Free Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly

girls who are boy crazy!”
    A little later the telephone rang and she answered. At first I couldn’t tell what she was talking about, catching only snatches of the conversation: “How tall did you say?” “Where will we go?” and “Who else will be along?” and then she came back into the living room very excited and already twisting the curlers out of her hair. It was a blind date, she told me, and her words were jumbled with excitement—a friend of a friend of one of the girls she knew. He was a little older; he graduated from the university about six years ago; he was a fraternity man but she couldn’t remember which one; he was now in town working with an insurance company and he wasn’t too tall but tall enough!
    “He wouldn’t have been looking for a date this late on a Saturday night but he’s new in town and doesn’t know many girls yet,” she explained carefully. “We’re not going anywhere special—just dance somewhere or something.” She snapped off the radio and said, “Come on with me, Angie, and help me decide what to wear—I want to look nice.”
    I sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. After she powdered her face she stood in front of the mirror with her eyes opened very wide as if she was amazed at something and put vaseline on her eyelashes. Her lipstick she put on with a brush—a small, pointed one like the kind that came in the tin boxes of paints we used in grade school. She talked to me with hairpins in her mouth as she fixed her hair. It had been dampened when she put the curlers in and now the curls weren’t quite dry so she combedthem out into a fluff, curled it all around her finger, and then combed it out into a fluff again.
    “You know,” she said through hairpins, “if he went to the university he is probably a smooth boy—probably drinks Scotch and things. I wish I knew what kind of girls he likes. I don’t know if I should pretend I’m the real intelligent type or pretend I’m sophisticated and have been around. It’s different,” she added, “with a town boy who knows all about you. Like with you and Jack—he knows that you’ve never gone with another fellow anyway.”
    I’d never thought of “pretending” with a boy. I’d thought either you had been around or you hadn’t, either you were the intelligent type or you weren’t. Lorraine talked as if she were dressing up a paper doll.
    I had meant to tell her about Jack right away. When something as important as that happens to a girl she ought to tell someone. But the words were hard to pick. Every statement I figured out seemed to require a “so what?” answer. What if I did like Jack, she might say. What did I expect to do—dislike him?
    The date came before she was ready so I opened the front door for him and asked him to come in and sit down. He wasn’t very tall and when he smiled only his lips moved, as if his eyes were thinking of something else. He introduced himself very politely, saying he was Martin Keefe and how was I tonight. He said it nicely enough, but the way he looked at me made me feellike one of those pale, eyelashless girls used in advertisements to sell mascara. Lorraine didn’t come downstairs at once.
    He took out a cigarette and tapped it on the back of his hand, lit it, and then sat there holding the burnt match end. We have no ash trays in our living room. None of us girls is supposed to smoke and my father gave it up years ago. I went into the kitchen and brought him a little crystal saucedish to use. “Thanks,” he said in a half-angry tone and then added abruptly, “What grade you in in school?” I explained that I had just graduated last week and he nodded in an approving sort of way without even listening and said, “Well. Do you like school?” I assured him I did though I had found senior chemistry a little hard and he answered vaguely, “Good. Everybody should like school. Is that a picture of your sister on the piano?”
    It was Margaret’s picture he was