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Charles. Slow down and look the facts in the face. You’re not crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you.
    I get excited.
    Everyone does. It’s O.K. It’s all right.
    I ought to go home.
    Sure. Get some sleep, boy. Sleep that knits up the ravel’d sleave of care.
    Charlie laughed. Shakespeare. My conscience is a literate fellow.
    Darn right, Charles, Charles. Darn right.
    Charlie stood up and stretched. He didn’t feel sleepy, he felt good, and gee, it was pretty where he was. Once, when he had been standing on this exact spot in January when the tows were running, one of Evie’s silly girl friends cut a curve short, fell, and punctured her cheek with the pointed edge of her ski pole. The blood had run down the whiteness of her soft cheek and it was red and white, and her eyes lost their sparkle and she looked sad and hurt and she didn’t cry. But she was ready to. There was a hole in her cheek with the blood oozing out of it, dropping to the snow, and Evie had said, “Well, what’s the matter with you?” to Charlie. Evie had said, “You afraid of blood? Don’t just stand there like an old woman. Get a doctor!”
    No, he wasn’t afraid of blood. He just couldn’t stop looking at that girl’s face. There was nothing smart about her any more, nothing mocking, nothing gay.
She
was afraid. Charlie had wanted to kiss her. It was the first time he had ever wanted to kiss any girl he knew. He had wanted to kiss her where the blood was and say, “I’ll help you now. I’ll help you.”
    It was summer, though. Why think of winter? Why think of all that was past, and why not think of all that was happening now?
    He said aloud, “Her name is Jill.”
    Charlie dug his hands in the pockets of his trousers and walked back across the path to the road. He felt good and he thought that when he got home he would talk to his mother. Gee, he never talked to her very much, but tonight he would. He might even tell her he met Miss Jill Latham and she had asked him in for a Coke. That would depend. He might, though.
    He hoped Evie would not be home. He could never talk around Evie, he had never been able to. She was all right for a girl, but she was young, she was like Jill said, “young, but invariably children. Wild. No tenderness.” The matter with Evie was that she only thought about one thing. It made Charlie feel buggy and disgraced.
    “Her name is Jill.”
    Conrad Street was quiet and Charlie was aware suddenly of the time, that it must be late. Eddie Watkins was standing on Janice Poynton’s porch in a clinch. Charlie made a rhyme. It’s a cinch to be in a clinch. Ridiculous! Fool! He saw the lights in his house and quickened his pace, a mood of expansiveness starting up inside of him.
    Hi, Mom. You know where I’ve been?
    Usually he went to his room when he got in nights, but this evening he would sit in the parlor and talk. Even though Russel Lofton
was
there. He saw his car in the driveway.
    As he entered the hallway of the bungalow, he collided with Lofton, who was on his way out, his face furrowed in frowns, his legs moving swiftly. Lofton said, “Where the deuce have
you
been?”
    Startled, Charlie only stood there staring at Lofton, saying, “At the library,” in a meek, shocked tone. Russel Lofton had never reproached him for anything, never raised his voice or glared at him.
    He brushed Charlie aside and called back over his shoulder, “Now, don’t
worry,
Em.” Then he disappeared out the front door, and as Charlie went on into the living room he heard the roar of Lofton’s automobile as it started and shot off the driveway at a fast speed, kicking up gravel so that it riddled the car’s sides.
    “He’s got some nerve!” Charlie said hotly to his mother. “What business is it of his where I go and what I do, for the love of Pete?”
    Emily Wright was standing at the window of the living room staring out. When she turned to face her son, her eyes were hard and anxious. She said, “You have a nerve