Free 8 Plus 1 by Robert Cormier Page A

make everything bright and gay?
    I turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Roger Lussier greeted me with a sour face.
    “I thought you were practicing with the Tigers,” I said.
    “Rollie Tremaine,” he said. “I just couldn’t stand him.” He slammed his fist against the railing. “Jeez, why did
he
have to be the one to get a Grover Cleveland? You should see him showing off. He won’t let anybody even touch that glove …”
    I felt like Benedict Arnold and knew that I had to confess what I had done.
    “Roger,” I said, “I got a Grover Cleveland card up on the North Side. I sold it to Rollie Tremaine for five dollars.”
    “Are you crazy?” he asked.
    “I needed that five dollars. It was an—an emergency.”
    “Boy!” he said, looking down at the ground andshaking his head. “What did you have to do a thing like that for?”
    I watched him as he turned away and began walking down the stairs.
    “Hey, Roger!” I called.
    He squinted up at me as if I were a stranger, someone he’d never seen before.
    “What?” he asked, his voice flat.
    “I had to do it,” I said. “Honest.”
    He didn’t answer. He headed toward the fence, searching for the board we had loosened to give us a secret passage.
    I thought of my father and Armand and Rollie Tremaine and Grover Cleveland and wished that I could go away someplace far away. But there was no place to go.
    Roger found the loose slat in the fence and slipped through. I felt betrayed: weren’t you supposed to feel good when you did something fine and noble?
    A moment later two hands gripped the top of the fence and Roger’s face appeared. “Was it a real emergency?” he yelled.
    “A real one!” I called. “Something important!”
    His face dropped from sight and his voice reached me across the yard: “All right.”
    “See you tomorrow!” I yelled.
    I swung my legs over the railing again. The gathering dusk began to soften the sharp edges of the fence, the rooftops, the distant church steeple. I sat there a long time, waiting for the good feeling to come.

A Bad Time for Fathers
INTRODUCTION
    When the story that follows appeared in
Woman’s Day,
it carried the title “A Bad Time for Fathers,” a drastic departure from its original title, “The Indians Don’t Attack at Dawn Anymore.” I accepted the change philosophically, thinking that an apt title for a certain aspect of my writing career could be called “A Bad Time for Titles.”
    Most of my titles arrive in a flash, usually about the time the idea of the story comes to life. Because the titles are with me during the entire experience of writing any change is unsettling. It’s as if you called your child John while he was growing up and, suddenly, when he begins school, the teacher calls him George. George may be fine—but you named him John.
    I don’t try to be perversely flamboyant with titles, although I must confess a weakness for long ones. Yet, could any title be shorter than “The Moustache?” Why should a title always be brief and obvious? Why not a title that seems obscure, although it evokes the mood of the story? A story I once wrote has a title that sets the tone of the story—“Charlie Mitchell, You Rat, Be Kind to My LittleGirl”—light, direct, but with a hint of poignance in those last three words
, my little girl.
Or so it seems to me.
    The question arises: What’s a good title, anyway? What’s it supposed to do? Arouse curiosity, compel the reader to begin reading at once, hint gently at what is to come, or spell out to the reader exactly what awaits? I’m not sure. In fact, I even contradict myself on occasion. “The Indians Don’t Attack at Dawn Anymore” certainly doesn’t convey the plot or the theme of the story. It’s not about the end of the Indian wars. Yet, it’s about the end of
something
only gently indicated, and the reader will learn what that something is eventually. I think the reader receives a pleasant shock of recognition when,