Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Read Online Free Page A

friends. But it was, and the scene made her want to laugh aloud with pleasure and relief. He was going to be all right, after all. For all her well-intentioned groping in the shadows she could never have predicted a scene like this, and certainly could never have caused it to happen. But it was happening, and it just proved, once again, that she would never understand the ways of children.
    She quickened her graceful stride and overtook them, turning to smile down at them as she passed. “Goodnight, boys,” she called, intending it as a kind of cheerful benediction; and then, embarrassed by their three startled faces, she smiled even wider and said, “Goodness, it is getting colder, isn’t it? That windbreaker of yours looks nice and warm, Vincent. I envy you.” Finally they nodded bashfully at her; she called goodnight again, turned, and continued on her way to the bus stop.
    She left a profound silence in her wake. Staring after her, Warren Berg and Bill Stringer waited until she had disappeared around the corner before they turned on Vincent Sabella.
    “Ruler, my eye!” Bill Stringer said. “Ruler, my eye!” He gave Vincent a disgusted shove that sent him stumbling against Warren Berg, who shoved him back.
    “Jeez, you lie about everything , don’tcha, Sabella? You lie about everything! ”
    Jostled off balance, keeping his hands tight in the windbreaker pockets, Vincent tried in vain to retain his dignity. “Think I care if yiz believe me?” he said, and then because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he said it again. “Think I care if yiz believe me?”
    But he was walking alone. Warren Berg and Bill Stringer were drifting away across the street, walking backwards in order to look back on him with furious contempt. “Just like the lies youtold about the policeman shooting your father,” Bill Stringer called.
    “Even movies he lies about,” Warren Berg put in; and suddenly doubling up with artificial laughter he cupped both hands to his mouth and yelled, “Hey, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern!”
    It wasn’t a very good nickname, but it had an authentic ring to it—the kind of a name that might spread around, catch on quickly, and stick. Nudging each other, they both took up the cry:
    “What’s the matter, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern?”
    “Why don’tcha run on home with Miss Price, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern?”
    “So long, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern!”
    Vincent Sabella went on walking, ignoring them, waiting until they were out of sight. Then he turned and retraced his steps all the way back to school, around through the playground and back to the alley, where the wall was still dark in spots from the circular scrubbing of his wet rag.
    Choosing a dry place, he got out his chalk and began to draw a head with great care, in profile, making the hair long and rich and taking his time over the face, erasing it with moist fingers and reworking it until it was the most beautiful face he had ever drawn: a delicate nose, slightly parted lips, an eye with lashes that curved as gracefully as a bird’s wing. He paused to admire it with a lover’s solemnity; then from the lips he drew a line that connected with a big speech balloon, and in the balloon he wrote, so angrily that the chalk kept breaking in his fingers, every one of the words he had written that noon. Returning to the head, he gave it a slender neck and gently sloping shoulders, and then, with bold strikes, he gave it the body of a naked woman: great breasts with hard little nipples, a trim waist, a dot for a navel, wide hips and thighs that flared around a triangle offiercely scribbled pubic hair. Beneath the picture he printed its title: “Miss Price.”
    He stood there looking at it for a little while, breathing hard, and then he went home.

The Best of Everything
     
    N OBODY EXPECTED GRACE to do any work the Friday before her wedding. In fact, nobody would let her, whether she wanted to or not.
    A gardenia corsage lay in a cellophane box