“Come on,” she said, noiselessly, just moving her lips and beckoning with a finger. She led me from the kitchen into the dining room. She started up the carpeted stairs, tiptoeing with great care, keeping to the edge of the stairs nearest the wall. I followed her, my heart pounding, fear gathering in my throat like a cat’s fur ball. Whatever was going on up there, it was, I was certain, none of my business. To get caught even tiptoeing up the stairs like this would mean trouble, and whatever Veronica had in mind for us to do when we reached the top of the stairs was going to mean more trouble. Ah, but curiosity is a powerful force. Ignorance is so bleak a state that we are willing to risk a great deal to get out of it. Ignorance seems cold and wet and gray and foggy; knowledge seems warm and sunny and golden and clear. I followed Veronica as if she were leading me out of the darkness into the dawn.
We reached the top of the stairs. The door to Veronica’s parents’ room, where Jack and Mrs. McCall were, was closed, but Mrs. McCall was speaking, or making sounds, in a falsetto voice, a voice that made me think she and Jack were playing a game. Veronica and I had reached the top of the stairs, and we stood outside the door now. The thought occurred to me that Jack and Mrs. McCall might burst out of the room, intending to continue the game on the stairs or in the living room. Suppose the game involved running up and down the stairs? Veronica tugged my hand, and I realized that I’d been standing for some time on the landing, without moving, staring at the door. Veronica led me to the door to her room. She opened it and pulled me inside.
“Veronica,” I said, as quietly as I could. “Maybe I’ll go home now.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Don’t you want to see them?”
“No, I don’t think—” I began, turning away.
“They’re naked, stupid,” she whispered. She giggled.
To explain the effect that Veronica’s statement had on me, I must describe the toy gun that I had received as a present the preceding Christmas. It was shaped like a bazooka, the antitank weapon that fired a rocket. This bazooka gun, as I called it, fired Ping-Pong balls. The barrel of the gun was in two parts: a larger cylinder in the front slid over a narrower cylinder behind. One loaded a supply of balls into a magazine and then, by sliding the outer barrel forward once, loaded a ball into the inner barrel and filled the space in the barrel behind the ball with air. The ball was pushed by the air all the way to the muzzle, where the ball itself functioned as a stopper because a rubber ring fixed inside the muzzle, a ring with an opening just slightly smaller than the diameter of the ball, prevented the ball from leaving the barrel. However, when one suddenly pulled the outer barrel backward, the air in the chamber behind the ball was compressed, and when the pressure reached a sufficiently high level, the ball was forced suddenly through the opening in the rubber ring and exploded from the muzzle. The firing was accompanied by a wonderfully loud whoomp, and the ball flew out with impressive velocity. Since a Ping-Pong ball has little mass, air resistance would slow its flight quickly, so the gun was actually a reasonably safe toy. (At least it was a physicallysafe toy. It was probably extremely harmful psychologically, but during the time that I’m recalling, children were apparently regarded as immune from psychological harm.) My friends and I devised a nasty little game with this bazooka gun. One player would be chosen as shooter, another as target. The target would stand up against a wall, facing the wall. The shooter would walk several paces away from the target and aim the gun at the back of the target’s head. The object, for the shooter, was to make the target flinch (cringe, shudder, or otherwise respond out of fear) between the time of the whoomp and the time that the ball struck the target’s head. The object for the target was not to flinch. Being a good target was much more difficult than being a good shooter. Raskolnikov was remarkably good at this game, in both roles. I was quite bad at it, especially as target. The worst part was the waiting. The impact of the ball grew more and more forceful in the mind until it was as powerful as a punch from one of the boys in the gang that Spike O’Grady led. When I finally heard the whoomp, I could never help myself: the muscles across my back tightened automatically, my shoulder blades snapped inward, and my neck snapped back, as if I had already received the blow. Then, smack, the ball would strike me, but feebly, harmlessly. The laughs followed. It was the laughter, not the ball, that stung.
Veronica’s remark struck me like the Ping-Pong ball from the bazooka gun. As Veronica and I mounted the stairs and slipped into her room, I began to understand, somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind, that whatever Mrs. McCall and Jack were up to was something that they wouldn’t want me to know anything about, something that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about, and something that in my heart of hearts I didn’t want to know anything about.
“They’re naked (whoomp), stupid (smack),” she whispered. She giggled. That stung.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I knew that.”
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