Leo the Lioness Read Free Page B

most of them quite a bit smaller than I am and infinitely less mature, taking a girl out and all of a sudden getting passionate and everything.
    It cracks me up.
    â€œWhen’s his birthday?” I asked.
    â€œOh, you and your signs of the zodiac,” Jen sighed. “He was seventeen on April second.”
    â€œOh, oh,” I said. “Aries the Ram.” I know a lot about Aries males because last year I was in love with Marlon Brando and he is an Aries so I found out all about the Aries male. I hasten to add that I am no longer in love with Marlon Brando. It was just a fleeting thing that came about when I happened to see an early movie of his on “The Late Show.” I thought he was fantastic at the time.
    â€œThat means he is creative, a bad credit risk, and a natural rebel,” I ticked off. “Also the Ram is unlikely to commit himself physically to more than one woman at a time.”
    â€œWell, gee, golly, that makes me feel better,” Jen said. “For Gawd’s sake, I went out with the guy once, I’m not engaged to him.”
    â€œJust thought you ought to know,” I said. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
    â€œThere you are.” Nina came slinking onto the porch. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Niffy,” and she looked at Jen and winked.
    Just when Jen and I were getting to be friends again, Nina had to come along and spoil it.
    â€œI have a couple of things I have to discuss with you, Niff,” Nina said. “In private.”
    â€œI was just going,” I said.
    â€œDon’t go on my account,” Nina said in her absolutely stickiest voice.
    â€œGawd forbid,” I said, smiling.
    â€œGawd forbid,” I said again. It wasn’t very good but it was the best I could do.
    I heard them laughing in that awful way girls have when they have just said something very mean. I heard but I didn’t turn around. I just went.

7.
    I got on my bike and rode downtown. Most of the kids I know consider themselves too old and too sophisticated to still ride bikes, but I like to. There is a very free feeling, an abandonment, that comes when you whistle down a hill on a bike with your feet off the pedals. Especially if your brakes don’t work.
    I decided to go and see Carla McAllister. She works in Moody’s bookstore on Main Street during the summers. She used to baby-sit for us a lot, for Nina and me and John, when she was just about the age I am now. She was the first baby-sitter we’d ever had who didn’t treat us like fungus or turds or juvenile delinquents. I mean, she actually played games with us, read us stories, and let us put the ketchup bottle on the table, which is strictly against my mother’s code of ethics. She also once drank some gin from my father’s liquor closet because she had never tasted it and had always wanted to. I remember standing and watching her toss it down, gag, make a face, and spit the rest of it into the sink. Then she added some water to the bottle so they wouldn’t know she had taken any. I thought that was pretty smart of her. My father complained for days that his martini tasted awfully weak. We never told, Nina and I. John couldn’t talk at that time so he wasn’t any problem. But we never breathed a word, which shows you how much we liked Carla.
    Carla is a Capricorn. She was born the day after Christmas, which is a tough break. She’s in college now, going into her third year. She is on a partial scholarship, as she is not only very pretty but exceptionally bright. I would say “brilliant,” but that is a word that is so misused as a rule that I shy away from it.
    Even when she was my age Carla was pretty, which is a rare thing. I read somewhere that there is nothing so ugly as a thirteen-year-old girl and I am inclined to agree. But when Carla was that age, she was already good-looking. Boys used to call her up when she was sitting with us and