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great?” Jean said at once. “I kind of like babies. I told Ma I’d help her with it, you know—get in practice.…”
    She giggled and Jesse laughed with her breathlessly.
    “It’s going to be next March,” Jean whispered. “I want to take the whole week off from school. I’ll take care of the house and make all the meals.”
    “Next March.…”
    “Don’t look so strange,” Jean said, poking him.
    Jesse smiled shakily. There was still something about Jean’s face, her expression, that alarmed him. The tip of her tongue appeared between her lips, moist and pink. Secrets. Whisperings. Sometimes Jean and their mother whispered together, and if Jesse came near they would go silent. Whisperings, secrets, then silence. Were all the secrets about this new baby, or about other things …? He wanted now to ask Jean about the baby. He wanted to know more. And why was their father unhappy, what was the trouble about money? Always there was talk of money, of not having enough. The gas station was not making enough money, there was a mortgage on it, and before that there had been other ventures—a partnership in a lumberyard, a partnership in a diner on the Five Bridges Road. Jesse had heard the word “mortgage” often.
Interest payments. Partnerships
. If his father and mother whispered together, it was often about these things, kept secret from Jesse.
    And now, on this Wednesday, on the day before Christmas recess,Jesse stands in the corridor of the high school, miles from home, and hears this conversation again. It is so clear to him, so strangely clear. Will he never forget it? Jean’s terse whispered words:
Because he doesn’t want a baby
.
    He will never forget it. He will never forget this Wednesday.
    He walks quickly down the hall. Strange, to be the only person in it. On either wall there are lockers, dented and rusty, and everywhere the smell of wet wool, wet rubber. Galoshes are lined up on the floor. Someone has kicked a pile of them around. The floor is slightly warped, but it has a smooth, pleasant, dreamy look to it, as if it were hundreds of years old. High above, the ceiling is cracked in many places. Spider webs of cracks. They are dreamy, too, the kind of frail formal pattern that dreams suggest. An editorial in the
Yewville Journal
complained about the high school being a firetrap. Jesse thought that was an interesting expression:
firetrap
. Every week, at odd times, the fire bells rang and all the students filed out into the halls, down the stairs, and outside onto the walk, preparing themselves for a real fire. It was exciting, a rowdy half hour. But no real fires ever came.
    Many of the girls had decorated their lockers for Christmas. Cutouts from magazines of Santa Claus, cutouts of Christmas trees and angels.… Jean’s locker, at one corner of the hall, was decorated in green and red ribbons, pasted onto the locker in the form of a Christmas tree. When Jesse saw his sister around school he was startled—her adultness, the authority of her firm little legs and her frizzy red hair, her lips, her eyes, her manner of being in a hurry, always amused, always with other girls. If she dawdled after school with a boy, other boys teased them, hung around them, but Jean paid no attention. Jesse heard boys whistle at his sister on the street, but Jean paid no attention. She would turn away gravely and stare at something distant, sighting it along the curve of her cheek.
    In the distance the chorus is still singing. A song Jesse can’t recognize because the words are blurred this far away, and only the hypnotic, light sound of the music itself comes to him.
    He hurries to the boys’ lavatory. The smell of this place makes him gag; suddenly he knows he is going to be sick.
    Yes, he is sick.
    He gags and chokes, his eyes closed. Tears stream out of the cornersof his eyes. Hot, everything is hot, stinking.… He spits into the toilet bowl, trying to clean his mouth. The bowl is not very clean. Oh,