Who Do You Think You Are

sweat for our pretensions.
    It could have been worse. Disgrace was the easiest thing to come by. High school life was hazardous, in that harsh clean light, and nothing was ever forgotten. Rose could have been the girl who lost the Kotex. That was probably a country girl, carrying the Kotex in her pocket or in the back of her notebook, for use later in the day. Anybody who lived at a distance might have done that. Rose herself had done it. There was a Kotex dispenser in the girls’ washroom but it was always empty, would swallow your dimes but disgorge nothing in return. There was the famous pact made by two country girls to seek out the janitor at lunchtime, ask him to fill it. No use.
    “Which one of you is the one that needs it?” he said. They fled. They said his room under the stairs had an old grimy couch in it, and a cat’s skeleton. They swore to it.
    That Kotex must have fallen on the floor, maybe in the cloakroom, then been picked up and smuggled somehow into the trophy case in the main hall. There it came to public notice. Folding and carrying had spoiled its fresh look, rubbed its surface, so that it was possible to imagine it had been warmed against the body. A great scandal. In morning assembly, the Principal made reference to a disgusting object. He vowed to discover, expose, flog and expel, the culprit who had put it on view. Every girl in the school was denying knowledge of it. Theories abounded. Rose was afraid that she might be a leading candidate for ownership, so was relieved when responsibility was fixed on a big sullen country girl named Muriel Mason, who wore slub rayon housedresses to school, and had B.O.
    “You got the rag on today, Muriel?” boys would say to her now, would call after her.
    “If I was Muriel Mason I would want to kill myself,” Rose heard a senior girl say to another on the stairs. “I would kill myself.” She spoke not pityingly but impatiently.
    Every day when Rose got home she would tell Flo about what went on in school. Flo enjoyed the episode of the Kotex, would ask about fresh developments. Half-a-grapefruit she never got to hear about. Rose would not have told her anything in which she did not play a superior, an onlooker’s part. Pitfalls were for others, Flo and Rose agreed. The change in Rose, once she left the scene, crossed the bridge, changed herself into chronicler, was remarkable. No nerves any more. A loud skeptical voice, some hip-swinging in a red and yellow plaid skirt, more than a hint of swaggering.
    Flo and Rose had switched roles. Now Rose was the one bringing stories home, Flo was the one who knew the names of the characters and was waiting to hear.
    Horse Nicholson, Del Fairbridge, Runt Chesterton. Florence Dodie, Shirley Pickering, Ruby Carruthers. Flo waited daily for news of them. She called them Jokers.
    “Well, what did those jokers get up to today?”
    They would sit in the kitchen, the door wide open to the store in case any customers came in, and to the stairs in case her father called. He was in bed. Flo made coffee or she told Rose to get a couple of Cokes out of the cooler.
    This is the sort of story Rose brought home:
    Ruby Carruthers was a slutty sort of girl, a red-head with a bad squint. (One of the great differences between then and now, at least in the country, and places like West Hanratty, was that squints and walleyes were let alone, teeth overlapped or protruded any way they liked.) Ruby Carruthers worked for Bryants the hardware people; she did housework for her board and stayed in the house when they went away, as they often did, to the horse races or the hockey games or to Florida. One time when she was there alone three boys went over to see her. Del Fairbridge, Horse Nicholson, Runt Chesterton.
    “To see what they could get,” Flo put in. She looked at the ceiling and told Rose to keep her voice down. Her father would not tolerate this sort of story.
    Del Fairbridge was a good-looking boy, conceited, and not very clever. He said he would go into the house and persuade Ruby with no trouble at all, and if he could get her to do it with all three of them, he would. What he did not know was that Horse Nicholson had already arranged with Ruby to meet him under the veranda.
    “Spiders in there, likely,” said Flo. “I guess they don’t care.” While Del was wandering around the dark house looking for her, Ruby was under the veranda with Horse, and Runt who was in on the whole plan was sitting on the veranda