Free Web of the City by Harlan Ellison

looked from one to the other with a knowing hesitance. Should she ask what was the matter? No, stay out of it.
    “Where you goin’ tonight?” the gray-haired woman asked her daughter.
    Dolores did not answer. Her eyes lifted sidewise from the plate to stare at her brother for an instant, then they returned to the plate.
    “I ast ya where you was goin’ tonight.”
    Dolores looked up again and a flash of defiance coursed across her dark eyes. Her long lashes lowered and she addressed the inch of table just beyond the plate. “To a dance.”
    Rusty butted in, “Where at?”
    “What’re you, the F.B.I.?”
    “No, just askin’.”
    “The clubhouse.”
    “The Cougars’ rooms? Down in the bowling alley?”
    She nodded. “You know any place else they hold their dances?” Her fork skewered a piece of meat, shucked it off.
    Rusty looked across at his mother and she sensed his concern. Her own words were carefully chosen, carefully selected in softness. “You goin’ with anybody we know, Dolores?”
    The girl flipped her hair again, insolently, defiantly, “Just by myself is all. Just alone, with some of the kids.”
    Rusty said, “You know there’s been trouble with the Chero-kees. I heard over at Tom-Tom’s they might crash the drag tonight.” Rumors had been flooding the neighborhood, not only about Rusty’s stand with Candle—which somehow had been kept from Moms—but of a proposed war that seemed about to break. Rusty was worried. The Cherokees had been bested in a battle three weeks before and the winds had it they were still nursing their wounds.
    “You never can tell,” Moms said, picking at her food nervously. “You better go to a movie tonight, or something.”
    She waited for what she knew must come.
    “I’m goin’ ta the dance. Alone.”
    Rusty inched forward, till his hard belly pushed the edge of the table. “You know what happened to Margie?”
    Dolo decided to play it cool. “Margie who?”
    Rusty stared at her with exasperation. “Come off it. Lockup’s stupid broad. You know she had it right on the school grounds and put it in a paper sack an’ left it leaning against a tree.”
    Margie’s stillbirth had been the talk of the school for months. Her miscarriage had been a big thing in the Cougars’ social whirl. Rusty feared a like situation with his sister. The main job of the Cougie Cats was to keep the Cougars’ studs happy. Rusty wanted nothing like that to happen to Dolores.
    “You want somethin’ like that to hit you?”
    Dolores shoved back from the table, anxious to bluff high and snappy, not yet ready to storm away. She dropped her fork with a clatter and her mouth twisted venomously.
    “You got a dirty mouth,” she snarled.
    “I’m just tellin’ the truth. An’ Paulie Ricco’s sister got a busted spine in that Prospect Park thing a few weeks back. You wanna spend the rest of your life in bed like that? You keep runnin’ with them girls, that’s what’s gonna happen.”
    “Don’t you chop low on my friends.”
    “Friends, crap! They don’t know from friends!”
    Moms had been sitting there, her faded gray eyes open wide at these tales of horror from just beyond her walls. She had sensed the crowd with which Dolores ran was a wild one, but she had never suspected that they were—were like this. Her heart stopped beating, she was sure, and she was sure her daughter heard the silence. This was her baby, her Dolores, just baptized and just having her first party and just wearing her first high heels and now suddenly grown, and playing with a deadly sort of fire.
    She had to stop her.
    “Dolores, I forbid you to go there tonight. You gonna stay home and dry dishes with me, then we’ll go take in a show, huh?”
    The girl sensed the time for total retaliation had come. She leaned over, as if to clamp down on everything her mother had said, and she came back with, “Can’t you ever leave me alone? Can’t you let me have a little fun once in a while? I’m