Henry could not stop thinking about Swan. His grades plummeted, and his mother noticed. He started riding his bike through the colored section of town, trying to get a look at Swan sitting on Albert’s porch. The first time she saw him doing this, Swan knitted her brow in an angry frown and did not wave. The next Thursday, Henry found Albert waiting in the teaching room, saying Swan was too sick to teach. Henry immediately stopped riding his bike on the wrong side of Louisiana Avenue.

The next Thursday he found Swan waiting in the teaching room as though nothing had happened. When Albert started giving a church organist a lesson in the main room, Swan stood up and began playing the piano Jerry Lee Lewis style. As Henry gaped, she reached back with her right hand, flipped up her skirt, and pulled down her panties without stopping the bass line with her left hand. By this time Henry had lost his childish nerves. He dropped his jeans and plunged into her from behind, amazed that she could play so perfectly while he thrust so hard. But on this occasion Swan didn’t realize he was going to finish, and neither did he—not until the moment had passed. Suddenly Swan was twice as slippery as before, and she jerked away from Henry as though he’d scalded her.

“I’m sorry!” he cried, yanking up his pants in shame. “It was an accident!”

Swan’s face went twice as dark as usual. “Boy, you and your little thang gonna get me with child!” She sat on the bench and looked down at her little bush while her father played a hymn on a Hammond organ in the next room. “Run up the street to the gas station and get me a pop,” she said crossly.

Henry looked blankly at her. “A pop?”

“A Dr. Pepper! A hot one, if you can get it. Hurry.”

“What do I tell your father?”

“Tell him … tell him you bet me a Dr. Pepper that I couldn’t play something.”

“Like what?”

Swan nearly swatted him. “What do I care? Charlie Parker. Get going, dummy!”

When Henry returned, Swan took the ten-cent bottle of soda into the bathroom. It was only years later that he learned a fizzing Dr. Pepper had been a primitive method of birth control used by desperate girls in the days before the Pill.