“What’s matter?” she asked.

“He’s up!”

“Who?”

“The old man! You woke him up! He’ll kill you!”

“Pop? He likes me.”

“He’s not rational at this hour. Run for it!”

Bunny hurried down the steps and struggled through the knee-deep snow. She didn’t look back until she got to the Vega.

I waved her on.

My number-one priority in the spring term was to make the baseball team. I hadn’t played organized ball in a couple of years, but I knew I could pick it back up quickly. Unfortunately, I fanned my first nine times up and was cut from the team. The problem was that I’d played a lot of Whiffle ball the previous summer on Suicide, and I’d picked up some bad habits. You know, you start thinking you’re King Kong. You can hitch, step in the bucket, roll your wrists all over town, and still pull the ball. Not in hardball. I’d be standing there waving the bat like Hank Aaron, and by the time I started swinging, the ball would already be in the catcher’s mitt. First cut. Take a hike. I ended up playing for the J.V.s.

All spring, Jonathan Wheeler chased after S.D. Stuart. Because she was straight as an arrow, Wheeler came on like Steve Garvey. He agreed with her that no one should smoke or drink until they were at least in college (even though he got shit-faced three or four nights a week), and he never missed an opportunity to open a door or pull out a chair while pointing out my lack of manners. I was a derelict, he told her. You wouldn’t believe Dunphy, he should be incarcerated, the craziest kid alive, and so forth.

Because Wheeler was too afraid to be alone with her, he always dragged me along. But the more I fucked off around S.D., the more she smiled. Then one day I received an ornate, cutesy-pie, amazingly folded note via one of S.D.’s friends inviting me up to the Girls School for a Saturday night Sadie Hawkins wingding. Wheeler was stunned. I felt sort of bad. Even suggested that maybe I should blow it off. He told me to go, though, “just to see what she wants.” We both figured it was a subtle ploy aimed at making him jealous.

S.D. and I went out during April and May. She was one of the two or three most popular girls in the school, and at first I was happy about her liking me but for some reason I couldn’t maintain the feeling. S.D. Stuart had a four-year-old’s nose, well-bred cheekbones, a sturdy if large toilet, and those naturally pouty lips earned from years of practice. She was extremely cool, rarely was impressed enough to laugh, wore a batch of wonderful-smelling perfumes and makeups, never let a hair fall out of place, and had nothing in common with me. What I called an alley, she called a cul-de-sac. I wanted to go out in the woods and drink beer, she’d just as soon sit in her room and read The Bell Jar for the seventeenth time. S.D. claimed to be “averse to premarital intimacy.” (At this point, I was told, she was a virgin. “The furthest anyone ever got with her,” Jonathan Wheeler said, “was when Les O’Neill stink-fingered her at a movie last fall.” Wheeler knew this because he’d sniffed O’Neill’s finger during intermission.)