the latest stop in Mr. Bud’s progress from one important position in the food-processing industry to another. Clarissa’s desk was beside mine.
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