“Yeah,” I say.
Perdie and Mirrie come in, and Perdie says, “Not mooning over him again,” and Mirrie says, “Cordelia dear, would you mind turning down the sound?” These days she speaks to Cordelia in tones of extra sweetness and calls her dear a lot.
Perdie is in university now. She goes to frat parties. Mirrie’s in the last year of high school, though not our high school. They are both more charming and beautiful and sophisticated than ever. They wear cashmere sweaters and pearl button earrings, and smoke cigarettes. They call them ciggie-poos. They call eggs eggie-poos, and breakfast brekkers. If someone is pregnant they say preggers. They call their mother Mummie, still. They sit and smoke their cigarettes and talk casually and with amused, semi-contemp tuous irony about their friends, who have names like Mickie and Bobbie and Poochie and Robin. It’s hard to figure out from the names whether these people are boys or girls.
“Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” Perdie asks Cordelia. This is a new thing they’ve taken to saying. It means, have you had enough to eat? “Those were supposed to be for dinner.” She means the doughnuts.
“There’s a lot left,” says Cordelia, still upside-down, wiping her nose.
“Cordelia,” says Perdie. “Don’t turn your collar up like that. It’s cheap.”
“It’s not cheap,” says Cordelia. “It’s sharp.”
“Sharp,” says Perdie, rolling her eyes, blowing smoke from her nose. Her mouth is little and plump and curly at the edges. “That sounds like a hair oil ad.”
Cordelia sits around right side up and sticks her tongue in the corner of her mouth and looks at Perdie.
“So?” she says at last. “What do you know? You’re already over the hill.”
Perdie, who’s old enough to drink cocktails with the grown-ups before dinner although she’s not supposed to do it in bars, curls up her mouth. “I think high school’s bad for her,” she says to Mirrie.
“She’s turning into a hardrock.” She pronounces this word in a mocking drawl, to show that it’s the sort of word she herself has outgrown. “Pull up your socks, Cordelia, or you’ll flunk your year again. You know what Daddy said last time.”
Cordelia flushes, and can’t think what to say back.
Cordelia begins to pinch things from stores. She doesn’t call it stealing, she calls it pinching. She pinches tubes of lipstick from Woolworth’s, packets of licorice Nibs from the drugstore. She goes in and buys some small item, such as bobby pins, and when the salesgirl has her back turned getting the change out of the till she slips something off the counter and hides it under her coat or in her coat pocket. By this time it’s autumn, and we have long coats which flap against the backs of our legs, coats with baggy, outsize patch pockets, good for pinching. Outside the store she shows me what she’s gotten away with. She seems to think there’s nothing wrong in what she’s doing; she laughs with delight, her eyes sparkle, her cheeks are flushed. It’s as if she’s won a prize.
The Woolworth’s has old wooden floors, stained from years of winter slush on people’s boots, and dim overhead lights that hang down from the ceiling on metal stems. Nothing in it is anything we would really want, except maybe the lipsticks. There are photo frames with strangely tinted pictures of movie stars in them to show what the frame would look like with a photo in it; these stars have names like Raymon Novarro and Linda Darnell, stars from some remote period several years ago. There are cheesy hats, old-lady hats with veiling around them, and hair combs stuck with imitation rhinestones. Just about everything in here is imitation something else. We walk up and down the aisles, spraying ourselves from the cologne testers, rubbing the sample lipsticks on the backs of our hands, fingering the merchandise and disparaging it in loud voices, while the middle-aged salesladies glare at us. Cordelia pinches a pink nylon scarf and thinks she’s been seen by one of the glaring salesladies, so we don’t go back there for a while. We go into the drugstore and buy Cream-sicles, and while I’m paying for them Cordelia pinches two horror comics. As we walk the rest of the way home from school we take turns reading them out loud, dramatizing the parts like radio plays, pausing to shriek with laughter. We sit on the low stone wall in front of the funeral parlor so we can both see the pictures, reading and laughing. The comic books are drawn in great detail and garishly colored, with green and purple and sulfur-yellow prevailing. Cordelia reads a story about two sisters, a pretty one and one who has a burn covering half her face. The burn is maroon-colored and wrinkled like a dead apple. The pretty one has a boyfriend and goes to dances, the burned one hates her and loves the boyfriend. The burned one hangs herself in front of a mirror, out of jealousy. But her spirit goes into the mirror, and the next time the pretty one is brushing her hair in front of that mirror, she looks up and there’s the burned one looking back at her. This is a shock and she faints, and the burned one gets out of the mirror and into the pretty one’s body. She takes over the body and fools the boyfriend, she even gets him to kiss her, but although her face is now perfect, her reflection in that one mirror still shows her real, ruined face. The boyfriend sees it. Luckily he knows what to do. He freaks the mirror.
“Sob, sob,” says Cordelia. “Oh, Bob…it was…horrible. Never mind, my darling, it’s all over now. She’s gone… back… to where she came from… forever. Now we can truly be together, without fear. Clinch. The End. Oh, puke!”
I read one about a man and a woman who drown at sea but find they aren’t dead exactly. Instead they are enormously bloated and far, and living on a desert island. They don’t love each other any more because of being so fat. Along comes a ship and they wave to it. “They don’t see us! They’re passing right through us! Oh no…that must mean…we’re condemned to be this way forever! Is there no way out?”
In the next picture they’ve hanged themselves. The fat bodies are dangling from one of the palm trees, and their previous thin bodies, wispy-looking and dressed in falling-apart bathing suits, are holding hands and walking into the ocean. “Clinch. The End.”
“Oh, double puke,” says Cordelia.
Cordelia reads one about a dead man coming back out of a swamp, covered with dripping, peeling-off flesh, to strangle the brother who pushed him into the swamp in the first place, and I read one about a man picking up a beautiful girl hitchhiker who turns out to have been dead for ten years. Cordelia reads one about a man who gets cursed by a voodoo witch doctor and grows a big red lobster claw on his hand, which turns on him and attacks him.
When we get to Cordelia’s house, Cordelia doesn’t want to take the horror comics inside with her. She says someone might find them and wonder where she got them. Even if they think she bought them, she’ll be in trouble. So I end up taking them home with me. It doesn’t occur to either of us to throw them out. Once I get them home, I realize I don’t want them in them in the daylight, but I don’t like the idea of them lying there, right in my bedroom, while I’m asleep. I think of them glowing in the dark, with a lurid sulfur-yellow light; I think of curling wisps of mist coming out of them and materializing on top of my bureau. I’m afraid I’ll find out that there’s someone else trapped inside my body; I’ll look into the bathroom mirror and see the face of another girl, someone who looks like me but has half of her face darkened, the skin burned away.
I know these things won’t really happen, but I don’t like the thought. Nor do I want to throw the comics away; that would be letting them loose, they might go out of control. So I take them into Stephen’s room and slide them in among his own old comic books, which are still there, stacked up under his bed. He never reads them any more, so he won’t find these ones. Whatever emanations may seep from them at night, he will be impervious to them. In my opinion he is up to things, which includes things of this kind.