Runaway

six, though she had not liked either one. She sometimes had a little wine at dinner, and she liked that all right. She knew about oral sex and all methods of birth control and what homosexuals did. She had regularly seen Harry and Eileen naked, also a party of their friends naked around a campfire in the woods. On that same holiday she had sneaked out with other children to watch fathers slipping by sly agreement into the tents of mothers who were not their wives. One of the boys had suggested sex to her and she had agreed, but he could not make any progress and they became cross with each other and later she hated the sight of him.
    This was all a burden to her here—it gave her a sense of embarrassment and peculiar sadness, even of deprivation. And there wasn’t much she could do except remember, at school, to call Harry and Eileen Dad and Mom. That seemed to make them larger, but not so sharp. Their tense outlines were slightly blurred when they were spoken of in this way, their personalities slightly glossed over. Face-to-face with them, she had no technique for making this happen. She couldn’t even acknowledge that it might be a comfort.
    Some girls in Lauren’s class, finding the vicinity of the coffee shop irresistible but not being brave enough to go in, would enter the hotel lobby and make their way to the Ladies Room. There they would spend a quarter or a half hour fixing their own and each other’s hair in different styles, putting on lipstick that they might have stolen from Stedmans, sniffing each other’s necks and wrists, which they had sprayed with all the free trial perfumes in the drugstore.
    When they asked Lauren to go with them she suspected some sort of trick, but agreed anyway, partly because she so disliked going home alone in the ever-shortening afternoons to the house on the edge of the forest.
    As soon as they were inside the lobby a couple of these girls took hold of her and pushed her up to the desk, where the woman from the restaurant was seated on a high stool, working out some figures on a calculator.
    This woman’s name—Lauren already knew it from Harry— was Delphine. She had long fine hair that might be whitish blond or might be really white, because she was not young. She must often have to shake that hair back out of her face, as she did now. Her eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, were hooded by purple lids. Her face was broad, like her body, pale and smooth. But there was nothing indolent about her. Her eyes, now lifted, were a light flat blue, and she looked from one girl to another as if no contemptible behavior of theirs would surprise her.
    “This is her,” the girls said.
    The woman—Delphine—now looked at Lauren. She said, “Lauren? You sure?”
    Lauren, bewildered, said yes.
    “Well, I asked them was there anybody at their school called Lauren,” Delphine said—referring to the other girls as if they were already at a distance, shut out of her conversation with Lauren. “I asked them because of something that was found in here. Somebody must’ve dropped it in the coffee shop.”
    She opened a drawer and lifted out a gold chain. Dangling from the chain were the letters that spelled LAUREN.
    Lauren shook her head.
    “Not yours?” said Delphine. “Too bad. I already asked the kids in high school. So I guess I’ll just have to keep it around. Somebody might come back looking for it.”
    Lauren said, “You could put an ad in my dad’s paper.” She did not realize that she should have said just “the paper” until the next day, when she passed a couple of girls in the school hallway and heard a mincing voice say
my dad’s paper.
    “I could,” said Delphine. “But then I might get all kinds of people coming in and saying it’s theirs. Lying about what their name was, even. It’s gold.”
    “But they couldn’t wear it,” Lauren pointed out, “if it wasn’t their real name.”
    “Maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past them to claim it anyway.”
    The other girls had started for the Ladies.
    “Hey you,” Delphine called after them. “That’s out of bounds.”
    They turned around, surprised.
    “How come?”
    “Because it’s out of bounds, that’s how come. You can go and fool around someplace else.”
    “You never stopped us going in there before.”
    “Before was before and now is now.”
    “It’s supposed to be public.”
    “It is not,” said Delphine. “The one in the town hall is public. So get lost.”
    “I wasn’t