Black Ice by Lorene Cary Read Free Book Online Page A

but at other times too—completely against my will. It did it when Gregory, our paper boy, sang to us girls with exaggerated enjoyment:
    I’m a girl watcher, I’m a girl watcher
,
Watchin’ girls go by. My, my, my
.
I’m a girl watcher, I’m a girl watcher
,
Here comes one now
.
    It could jangle despite danger, too. I’d learned that in junior high when two older boys, one black and one white, called out to me after school. They hung out together. That was all I knew about them. They stared at pieces of us girls, at our breasts, our thighs, our buttocks. Once, they asked me to go somewhere with them, and they walked behind me until I’d found a friend to latch onto and accompany home. The clamorous, bulging body under my skin set to jangling with fear, and I spoke about them to my mother.
    “Next time they come near you,” she said, “I want you to turn around and shout, ‘Just what is wrong with you? What is your basic maladjustment?’ ”
    I couldn’t say that, of course, so I determined to avoid them. Eventually, they lost interest in teasing me.
    Months later, they were arrested, tried, and found guilty of raping and killing a girl in her own basement. She was discovered, as the newspapers said, as my mother often repeated, and as I visualized at odd moments during the school day, in a pool of her own blood.
    I remember little else about them or about the incident. It blended into, rather than stood out from, the daily rhythm of my life. It was just like that, adolescence was: jerky, disorderly, the most important times condensed by fear.
    I went inside to bed then, because for the first time since I had applied to St. Paul’s School, I realized that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
    The next morning we left early. St. Paul’s fall term began later than public schools, so my father had to take a day off from teaching.
    Late-model station wagons, weighted down like our Citroën sedan, drove north with us. We watched them. We counted them. We took an inventory of their cargo. Suitcases, boxes, blankets, potted plants, reading lamps; pillows smashed up against the windows; rocking chairs, easy chairs, rolled up Orientals, and bean bags in various colors lashed to the rooftops or straddling open back doors. We decided that these folks were off to college or to boarding schools less stringent than St. Paul’s regarding matters of personal possessions. (The Vice-Rector had sent us a letter, which my parents approved of, stating that students were not allowed to own or have access to automobiles and were strongly discouraged from bringing expensive objects to school, such as fancy jewelry or stereo systems.)
    I missed my baton. For the first time in three years, I would not have it close to hand where I could twirl it absently in my room, to comfort myself with the simple competence of my fingers and the smooth, cool weight of the metal. I would twirl at night after my mother had told me to turn off the lights and stop reading. Even in the morning glare of the Garden State Parkway I could remember the whirl of silver splinters of light the baton gave off, and the funnel of air around my head and legs and behind my back.
    St. Paul’s did not have majorettes with epaulets and white, half-calf boots with tassels; it had no cheerleaders, drum majors, or flag squads; no prom or prom queen; no caps andgowns at graduation; no class rings such as the big gold one Wash once gave me and I tried solemnly to give back. I had the ring, packed up and hidden, but the baton would have given me away, so I’d left it home with the rest of the folderol of a public-school education and my gospel choir robes from church. No sooner were we on the road, however, amid the station wagons and their cool-eyed passengers, than I missed each and every public-school artifact.
    Three years before, I’d had my hair cut, straightened, and curled into what had seemed a most sophisticated style. My mother had warned me that it