I have a new pastime, after school, which involves the shopping center. I like to walk there, through the sandy pine grove where our development stops, and across the busy street to the Woolworth’s, which has not only a soda fountain but a number of booths upholstered in tufted red vinyl. I like to sit in one of these booths and order a Cherry Coke, and then sip it slowly and wait to see if I can meet someone to talk to. In my mind I call this game “picking someone up.” (Have I learned this phrase at the movies? Have I already seen, on late afternoon TV, Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke, the delicate Southern spinster Miss Alma, after her ruination by unrequited love, headed out to the soda fountain where she can pick up a traveling salesman?) I talk to boys, older ones, since there aren’t too many fifth-graders hanging out at the dime store looking to make friends. If I focus on making this happen, I can get a boy to talk to me; then I can make myself funny and interesting, I discover, and he’ll like me and keep talking to me. The pills help; I seem to possess a new reserve of conversational sparkle. I ask questions, flatter the boys with my interest, my insight and ease. I understand, as if intuitively, that I’m not going to see them again. They’re not really going to be my friends. I just like to find out that they could be, a while, that I can make myself lively enough that an older boy, maybe even a boy in high school, will sit and have a Coke with me. I like having that kind of power.