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that hung like a curtain over the tobacco warehouses and a typewriter of birds banging out sonnets in the dogwood buds ( And wilt thou have me fashion into speech Ding! Line space. Carriage return. The love I bear thee, finding words enough Ding! The birds hacking it out) and spring in general coming on like a geometric progression, she began to get ideas. For the first time in her life, perhaps (although Sunday school had occasionally moved her and although Madame Zoe's bosom and the by-now-customary mobile molestings had certainly stirred her), she felt directed by forces other than her thumbs. She heard music that was not road music; her head swayed to rhythms that were softer and lighter than the rhythms of the hitch. Something in the springtime had telephoned something in her limbic system and reversed the charges. Something had touched Sissy Hankshaw and it doesn't matter what.
    Sissy went out back and gathered feathers where her mama had recently deplumed a hen. Using electrical tape, she fashioned them—slowly and sloppily—into a kind of headdress. With Jerry's old watercolor kit, she painted herself as best she could, not neglecting at the last moment to paint her hands.
    She went to Betty's costume party. She went as Chief Crazy Horse. She drank two bottles of Coke, munched a package of Nabs, listened to the new Fats Domino records, smiled at some jokes and left early. Only two thin rivulets streaked her warpaint to reveal how she felt when Billy Seward, Betty's boy friend and the most popular guy in school, bounded through the door, amid shrieks of laughter, wearing giant papier-mâché thumbs. Ach! Billy had come as Sissy Hankshaw.

    12.
    "WHEN YOU GROW UP with somebody you just sort of accept them, even if they are odd,” said Betty Seward née Clanton. She checked the coffeepot. It was still perking. Over and over the coffee turned in the pot. Its wheels sang in the interviewer's nostrils. They were singing a song of the past.
    “I mean, she wasn't a freak, exactly, or a loony; she was a right smart girl and right polite and nice, but you know, she did have this peculiar development; but what I'm saying is, we got pretty used to it over the years, except that every now and then . . .
    “I remember the night we graduated from junior high. When your name was called you were supposed to get up and walk across the stage and take your diploma from the principal with your left hand and shake hands with him with your right hand. But Sissy wouldn't shake hands. Not even with the principal. It wasn't that she couldn't ; she just wouldn't. Mr. Perkins was pretty irritated. And a lot of the kids complained that Sissy was making a mockery of our graduation.
    “There's an old abandoned rock quarry in South Richmond, all filled up with water, you know, and we used to swim there when we got the chance. The day after graduation our class was gonna have a picnic there—unchaperoned, weren't we devils? all on the sly—and some older kids who drove cars were gonna pick us up and take us. We were supposed to pick up Sissy, but just for spite we decided not to. We left her. Well, about noon somebody saw her out on the road catching a ride, hitchhiking like she did, big as life, not scared or ashamed but getting into any car that would stop for her, but she never showed up at the picnic. All day long she hitched up and down the road that runs near the quarry, up and down, back and forth, passing again and again. But she didn't ever stop; she just kept passing it by.
    “And, you know, most of us at the picnic got sunburned, and a third of us got poison oak, and a bunch of us got drunk and sick off beer the older kids bought us and we caught the dickens from our parents, and one boy got bit by a watersnake and somebody sat on broken glass. And I thought to myself, hmmm, that Sissy's the only one that came out of that day okay; nothing happened to her 'cause she just kept moving. You know what I mean?”
    Mrs. Seward left her