Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Read Free Page A

him at all were doing so with heads on one side and mouths partly open, the way you look at a broken arm or a circus freak.
    “We just barely made it,” Vincent went on, his eyes gleaming, “and this one bullet got my fodda in the shoulder. Didn’t hurt him bad—just grazed him, like—so my mudda bandaged it up for him and all, but he couldn’t do no more drivin’ after that, and we had to get him to a doctor, see? So my fodda siz, ‘Vinny, think you can drive a ways?’ I siz, ‘Sure, if you show me how.’ So he showed me how to work the gas and the brake, and all like that, and I drove to the doctor. My mudda siz, ‘I’m prouda you, Vinny, drivin’ all by yourself.’ So anyways, we got to the doctor, got my fodda fixed up and all, and then he drove us back home.”He was breathless. After an uncertain pause he said, “And that’s all.” Then he walked quickly back to his desk, his stiff new corduroy pants whistling faintly with each step.
    “Well, that was very—entertaining, Vincent,” Miss Price said, trying to act as if nothing had happened. “Now, who’s next?” But nobody raised a hand.
    Recess was worse than usual for him that day; at least it was until he found a place to hide—a narrow concrete alley, blind except for several closed fire-exit doors, that cut between two sections of the school building. It was reassuringly dismal and cool in there—he could stand with his back to the wall and his eyes guarding the entrance, and the noises of recess were as remote as the sunshine. But when the bell rang he had to go back to class, and in another hour it was lunchtime.
    Miss Price left him alone until her own meal was finished. Then, after standing with one hand on the doorknob for a full minute to gather courage, she went in and sat beside him for another little talk, just as he was trying to swallow the last of a pimento-cheese sandwich.
    “Vincent,” she began, “we all enjoyed your report this morning, but I think we would have enjoyed it more—a great deal more—if you’d told us something about your real life instead. I mean,” she hurried on, “for instance, I noticed you were wearing a nice new windbreaker this morning. It is new, isn’t it? And did your aunt buy it for you over the weekend?”
    He did not deny it.
    “Well then, why couldn’t you have told us about going to the store with your aunt, and buying the windbreaker, and whatever you did afterwards. That would have made a perfectly good report.” She paused, and for the first time looked steadily into his eyes. “You do understand what I’m trying to say, don’t you, Vincent?”
    He wiped crumbs of bread from his lips, looked at the floor, and nodded.
    “And you’ll remember next time, won’t you?”
    He nodded again. “Please may I be excused, Miss Price?”
    “Of course you may.”
    He went to the boys’ lavatory and vomited. Afterwards he washed his face and drank a little water, and then he returned to the classroom. Miss Price was busy at her desk now, and didn’t look up. To avoid getting involved with her again, he wandered out to the cloakroom and sat on one of the long benches, where he picked up someone’s discarded overshoe and turned it over and over in his hands. In a little while he heard the chatter of returning children, and to avoid being discovered there, he got up and went to the fire-exit door. Pushing it open, he found that it gave onto the alley he had hidden in that morning, and he slipped outside. For a minute or two he just stood there, looking at the blankness of the concrete wall; then he found a piece of chalk in his pocket and wrote out all the dirty words he could think of, in block letters a foot high. He had put down four words and was trying to remember a fifth when he heard a shuffling at the door behind him. Arthur Cross was there, holding the door open and reading the words with wide eyes. “Boy,” he said in an awed half-whisper. “Boy, you’re gonna get it.