Free Whisper Their Love by Valerie Taylor Page A

convention.
    Holly Mae picked up the cup Mary Jean had put on the bed. "Going somewhere, dear?"
    "Late date." Mary Jean pulled on her tweed jacket, slanted a reminding look at Joyce: the door. Joyce blushed. Last time she had forgotten it and Mary Jean had had to come in through a basement window, which involved dropping several feet onto a sorting table in the laundry. "I'm going, too," she said vaguely, taking one more cooky from the carton and sinking back with her spine against the leg of the bed.
    If she'd had a boy friend, she thought gloomily while Holly Mae refilled the percolator—if she hadn't made that Tony character so mad and "he'd asked for another date, she could have talked about him the way Mary Jean did about Bill and the girls would have kidded her, offered good advice and asked prying questions to find out how far it had gone.
    One disadvantage of this off-beat love, or whatever you wanted to call it—she guessed Mary Jean would have had a name for it but there were some things she couldn't tell even Mary Jean, not even in that hour after the lights were off, when confidences came naturally—one problem was that you had to keep it to yourself. You can admit being sexy or frustrated, but not abnormal. If love at its crazy best is a special kind of insanity that people hanker after instead of fleeing from it, at least being able to talk about it is a kind of therapy. She guessed that some of the girls got more real pleasure out of sharing their affairs than they did out of having them.
    When you're a girl of eighteen, and suddenly all that matters much is a woman almost twice your age, the need to keep it extra-secret makes everything that much worse. For a while Joyce went through her days blind and deaf to everything but Edith Bannister, pretending not to pay any special attention to her—keeping her face composed when they met at the table or in the hall. It would have been even more difficult if she hadn't been feeling vague and exalted at the same time, like a person walking around with about two degrees of fever.
    This love hasn't anything to do with movies and the sweet mush of popular songs, or even the poetry she used to copy at the library and carry around in the back of her chemistry book. Those were surface things. Two-dimensional, like pieces of paper.
    She slept heavily at night, waking full of a queer excitement and riot rested, rejecting sleep and needing more of it at the same time. She felt always a little hungry and thirsty. Yet it wasn't food she wanted. She ate what was set in front of her without paying any particular attention to it. She walked over to town with Mary Jean and Bonnie and Alberta, who had the same free periods she did, and in the slow interval between the last afternoon class and dinner they bought things to eat: Hershey bars and sacks of potato chips, sundaes with imitation whipped cream and maraschino cherries at the Bee. They were always stopping downtown for Cokes, though it cost a dime and tasted exactly like the six-cent coke in the vending machines on campus.-Once she picked an empty sack off the floor of the room and asked, "Who dropped this?" and Mary Jean said, "Goofus, you just ate the peanuts." She rolled up the bit of paper and threw it away, but she couldn't remember eating any peanuts.
    She must have taken showers and dressed, fixed her face, gone to class and recited when called on. She was always finding herself sitting in the library with a book open in front of her, and some of the print got through to whatever she did her thinking with in those days. But she was certainly not all there.
    Mostly, she waited. It was appalling how much time you could spend just sitting around and waiting, and the way most days ended in blankness. Edith went out a great deal, evenings. She sponsored school activities and belonged to social and study clubs in town. She dated, too. She went out with a lawyer who was supposed to be looking for a second wife, an eligible