* * * * *
She laughed tiredly, for he was gone, and it was almost too late, now.
"Don't be serious. Tonight, don't be serious. Let's not talk any more
about that. I don't want to talk about that."
"We've _got to_," he insisted. "We've got to learn to be serious. We
can't go on like a couple of kids like this forever."
"There's ... there's a lot of time, yet. We've got so much time ...
before we...." She wondered how the thought had almost crept into
words, and she shuddered, while from across the lake, a tree frog began
to chirp eerily. "I'm afraid to think about dying," she said, and
it was the most important thing in the world to make him understand
that. "Dying worries me. I don't want to have to die." Her voice went
on evenly, monotonously, in chorus with the tree frog, and her hand
clamped his wetly, but she hardly listened to the words herself,
because she knew that he did not understand what she was saying. "But I
don't have to think about it. There's so much time left. And I want to
stay young like this. Don't you understand, Clyde? I thought you said
you understood me? I don't want to be sick and hurt. I want things to
be simple and ... pretty. Pretty. Can't you see that, Clyde? I don't
care about anything else."
"You don't believe that," he said.
After a pause (while the wind quieted), she said, insistently, "I do.
Yes, I _do_, Clyde ... I really do."
He tried to release her hand.
And he was trying to cheat her. They were trying to cheat her. She did
not know, she did not care. There was something inside of her, and it
was desperation.
"Don't leave me, too," she sobbed. "I just want to be loved. I just
want somebody to love me." Her arms were suddenly around him, strong
and hungry, and the contact with him was electric, but somewhere
in the back of her mind, blunted, a small voice moaned. "Please,"
she whimpered, her mind almost blank and spinning. "Please, Clyde.
Like this. Just like this. When you touched me on the elbow this
afternoon...."
He tried to draw away; but her arms held him tightly. Suddenly he put
both hands against her breasts and pushed brutally. She fell back,
stunned.
Clyde jumped to his feet and started to run, terrified.
"Clyde!" she moaned. "Clyde, don't run away! Don't cheat me, Clyde.
Don't leave me, Clyde."
The wind was in the trees again, and she put her head on her arm and
began to cry softly. "Clyde," she whispered. (Or was it only the wind
in the trees?)
* * * * *
She hardly knew why she came to school the next day; her body was
leaden with fatigue, and in her mind there was a sense of impending
doom. On the way down the soft, green path, she stared at the ground,
and when an adult passed, she was afraid to look into his eyes, lest,
somehow, he understand.
She should go away; as she crossed the school ground she knew that, but
she was too hurt to go away, and nothing seemed to matter greatly.
And then she was in class and Clyde was not there. She wanted to run
out into the sunshine, and run forever, mostly backward into yesterday,
where everything was so very simple.
Looking at Teach, she could not help hating her: so poised, so calm, so
understanding, so sure; even with the tiny crows-feet--the first signs
of wearing out--around her eyes, as if she had never seen herself as a
white death's head, and imagined the wind whispering over her grave
and rustling the grass that had been her body, the green grass, dying.
But Teach's movements were still quick and lively, and her body did not
look as if there was death inside of it, waiting.
And as she watched Teach conduct the class and play upon it as a
maestro might upon an orchestra, she remembered the last night, and the
wind, and the boy, and she felt _unclean_.
Time hung suspended; and every second the clock let fall was a
heartbeat of increasing intensity. Suspense was in the air, and Margy
knew that she was waiting, waiting with a wound up tenseness that would
explode inside of her if something didn't happen.
And it was almost a relief when the messenger came, and Teach said,
"Margy, would you mind going into room C? Someone wants to see you
there."