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might come from public knowledge of such a thing.
    The fact was that though Tony’s proficiency at football was well known, his position on the team was not one of the glamorous roles. What he did was to make the heroics of the backfield possible, but he was not himself a hero or, except while running out of the locker room with the rest of the players, a celebrity at Hornbeck High. With his thick glasses he was hardly considered a collar ad, nor was he a good dancer, nor given to witty repartee borrowed from radio comedians. He had no confidence when it came to girls, and he had had but few dates. Only two, in fact; both with Mary Catherine Lutz, who lived across the back alley from his house, was his own age and a tomboy, and with whom, when they were younger, he had shot baskets or tossed ball—on days when he couldn’t find another guy. Mary Catherine’s breasts were still almost undis-cernible and she was as tall as he.
    It was by accident that he had come upon the dance in the Millville park. He had been taking one of his long, lone walks, and if you went more than a mile in a westerly direction you were out of Hornbeck. At the edge of the concrete floor he had seen this large-breasted, round-faced girl in the short blue wash-dress. He had found the nerve to ask her to dance because, one, she was alone, and, two, he was a stranger in Millville. He should have stayed home.
    However, he returned on the same evening a week later. He had no plan beyond a vague intention to spy on Eva without her knowing he was there. He wondered whether she made a practice of letting boys feel her up, and he wanted to settle this question by personal observation. But search as he did, he could not find her on this Friday evening. After several careful tours around the concrete and the ultimate descent to the shrubs, he even went across to and along the doorways of the shops. Until he had completed his rounds it did not occur to him that he had not been prepared for what might have happened if he had seen her with a guy. He did not own her, and he wasn’t a cop. It was foolish to think of making a citizen’s arrest of the guy for molestation of a minor, when the boy would probably be, like Tony, himself underaged and not a notorious Hollywood movie star.
    He finally walked back to Hornbeck with the conviction that Eva was just a little smart aleck, still wet behind the ears, and deserved to be taught a lesson but he hoped would not really get one unless it was administered by him. “You know, you really ought to be more ladylike or you might find yourself in a situation too hot to handle. Some hillbilly might get the wrong idea, the way you flirt with guys, and you could find yourself in a lot of trouble. Of course, if I was around nearby someplace, and I heard you scream or cry, I’d come and I would kill him. I would beat him to death. I wouldn’t care if he had a knife or a club, or if he pulled a gun on me. I’d make him eat it, I swear. You can rely on me! But you oughtn’t to get yourself in this kinda spot in the first place, hanging around with bad company.”
    This was a new idiom for Tony. He had never before been passionately, madly, hopelessly in love. In fact, anything of that sort had always turned his stomach, and if he possibly could, he avoided movies that had to do with romance, though even comedies might spring that theme on you without warning, somewhere along the line.
    But what was so rotten about this state of affairs was that no matter how great his ardor, Eva would, even after her coming birthday, be only fourteen years of age. There was no way to change that. However, when he was twenty-three she would be all of twenty, and at his thirty she would have twenty-seven, and when he was eighty, she’d be seventy-seven, so the solution was to live a long time. In the short run he continued to be a pervert, but it wasn’t as bad as if he had met her when he was thirteen—and she nine. Of course she would not