Ella saw the way his eyes traveled over her sweater, and suddenly she felt quite sure that he would touch her. And she would let him do it. On the outside.

She could think of very little else.

“Has he spoken to you?” Adam Cramer asked.

“Who?”

“Your father. Has he said anything about me?”

“Well, he hasn’t talked an awful lot. He—I don’t know. He doesn’t like you.”

“But why?”

“He says you’re a rabble-rouser.”

“I am, in a way. But is that bad?”

Ella shrugged. “I don’t know. Daddy seems to think so.”

“He must. My God, you’d think I’d poisoned his favorite dog or something, the way he acts. I mean, I’m working for the same thing he is, just in a different way, that’s all. You can see that, can’t you, Ella?”

“Sure, I guess.”

They were silent for a time. “Are you worried about being out with me?”

“Not exactly,” Ella said. “But I’ve got to get home early. And—well, I don’t like to tell lies. We better not do it again, not like this, anyway.”

“If you were worried, why did you agree to meet me?”

“I don’t know.” Ella bit her lip. Everything I say around him, she thought, comes out so dumb. I sound like an idiot.

Adam Cramer drove over the bridge, turned into the gravel path and parked the car beneath a large tree. He left the engine running. “Maybe if you put in a good word for me I could talk with Tom, with your father, and maybe then he’d see I’m not such a bad guy.”

“He’s pretty set in his ways.”

“I know. He tried to get me arrested—had you heard?”

“No!”

“It’s true. He claimed that I goaded the people into attacking those Negroes in the car—you must have been told about that. Or maybe you were there?”

“I heard some of the speech.”

“Then you know that I wasn’t even around when the incident happened. But your father blames me! He blames me for the whole thing. Ella, listen to me, listen now. If I’d been there, I would personally have called the sheriff, even before your dad did. That’s the truth. I don’t like to see people get hurt.”

Ella looked into his eyes, and she believed him. Most of the speech had been boring to her, because it didn’t seem that he had said anything other than what everyone else was saying, and it was all political stuff anyway, but she’d noticed how all the people had listened to him. All the grownups, listening to this young man. And a portion of her had begun to regard him as a celebrity—almost like a movie star. That was part of it. She was being courted by a celebrity.