1975 - Night of the Juggler Read Free Page A

chattering youngsters climbed down the steps and stood at the intersection waving good-bye to friends, who waved back to them from behind the windows of the bus which was accelerating, heading toward the southern boundaries of Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street.
    The names of the two girls were Kate (Katherine Jackson) Boyd and Tish (Patricia) Tennyson, and they were eleven years of age and wore identical uniforms, which consisted of smartly cut black blazers, short green flannel skirts, green berets, white socks, and black moccasins.
    The girls lived in adjoining apartment buildings whose drawing-room windows faced the verdant and dramatic views of Central Park.
    Kate Boyd had shining blond hair which she wore in a ponytail, secured by a green ribbon, and a pale, unblemished complexion from which her cherry-dark eyes blazed with an almost comical intensity. It was apparent from even a superficial view of these youngsters that the confident excitement and aggressiveness in Kate’s manner completely dominated her friend, Tish Tennyson, whose skin tended to be sallow and whose chubby hips and rounded stomach had scored permanent diagonal creases in her green flannel skirt.
    As the crisp gusting winds whipped their hair about their foreheads and cheeks, the two girls hugged their book bags to their chests and chattered at each other with ferocious intensity. Their present preoccupation and stimulation stemmed from a mix of heady ingredients: boys, older boys at that, practically men, and the girls’ shabby betrayal by these adult and arrogant males.
    Kate and Tish had scored a coup for their fifth-grade class. They had worked up their nerve to approach Bob Elliott, who was seventeen and the leader of a rock group called The Purple Dreams, with an offer to play the Prewitt School’s “sweet young thing” afternoon tea dance.
    To their surprise and delight, Bob Elliott had accepted; The Purple Dreams were cool and “in,” thus an impressive catch indeed for a fifth-grade tea dance. Even though the fee was high, one hundred dollars for a three-hour gig, plus fifteen dollars for the transportation of their electronic gear, Kate Boyd had committed the class funds to the project without reservations, knowing that whatever the price, it was a triumph and worth it.
    But this morning their excitement and dreams had collapsed, after Bob Elliott had called to tell them the gig was off because two of The Purple Dreams were down with the flu. This, while wretchedly disappointing, was something they could live with, but at lunch in a pizzeria near Miss Prewitt’s, Kate had learned a bitter, unacceptable truth: Bob Elliott had simply dropped them to play a more prestigious date at Darwin Prep’s senior dinner dance.
    Kate Boyd, who was flamingly outraged by any and all degrees of injustice, had cabbed across town to Bob Elliott’s apartment immediately on learning of his betrayal.
    “He just laughed at me,” Kate said for about the fifteenth time to Tish.
    “Laughed at me. He said we were just kids and wouldn’t understand his music anyway.”
    “Did you really say it to him?” Tish said with a thread of excitement in her voice. “What you told me?”
    Kate sighed. “No, I didn’t.”
    “But you said you said it.”
    “Well, I wanted to. I wanted to say, ‘I’d like to kick you’”—Kate lowered her voice theatrically—”’right in your jewels, Bob Elliott.’”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “Don’t be stupid. I wanted to, it’s the same thing.”
    “No, it isn’t, Kate.”
    “You don’t even know what it means,” Kate said.
    Tish looked anxiously at Kate. She could stand neither Kate’s dismissal nor Kate’s displeasure. “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “Where’d you hear it?”
    “They were in bed and she was laughing,” Kate said, and then added the logical prologue to the sentence as almost an afterthought: “I heard my mother say it to my father.”
    “When’s your mother coming back,