Read A Ticket to the Circus for Free Online Page A

went off to Arkansas Tech. The summer before my senior year, he was working for the school, going around to all the seniors in the area and trying to convince them to go to school there. I had already decided to go to Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway, and I even had an academic scholarship promised, but Larry showed up at my door early one summer morning.
    I was still asleep, and looked out the window when his knock woke me up. I threw on some clothes, ran a brush through my hair, and answered the door in less than two minutes. He looked a little like Burt Reynolds, with ultramarine blue eyes and dark hair. He was funny and convincing, and I decided Tech might not be such a bad place to go after all. I said I’d think about it. Before he left, he asked me out to the movies. His family lived up on Crow Mountain and grew watermelons as a cash crop. He was paying his way through school on an ROTC scholarship, so it was a foregone conclusion that he would be joining the army when he graduated. This was 1966, and Vietnam was just beginning to get hot but wasn’t yet the explosive war it became in the next couple of years.
    When I started dating Larry, I was still seeing Rex off and on, and occasionally a few others as well, such as a boy named Audie Ray, who had a tiny Triumph sports car and a broken left leg. He had to drive with his cast out the window, so we worked out a routine where he would use the clutch and brake with his right foot and I would work the gas pedal. I can’t believe we didn’t wreck the car. One memorableafternoon, Audie Ray was at my house, Larry stopped by, and Rex showed up. We all sat in the living room trying to talk, them waiting one another out. I wanted to sneak out the back door and leave, but I was too much of a good Southern hostess, so there we sat, drinking Cokes, them talking about football like they had all come there specifically to hang out with one another. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Audie Ray left, then Rex, and Larry was the winner. That got him a lot of points.
    I had promised Rex I would go with him to the homecoming dance months in advance, and he held me to the promise even though I was seeing more of Larry at that time. I don’t know why I just didn’t say no, but I had some weird, strong ideas about keeping my word, and Rex was emphatic that I couldn’t back out on a promise. I was the homecoming maid, and since Rex was the captain of the football team and had to escort the queen, another football player named Robert Lee (whom I wasn’t dating) escorted me across the field.
    It was the biggest thrill of my high school years. Although I never got to be a cheerleader, which the most popular girls were, I made good grades in class, was in most of the clubs, edited the school newspaper, and sang in the glee club. I was a good kid who didn’t smoke or drink, and was certainly not going to have sex until I married. At least that was the plan.
    Larry wasn’t happy that I was at homecoming with Rex, but he came with another girl named Janet and we spent the entire night gloomily looking at each other across the dance floor, dancing with the wrong partner. It was my last date with Rex. From then on, Larry and I were going steady.
    Our dates consisted for the most part of going to his brother and sister-in-law’s house to play cards. If you remember, cards were on the sin list (Larry didn’t go to church, so he didn’t have a sin list), but we never played for money, just for fun, so I didn’t worry too much about it. My mother and father had relaxed a bit, knowing it was impossible to ask me to stay home from movies. They knew I went to parties but never asked me head-on if I was dancing, and I never said. Needless to say, Mother, Daddy, and I never once discussed sex, or even said the word out loud.
    When I was thirteen, I of course knew I would start my periodsoon. Several of my girlfriends already had theirs, and one had gotten hers in the fourth grade.