Anne Wallace was a little embarrassed about having dropped her glove in the cab of the Gazette truck. It really was an amateur trick. Linda had shrieked with laughter when Anne had told her about it the night before.

“You dropped your glove in the truck?” she’d howled, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “Subtle, Wallace, real subtle.”

Who’s laughing now, Anne thought as she closed the door gently behind Harry after they’d said their good-byes for the evening and made arrangements for him to pick her up at seven o’clock the next night.

“Linda! Oh, Linda!” she sang up the stairs.

Linda’s bedroom door opened and out she came, her face lit with a bright smile, blond hair poufing out behind her as she thundered down the stairs to clutch Anne in a hug. Trailing two steps behind and piling on to the hug was dark-haired Janice. The three of them had been inseparable since meeting the first week of freshman year, and together they’d been through six-and-a-half semesters that had been a roller coaster of excitement, laughter, boredom, agony, grief, and, sometimes it seemed, starting over again and again.

“We heard the whole thing!” Linda exclaimed. “We listened at the grate.”

“Yes, the music was much to our satisfaction,” Janice said, “but then suddenly it stopped!” Her dramatic tone made all three girls laugh.

Linda grabbed Anne’s elbow and pulled her up the stairs; in a moment the three were heaped onto Linda’s bed, plumping pillows in preparation for the full debriefing.

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Linda said, flopping onto her stomach with a pillow under her folded arms. “He’s an absolute dreamboat!” She turned to Janice. “Think of a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, but with blond hair. You know, the tall, gangly type, but with a killer smile and bedroom eyes.”

“Linda!” Anne said.

“So, tell us what happened,” Linda prodded.

“Well, he’s going to take me to Vinzetti’s tomorrow night.”

“Vinzetti’s!” Linda said.

Janice whistled. “That’s high class, right off the bat. And you haven’t even gone on a date since Bobby—He must really be something special.”

“He’s—different from any man I’ve met before,” Anne said. “He’s funny, and very nice, and he’s been taking all sorts of trouble to get to know me. He isn’t just concerned about looks, and it doesn’t seem to matter to him whether I disagree with him or say something out of turn—”

“One thing you couldn’t say about Bobby,” Linda put in.