Black Ice by Lorene Cary Read Free Book Online Page B

would have to be maintained: rolled at night in pink sponge curlers, oiled and brushed and styled, covered like a matron’s in the rain. I agreed happily to a price I’d never paid. After a few days, when my pressed hair began to nap up around the temples, when short and sassy degenerated into short and picky, I tried, one rainy day, to pull my hair back into a ponytail, as I always had before. The cut ends wouldn’t meet, and, five minutes before the bus was due on our corner, I stood before our bathroom mirror sobbing stupidly. What if I had judged that badly again? It was the sort of blunder I wouldn’t know about until too late.
    We turned left off Pleasant Street at the sign for the school. The grounds were green and tidy. At each dormitory house, parked cars were in various stages of unloading. Young people called to each other. They darted across lawns and jogged along the paths; they stood together in groups just as they’d done in the admissions slides.
    My letter said that I was to come directly to the Rectory where I’d be welcomed by the Rector and my old girl, a Sixth Former whose job it was to help a new student through the first confusing days. I remember that we discussed whether to do that or to go first to my dormitory. We had the map out.My father drove slowly, but did not stop, and we had some trouble following the pen-and-ink drawing of the campus. Dad kept rolling, and we couldn’t decide where we were, which to do first. Eventually, we landed at the Rectory for my official welcome.
    The big, gray clapboard Rectory formed a triangle at the center of school with the two red-brick chapels: the homey Old Chapel and the towering Gothic. The brick was repeated in stolid dormitory houses built before the Depression; in low, modern ones that rose in the middle to two-story diamond windows; in the art studios that perched next to a waterfall. White clapboard houses made cheerful spots of light against the grass and trees. An amber-colored system of ponds and streams watered the grounds and enforced a graceful but informal spacing between buildings. From the center greensward to the dining hall or to the meadow behind the Rectory or to the gray granite library, poised like a shrine at the edge of the reflecting pond, we had to cross bridges girded by stone and masonry arches. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and the most plentiful.
    As we headed up the brick walkway toward the Rectory receiving line, I felt a public family face spreading over our countenances. Someone asked us how we’d come up. How long was the drive? Did we drive straight through? Were we tired? Would we like refreshments?
    A student runner was dispatched to find my old girl. We were guided into the house by a receiving line of older white students and a few unidentified adults. A black student greeted us, too. His name was Wally Talbot, he told us, and he was president of the Sixth Form. He was a few inches taller than I. He had a smile for the adults that was quick and bright, and a wink for me.
    “Did he say that he was president of the School?” my mother whispered.
    “I think that’s what he said,” my father answered, and we all turned around and looked again at the black student who was joking easily with the white students beside him.
    The Rector, Mr. Oates, made us a hearty greeting as we walked toward the parlor. He was a smallish man, compact, robust. He looked straight at me and pronounced my name carefully. He looked evenly at my parents, and with respect. He knew where we had driven from, knew that my father had had to take the day off from school. I did not know whether to be flattered or disturbed that a man who’d never seen me knew so much about me and my folks.
    We passed through the wide foyer of the Rectory, into an outer parlor and then a large, rectangular living room. My mother and I caught each other taking inventory: fireplaces, bay windows, bookshelves, French doors, rear patio, enclosed