She went reeling back across the room, lost her balance, and sat down
butt-first on the linoleum with a _whack_! Her face wore an expression
of utter astonishment, but only for an instant. A moment later the look
was one of hatred.
Any glares Bonnie had given me before were sheer benevolent smiles
compared with this. This was a sizzling stare of complete malevolence
that made her look a hundred and eighty years old, and sent cold chills
through me. She sat up, kneeling, her legs spread, her breasts rising
and falling in a paroxysm of excitement and frustration and hatred, and
she looked H-bombs at me. I could only take it for a moment. I turned
and rushed out, slamming the door behind me, just as the torrent of
abuse began to spill from her lips.
I was shaking. I had only seen such a look of pure hatred once before
in my life, and that had been in the Army. There was this recruit from
Mississippi, and this big colored corporal, and the recruit made a
remark about the colored boy's ancestry, and the colored boy came right
back with a crack about the Mississippi lad's mother. For a moment I
thought the white boy would go purple with rage. The look he turned on
the corporal had been almost the equal of the look Bonnie had given me.
Then the Mississippi lad came piling forward, fists swinging, and the
colored corporal beat him to a pulp. The Southerner came out of it with
two smashed ribs and a bunch of stumps where his front teeth had been,
and after that he remembered that he wasn't back home in Crackerville
now.
I didn't look back at Bonnie. I half expected her to come flying out
of the library wielding a scissor or a knife and avenge the insult to
her femininity. I ducked into the social hall, found nobody there, and
headed back toward the cabin area.
I was just going past Cabin Six when the new girl, Naomi, appeared. She
looked terribly pale, and when she saw me she kept her eyes rigidly
above my waist, as though the sight of a naked male would strike her
blind or something.
She was wearing a bikini.
I was so startled I almost gasped. She was about twenty-two or so,
nicely tanned, very nicely built. She had long legs and full breasts
and wide shoulders, and she had this little wisp of orange and black
cloth around her hips and another one over her breasts. I stood there
gaping.
"Hi," she said, eyes above the beltline.
"Hi," I returned. "All moved in?"
"Yes," she said, coming down off the porch. She moved with a kind of
fluid catlike grace. And the bikini heightened her considerable erotic
appeal. I understood now why such skimpy swimsuits were _verboten_
around here. She was practically an invitation to rape, dressed that
way.