Free Psychology and Other Stories by C. P. Boyko

with fingernails but through the sleeve, which seemed a minor enough lapse given the circumstances.
    The adjective had been “fat.” She was not yet ready to contemplate the noun.
    Missy was not talking to her, but that suited Slim just fine. As far as she was concerned, Missy’s silence was proof of a guilty conscience. She knew she’d caused them to miss the bus.
    But Slim was damned if she was going to stoop to such adolescent behavior herself. She walked back, placed one hand on her hip and the other above her eyes (though the sun was in the other direction and almost behind the mountains now) and looked down the highway in the direction the truck had gone.
    â€œHell, I wonder if we shouldn’t’ve taken that ride.”
    Missy issued a dismissive syllable through her nose. Missy preferred, whenever possible, to express her point of view non-verbally: she had found that sighs, grunts, and gasps were more difficult to refute than even the most eloquent arguments.
    â€œNothing we can do about it now,” said Slim, and offered a few of her gramma’s proverbs on the impossibility of undoing that which was already done and the inevitable improvement of a bad situation. She was afraid that if she did not make light of their predicament she would cry.
    Missy ripped a blade of crabgrass in half and tore another one out of the ground.
    â€œWe’ll have to take some ride,” Slim hypothesized.
    â€œThose goons would have raped us and left us in the ditch to die,” said Missy, as though she relished the idea.
    Slim shrugged and walked off down the shoulder. The sky was turning mauve above the pines, which swayed slightly in the cool windless air, as though drunk. Slim rubbed her arm for three seconds, under the sleeve but without fingernails.
    â€œAdolescent” was one of her gramma’s favorite epithets, but now that Slim had run away, she felt more kindly towards The Gramophone. She almost wished her gramma were here to see Missy now. For the longest time, The Gramophone had had a very low opinion of Slim’s friend, and was always insinuating—through proverbs, homilies, and allegorical newspaper clippings—that Missy was a “bad influence.” (This was another of her pet phrases; there were few people on the planet who escaped being a bad influence on someone or other at some time or another.) But after Missy “ran away from home” (her suitcase, Slim discovered, had contained little more than cigarettes and shampoo), The Gramophone had started treating her like a saint. It was no longer Missy but her mother, Mrs. Acorne, who was the bad influence. At the breakfast table (while Missy slept in) Slim’s gramma now fulminated against not “peer pressure” but the creeping evil of “hereditary delinquency,” and newspaper stories about roaming gangs of wayward youth were replaced by tales of bank-robbing families and orphanmurderers. “I’m more of an orphan than she is,” Slim protested, but her gramma seemed to think this clinched the matter: In her book, you were better off with two dead parents than an absent one. Divorce, in her book, was about the worst thing you could inflict on a child.
    Slim might have been inclined to agree that Mrs. Acorne was bad, but you could hardly call her an influence. No matter how loudly or how often she shrieked at Missy to do this or harped at her to stop that, as far as Slim could tell it trickled in one ear and right out the other without leaving behind the slightest residue. Missy did as she pleased, when she pleased. This was the very characteristic that had made Slim fall in love with her in the first place. She desperately wanted to attain that same imperturbable state of grace; she dreamed of a day when her gramma’s harangues would slide right off her like grease off a hot griddle.
    Even here, however, miles from home, she could not block out The Gramophone’s voice.