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pretty cute of her. Pete was a snob about jeans, which he called Levi’s. Only the genuine cowpoke’s would do. His came from Jackson, Wyoming, where he had worked on a ranch part of every summer before he went
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    into the army. I don’t know where McLeod got the ones I was wearing, but the chances of their coming from Jackson, Wyoming, were about zero.
    There happened to be a ruler on the table; why, I don’t know. But there it was like the serpent in the Garden of Eden and of course I picked it up and whacked her hand away. I guess I hit harder than I really intended. . . .
    The only thing I can say about what followed is that it took everybody’s mind off where I had been and what I’d been doing.
    Mother’s lecture went on for what felt like half an hour while she bathed Gloria’s hand and mopped up the blood from the cut across her palm. The thin steel plate along the edge of the ruler had sliced the inside of her hand and it was no use my saying that it wasn’t deliberate. With Gloria sobbing as though she’d been attacked with a switchblade and Mother going on and on about my dangerous temper and what it had done to my father, who was listening?
    “You’ll apologize to Gloria, do you hear me?” Mother said, as I tried again to split by the back staircase. “If you don’t we’ll come up and stay in your room until you do.”
    What I would have given to say “So stay!” But Mother had learned early that that was the one threat that worked. All the rest of the house—or the apartment in New York— was theirs. My room was mine and I’d pay the price, usually an apology, to keep it that way. I turned and came down the stairs.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, lying in my teeth and with my fingers crossed behind my back. I hope you get tetanus and die, was what I thought to myself. And then a kind of superstitious horror took hold of me. / didn't mean that, God, I thought quickly. Undo it, please. I didn’t want that on my conscience.
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    In the middle of what The Hairball used to call this Sturm und Drang, old Barry Rumble Seat pushed open the screen door and came in.
    “Hiya,” he said, as though it were midafternoon and everybody was sitting around having sweetness and light.
    “Hello,” Meg said.
    “Hi, Sweetheart.”
    Meg digs Barry. Why, I can’t think, unless it’s what’s called a community of suffering. They’re both overweight. She gave him her best grin which even with braces and cookie crumbs packs a lot of voltage.
    He grinned back. “What’s going on?”
    What with the Band-Aids all over the table and the disinfectant making the kitchen smell like a hospital and Gloria sitting there with her blotched tears acting like a rape case, I can see why he’d ask. But it was the lead-in that Gloria the Wronged must have been praying for. As I eased out she was sounding her favorite theme. “Something simply has to be done about Chuck’s paranoid attacks. With his background and his father being the way he was . . .”
    I got into my room, just barely managing not to slam the door. Gloria, the fink, knows where to shove in the needle, which is one reason why she is so universally beloved. . . .
    I kicked the wastebasket and stood there, watching the paper and candy wrappers and peanut shells ricochet off the walls ail over the rag rug, thinking how stinking lousy everything was. Six hours’ work a day, Himmler McLeod, and if everything worked, a crummy boarding school in the fall where they probably goose-stepped you off to chapel six times a day.
    “But you got what you wanted,” said the Judas voice inside me that always speaks up when I am about to enjoy my own misery.
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    * * *
    During the course of the night I contemplated my readymade decision not to tell Mother or Gloria about McLeod coaching me, although I might tell Meg since it had been her idea. But nobody else, because in a summer community like ours it would get back in less than twenty-four hours. I’m not sure why I