8 Plus 1 by Robert Cormier Read Free Book Online

passes for my Bogart grimace.
    “I wonder what this one is like.”
    “Which one?” I asked.
    “Mike’s latest.”
    “Like all the others,” I said.
    All the girls Mike brought home looked alike. Long hair and short skirts. Or long hair and hip huggers. They were polite and pretty and had been pumped full of vitamins from the day of their birth and had started keeping dental appointments at the age of three or four. They wereall entranced by the same songs on the Top 40, and they wore the same cologne. They had similar vocabularies—words like
gross
and
heavy—
and they prefixed almost every sentence with
like.
As a senior in high school, Mike majored in basketball, English and girls, not necessarily in that order, and I mention English because that’s the only subject in which he receives an A on his report card. Although he’s been on the varsity basketball squad since his sophomore year, the coach doesn’t send him in too often—Mike’s of average height, and he suffers in comparison with all those giants. But he’s loyal and industrious and loves the game. One night last year he was sent in during the final moments, and he sank a beauty, the ball going through the hoop without touching the rim. He turned, searching the stands, and our eyes caught. He grinned, a grin that was a marvel of triumph and pride. For that quick moment, he was the boy I had taught to swim and fish, the boy with whom I took long walks on Saturday afternoons. The stands, with all the cheering fans, didn’t exist for him. We were simply father and son, and the moment was all the more precious because I knew that this kind of sharing would become rarer and rarer. Why share moments like that with a father when the girls would be leaping and shouting?
    As it turned out, the new girl was a basketball cheerleader. Her name was Jane, which was a change. I had been expecting something like Debbie or Donna or Cindy. Her hair streamed down to her shoulders; it was parted in the middle and stray strands kept falling across her eyes. She wassweet and well-mannered and her teeth were orthodontist-perfect and her favorite word was
wow
, which she pronounced with wonder and delight.
    Mike was dazzled by her although, frankly, she was virtually a replica of the girl whose name I’ve forgotten that Mike had brought home a few weeks before. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her, gulping her at every glance. He didn’t mind the way she said
wow
about twice a minute. As in, “Wow, is that a heavy song.” Or, “Wow, is that a neat sweater.” She liked that word
neat
almost as much as
wow.
Embellish every sentence with the same recurring words, and the results can be nerve-racking, particularly if you hear it all from the next room where you’re trying to concentrate on the new Maigret novel.
    Actually, I was accustomed to the sounds of young people in the house. Annie brings her friends home from college for occasional weekends, and there’s lots of singing and laughing. Julie is fourteen and brings home the younger set, and some of her girl friends merge into Mike’s crowd. The telephone seems to ring all the time and the stereo plays frantically and the television is never mute. Ellie calls it “sweet racket,” but it’s only sweet to me when strained through a closed door.
    Jane became part of the racket and the activity throughout the fall and on into the basketball season. Mike managed to play regularly—one of the Goliaths broke an ankle—and he scored his share of points. He’d drop his eyes modestly after making a basket, and Jane would leap in joyous triumph.There were five cheerleaders, and sometimes I couldn’t tell her apart from the others.
    Snow fell early, and they went off skating or skiing on weekend afternoons and evenings. “All that energy wasted on the young,” I said to Ellie. Mike failed an important algebra test and received a warning card.
    “Better talk to him,” Ellie said.
    And I did. He promised to do better,