“Okay. You’re right. We won’t see them. Come here. Let’s go up to my room. Please go up there with me.” Then he agreed to fuck me and we went up to my room and I used my fabulous imagination to make myself come and gave him credit for it. The bonding energy had kicked in and I was growing more and more in love with this cold unloving Georgia boy. I had to have him love me. This poor little twenty-year-old boy with his burning ambition and terrible fear of failure, with his overbearing mother and his gentle weak father was going to be called upon to love me twenty-four hours a day, morning, night, and noon. If he so much as frowned at me, I was going to have to blame someone, wasn’t I? For a while I would blame myself, but sooner or later I was going to figure out how much more pleasant and easier it was to put the blame on him. At first, however, I was going to be good and try to please him.

It was easy when I first got to Atlanta. I was enthralled by our garage apartment and stayed busy trying to “fix it up.” I covered lampshades with burlap and painted wastebaskets and shoved cheap unpainted furniture around from wall to wall trying to find a satisfactory arrangement. Also, I had gotten a job selling clothes in the French Room of J. P. Allen’s and that used up my days. Every morning Malcolm dropped me off on his way to school and in the evenings he picked me up. Charles William called several times but I was cool to him. Then one day, a bright clear day in early October, Charles William came downtown and found me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why are you working in a store?”

“I’m putting him through school. It’s fun. You get to see all the new clothes come in.”

“You aren’t going back to school?”

“No. What for? It’s boring. I hate to go to school.”

“Oh, Dee.”

“Oh, Dee, what? Look, do you want to go to lunch? I can leave in a few minutes. You want to wait for me?”