The Little Friend

“Don’t come with me tomorrow, then. I’d rather go by myself.”

“One leg is scattered all over the lawn …” sang Hely, right over her, gazing up into the air with a rapt goody-two-shoes expression.

“I don’t care if you come or not.”

“At least I don’t fall down on the ground screaming like a big fat baby.” He fluttered his eyelashes. “ ‘Oh, Hely! Save me, save me!’ ” he cried in a high-pitched voice that made the high-school girls on the other side of the pool start laughing.

A sheet of water hit him in the face.

He squirted her with his fist, expertly, and ducked her answering squirt. “Harriet. Hey, Harriet,” he said, in a babyish voice. He felt unaccountably pleased with himself for having stirred her up. “Let’s play horsie, okay? I’ll be the front end, and you be yourself.”

Triumphantly, he kicked off—evading retaliation—and swam out to the middle of the pool, fast, with much noisy splashing. He had a blistering sunburn, and the pool chemicals burned his face like acid, but he’d drunk five Coca-Colas that afternoon (three when he got home, parched and exhausted; two more, with crushed ice and peppermint-striped straws, from the concession stand at the swimming pool) and his ears roared and the sugar trilled high and quick through his pulse. He felt exhilarated. Often, before, Harriet’s recklessness had shamed him. But though the snake hunt had stricken him, temporarily, rambling and crack-brained with terror, something in him still rejoiced over her fainting fit.

He burst exuberantly to the surface, spitting and treading water. When he blinked the sting from his eyes he realized that Harriet was no longer in the pool. Then he saw her, far away, walking rapidly towards the ladies’ locker room with her head down and a zig-zag of wet footprints on the concrete behind her.

“Harriet!” he shouted without thinking, and got a mouthful of water for his carelessness; he’d forgotten that he was in over his head.

————

The sky was dove-gray and the evening air heavy and soft. Down on the sidewalk Harriet still heard, faintly, the shouts of the little kids in the shallow end of the pool. A small breeze raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. She drew her towel closer and began to walk home, very quickly.

A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.