Wayne's heart skipped a beat. "Girls?"
"Yeah." Terry rang the doorbell. "Girls. You know what they are, don't you?"
The door opened, and the riotous noise of a party in full swing came crashing out. Hal Baker stood on the threshold, his arm around a skinny blond girl who looked drunk. "How's it hangin', Terry!" Hal said. "Come on in! Old Steve's around here some—" His blurry gaze fell upon Wayne Falconer, and his face went into shock. "Is that . . . Little Wayne?"
"Yep," Terry chortled, "sure is. Thought we'd stop by to check out the action!" Terry and Helen stepped into the house, but Wayne paused. Laughter and music were thunderous inside there.
The blond girl's nipples were showing through the purple halter-top she wore. She smiled at him.
"Comin' in?" Terry asked.
"No ... I think I'd better ..."
"What's wrong, man?" the girl asked him, a foxy grin on her face. "You afraid of big bad parties?"
"No. I'm not afraid." And before he'd realized it, Wayne had taken a step forward. Hal closed the door behind him. The Amboy Dukes singing "Journey to the Center of the Mind" blasted from the rear of the house. Sinful drug music, Wayne thought, as he followed Terry and Helen through a mass of people he didn't know. They were drinking and smoking and running as wild as bucks through the entire house. Wayne's spine was as stiff as pineboard. He felt as if he'd stepped onto another planet. An aroma of burning rope scorched his nostrils, and a boy stumbled past him stinking drunk.
Terry pressed a paper cup into Wayne's hand. "There you go. Oh, don't worry. It's just Seven-Up."
Wayne sipped at it. It was Seven-Up, all right, but it had gone flat and tasted like the inside of an old shoe. It was as hot and smoky as Hades inside this house, and Wayne sucked on the ice in his cup.
"Mingle, Wayne," Terry told him, and pulled Helen away into the crowd. He didn't dare tell her that he'd laced Wayne's drink with gin.
Wayne had never been to an unchaperoned party before. He wandered through the house, repelled and yet fascinated. He saw many pretty girls, some wearing tight hotpants, and one of them even smiled at him across the room. He blushed and hurried away, trying to hide the stirring in his pants. On the patio that overlooked the dark, still lake, people were dancing to the roar of a stereo. Dancing! Wayne thought. It was inviting sin! But he watched the bodies rub, transfixed. It was like watching a pagan frenzy. That burned-rope smell followed him everywhere, and he saw people smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. His eyes began to water. Across the patio he saw Terry talking to a girl with long black hair. He tried to catch Terry's attention, because he was feeling a little light-headed and needed to get home; but then Terry and Helen had started dancing to Steppenwolf music, so Wayne went off toward the lakeshore to get away from the noise.
The party, to him, was like the inside of a nervous breakdown.
He almost stumbled over a pair of bodies entwined on the ground. Catching a glimpse of exposed breasts, he apologized and continued on as a boy cursed at him. Walking far away from the house, Wayne sat down on the shore near a couple of beached canoes and sucked on his ice. He was trembling inside, and wished he'd never stepped across that doorway.
"You all alone?" someone asked. A girl's voice, with a thick backhills accent.
Wayne looked up. He couldn't see her face, but she had thick waves of black hair and he thought she was the same girl Terry had been talking to. She was wearing a low-cut peasant blouse and bell-bottoms, rolled up as if she'd been wading in the water "Want some company?"
"No, thank you."
She swigged from a can of beer. "This party's fucked up. I hear Dickerson put acid in the punch. That would really fuck everybody's mind, huh?"
He winced at the first use of that awful four-letter sex word; the second gave him a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. She was the kind of girl who did it, he realized.
"Pretend I'm blind," the girl said, and crouched down in front of Wayne. She ran her hand all over Wayne's face. He flinched because she smelled so strongly of beer. "See, I'm blind and I've got to feel what you look like. You go to Indian Hills?"
"I graduated." Beneath the beer odor was another aroma: the rich, musky, forbidden scent of a woman. He told himself to get up and go back to the car. But he didn't move.
"My name's Lonnie. What's yours?"
"Wayne." He almost said Falconer, but the name hung on his lips. He shifted his position, hoping she wouldn't notice his swelling penis. Tell her who you are, he told himself, so she'll get up and leave you alone!
"You know Randy Leach? Well me and him broke up tonight. Sonofabitch is going to Samford University in Birmingham, says he's got to date other girls. Shit!" She drank from the beer and offered it to him, but he shook his head. "I wasted a whole summer on that bastard!"
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Well, that's how it goes I guess." She looked at him and laughed. "Hey, what's wrong? You look like a whore in church, you're so tense!"
Blasphemy and sacrilege! Wayne thought. He looked at her in the darkness, but could only make out the pale oval of her face, He couldn't tell if she was pretty or not, but he knew she was a lost sinner. "Are you saved, girl?" he asked.
There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the girl laughed uproariously. "Oh, wow! I thought you really meant that! You sounded just like my damn momma, always after me to go to churchy-wurchy! Are you rich?"
"Rich?" Wayne echoed. "I . . . guess I am," he said truthfully.
"I knew it. Know how I knew? 'Cause there's somethin' so squeaky-clean about you. And you don't even drink beer, do you, 'cause it's too low-class for you. Where you going to college?"
"Up in Tennessee." Tell her it's the Southeastern Bible College!
He could sense the girl staring at him. "You're sweet," she said softly. "Who'd you come here with?"
"Terry Dozier and Helen Betts."
"Don't know them." She sat close to him and looked out toward the lake. Wayne could feel her body heat, and again he shifted uncomfortably. The images tumbling through his mind were nasty and sinful, and he knew he was walking close to the Pit. "I've went with a lot of boys," Lonnie said after a while. "How come every boy I ever go with just wants to have sex?"
Jezebel! Wayne thought.
"I mean, I know I've got a good body and all. I was in the Miss Fayette Junior High contest last year, and I got the most points in the swimsuit competition. But seems like everybody tries to take advantage of me. Wonder why that is?"
"I don't know," Wayne said in a husky voice. From a black part of his mind a sibilant voice said, She wants to do it and she uses the four-letter sex word.
Then, before Wayne could shift away again, Lonnie leaned toward him and whispered in his ear, "Why don't we go out in one of them canoes?"
"I can't. I've . . . I've got my good clothes on."
She giggled and tugged at his shirt. "Then take your good clothes off."
"You'd better get back to the party. Somebody'll miss you."
"Miss me? Naw! Randy left with somebody else! Come on, sweet thing, let's go out in a canoe. Okay? You're so tense, what's wrong? Little Lonnie make you nervous?" She took his hand and tugged at him until he stood up, and then she pulled him with her to the nearest canoe.
Wayne's head was dizzy, throbbing from the echo of the rock music from way up on the patio. Lake water lapped softly at the shore. "I don't see any paddles in there."
She climbed in carefully and rummaged around, then held up a paddle. "Here you go. Just one, though, so you'll have to drive the boat." She sat down. "What're you waitin' for, sweet thing?"