Julep was a Baptist, a clarinetist in the band, a forward on the six-girl basketball team which was famous throughout the state, undefeated, unthreatened, unsmiling. She had scabs upon her knees, a blue silk uniform in her locker, fingernails split and ragged from the gritty leather ball. Julep was an innocent.
Now, Judy Cushman too was an innocent, but had a tendency to see things in a greedy, rutting way. Judy was tiny and tough and wore a garter belt. Almost every one of her eyebrows was plucked from her head and her hair was stacked over a foot high, for her older sister was a hairdresser who taught her half of everything she knew.
Judy was full and sleek and a favorite with the boys and she would tell Julep things that Julep almost died hearing. She would say, “Last night Tommy Saloma exposed himself to my eyes only in the rumpus room of his house,” and Julep would almost faint. She would say, “Billy Colter touched my breast in Library,” and Julep would gasp and hold her head at an unnaturally high angle for she felt that if she held her head on the slightest cant, everything inside her would stream terribly from her mouth, everything she was made of, falling out of her head and shaking out on the floor in front of them.
Judy always told her friend the most awful things she could think of, true or false, and made promises that she would not keep and insulted and disappointed and teased her as much as possible. Julep allowed this and was always deeply affected and bewildered by this, which flattered Judy enormously. This pleasure compensated for the fact that Julep had white hair that Judy would have given anything in the world to have. It annoyed her that her friend had such strange and devastating hair and didn’t know how to cut or curl it properly.
After school, they would often go to Julep’s house. They usually went there rather than to Judy’s because Julep’s room was bigger. Judy’s room was just a closet with a bright light bulb and a studio bed and the smell of underwear.
“Look now,” Judy said, peeling off a strip of Scotch tape from her bangs, “we’ve got to broaden our conversational base. Why don’t we talk about men or movies? Or even mixed drinks?”
Julep shrugged. “We don’t know anything about those things.” She looked at the black worn Bible on her bedside table. She had read there that the sun would someday become black as a sackcloth of hair and the moon would turn red as blood. This was because of the evil in people, and Julep worried that this would happen to the sun before she had a chance to get back to where it was again.
“You don’t know anything is all.” Judy plucked at her sweater and smiled the bittersweet smile she found so crushing on the lips of the girl models of the fashion magazines. Her new breasts rose and fell eerily beneath a sweater of puce.
“I know that someday you’re gonna poke someone’s eye out with those things,” Julep said pointing at her friend’s chest. “If I were you, I’d be worried sick.”
Judy yawned. Julep stared out the window. The sun was still up but nowhere in sight. The air was blue and the snow falling through it was blue, and the trees were as black as though they had been burned.
“I’m leaving,” Judy said abruptly and swept out of Julep’s bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen.
Julep rubbed at the frost forming inside the windowpane with a thin grey nail which was bleeding beneath the quick. She felt her head sweating. If she pressed her hands to it, it would pop like a too heavy tick on a dog. If Hell were hot then Heaven must be freezing cold. She backed away from the window and thudded down the stairs.
Judy had drawn on her boots and coat. She waved coyly at Julep.
“Well, aren’t we going over there tonight to watch him?” Julep asked nervously, swinging her eyes heavily toward her friend. Looking often cost Julep a great deal of effort as though her eyes were boxes of bricks she had to push around in front of her.
“No,” Judy said, for she wanted to punish Julep for her dullness. Her books were lying on the kitchen table beside a small dish that said LET ME HOLD YOUR TEABAG. Judy rolled her eyes and then shook her head at Julep. Julep’s father owned a little grocery and variety store down the street, and in the window of it was a hand-lettered sign.
WHY MAKE THE RICH RICHER
PATRONIZE THE POOR
THANK YOU
“How can you stand to live in such a dump?” she asked. “With such dummies?” Julep didn’t know. Judy left and walked through the heavy snow to dumb Julep’s father’s dumb store where she bought a package of gum and lifted a mascara and eyeliner set.
Julep ate supper. Chowder, bread, two glasses of milk and three pieces of cake. She felt that she was feeding something inside her that belonged in a pen in the zoo. A plow traveled up the street, its orange light chopping through the blackness. She went to bed early, for she had tests and a basketball game the next day. She thought of the tropical ocean, of enormous white flowers on yellow stalks motionless in the sun. Things would carry distantly over the water there. Things would start out from ugly places and never reach Julep at all.
Judy Cushman and Julep Lee had become friends the summer before when they were on the beach. It was a bitter, shining Maine day and they were alone except for two people drowning just beyond the breaker line. The two girls sat on the beach, eating potato chips, unable to decide if the people were drowning or if they were just having a good time. Even after they disappeared, the girls could not believe they had really done it. They went home and the next day read about it in the newspapers. From that day on, they spent all their time together, even though they never mentioned the incident again.
Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boarding house. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.
And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.
They could approach the house either by walking up the beach, climbing the metal rungs welded into the rock, which was dangerous and gave them no cover, or they could walk through the little town and across the field. Their post was a small depression beside an enormous pine, the branches of which swept the ground. Further away was a rim of rocks which they had assembled as another hiding place. Every night they could see everything from either one of these locations.
Every night the chemistry teacher was projected brightly behind the square window glass and watching him was like watching a museum. The girls would often close their eyes and even doze off for a time, and the snow would fall on them and freeze in their hair. Sometimes he would take off all his clothes and walk around the room, punching at the wall but never hitting it. Seeing him naked was never as exciting as the girls kept on imagining it would be since no one had ever told them what to feel about this.