The View from Castle Rock

laughter when we peered through the desks and saw her looking for us.
    After a while she didn’t do that anymore, she ate her lunch upstairs in the cloakroom, alone.
    I would like to think that it was Wanda who pointed Frances out, when we stood in line ready to march into the classroom, as the girl we were always trying to avoid. But I could have been the one who did that, and certainly I went along with the joke, and was glad to be on the side of those who maintained the business of raised eyebrows and bitten lips and suppressed-but not
quite
suppressed-giggles. Living out at the end of that road as I did, and being easily embarrassed, yet a show-off, as I improbably was, I could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated. I could never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me.
    The hair ribbons became part of it. Just to go up to Frances and say, “I love your hair ribbon, where did you get it?” and have her say, in innocent bewilderment, “In Chicago,” was a lasting source of pleasure. For a while, “In Chicago,” or just “Chicago,” became the answer to everything.
    “Where did you go after school yesterday?”
    “Chicago.”
    “Where did your sister get her permanent?”
    “Oh, in Chicago.”
    Some girls would clamp their mouths down on the very word, and their chests would heave, or they would pretend to have hiccups till they were half sick.
    I didn’t avoid walking home with Frances, though I certainly let it be known that I didn’t choose to do that, but did it only because her mother had asked it of me. How much of this special very feminine persecution she was aware of, I don’t know. She may have thought there was some place where girls of my class always went to have lunch, and that I just went on doing that. She may never have understood what the giggling was about. She never asked about it. She tried to hold my hand, crossing the street, but I pulled away and told her not to.
    She said she always used to hold Sadie’s hand, when Sadie walked her to school in Chicago.
    “But that was different,” she said. “There aren’t any streetcars here.”
    One day she offered me a cookie left over from her lunch. I refused, so as not to feel any inconvenient obligation.
    “Go on,” she said. “My mother put it in for you.”
    Then I understood. Her mother put in this extra cookie, this treat, for me to eat when we had our lunches together. She had never told her mother that I didn’t show up at lunchtime, and that she could not find me. She must have been eating the extra cookie herself, but now the dishonesty was bothering her.

    So every day from then on she offered it, almost at the last minute as if she was embarrassed, and every day I accepted.
    We began to have a little conversation, starting when we were almost clear of town. We were both interested in movie stars. She had seen far more movies than I had-in Chicago you could see movies every afternoon, and Sadie used to take her. But I walked past our theatre and looked at the stills every time the picture changed, so I knew something about them. And I had one movie magazine at home, which a visiting cousin had left. It had pictures of Deanna Durbin’s wedding in it, so we talked about that, and what we wanted our own weddings to be like-the bridal dresses and the bridesmaids’ dresses and the flowers and the going-away outfits. The same cousin had given me a present-a Ziegfeld Girls cutout book. Frances had seen the Ziegfeld Girls movie and we talked about which Ziegfeld Girl we would like to be. She chose Judy Garland because she could sing, and I chose Hedy Lamarr because she was the most beautiful.
    “My father and mother used to sing in the Light Opera Society,” she said. “They sang in
The Pirates of Penzance.
”
    Lightopra-sussciety. Pirazapenzanze. I filed those words away but would not ask what they meant. If she had said them at school, in front of others, they would have been irresistible ammunition.
    When her mother came out to greet us-kissing Frances hello as she had kissed her good-bye-she might ask if I could come in and play. I always said I had to go straight home.

    Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Wainwright asked me if I could come to have supper the next Sunday. She said it would be a little thank-you party and a farewell party, now that they were going away. I was on the point of saying that I didn’t think my mother would let me, but when I heard the word
farewell
I saw the