The Jane Austen Book Club Part 6

They ducked into the next aisle just before the other boy, a heavy young man with an earnest, baffled expression, appeared. He was obviously looking for them. They were obviously ditching him. He tried the next aisle. They doubled back.

Cameron had been talking this whole time, talking with pas-sion, although still scrolling down his own screen. Mult.i.tasking. "You need bandwidth," he was saying. "Your upgrade now, it's not about processors and storage anymore. You need tosituate yourself on the Web. That desktop paradigm-that's over. That's beached. Stop thinking that way. I can get you some killer freeware." Trey and Sallie had surfaced in the magazines. She was laugh-ing. He slid his hand under one strap of her top, opened his fin-gers over her shoulder. They heard the other boy coming, Sallie laughing harder, and Trey pulled her down another aisle and out of Prudie's sight.

"Like a free long-distance line," Cameron was saying. "Stream-ing live real-time video, IRC. You'll be able to fold your com-puter like a handkerchief. You'll be living inside it. You'll be global." Somehow they'd morphed intoThe Matrix. Prudie hadn't been paying attention and might not have known when it hap-pened even if she had been. The air-conditioning was starting to chill her. Nothing a brisk walk to her cla.s.sroom wouldn't cure.

Trey and Sallie reappeared in the magazines. He backed her intoNational Geographic and they kissed.

"Your computer's not a noun anymore," Cameron said. "Your computer's a f-frickingverb."

The heavy young man came into the computer station. If he had turned around he'd have seen Sallie Wong's lips closing over Trey Norton's tongue. He didn't turn around. "You're not sup-posed to be in here," he told Cameron accusingly. "We're all supposed to be working together."

"I'll be there in a minute." Cameron sounded neither apolo-getic nor concerned. "Find the others."

"I can't." The boy took a seat. "I'm not going to do anything by myself."

Sallie was holding on to the back of Trey's neck, arching slightly. The air-conditioning was no longer a problem for Prudie. She forced herself to stop watching, swung back to Cameron.

"I'm not going to do the whole a.s.signment by myself and then put all your names on it," the boy said, "if that's what you think."

Cameron continued to type. He could spot a hoax in seconds, but he had no sense of humour. He thought the graphics for Doom were totally awesome-his fingers twitched spasmodically when he talked about them-but he'd fainted dead away whenBlood on the Highway was shown in driver's ed.

Although this was a fa-tal step for his high school rep, it consoled Prudie when she heard about it. This was not a boy who would open fire in the hallway anytime soon. This was a boy who still knew the difference be-tween what was real and what wasn't.

For an instant, like an ambush, a picture came into Prudie's mind. In this picture she was backed into National Geographic, kissing Cameron Watson. She deleted the image instantly (good G.o.d!), kept an expressionless face, concentrated on whatever the h.e.l.l Cameron was saying. Which was- "What if they changed the paradigm and no one came?"

Cameron did something strange with his hands, thumbs touch-ing at the tips, fingers curled above.

"What's that?" Prudie asked him.

"A smiley face. Emoticon. So you'll know I'm joking."

He wouldn't look at her, but if he had, she wouldn't have been able to look back. How lucky his generation was, making all these friends they'd never actually meet. In cybers.p.a.ce, no one gets pantsed.

"If any one faculty of our nature may be calledmorewonder-ful than the rest, I do think it is memory....The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others, so bewildered and so weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!" (MANSFIELD PARK).

Prudie liked the beginningof Mansfield Park most especially. This was the part about f.a.n.n.y Price's mother and aunts, the three beautiful sisters, and how they all married. It bore some re-semblance to the story of the Three Little Pigs. One sister had married a wealthy man. One had married a respectable man with a modest income. One, f.a.n.n.y's mother, had married a man of straw. Her poverty became so p.r.o.nounced that f.a.n.n.y Price was sent all alone to live with the wealthy aunt and uncle. Every-thing changed then into "Cinderella" and the real story began. Someone else had talked about fairy tales last time. Was it Grigg? Prudie had read a million fairy tales as a child. And reread them. Her favourite was "The Twelve Swans."

One thing she'd noticed early-parents and adventures did not mix. She herself had no father, only a picture in the hallway of a young man in uniform. He'd died, she'd been told, on some secret mission in Cambodia when she was nine months old. Prudie had no reason to believe this and, in spite of its obvious appeals, didn't. Her mother was the problem; no matter what Prudie did, she showed no inclination to give Prudie away.

Prudie's mother was sweet, affectionate, tolerant, and cheer-ful. She was also strangely tired. All the time. She claimed to work in an office, and it was this work, she said, that so wore her out that even lying on the couch watching television was some-times too taxing. She spent the weekends napping.

It made Prudie suspicious. It was true that her mother left the house after breakfast and didn't come back until dinnertime, it was true that Prudie had gone to visit her at her office building (though never unannounced) and there she would always be, but she was never actually working when Prudie did visit.

Usually she was talking on the telephone. Her mother should try a day at day care! "I'm too tired" cut no mustard there.

On Prudie's fourth birthday her mother was unable to rouse herself to the demands of a party at which many of the guests would presumably be four years old. For several days she told Prudie that the birthday was coming up-the day after tomor-row, or maybe the day after after-until she finally gave Prudie a present (not wrapped) of aSesame Street record and apologized for its being late. Prudie's birthday, she now admitted, lay some-where vaguely behind them.

Prudie threw the record and herself onto the floor. She had all the advantages of justice on her side, as well as four-year-old tenacity. Her mother had only twenty-three-year-old cunning. The whole thing should have been happily resolved in less than an hour.

So it was with considerable confidence that Prudie lay on the rug, drumming her toes, thudding her fists, and she could hardly hear what her mother was saying over her own wailing. But the bits she caught when she paused for breath were so outrageous as to silence her completely. Yes, Prudie's birthday was over, her mother was now contending. But, of course, there'd been a party. Prudie's mother described this party. Balloons, cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles, a pinata shaped like a strawberry. Prudie had worn her unicorn shirt and blown out all the candles. She was such a good hostess, such a wonderful, uncommon child, that she'd opened all the presents and then insisted the guests take them back, even though one had been the stuffed squirrel that sucked its thumb, which she'd seen in the toysection at Dis-coveries and been whining after ever since. None of the other parents could believe how unselfish she was. Prudie's mother had never been so proud.

Prudie looked up through a screen of wet and knotted hair. "Who were the guests?" she asked.

"No one you know," Prudie's mother said, not missing a beat.

And her mother refused to back down. On the contrary, over the next few days, she embellished.

Scarcely a meal went by (a favourite dinner was bagels with b.u.t.ter, which left only a single knife to be washed afterward) without a vivid description of a treasure hunt, pirate hats as party favours, pizza just the way four-year-olds like it, with nothing on it but cheese and not a lot of that. She even produced an opened package of napkins from the back of the cupboard, with ladybugs on them. "Left over," her mother said.

The other children had not behaved as well as Prudie had. Someone had been pushed down the slide and needed a Band-Aid. Someone had been called a chicken noodle and cried overit. And her mother provided all of this detail with a conspiratorial twinkle. "Don't you remember?" she would ask periodically, in-viting Prudie to join her inside the rich, rewarding world of the imagination.

Prudie held out less than a week. She was drinking orange juice from a little plastic orange that her mother had said they would rinse out and she could keep after. The prospect had her charmed almost to the point of sedation. "I remember a clown," Prudie offered carefully. "At my birthday." She was, in fact, be-ginning to recall the party, or bits of it. She could close her eyes and see: wrapping paper stamped with stars; the cheese sliding in a sheet off her pizza slice; a fat girl with sparkly gla.s.ses she'd once seen at the park winning the ring toss. She'd already told Roberta at day care about the pinata. But the clown was a gambit, one last attempt to resist. Prudie hated nothing so much as clowns.

Once again her mother eluded the trap. She gave Prudie a hug, her chin pressing into the top of Prudie's head and then re-tracting, like a pen point. "I would never bring a clown into this house," she said.

The stratagem had been such a success it was reemployed on Halloween, and then whenever it suited her mother's purposes. "I got milk at the store this morning," she might say. "You al-ready drank it." Or, "We've seen that movie. You didn't like it." Always with a smile, as if it were a game they were playing to-gether. (When they did play games, Prudie's mother let her roll the dice and move her token for her.

She always let Prudie win.) Sometimes it seemed to Prudie that she'd had a childhood filled with wonderful parties, trips to Marine World, dinners at Chuck E. Cheese, where grownup-sized rodents played guitar and sang Elvis songs to her. Surely some of these things must have happened. But she was often not certain which. She began to keep a diary, became a maker of lists, but it proved surpris-ingly hard to write things down accurately.

It was especially hard to be honest about her own behaviour, and she began to feel, long before she could put it into words, that there was something manufactured about her, not just in the diaries, but in the real world. (Whatever the h.e.l.l that was.) The years receded behind her like a map with no landmarks, a hand-ful of air, another of water. Of all the things she had to make up, the hardest was herself.

One evening when she was eight or nine, during a commercial break in the middle ofThe Greatest American Hero (Prudie's mother was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of super-heroes. InThe Greatest American Hero, a high school teacher was given a magical red suit and superpowers, which he then used to battle spies and criminals; as if the cla.s.sroom isn't the place super-powers are really needed), her mother recalled a Christmas when they'd gone to meet Santa at Macy's. "We hadbreakfast there," she said. "You ate chocolate chip pancakes. Santa came and sat at the table with us and you asked him for Matchbox cars.

Prudie paused with her dinner (spoonfuls of peanut b.u.t.ter taken with milk) softening in her mouth.

Something unfamiliar bloomed inside her chest, expanding until it took up all the empty s.p.a.ce around her heart. This something was a conviction. She had never, in her whole life, wanted Matchbox cars. She swallowed, and the peanut b.u.t.ter rolled down her throat in a life-threatening clump. "That wasn't me,"

she said.

"The menus were shaped like snowflakes."

Prudie gave her mother what she imagined was a look of steel. "I'm a poor orphan. No one takes me to see Santa."

"Santa had just eaten a Christmas cookie. He had red and green sugar sprinkled all through his beard.

I'm your mother," Prudie's mother said. She blinked once, twice, three times. She took the low road.

"What would I do without my little crumble-cake?"

But an eight- or nine-year-old has no heart, except maybe where baby animals are concerned. Prudie was unmoved. "My mother is dead."

"What of?"

"Cholera." Prudie hadThe Secret Garden very much in mind. If she'd been readingIrish Red it would have been rabies. (Not that anyone inIrish Red got rabies. They nearly died of starva-tion in a snowstorm on a mountain when they went out hunting martens. Rabies was not even mentioned. It was just that any dog book made one think ofOld Yeller.) Her mother was in no mood for small mercies. "I see," she said slowly. Her face was melted sadly around the eyes and lips. "Cholera. That's a nasty death. Vomiting. Diarrhoea. Really, really painful. Like you're turning inside out. Puking your guts up.

Prudie had pictured something less rude. "I loved her very much," she offered, but it was too late, her mother was already rising.

"I didn't know you liked to pretend you were an orphan," she said, and bull's-eye! How many times had Prudie imagined her mother dead? How many ways? Riptides, car crashes, kidnap-ping by bandits, misadventures at the zoo. She began to cry with the shame of being such a horrible daughter.

Her mother went to her room and closed the door, even though the show had come on again-William Katt, who, her mother always said, was hot, hot, hot, and anyone who preferred Tom Selleck wasn't using the eyes G.o.d gave them. If theyhad been playing a game, Prudie couldn't have told if she'd just won or just lost. But if it was a game, that was the sort of game it would be, the kind where you wouldn't know.

For her tenth birthday Prudie saved her allowance for four months in order to buy her own invitations, which she then addressed herself, and an ice cream cake, which she served on Ewok plates with matching napkins. She asked seven girls she knew from school, and on the day she gave out the invitations she had one lunchtime in which she was the centre of attention. This turned out to be more alarming than enjoyable. On the day of the party, because her mother had measured her for a dress she'd seen in the Sears catalogue, but then not gotten around to ordering it, she let Prudie wear her pearl-drop necklace from Hawaii. The chain was too long for Prudie, so they strung the pendant on a black cord that could be tied at any length she liked.

Prudie was given three books, all too young for her, a kite, children's Trivial Pursuit, a bicycle bell, and a plastic goldfish in a plastic goldfish bowl, none of which she gave back. The pres-ents and the party struck her as lame. The girls behaved very nicely. It was all a sad comedown from what she was used to.

It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed-the two bridesmaids were duly inferior... her mother stood with salts in her hand, expecting to be agitated- her aunt tried to cry- (MANSFIELD PARK).

Prudie had brought a magazine to read in the teachers' lounge at lunch. She was prepared to socialize if there was interesting conversation, but two of the teachers had developed bunions and were commiserating over it. Prudie was too young to be told that shopping for shoes could ever become a nightmare. Nurses' shoes were suggested. Orthotics. It was horrible. Prudie opened her magazine. She saw that Dean had already taken the quiz, a set of questions to determine which of thes.e.x and the City girls you were most like. She checked out his answers: To make a good impression on a Sat.u.r.day night, Dean would "(a) wear a flirty top and a pencil skirt." If a hot guy stood next to him at a bar, Dean would "(d) tell him he has great biceps-and ask him to flex."

Prudie and Dean had first met at a bar. She was in college, out with her friends Laurie and Kerstin, celebrating something or other. Finals or the week before finals or the week before that. "We just need some girl time," Kerstin had told him warningly, but the words had no impact. Dean leaned past her without so much as a look and asked Prudie to dance.

Everyone else was dancing fast. Dean put his arms around her, pulled her in. His mouth was right beside her ear; his chin brushed her neck. Al Green's "Don't Look Back" was playing. "I'm going to marry you," he told her. Laurie thought it was weird. Kerstin thought it was scary. It wasn't their ear; it wasn't their neck.

Dean had that specific confidence that comes from nothing else but being popular in high school. He had been a high school jock, made the college soccer team as a freshman, was a scoring left wing with a fan section. He was the sort of guy who, a few years before, wouldn't have even seen Prudie standing in front of him. Now he picked her out in a crowded bar. She was flattered, though she a.s.sumed she was not the first woman he'd vowed to marry in this fashion. (She found out later that she was.) Didn't matter. His heavy-lidded eyes, his cheekbones, athlete legs, orthodontic teeth-none of it mattered. Forget the fact that he would look sogood walking in next to her at her high school reunions.

Some people would be so surprised.

No, the only thing that turned out to matter was that the first time he laid eyes on her he thought she was pretty. Love at first sight was as ridiculous as it was irresistible. In fact, Prudie wasn't pretty. She just pretended to be. She'd a.s.sumed from this beginning that Dean was a romantic sort of guy. Her mother saw him clearer.

"There's a young man with his feet on the ground," she had said. Prudie's mother didn't much care for young men with their feet on the ground. (Though she turned out to really like Dean. They both watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer every Tuesday night and phoned each other after-ward to discuss the week's developments. Dean was a sucker for the sad, guilt-ridden lives of superheroes. Now he had her mom rooting desperately for the no-superpowers-at-all U.S. soccer team and talking about offside traps as if she knew what they were and when to use them.) Prudie heard the criticism implied in her mother's a.s.sessment and forced it in Dean's favour. What was wrong with a solid sort of guy? Did you want a marriage full of surprises, or did you want a guy you could depend on? Someone who, when you looked at him, you knew what he'd be like in fifty years?

She asked Laurie, because Laurie had a theory about every-thing. "It seems to me," Laurie had said, "that you can marry someone you're lucky to get or you can marry someone who's lucky to get you. I used to think the first was best. Now I don't know. Wouldn't it be better to spend your life with someone who thinks he's lucky to be there?"

"Why can't you both be lucky?" Prudie asked.

"You can wait for that, if you like." (But Laurie was the one who hadn't married yet.) Of course Prudie had to plan the wedding herself. It was a modest affair in her mother's backyard. She heard later that the food had been good, strawberries and oranges and cherries with chocolate and white chocolate dipping sauces. She was too busy to eat any of it. Too dazed. When she looked at the pictures-her pleated dress, the flowers, Dean's politely drunken friends--she hardly remembered being there. It was a very nice wed-ding, people said afterward, and the minute they said it, Prudie realized she hadn't wanted a very nice wedding. She'd wanted something memorable. They should have eloped and never told anyone.

But it was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding. Prudie had married Dean, who, for no reason that Prudie could see, thought he was lucky to get her.

She was still learning how lucky she was. Dean was so much more than solid. He was generous, friendly, easygoing, hard-working, good-looking. He shared the housework and he never complained and you never had to ask. For their wedding an-niversary, he'd bought two tickets to Paris. This very summer Prudie and Dean were going to France.

And that was the problem. Prudie loved France; she'd made a life out of loving France. She'd never been, but she could imagine it perfectly. Of course, she didn't want to actually go. What if the trip was a disappointment? What if, once there, she didn't like it at all? Then what? It seemed to her that her husband, the love of her life, should have understood her well enough to know this.

Kerstin's husband did impressions. He could do people, but he could do objects as well-lawn mowers, corkscrews, cake beat-ers. He could do the whole cast ofStar Wars, especially an excel-lent Chewbacca. Dean was a thoughtful lover with no objections to oral s.e.x, even when it washis mouth.

Even so-if Prudie had an itch one night for Chewbacca, there wasn't a thing Dean could do about it. He was always himself.

Prudie had thought that was what she wanted. Someone de-pendable. Someone with no pretence. Most of the time she was deeply in love with Dean. But just occasionally she felt more lucky in her marriage than contented with it. She could imagine something better. She knew who to blame for this, and it wasn't Dean. The girl ons.e.x and the City that Dean was most like was Miranda.

It would be the last-in all probability the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest eclat.(MANSFIELD PARK)

Prudie had a terrible headache. The air was so hot all the oxy-gen seemed to have been squeezed out of it. She took two aspirin and drank lukewarm water from the only fountain whose noz-zle wasn't blocked with a wad of gum. Careless of her makeup, she splashed some water on her face. By the time she arrived at her fifth-period cla.s.s, her headache was survivable, though she still felt it in her temples like a distant drum.

KarinBhave was waiting for her with a note: Ms. Fry, the drama teacher, asked if Karin could be excused for the period. The school productionof Brigadoon was having its first dress re-hearsal this afternoon and its second this evening, and the block-ing for some of the scenes was still not working.

Karin had played Maria inThe Sound of Music her soph.o.m.ore year, Marian the librarian her junior. The day the cast list forBrigadoon had gone up, Prudie had come upon her sobbing alone in the bathroom, tears streaking the blusher on her cheeks, turn-ing it to war paint. Prudie had a.s.sumed, naturally enough, that the lead had gone to someone else. She'd said something well in-tentioned, that one didn't want to do the same thing over and over again, even when that something was something good. She'd said it in French, because everything sounded better in French. Prudie was a better person in French-wiser, s.e.xier, more sophisticated."Toujours perdrix," she'd finished, exhila-rated by the idiom. (When she'd thought back on it later, she realized there was little chance Karin had understood her. The straight path, the English version, would have served better. Her ego had gotten in the way of her purpose.Tout le monde est sage apres le coup.) As luck would have it, she'd misjudged the problem anyway. Karin had once again been given the female lead. Of course she had. No one else had her bell-like voice and her slender figure and her innocent face. Karin was crying because the male lead had gone to Danny Fargo and not, as she'd secretly hoped, to Jimmy Johns, who was, instead, playing the part of Charlie Dal-rymple. So Karin was going to have to fall in love with Danny Fargo in front of the whole school. They would kiss with everyone watching, and in order to do so, they would have to practice kissing. This was what her future held-numerous kiss-ings of Danny Fargo while Ms. Fry stood at her elbow, demand-ing more and more pa.s.sion. "Look into his eyes first. Slower. Naked longing." Karin had kissed under Ms. Fry's direction plenty of times before.

Plus, there were no other imaginable circ.u.mstances under which a girl like Karin could hope to kiss a boy like Jimmy. Jimmy had surprised everyone by even trying out when the show would pose such an obvious conflict with the baseball season. Jimmy's coach had told the team they couldn't do any other sports. Not in his wildest dreams had it occurred to him to out-law the musical.

Jimmy was his only reliable closer. Accommodations were made, though the choice of a musical overbaseball had left Coach Blumberg at first stunned and then dispirited. "I don't have so many seasons left in me," he'd told a group of women in the teachers' lounge.

The whole thing had cruelly raised Karin's hopes. If Jimmy had gotten the part of Tommy, they would have spent a lot of time together. He might have actually looked at her. He might have noticed that she could, in makeup and with her hair done, look just like a star in a Bollywood musical. Danny Fargo might have the same revelation, but who wanted him to?

"Are you coming to see us?" Karin asked Prudie, and Prudie said she wouldn't miss it. (Though how hot was the theatre go-ing to be? How would she herself respond to the spectacle of Jimmy Johns, with his closing-pitcher arms, singing "Come to Me, Bend to Me"?) She gave her sixth-period cla.s.s the same section ofThe Little Prince to translate, but as they were third-years, English to French instead of the other way around. "The second planet was inhab-ited by a conceited man."

Prudie returned to her index cards. It had occurred to her over lunch that none of Jane's other heroines was anywhere near as de-vout as f.a.n.n.y. The book club had yet to even mention religion.

Austen's other books were filled with clergymen's livings--promised, offered, desired-but these posed more financial concerns than spiritual ones. No heroine but f.a.n.n.y spoke so ap-provingly of worship or seemed to admire the clergy so much. Six books. So many scenes of village life, so many dances and din-ners carefully depicted. Not a single sermon. And Jane's father had been a clergyman himself. There was much here to discuss! Bernadette would surely have things to say about this. Prudie filled five new cards before the heat got to her.

Her headache was making a comeback. She pressed on her temples and looked at the clock. Sallie Wong had written a note, folded it like a crane, brushed it off the desk with her elbow. Ten Cheyney picked it up, unfolded it, read it. Oh my G.o.d, she mouthed. (And notMon dieu.) Probably Trey's name was in that note somewhere. Prudie considered confiscating it, but that would involve standing. She was so hot she thought she might actually faint if she stood. What might the students not do if she were unconscious? What romps and frolics? Little black spots swam through her vision like tadpoles. She put her head on the desk, closed her eyes.

It was, thank G.o.d, almost time to go home. She would do some light cleaning before the book club came. Quick vacuum. Casual dusting. Perhaps it would be cool enough by eight to meet out on the deck.

That might be lovely if the Delta breeze came in. The noise level in the cla.s.sroom was rising subtly. She should sit up before it got out of hand, open her eyes, clear her throat loudly. She was determined to do so, and then the bell rang.

And then, instead of going straight home, Prudie found her-self outside the multipurpose room. The kids who did drama were an interesting group. Mostly into pot, which distinguished them from the ones who did student government (alcohol) or played sports (steroids) or did yearbook (glue). So many distinct sets and subsets. There was something quite mandarin about the complexity of it. Prudie sometimes wished she'd studied anthro-pology. There would have been papers to write. Of course, that was the bad news as well as the good. Writing papers would have been an effort. She wasn't her mother's daughter for nothing.

She could hear music, m.u.f.fled through the multipurpose room door. Behind that door was the Scottish highlands. Mists and hills and heather. It sounded lovely and cool. While going home, desirable in every other way, involved getting into a car that had been in the parking lot with the windows up since eight thatmorning. She would have to wrap her hand in her skirt to open the door. The seat would be too hot to sit on, the steering wheel too hot to hold. She would spend several minutes actually, technically, baking as she drove.

None of this would improve with delay, but the prospect was so unappealing that Prudie chose door B.

She was rewarded with a wash of air-conditioning over her face. Some kid who'd never taken French was playing the bagpipe. Onstage the players re-hea.r.s.ed the chase of Harry Beaton. Ms. Fry was having them run through the scene, first in slow motion, and then up to speed. From her seat, Prudie could see the stage, and also the actors waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, in the back, the bagpipe prac-ticed for Harry's funeral. Without exactly liking the instrument, Prudie admired the performance. Where would a kid from Cal-ifornia have learned to blow and squeeze that way?

The boys jumped down off the stage, kilts flying. Jimmy Johns put his arm around the blond soph.o.m.ore girl who was playing his fiancee. In Brigadoon, their love had broken Harry's heart; at Valley High, the broken heart was Karin's. She sat a few rows back and alone, a careful distance from Danny.

Prudie found herself in sudden sympathy with Coach Blum-berg. How wise was it, after all, to encourage these children to play at great love? To tell them that romance was worth dying for, that simple steadfastness was stronger than any other force in the world? What Coach Blumberg believed--that there was something important about nine boys outpitching, outhitting, and outrunning nine other boys-seemed, by contrast, a harm-less fraud. Jane Austen wrote six great romances, and no one died for love in any of them. Prudie observed a moment's silence in honour of Austen and her impeccable restraint. Then she was just quiet with no purpose to being so.

Trey Norton slid into the seat beside her. "Should you be here? Don't you have cla.s.s?" she asked him.

"It was a hundred fourteen in the Quonset. Some geek had an actual thermometer on him, we were let out. I'm picking up Jimmy." Trey was smiling at Prudie in a disconcerting way that wasn't his usual disconcerting way. "I saw you in the library. You were watching me.

Prudie felt herself flush. "A public display of affection is public."

"Okay, public. I wouldn't call it affection, though."

It was long past time to change the subject. "The boy playing the bagpipes is really good," Prudie said.