Girls In 3-B, The by Valerie Taylor Read Free Book Online

leave them?"
    "On that table right over there."
    "Well, don't holler at me. I didn't take your stuff." He had a pleasant, rather round face and a nice voice with a hint of southern drawl. Not the kind of boy to steal anything. She snapped, "I never said you did. It's too bad if a person can't set something down and find it there when they get back."
    "What did you do, just walk off and leave your stuff?"
    "I didn't do it on purpose. I was thinking about something more important," she said with dignity. "I was making up a poem."
    "Oh, one of those."
    "Why not?"
    He smiled. "Honey, this place is just lousy with poets. Every campus is, I guess, but this one's worse than most. Sculptors and painters, too, all fifty-seven varieties, but the poets are the worst." He looked as if the idea pained him. "You don't have to have any special equipment to write poetry, and if the critics don't like it, you can publish an article in the little no-pay magazines and complain how stupid they are. Do you write free verse with no punctuation, or are you one of those romantic sonnet girls?"
    "I'm not going to talk about it," Annice said. "You wouldn't understand."
    "Okay, okay, what are you going to do about lunch?"
    Annice stopped in her dignified retreat. Her own helplessness was suddenly borne in upon her -- no carfare, no lunch money, no change for the endless small purchases a student was always making. Not even a dime to telephone home. She could borrow, of course. She had struck up casual friendships with a dozen people who would surely lend her a dime and might even let her have a dollar. It was nothing to get excited about. But for a moment she was filled with pure terror, seeing herself helpless and lost. It was worse than uncomfortable, it was almost physically painful. She said weakly, "I don't know."
    He dug into his pocket and came up with handful of small change which he counted soberly, like a man at a newsstand. "I'll treat you to lunch if you'll order something cheap."
    "Oh -- all right. When do you get off?" Anything for a free meal, the girls said, meaning not quite anything -- but still it was a break to have a man, almost any man, pick up the tab. It lent a girl status. She was happily conscious of curious looks as she tucked her hand through his arm and left the library.
    "I meant it when I said cheap. One hamburger. You can have two orders of fries, though, they're only twenty cents."
    "And get fat?"
    "Little meat on your bones wouldn't hurt you any. I like girls cornfed."
    They sat at the counter in Walgreen's, with a magazine rack at one end and a case of electric pads and bathroom scales at the other. "Just one coffee. I'm a poor farm boy."
    "You're kidding."
    "Am not." His name was Jackson Carter and he came from a wide spot in the road in Missouri, named Jackson Center after his mama's folks. Jackson Center was purely Southern. "Any place where they farm with mules is in the South, I don't give a damn what the Texaco road maps say."
    "I'm from the farm too. I hate it."
    "Well, I wouldn't go that far. Makes no difference how many electric gadgets they have or how many horsepower the old tractor has, farm folks don't change much, that's true. They've got a good way of living -- for them. Of course if it doesn't happen to be your way you're out of luck." He thought this over and nodded. "You have to fit the pattern, you can't diverge."
    "Do you diverge?"
    "I'm not a fairy if that's what you mean. There's plenty of them around, have you noticed? I'm an old-fashioned guy -- I like women," She giggled. "No, I mean -- that's a good way to live if that's what you want to do. Me, I want to be a physicist. Turn the atomic stuff to some useful purpose."
    "You ought to be at U. of Chicago, then."
    "That's all I can do to work my way here."
    He was twenty, had worked two years in a filling station, been stock boy in a drugstore, done a short term in a canning factory where the workday was maybe sixteen or eighteen hours. That was