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conversation. She called Stacy constantly. She wrote Stacy notes. She sat next to her at lunch. And slowly, very slowly, Stacy Hamilton, a somewhat plump and prudish young honor student, came to view Linda Barrett as a friend.
    When Linda Barrett moved over to Ridgemont High, many of the same boys she had gone out with before the bust were still attending the school. The same boys who abandoned her in the mall pretended it never happened. They took one look at Linda Barrett, then fifteen and gorgeous, in full bloom, and they began crowding around her. They asked her out. They proposed. They complimented her until, as she told Stacy, they turned blue. Linda Barrett still would not go out with another high school boy. It made her more desirable than ever.
    As part of her Juvenile Hall rehabilitation program, Linda Barrett had joined a Christian youth organization called Campus Life. Campus Life met once a week during third period—no Algebra—and on irregular weekends for prayer outings at various sites around the county.
    Linda had been on a weekend retreat in the country, praying with a group of other girls under a tree, when she first met Doug Stallworth.
    “Hey,” said Doug Stallworth, “anybody seen a little gold chain around here?”
    Their eyes met. Linda Barrett gazed at a young man who was older than the high school boys, but not too old. He had a face that was a little too thin, a nose that was a bit too big, but he did have that one great asset of maturity. He had a beard.
    They began going out, Linda and her “older man.” Doug Stallworth was then twenty years old. He had just graduated Lincoln High School. Not only was he older, but he was also from the forbidden rival high school. To Doug, Linda Barrett was the complete fox girlfriend he had never had before. They fell in love, and had stayed that way throughout her entire sophomore and junior years at Ridgemont. Almost every day after her last class, Doug would be waiting for her out on Luna Street, on a break from his job at Barker Brothers Furniture. It was one of the sights Ridgemont students were used to.
    Pictures of Doug Stallworth filled Linda Barrett’s green Velcro wallet. She showed them to everybody. Doug, clowning. Doug, sexy. Doug, indignant. Doug. His name appeared on all of Linda’s Pee-Chee folders and notebooks and free pages of her textbooks. Douglas Raymond Stallworth. Mrs. Raymond Douglas Stallworth. Stallworth Raymond Douglas. Dougie. The names of their kids.
    And that was how Linda Barrett had come to be the retired sex expert of Ridgemont Senior High School, giving her young neighborhood friend, Stacy Hamilton, the many benefits of her years of field experience.
    One day last May, Linda had called Stacy to break the news. She and Doug were engaged to be married. Doug had just asked her on a drive-in date to see A Force of One, and she had accepted, and they were going to be married on an undisclosed date. The local papers printed a blurb with a picture.
    From that moment on, their relationship began a downhill slide. Other boys started slipping back into her peripheral vision. The engagement was still on, of course, but Christ, she didn’t know when.

Lunch Court

    F inding the right spot at Ridgemont High’s outdoor lunch area was tougher than getting the best table at the finest restaurant. It was a puny swimming-pool-sized courtyard dominated by a stocky oak tree in the center, and it was always packed with students. Even by the first day, they had sectioned off into different cliques and staked out their lunch-court territory for the year.
    All this for a twenty-six-minute lunch period.
    The closer one looked at lunch court, the more interesting it became. The object had always been to eat near the big oak tree at the center, and in the beginning at Ridgemont it was the surfers and stoners who ruled this domain. Seven years later, they had moved to the parking lot and the cafeteria (which was twice the size of lunch court, but