I began to picture Wanda Hoople as the girl with the groceries.­ “She drowned?” I asked.

“In a way,” he said, still looking at the candle. “Every year the high school put on a Holly Hop, a dressy Christmas dance where the girls asked the boys. I had never had a date in high school and I sure wasn’t planning on being asked. But Wanda asked me. Three days in a row she stood on this street corner in the morning when I came to school and then again in the afternoon when I went home. She lived in the opposite direction, so there was no reason for her being there. The third day we saw her, my friend and I started joking about it. I said maybe she was trying to get picked up. Her sisters were all whores, so it was easy to figure she would follow the same path. Since it had been drilled into me that the Hooples were below us, I didn’t want to admit even one of them could be different from the rest. But Wanda was different. Her skirts were always safety-pinned in the back and her ankle socks were so limp they kept sliding down into her shoes, but her face and hair—shiny as glass. The other girls in school were experimenting with make-up, but she never wore it. Her sisters wore it in layers, but she didn’t. Her face and hair were sort of a badge, something that would show everyone she was clean. Her sisters were loud too, always egging on the boys to prove they could talk dirtier. But Wanda was a mouse. That third afternoon we passed her, she called out my name. Her eyes looked terrified when she asked me to step over to the curb. There was this pause and when she finally asked me to go to the dance she didn’t look at me, she looked at the fire hydrant. For a minute I thought it was a joke, or maybe I was hoping it was. I didn’t answer her; I just stared at the rip in her coat and felt my face getting hot. Then she began to back away, very slowly. I stood there, she stopped for a second, then backed up some more. I heard my friend snickering and I felt the heat in my face, but I didn’t say a word. She gave me one last look, like I was going to kill her or something, and she ran off down the street. I could have called out to her, but I didn’t.”

“Did you ever speak to her after that?”

He shook his head. “My friend spread the word and it became a big joke for a while. I wanted to hate her for embarrassing me, but . . . I couldn’t get past that look on her face. Or those socks that went down in her shoes. Whenever we saw each other in school, we both looked the other way. I didn’t want to admit to myself I was ashamed. When she asked me that day, it must have taken every ounce of courage she had, and all she got for it was humiliation. She quit school in the middle of the twelfth grade and got married to a much older man who was a farmer. That was just about the time I was looking forward to getting out of that town and going to college.”