Into the Great Wide Open Read Free Page A

loudly.
    Kenny nodded, not smiling. The other children looked up at him suspiciously, he had come for their dope, their girlfriends.
    “I’m Dave McHenry,” the counselor said. “Come on over, sit down.”
    “It’s OK,” Kenny said. “I’m going to take a look around outside, maybe go down to the beach.”
    “It’s raining out there,” one of the children said; and the words hung in the air, along with the noise of the raindrops clicking at the windows. It seemed to be contagious, speaking the obvious. Isn’t that a roof up there?
    “Later,” Kenny said, and walked out the long way, down the line of bedroom doors in the corridor behind the office. Not here, not here, not here. He felt dislocated: maybe it was the wood fire burning, the smell of smoke and cocoa, the fancy mountaineering baby clothes that the children wore, but he felt like he was going to walk out into an Appalachian meadow. That and the darkness under the pines. Lonely something. Empty hallway. Why am I always leaving the party, Kenny wondered. Why do parties have to end? A picture of his mother’s face, only for a second, in one of her manic phases: grinning like a funhouse clown,
happy
. Nobody knew if it was inherited or not. That was one of the first things they told you.
    Outside she was still nowhere. The afternoon had darkened toward evening; Kenny pulled his two-dollar pocket watch out of his black jeans and it said four-thirty. The rain had thickened a little. He set off on one of the trails through the pines, past the outhouse, the little cabins set like dice under the trees. Yellow electric light through the windows, and Kenny outside in the rain. Familiar gray sadness, comfortable as flannel. Kenny was right at home, remembering hismother’s face, the poem that Mrs. Connolly taught him in English class: I am lonely, I am lonely … Inside, the little mommies and daddies, two to a house. Kenny was outside looking in.
    Not that it mattered, not that he had a choice. The pines tapered off in the sandy soil and then the dunes rose out of them, grass and sea oats. Kenny trudged up the path and into the deep, soft sand, which trickled down into his shoes, Chuck Taylor high-tops, black, wet with rain anyway. He reached down and took them off, and his ragged socks. Better to come to the ocean barefoot anyway, he thought: humble, a supplicant … He came over the top of the dunes and there was the Atlantic.
    A greater sadness rose up inside him at the sight of the ocean. Kenny surprised himself: it was just wind and water, a gray indefinite sky. But there it was, his sadness; he stopped for a minute at the top of the dunes and let himself feel it, sink into it; reminding himself, at the same time, that he had been warned against depression. Too much crazy sorrow in his family already for Kenny to flirt with it. He heard a crazy preacher on the radio once:
you give the devil a ride
, he said,
he’s gonna end up driving
.
    She was right where he expected her, walking down the beach. He saw her from a quarter mile off, hundreds of yards, a black scarecrow dissolving into rainy distance.
    He started off behind her, tracing her footprints in the sand. She was barefoot, like Kenny. Experimentally he slipped his own foot into the track she left behind in the hard sand but he was bigger, he wiped her out. Her stride was as long as his. A girl my own size, he thought, matching her stride—like the game he used to play with himself, walking down the sidewalk without ever stepping on a crack, the footsteps coming in alien rhythms. Walking to her pace. The sky went dark and then darker, the gray of a rainy afternoon giving way to evening, and still she didn’t turn around.
    Almost dark when they came near each other, almost cold. Araw day, Kenny thought. A
cooked
day. He watched her turn, glad for the distance between them. He didn’t want to be accused of lurking, creeping. A gradual certainty as she came closer that it was Junie after all,