Free Evil Eye by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

patrician friend in plebian western New York State.”
    Desmond asked me where I lived, and where I went to school; he described himself as “dangling, like a misplaced modifier, between academic accommodations” in a droll way to make me smile though I had no idea what this meant.
    At each street corner I was thinking that Desmond would pause and say good-bye; or I would summon up the courage to interrupt his entertaining speech and explain that I had to bicycle home soon, my parents were expecting me.
    On Main Street we were passing store windows. Pedestrians parted for us, glancing at us with no particular interest as if we were a couple— Lizbeth, Desmond.
    Desmond’s arm brushed against mine by accident. The hairs on my arm stirred.
    I saw a cluster of small freckles on his forearm. I felt a sensation like warmth lifting from his skin, communicated to me on the side of my body closest to him.
    Though I was sixteen I had not had a boyfriend, exactly. Not yet.
    I had not been kissed. Not exactly.
    There were boys in my class who’d asked me to parties, even back in middle school. But no one had ever picked me up at home, we’d just met at the party. Often the boy would drift off during the course of the evening, with his friends. Or I’d have drifted off eager to summon my father to come pick me up.
    Mostly I’d been with other girls, in gatherings with boys. We weren’t what you would call a popular crowd and no one had ever singled me out . No one had ever looked at me as Desmond Parrish was looking at me.
    Walking along Main Street! Saturday afternoon in October! So often I’d seen girls walking with their boyfriends, holding hands; I’d felt a pang of envy, that such a thing would never happen to me.
    Desmond and I weren’t holding hands of course. Not yet.
    Beside us in store windows our reflections moved ghostly and fleeting—tall lanky Desmond Parrish with his close-trimmed hair and schoolboy glasses; and me, Lizbeth, beside him, closer to the store windows so that it looked as if Desmond were looming above me, protecting me.
    At the corner of Main Street and Glenville Avenue, which would have been a natural time for me to take my bicycle from Desmond and bicycle home, Desmond suggested that we stop for a Coke, or ice cream—“If this was Italy, where there are gelato shops every five hundred feet, we’d have our pick of terrific flavors.”
    I’d never been to Italy, and would have thought that gelato meant Jell-O.
    In the vicinity there was only the Sweet Shoppe, a quaint little ice cream–candy store of another era, which Desmond declared had “character”—“atmosphere.” We sat at a booth beside a wall of dingy mirrors and each of us had a double scoop of pistachio-buttercrunch—this was Desmond’s choice, which he ordered for me as well and paid for, in a generous, careless gesture, with a ten-dollar bill tossed onto the table for the waitress: “Keep the change for yourself, please.”
    The waitress, not much older than I was, could not have been more surprised than if Desmond had tossed a fifty-dollar bill at her.
    In the Sweet Shoppe, tips were rare.
    For the next forty minutes, Desmond did most of the talking. Sitting across from me in the booth he leaned forward, elbows on the sticky tabletop, his shoulders stooped and the tendons in his neck taut. By this time I was beginning to feel dazed, hypnotized—I had not ever been made to feel so significant in anyone’s eyes.
    Kindly and intense in his questioning Desmond asked me more about myself. Had my family always lived in Strykersville, what did my father do, what were my favorite subjects at school, even my favorite teachers—though the names of Strykersville High School teachers could have meant nothing to him. He asked me my birth date and seemed surprised when I told him (April 11, 1961)—“You look younger”—and