Chapter Six

On the day Daddy re-married, the sky over Biloxi was the color of cardboard, gray like the inside of the shoe box that my powder blue, dyed-to-match pumps came in.

Charlene and I should have known he would marry again, but it was a shock when he did. He was too lonely to stay single. We’d heard him talking to Henry Pickens. Daddy’s voice was soft, but you could always hear Mr. Pickens’ voice. “You’re talking about the virile needs of a man,” he told Daddy in the living room. “That’s legitimate business. A man can’t deny his needs.”

“Gross,” said Charlene, and put the Beatles’s album, “Revolver,” on our new stereo console and cranked it up so loud that Daddy and Mr. Pickens went outside to talk.

Almost four years to the day after Mama died, Daddy married Marilyn Dixon in a ceremony with the Justice of the Peace and what Daddy called the immediate family, which included Henry Pickens, grinning and hugging the bride. Aunt Sylvia couldn’t come, something about a gallery opening, but I had a feeling she didn’t want to be there.

The ceremony was simple, but Marilyn wore a gown with a train that almost filled the Justice’s office. The color was called “candlelight,” since the wedding was her second. The rest of us stood with our heels against the wall, trying not to step on the satin. Marilyn was only twenty-six, and her father had the same gray in his sideburns that Daddy did. When the J.P. pronounced them “man and wife,” and Daddy kissed Marilyn, Charlene turned her head and refused to watch. Marilyn’s father looked down at his shoes.

After we threw rice at them on the courthouse steps, they drove to Pensacola while Charlene and I stayed with our grandparents. Aunt Sylvia flew down to join us at Grandma’s house during Daddy’s honeymoon. Grandma and I took the truck to New Orleans to pick her up. There was no room for Charlene, unless someone sat in the truckbed coming back, and she wasn’t about to ride in the back. “Looking like a redneck,” she said. Grandma drummed her fingers along the dashboard like she was playing the piano. “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” she said, and turned to me with her bright little blue eyes and sunken smile. “That’s Cajun talk. Let the good times roll.” She tapped her lace-up oxfords to imaginary music, ignoring how it made her brown stockings pool in wrinkles around her ankles. “I’ve missed Sylvia,” she said. For the first time, part of Mama sparked in Grandma. Or maybe I’d just never seen it before, it had been so buried beneath the finger-shaking and lectures.

At the airport, a silver jet wheeled down the runway and men rolled a staircase up to it when it stopped. After a few men in suits descended, a figure came sweeping down the steps wearing a green and purple sari, with a scarf wrapped around the top of her head like a small turban, the ends tumbling down over one shoulder. Black wraparound sunglasses covered her eyes and cheeks. She looked like an Andy Warhol fantasy. Grandma and I watched from behind the glass in the terminal.

“Where’s Sylvia?” Grandma asked, squinting at the emptied plane.

“That’s her,” I whispered, afraid to point out the creature walking across the runway toward the terminal with the normal passengers. I almost hadn’t recognized her, myself. Where the turban ended, her hair stood out from her head in long, frizzled curls. It might’ve been the hair of one of Michelangelo’s angels, streaked purple. She walked with her shoulders thrust back, chin high, bouncing on her toes like a dancer about to leap into a grand jeté. That was how I knew her. The black fishnet stockings, long, straight hair, and tight beatnik skirts were gone.

“Looks like they got the voltage on her shock treatment too high,” said a man beside us, wearing a baseball cap and windbreaker with “Campus Crusade” on the back.

“Is that what Christ would say?” I asked, and he turned away. Fortunately, Grandma was hard of hearing. But it was true, it looked as if she’d stuck her finger in a socket. When Aunt Sylvia moved her head, surveying the group of onlookers, her hair looked like a bush with a few flames glowing in it, blown by an unseen wind. It was spectacular.

A smile broke out on her face and we pushed toward each other through the onlookers. She was as thin as ever, and I felt like I could crush her with a hug. European-style, she kissed both my cheeks, and her perfume wafted gently to my nose, like an incense from when I’d last gone to mass months ago.

“Sylvia?” Grandma’s voice cracked, and Sylvia pulled off the sunglasses. Her eyes sparkled with tears, and she bent to put her arms gently around Grandma’s curved back. Grandma put both hands on either side of Sylvia’s face and beamed. “You’re always beautiful, just like Bernice was,” she said, and Aunt Sylvia’s face relaxed. No lectures.

On the way home, Aunt Sylvia crowded into the front seat between Grandma and me, her hair brushing my face, and she had to lean into Grandma to make room for me to shift. Every time she did, Grandma patted her knee.

Grandma tried to make the week-end special by baking a pound cake, but it was awful. The last time we’d stayed on the farm, Mama had just died, and now the wedding felt like another death. Charlene was so upset she could hardly talk. When she did, she said things no one wanted to hear.

“Just think of what they’re doing. A honeymoon, for pete’s sake,” she said. “Gross. She’s too young for Daddy.”

“That’s private, Charlene. Don’t think about it,” said Aunt Sylvia. “Your dad’s finally happy. Try to be glad.”

Charlene moaned and put a pillow over her head.

“People need some time alone after they get married, that’s all,” said Aunt Sylvia. “It doesn’t mean your dad’s leaving you. You’re seventeen, old enough to know that, honey.” She tugged at the pillow. “You’ll suffocate.”

“I wish he’d leave us.” Charlene emerged, her nose and right cheek pink from being pressed against the pillow. “Then we could live with you in New York.”

Aunt Sylvia patted Charlene’s cheek. “I’d like that, but Harry couldn’t stand being away from his girls.”

“Sure he could,” said Charlene. “Look how much time he spent with Marilyn. And that was before they got married. He’ll forget all about us now.” Ever since Daddy had met Marilyn, Charlene hadn’t been happy.

“Why don’t you wait a couple of weeks, till the anniversary of Mama’s death?” Charlene had asked, when he told us his wedding plans.

Daddy looked like somebody had slapped him. We were sitting in the kitchen around a chocolate cake he’d bought at the bakery. He probably knew we’d need cheering up, but it would take more than chocolate for Charlene. She sneered, and the brightness in Daddy’s eyes faded.

“It’s been four years, darlin’.” He reached for her hand, his own trembling. “I know it won’t be easy …”

Charlene pulled away. “I’m not calling anybody else Mama,” she said, and stalked off.

“She wants you to call her Marilyn,” Daddy called, just before the bathroom door slammed.

But I was happy for him. He was so lonely we could hear him sighing in his bedroom when the lights were out at night. Charlene would call, “Goodnight, Daddy. I love you,” in a false, cheerful voice, forcing him to strangle out, “Love you, too, darlin’.” I hated her for that little ritual at night. Couldn’t she see he needed to be left alone?

After he found Marilyn, his spirits lifted. Sometimes, we even heard him whistling. Marilyn was a grocery clerk at the Piggly Wiggly, and they’d talk every time Daddy shopped. She slipped him coupons and wrote recipes for the groceries he was buying, making people wait. The manager almost fired her after they complained, so Daddy started meeting her after work. For recipes, he said. But soon he was taking her for drinks at the Green Lizard Lounge. By then, alcohol was legal in nearly every county, and Grady Pickens’ dad was selling used cars in Gulfport. “I’ll be a little late tonight, girls,” he’d say, adjusting the pads in his shoes before shoe-horning them on. “Here’s a number if you need me,” and he’d scribble down the phone number at the Lounge.

“How can he do that?” Charlene hissed. “Mama used to sing there, for pete’s sake.” When he took Marilyn to the Shriners’ dance on New Years’ Eve, we knew life was certainly going to change.

He was whistling when he looped his tie into a knot, and then rubbed his palms together to warm the pomade for his hair. “You look great,” I said, and he kissed my cheek. Charlene turned before he could reach her.

“Wait’ll Marilyn sees Daddy on his little bicycle at the circus,” said Charlene. “She’ll ditch him in a minute.” Every March, the Gulf Coast Shriners held a circus, and Daddy was a clown. When we were little, we loved it, watching the sawdust fly under the wheels of the miniature bicycle Daddy could drive faster than anyone, his knees pumping like pistons. We were proud of him then. Now, it was unthinkable that anyone would want to marry a man who paraded around in a wig and red nose, even if it was once a year. Surely Marilyn would leave him then. But when the circus came, she cheered harder than anyone, jumping up and clapping her hands. Once she even threw her fist into the air the way cheerleaders did at pep rallies, while Charlene and I watched from a spot by the Coke machine.

“Turned on by a clown,” said Charlene, her lip curled. “Disgusting.”

Afterwards Marilyn bought the satin wedding gown with the longest train I’d ever seen.

When she was seventeen, Marilyn had married a guy named Jimmy Taylor who worked at Drummond’s Five and Dime Store. He was killed in Vietnam. All I remembered about him was his blonde hair and his boredom, like he didn’t want to be stocking the shelves with toilet paper or toothpaste. He never smiled—Charlene and I both remembered that. Though Marilyn was twenty-six now, sometimes she seemed younger than Charlene and me. We were taller by two inches, and Daddy could put his arm around her without reaching up. Maybe that was what he saw in her. She sure didn’t have Mama’s style.

The first time I saw her without her Piggly Wiggly apron, she was wearing Capri pants and sling-back pumps, though no one wore Capris anymore. Her hair looked like a light brown cap, stiff with hairspray. When Daddy took us all to dinner at Abby’s Little Diner near the Back Bay for oyster po’ boys, all she talked about was ‘Nam, and how we should “bomb the gooks.” It was supposed to be a time for us to get to know each other, but she didn’t ask Charlene and me a single question, not even the boring ones, like how school was going, or did we have a boyfriend yet.

“They ought to run those draft dodgers out of the country.” She slid across the formica table on both elbows, like it was something confidential. “You know who could do it? Joe Holliday, that’s who.” Mr. Holliday had taken to hanging out at the downtown Post Office in his camouflage fatigues with a banner, “Don’t Negotiate. Annihilate.”

“He hates everybody.” I started to tell her about the Halloween bullets, but Charlene interrupted.

“Anybody who likes Joe Holliday is a freak,” she said, jabbing an oyster with her fork.

“I don’t like the man, honey, but this country’s in trouble.” She stirred her coffee with a scratched spoon.

Daddy kept saying, “It’ll be okay, don’t you worry,” like he didn’t hear us at all. He hardly said much anymore, but at least he was happy. He was too busy trying to cheer up Marilyn now. Once, when Marilyn was crying about Jimmy, I heard Daddy say, “He’s in Heaven. He wouldn’t want you to live your life alone, pretty little sugar muffin like you.”

Sugar muffin! I stopped listening when I heard those words. What did Daddy know about Mama and Levi Litvak? Did he still dream about Mama? Then I wondered if Marilyn was his way of getting back at Mama, proving that he could have a sugar muffin, too, though he still put fresh flowers on her grave every week. Marilyn didn’t know about that.

The news that Daddy and Marilyn were engaged stirred up gossip again about Mama and Levi Litvak. People dug their claws into how Mama and Levi Litvak died and kept making up new stories, trying to nail down the truth, like they were sealing a coffin so it could finally be buried.

There were still rumors that Levi Litvak hadn’t burned up in the crash. He’d gotten away with murder, they said. “Why, look at those three civil rights workers, making us out to be a bunch of fools,” Charlene’s Sunday school teacher told Deanna’s mom in the beauty shop. “Anybody with any sense knows those bodies in that swamp weren’t theirs. They’re up North, laughing their heads off while our law-abiding officers are accused of something that happened back in 1964. So who knows whose ashes might’ve been in Levi Litvak’s car?” Though Deanna didn’t call much any more, she had to tell me that Mama’s murderer might be alive.

Levi Litvak was working on a cruise ship in the Bahamas, some folks said. The elementary school principal spotted him on TV, doing stunts for Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. Miss Tate, the hairdresser, said he’d made a fortune at a blackjack table in Reno. There was a mighty big cover-up, she told women while she twisted rollers into their hair. Could’ve been the same hired thugs who did Kennedy in. Mrs. Guest said she’d seen Levi Litvak giving the news on a station in Houston when she visited her sister there. He’d gained weight and grown a mustache, but he had the exact same voice, she said. The story of the man who killed Mama became a legend in Biloxi.

So Mama herself became famous, even as far away as New Orleans. She’d always wanted fame, to have the recognition that went with it. But not that way, as the victim in a murder people gossiped about all over the Gulf Coast. I decided Levi Litvak must’ve really loved Mama, to do what he did. Either that, or she’d driven him totally nuts. Mama did have a kind of power over people. It drove Daddy to wear elevator lifts in his shoes to this very day. Even after all those stories about Mama, Daddy carried his head high.

Mrs. Tate said Daddy was a hero for putting flowers on the grave of a runaway wife. She told Daddy she was thankful he and Marilyn had found each other. Poor Jimmy Taylor, dead in Vietnam, they said, but how nice Marilyn found a good man. That was what Mrs. Drummond, whose husband owned the five and dime store, told Mrs. Guest. The gossip didn’t stop, though every time Grandma Tattershall went to town, she told people to mind their own business.

When Daddy married, my friends avoided me again, as if they’d get sucked into misery if they got close. Charlene joined Youth for Christ, where the kids were willing to forgive her for having a mother who was murdered. After the first meeting, she came home glowing with excitement. “One of the kids didn’t even know about it!” she said.

“Didn’t know what?” I knew what she meant. I just wanted to make her say it.

“She didn’t know Mama was murdered, dummy,” she said, but she was too happy to stop smiling.

“I’m not the one who’s a dummy. That’s pathetic,” I told her. “You think you can erase the past? Erase Mama?”

She stopped smiling. “Sometimes I hate Mama. Messing around with Levi Litvak, ruining our lives.”

“She loved us.” I sank down on the bed and stared at her, like my sister was someone I’d never seen before.

“Daddy wasn’t good enough for her, that’s why she did it,” said Charlene. “Who’d marry Daddy? Marilyn, she’s good enough.” She stood at the mirror, pushing at her hair with the tips of her fingers.

“You hate both Mama and Daddy? What about me?”

“I love you, and you know it.” She spat the words out like nails. Those were the last words she spoke to me for a month, but then one night, at bedtime, she came up with a sack of pink rollers and offered to set my hair. “You know how your hair would look good? With curls around your face.”

Ever since she’d joined Youth for Christ, Charlene set her hair on pink curlers at night. But I stuck to the Beatles look, ironing my bangs so they’d lie straight.

“What’s wrong with it now?” I asked, glad she was talking at last.

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” she said.

“Do you dignify anything?” I muttered, but she was too busy turning my head to the mirror to even hear.

“Look,” she pointed at my reflection. “It’s hanging in strings like a hippie.”

“I like it,” I said, and tossed the long ends, trying to prove how shiny and pretty it could be, but she wasn’t looking.

She said, “Hopeless,” and wrapped a strand of her own hair around the curler, securing it with a pink plastic toothpick. “You don’t even have friends anymore,” she said, surveying herself in the mirror.

It was true. Deanna never called, unless it was gossip about Levi Litvak. When Biloxi sank its teeth into something, it chewed for a long time.

“You don’t even have a boyfriend. But worse things have happened to better people, I guess,” she continued. She’d finished her hair and could now devote her full attention to my life. “Look.” She pulled out a boy’s high school ring and put it on her left ring finger.

“Whose is that?” She hadn’t been talking about Art Johnson, not since he got sent to Parris Island.

“Ernie Crenshaw gave it to me at Youth for Christ.”

So that’s why she was being friendly. “Who’s he?” The phone rang a lot for Charlene lately, that was all I knew.

“You wouldn’t know,” she said importantly. “He’s a senior at Libertyburg High.” Libertyburg was a little town near the Green Lizard Lounge. She took a red rubber band, one of those that came around the newspaper, and strapped the ring to her finger by crossing the band beneath. “That’s how you do it. Some girls melt wax under the stone to make it fit, but I wouldn’t want to defile his ring.”

“Daddy won’t like it,” I said. “He’ll say it’s too close to being engaged.”

“He won’t notice.” She put a hair net over the curlers.

“I can still see those curlers, you know,” I said. “That ring’s even harder to hide.”

“Don’t worry,” said Charlene. She plumped her pillow and smoothed the case gently, as if it might be Ernie.

“What’s Ernie like?” I was too curious to ignore her.

She smiled and sat on her bed. “Gorgeous. Dark hair and brown eyes, and this great smile. I may be in love.”

After that, it was still hard to talk to her. When she wasn’t with Ernie, she was on the phone, or floating around the house in a trance. They went out every weekend, both Friday and Saturday nights. Once, she came home and told me about it, in the darkness of our bedroom while our transistor radio crackled with far-away stations.

“A cop caught us tonight.” She slipped on her gown.

“How fast were you going?” I asked.

She laughed and dotted some pimple cream on her chin. “We were parking, silly. You know, by the baseball field. Then there’s this light shining in the car.”

“What did you do?” I searched her face, but she turned out the light.

“Covered up. He went away. All pleasure isn’t sin, you know.” It sounded like something she’d learned from Ernie, a guy who would pick up girls at Youth for Christ.

Covered up? The cracked plastic seats of Ernie’s Plymouth must get cold against bare skin. An image of Charlene and Ernie exploring each other, with just the steamy windows between them and a cop’s flashlight, came into my mind, but I pushed it out. “Don’t let him take advantage of you,” I said, feeling like Marilyn.

Instead her voice was hushed. “His body, it’s wonderful, Jubilee.”

I wished the army hadn’t drafted Art Johnson. There wouldn’t have been room for Ernie then. Mama wouldn’t have liked her talking that way, and I tried to tell her so.

“You’re just jealous,” she said.

One night she came into our bedroom late and turned on the light to wake me. “Watch,” she said. “It’s important.” I held one hand to shield my eyes against the light while she walked across the room in her mini-skirt, then back. Her pantyhose looked twisted. “Am I walking different?”

“No.” All I wanted was to go back to sleep.

“Good.” She put on her nightgown and flipped the light out, but then a thought came into my mind and kept me awake. Girls whispered that you’d walk different when you weren’t a virgin anymore. Boys would notice, they said.

At breakfast, I whispered, “Why did you wake me up to watch you walk?”

She stared at her cereal. “I got a blister on my heel.”

“A blister?” Marilyn put down the spatula and went to get a Band-Aid for her. She wanted to do little things like that. I was beginning to like her, but Charlene would still barely talk to her.

She slid the Band-Aid into her purse when Marilyn came back. “I’ll put it on later,” she said.

After that, Charlene didn’t tell me much about Ernie.

Sometimes the past came roaring back, like a monster in a nightmare, when all you can do is run in place. Before lunch at school, I was passing the teachers’ lounge, when I heard the chemistry teacher, Mr. Langstrom, tell someone that Daddy had married a good woman, even if Marilyn was almost young enough to be his daughter. A hot little number, he said, and I stopped to listen. “But that Bernice, she was something else. Racy in high school, wasn’t she? Remember when she said she was singing in some New Orleans club? Don’t you know a gal as good lookin’ as Bernice Tattershall had a sugar daddy over there in the French Quarter?”

Another man chortled, but it was high, a giggle. “At the prom, she ate light bulbs before she sang. Remember that? Nibbled at the glass a little, like this.” I could imagine his teeth moving, but I didn’t know who was talking. “Said it made her singin’ voice better.”

“I hear she ate those light bulbs only if they were turned on.” It was Langstrom this time. They laughed together, with that chortling sound again, then it died away, and the other voice spoke.

“’Course, it’s a shame what happened.”

“Don’t pay attention to them. They’re jerks.” A boy was standing at my elbow. Robbie Godbold. He was the smartest boy in algebra class. He once wore his hair so long the assistant principal sent him home to get it cut. It was touching his collar, and that was the test at Tallulah High. The only person who paid much attention to Robbie was the algebra teacher. She called him “Robert,” and used his tests as examples for how to do the equations. The football players hated him for that. That, and his tie-dyed tee shirts. The shirts clung to his skinny chest, showing his ribs and shoulder blades. The football players called him “the only hippie in Mississippi,” and one of them tried to pick a fight with him once. Robbie talked his way out of it.

“They’re stupid.” He pointed to the Teachers’ Lounge.

I pushed past him to the cafeteria. The smell of boiled plastic trays and American cheese filled my nose, and even after I ran outside and threw up on the grass, I couldn’t stop smelling that boiled plastic.

“Don’t listen to them.” It was Robbie Godbold again. He held a tissue, trying to wipe the vomit from my mouth.

“I’m sick, that’s all.” I turned to walk to the truck, but he followed.

“Are you well enough to drive?” Behind his glasses, his eyes studied me like I was an equation he couldn’t solve.

“Why do you care?” I asked, but I felt mean when I saw the look on his face.

He was gripping his notebooks so tight the pages wrinkled. “I like you.” He smiled a little and shrugged. “You’re good at math.”

“I know,” I said.

“Maybe we can study together sometime.” He paused while I tried to think of something to say. “Sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” I climbed in the truck and moved off, the wind cool against my face. I headed for the coastal highway and drove for a long time. That night, I told Charlene how Mr. Langstrom had said Mama was racy and ate light bulbs.

“Jubilee!” She was beaming. “He means those race records Mama had. Everybody admired Mama. Are you sure he said light bulbs? Maybe he meant some kind of food, like turnips are a bulb, you know. They call it a rhizome. We’ve been studying it in biology. That’s what he meant.” She pulled a tee-shirt over her curlers and studied herself in the mirror. “I look like Mama, a little.”

“You said you hated her,” I said, and her face fell for a moment.

“Will you forgive me for those words?” she asked.

“Why’d you say it?”

Her mouth clamped down as she rummaged through a drawer for a lipstick. “You know I didn’t mean it. I’m glad I look like Mama. You look like Daddy; what they call a ‘handsome woman’.” Her eyes darted at me. “That’s what they say about Jane Wyman, you know. And she’s not so bad.”

In my mind, I could hear the “race records” Mama had collected, the ones I rescued from the garage where Marilyn stored them in boxes on a shelf, beside the decaying Piggly Wiggly bag with the poppy scarf inside. No one had ever bothered to throw the scarf out. I’d taken the bag, too, along with the old recordings of the deep, throaty voices that told gritty tales of life gone bad, songs Mama taught herself to play on the piano while she sang. She had tried to teach me the words, but now I could barely remember them.

My face felt hot. I had to tell her the truth. “That’s not what he meant, Charlene. Racy, that’s nothing to do with race records.” I told her that Mr. Langstrom meant that Mama had gone bad herself. It was embarrassing to know more than my big sister.

“That’s not true,” she said, so I got the dictionary, but pointing to the definition didn’t feel like a triumph.

“That creep,” Charlene said. “We’ll put sugar in his gas tank. He drives that banged-up green Ford.”

I closed the dictionary. “He’s not worth it.” But I felt like the little lost sheep Mama used to sing about, the one that kept trying to forget. I turned out the light. After a while I heard Charlene crying in the dark.

“Bastard Langstrom!” she whispered, and I got up from my bed and snuggled beside her. I buried my face in the bony spot between her shoulder blades, feeling her shake with tears, and then my own tears came. We fell asleep that way, nestled together like spoons, like kids. I was the little sister again, my arms wrapped around her middle from behind, as if she could face things I couldn’t.

The next day, I decided to talk to the school counselor, Mr. Woods, about what Mr. Langstrom said. I’d get that idiot fired, I thought. It was the sort of thing Mama would’ve done. That’s what I told myself when I screwed up my courage to knock on Mr. Woods’ door before gym started. It was open a crack, and I could see him looking at some papers. I tapped the wood. He nodded at the chair in front of his desk. “Come on in,” he said. He sounded impatient, but I sat down. “What can I do for you?” he asked, still shuffling some papers.

“Something awful happened yesterday,” I said, trying to think of what Mama would say to defend Charlene and me. “I heard Mr. Langstrom say our mother was racy in high school. It’s mean to talk that way about someone who’s dead,” I told Mr. Woods. “It’s mean and and …” I tried to think of the words Mama would’ve used, “and downright unprofessional.”

He locked both hands behind his bald head and stared at me while I talked. I tugged at my mini-skirt, wishing I hadn’t worn it. He might send me home. Little hairs edged out of his nostrils and fluttered as he breathed.

I told him about the lost sheep Mama used to sing about, and how could that be racy? When I sang some of the lyrics to show him how innocent they were, he interrupted.

“We know you have a good voice, Jubilee. You don’t have to prove it.” He surveyed me. “You and your mother are a lot alike. You ought to know better than to eavesdrop outside the teachers’ lounge. We’ve got enough problems at Tallulah without you kids loitering in the halls.” The phone rang, and he picked up. “Can’t right now. Be with you soon as I’m through with this girl.” He laughed, a chortle, like a man’s giggle, and a shiver ran down my spine. It was the same laugh I’d heard from the teachers’ lounge. He hung up and turned to me. “School policy doesn’t allow loitering.” He picked at a hangnail, and his eyes and mouth suddenly looked droopy, like they were melting. “When did you stop masturbating?” His eyes flicked up at me, and his voice sounded different, like it, too, had melted.

My mind spun so fast I could hardly think. “You need a new light bulb, Mr. Woods. It’s dim in here.” His bushy eyebrows shot up, and I glanced at the wall clock. “Gym class,” I said, and walked out, feeling his eyes on my back. How many other girls had he looked at that way, like a dog salivating? They all deserved to be fired. From then on, I’d take any course I could to graduate early. I was already in advanced English and math, but I’d even double up on gym, if it meant escaping Tallulah.

I walked straight out of that school, right past the gym where the girls were leaving the locker rooms in their blue shorts and white shirts. Deanna picked up a volley ball and served it straight into the net, on purpose. It bounced against the bleachers with a bang, and the last thing I saw was Kathy Holliday running to get it. On the boys’ side of the curtain that divided the gym, Coach Woods was giving a couple of boys “licks,” hitting them with a paddle if they wouldn’t say they wanted George Wallace to be President. It was radical to like Nixon, but I was secretly for McCarthy. Robbie Godbold had a McCarthy bumper sticker on his locker, but someone ripped it off until there was just a band of glue left, and the word “Commie” scrawled in red marker.

I heard the whack of the paddle, and hoped Robbie wasn’t on the other end of it. But all I could do was save myself.

The sky was dark with clouds, but the cheerleaders practiced anyway, looking like wooden puppets with desperate faces. “Give me a ‘T,’” they cried, and jumped with arms outstretched. “Give me an ‘A.’ They planted their feet apart, trying to look like the letter. “Give me an ‘L.’”

I wouldn’t give Tallulah High anything.