Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Read Online Free

she said. “Well, I’m not. I almost wish I could be angry—that would make it much easier—but instead I’m hurt. I’ve tried to be a good friend to you, and I thought you wanted to be my friend too. But this kind ofthing—well, it’s very hard to be friendly with a person who’d do a thing like that.”
    She saw, gratefully, that there were tears in his eyes. “Vincent, perhaps I understand some things better than you think. Perhaps I understand that sometimes, when a person does a thing like that, it isn’t really because he wants to hurt anyone, but only because he’s unhappy. He knows it isn’t a good thing to do, and he even knows it isn’t going to make him any happier afterwards, but he goes ahead and does it anyway. Then when he finds he’s lost a friend, he’s terribly sorry, but it’s too late. The thing is done.”
    She allowed this somber note to reverberate in the silence of the room for a little while before she spoke again. “I won’t be able to forget this, Vincent. But perhaps, just this once, we can still be friends—as long as I understand that you didn’t mean to hurt me. But you must promise me that you won’t forget it either. Never forget that when you do a thing like that, you’re going to hurt people who want very much to like you, and in that way you’re going to hurt yourself. Will you promise me to remember that, dear?”
    The “dear” was as involuntary as the slender hand that reached out and held the shoulder of his sweatshirt; both made his head hang lower than before.
    “All right,” she said. “You may go now.”
    He got his windbreaker out of the cloakroom and left, avoiding the tired uncertainty of her eyes. The corridors were deserted, and dead silent except for the hollow, rhythmic knocking of a janitor’s push-broom against some distant wall. His own rubber-soled tread only added to the silence; so did the lonely little noise made by the zipping-up of his windbreaker, and so did the faint mechanical sigh of the heavy front door. The silence made it all the more startling when he found, severalyards down the concrete walk outside, that two boys were walking beside him: Warren Berg and Bill Stringer. They were both smiling at him in an eager, almost friendly way.
    “What’d she do to ya, anyway?” Bill Stringer asked.
    Caught off guard, Vincent barely managed to put on his Edward G. Robinson face in time. “Nunnya business,” he said, and walked faster.
    “No, listen—wait up, hey,” Warren Berg said, as they trotted to keep up with him. “What’d she do, anyway? She bawl ya out, or what? Wait up, hey, Vinny.”
    The name made him tremble all over. He had to jam his hands in his windbreaker pockets and force himself to keep on walking; he had to force his voice to be steady when he said, “Nunnya business , I told ya. Lea’ me alone.”
    But they were right in step with him now. “Boy, she must of given you the works,” Warren Berg persisted. “What’d she say, anyway? C’mon, tell us, Vinny.”
    This time the name was too much for him. It overwhelmed his resistance and made his softening knees slow down to a slack, conversational stroll. “She din say nothin’,” he said at last; and then after a dramatic pause he added, “She let the ruler do her talkin’ for her.”
    “The ruler? Ya mean she used a ruler on ya?” Their faces were stunned, either with disbelief or admiration, and it began to look more and more like admiration as they listened.
    “On the knuckles,” Vincent said through tightening lips. “Five times on each hand. She siz, ‘Make a fist. Lay it out here on the desk.’ Then she takes the ruler and Whop! Whop! Whop! Five times. Ya think that don’t hurt, you’re crazy.”
    Miss Price, buttoning her polo coat as the front door whispered shut behind her, could scarcely believe her eyes. This couldn’t be Vincent Sabella—this perfectly normal, perfectlyhappy boy on the sidewalk ahead of her, flanked by attentive