"Let's go up and see those houses they're building, David."

I looked down at her again, only this time she was looking up at me.

"I thought your grandfather wanted you home."

She held on to my hand harder until I thought the blood in it would stop. I looked at her purple lips. They were still wet, and I wondered about them again.

"We won't be up there long. I just want to see what's been going on."

I said okay, so we went up the path the workmen and the trucks used. It had a lot of ruts, and Jo Lynne almost tripped sometimes, but I grabbed her by the waist and kept her from falling. It surprised me to find how soft her waist was. Aunt Mae's was hard and the same shape all the time.

We got up to the first little group of houses and looked around. Jo Lynne kept close to me because she said she was afraid to be in the hills at night and if it wasn't for me she wouldn't have come. It made me feel good to hear her say that.

It looked funny to see the little houses all empty with the doors and windows open. In a few days, they would all be closed with wood and glass, and it would be a crime to go into them then. I thought of what a difference there was between these little wooden boxes now with the moonlight shining through where the doors should be and what they'd be in a little while with people living in them and loving them for a home.

We sat down on the steps of one of the little houses. Everything smelled like fresh-cut pine and green wood and plaster, that funny dry smell of plaster that you thought would choke you. They had cleared almost all the pines down here, and the browning stumps stuck up all around us and combed out the breeze that blew through our hair.

Jo Lynne was quiet. The breeze blew through her hair, and I could hear her breathing the strong pine air. I put my arm around her. She looked up at me, and I saw her wet purple lips even in the dark. I saw the moonlight on their wet, with little cracks of dark between. She looked at me in a different way, like I had never seen her look, and I knew what to do. I kissed her.

Eight

Then Jo Lynne left. Her grandfather got better, and her mother said they could go back to Springhill. I remember the day she came in the store and told me. It was one of those times Mr. Williams was out, and I was moving some shampoo bottles around under the counter trying to clean up. I had heard the door close and the footsteps come across the old tile floor. It was a sort of slopping walk, and only one person I knew walked like that. I got up and saw Jo Lynne looking around, looking for me.

When I saw her face, I knew something was wrong. She didn't wait, though, she came right out and told me that she and her mother were planning to leave. I didn't answer her. When things like that happen to me, I just don't speak. I don't know what to say. I just looked up at the shelf next to me and thought a while about nothing. For a while my eye read the label on one of the bottles there. Then I heard Jo Lynne talking again. I was surprised to hear her talk that way, like it was any ordinary thing you could just talk about like the weather or the new houses on the hills. That night up in the new houses came into my mind, when her lips were purple and the moonlight was shining on their wet and I could see the little cracks in them thinner than a pin.

When she finished talking, I gathered that she was leaving the next day on the train. I came out from behind the counter and grabbed at her hand, but it felt different from the other night when it made mine so hot it sweated. She didn't look at my face. Her eyes were turned to the side, and she watched the people on the street who were passing by the big plate glass window not even thinking about what was going on inside the drugstore. I hoped nobody came in, because I wanted to talk to her when I was ready and could think of what to say.

She pulled her hand away and said that, well, she'd said all there was to say. It sounded something like a movie to me, like what they said in those cheap Friday night movies with the actors you never heard of. I grabbed her hand again when I saw she was going to leave. I asked her if she was going to come to town again or if I could write letters to her at her house. She turned away from the window and looked at me and said she might be coming to town again sometime. I asked her when.

"I don't know. Maybe if my grandfather gets sick again," she said, and tried to pull her hand away again, but I held her.

"Well, where can I write you? I have some paper here. Let me write it down."

"No, Mother won't want to see me getting letters from some boy. What's the matter with you, anyway? We just went out once. Let go of my hand. You act like you don't know any girls at all. I see. . ."

"I don't know any girls, I really don't. You're the only one I know. I don't. . ."

"Oh, keep quiet. And let me go now. It sounds like you want to get married."

"We could get married, Jo Lynne. The state'll marry us. You're almost seventeen, and I'm old. . ."

Jo Lynne hit me in the face with her free hand. Her face was red, and her eyes were wild, and I saw I was getting her scared, so I let her go. She fell down on the tiles, and I went to pick her up, but she was at the door before I could even bend over to get her. She was crying and screaming I was crazy when she slammed the door. I watched her from the window as she ran down Main with her hair flying. Then a woman passed the window and looked in at me and stared. I wondered why she didn't go away. She pointed to her cheek, but I didn't understand her, so I walked away from the window and passed the mirror. When I saw my face, I knew why she had been pointing. My cheek was beginning to bleed in the hollow where I was hit.

I ran behind the counter to where Mr. Williams kept the bandages in a box and got out one and pressed it to my cheek over the thin little scratches her nails made. My face was burning. I felt my eyes pounding against the lids like they wanted to get out, and my hair felt like wool that I wanted to tear off to cool myself.

When I got my mind steady, I began to think about what had happened. Sitting on the high stool behind the counter, I looked around the store and out onto the bright street. I wondered where Jo Lynne was, if she was home. Then I thought of myself and how dumb I was. I'd made a fool out of myself the night we went out, and it didn't even matter to her. The night up in the new houses didn't matter. Kissing her didn't matter either. She didn't know what I thought when I saw the moon on her face, or when my arm touched hers in the movie, or even when I heard her walk into the drugstore a little while before. She didn't know she was the only thing I ever wanted to have that I thought I'd get.

I took the bandage off and looked at the red lines on my cheek. They made a sort of tit-tat-toe pattern like we used to make on the blackboard at school when I was little. I felt ashamed when I looked at it. Someone hitting me. I never did anything to make anyone hit me, except for Bruce before I went to school. I wondered what people would think if they knew someone hit me, especially a girl. They'd think all kinds of dirty things like people always did. Or maybe they'd be surprised, too, because they thought I was just a quiet boy who worked at the drugstore and lived with my aunt and my mother up on the hill in an old house, and sat up there with my mother every night and took care of her and listened to the radio with her.

I went and looked in the mirror again. There were two dark red lines on my cheek right above where I shaved. The blood had stopped flowing now, so I knew that was what they were going to look like for the rest of today, anyway. Then I tried to think of some kind of excuse to give the people who might see me, but I couldn't think of anything that sounded like you could believe it. I didn't care, either.