“You won’t come back,” she said.

“I’ll come back,” he said. “I’ll always come back.” But she knew what this meant now, what it meant for him to say this: it meant that he wouldn’t come back, could not ever come back, that no one ever can; to say that he would was to admit that he couldn’t, to admit that there was no way back at all.

She didn’t behave well the next days, the last of Ben’s leave, she knew it but couldn’t stop, would every day hit upon the wrong thing to do and then with grim elation do it. Mostly she stayed in her room, waiting for his knock on her door, once slamming it in his face when he did come and then said the wrong insouciant impertinent thing. Sat folded up in her little velveteen armchair or under her quilt feeling herself seethe and boil uncontrollably, trying to think who she could be if she could no longer be herself, which she could not. Then she emerged suddenly, hectic smile pasted on, willing to let him take her for walks around the courts and drives and circles; she’d talk and talk, romping and frisking by his side like a bad puppy. Okay okay he’d say at last and she’d shut up and turn to go back, walking far ahead of him, hands in her pockets and shoulders hunched.

The morning he left he put his leather jacket around her shoulders. Keep it till I get back. Don’t lose it. Don’t give it away. She put it on over her nightgown and said nothing and did nothing until he had gone out the door with George and she heard the car start and turn out onto the street; then she tore open the door and broke away from Marion and ran in her slippers over the snow crying his name, knowing they wouldn’t hear or turn back.

Her job downtown changed after Christmas: now she stood at the window where people brought back the ravished packages she had made up the month before, dissatisfied, annoyed, exasperated, apologetic. Kit took the unwanted things and looked at them while their owners gave their reasons for rejection. Harmless hopeless unwanted things. After a dinner break she didn’t go back to the window where she had stood; went out of the store to the bus stop blocks away. A bus stopped but she didn’t get on; let it roll away.

Sometimes looking back Kit can see herself—by that trick of memory or imagination whereby we see our past selves from the outside, like people in a movie—on that street corner in the evening as she must have looked when Burke Eggert saw her, skinny in her flat shoes and straight skirt, hugging herself in Ben’s jacket, trying to warm herself with a cigarette. Why he chose to pull over and talk she couldn’t know, but surely it was something like his pulling over that she was trying to cause by her standing there.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Burke.” She hadn’t seen Burke since he had graduated in June. She felt a profound and exhilarating indifference. If nothing mattered then it didn’t matter what she said, or what she had once felt or not felt or written or done. “Hey, how’s it going. How’s tricks.”

He grinned at her, maybe a little baffled, leaning out the open window. The car was a Studebaker, a Hawk. Burke’s father had a dealership.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked. “Big graduate.”

“Oh. Not much.”

“Not much? What, not much?”

“Well.” He laughed at her vehemence. “I don’t know. Working for my dad.”

“Hey! Your dad!”

“Thinking of going to pharmacy school.”

“Pharmacy school!”

“Well. It’s only two years. Not like college.”

“Well sure.”

“I always got pretty good grades in chemistry. Hey, are you cold?”

“I’m freezing.”

“You want a ride somewhere?”

“Um sure.” She went around the Hawk’s sloping snarling nose and into the warm insides. “Nice car.” She knew that the girl she was imitating here would say this, so she did. She even stroked the dash appreciatively.

“Well, it’s not mine. I mean it’s the dealership’s.”

“I’ve none of my own, said the Hatter, I only keep them to sell,” said Kit. “Right?”

“Um right.”

“So how’s it going?” she asked again. “You married or engaged or anything?”

“Jeez no.” He grinned. “Give me a while.”

“What about what’s-her-name. Mary Anne.”

“Mary Jo.” He shrugged one shoulder, eyes on the street. “She’s at school. State.”

“Oh.” Mary Jo had worn Burke’s great ring around her neck on a chain, too wide for her finger. How about through her nose, Kit had asked of no one, like a bull’s, or a cannibal’s bone. “You want to know something? I used to have an awful crush on you.”

He grinned sideways at her, pleased and surprised but not exactly astonished; his walleye gave him an expression of devilish interest Kit was pretty sure he didn’t intend.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Of course you never gave a look my way.” As far as I could tell she thought of adding, and laughed.

“Well,” he said. “Hey. You were so, I don’t know. Standoffish. Like you thought we were all beneath you.”

“Beneath me?” she said. “Really?”

“Like you were better than us.”

“‘Us’?”

“Well, everybody.”

“No,” she said. “I never thought that.” She had, though; and realized in amazement that what she had felt she had shown. “I even,” she said, “gave you a poem I wrote. A couple.”

“That was you? You? And you wrote those?”

“Yup.” She shrugged, she’d done it, couldn’t help it.

“I thought somebody copied those out of a book. Like for homework. God.”

“Nope. Me.”

He shook his head and let a little sound escape his throat, a little cough of disbelief. “Damn,” he said.

“I had it bad,” she said.

“You were just kidding,” he said. “Come on.”

She didn’t answer. For some minutes she had been filling with some clear astringent fluid, a fuel that raced effervescent in her veins and skin, and she didn’t know what she would do or say next.

“So how come you’re not in school?” he asked. “You didn’t quit, did you?”

“Christmas vacation!” she said, and slapped his wrist lightly, you silly.

“Oh right,” he said. “Yeah. Two weeks.”

“Not for you, huh.”

“No. Day or two at Christmas.” He hooked an arm over the seat between them and looked ahead as though seeing more than the street. “School was easy,” he said, and Kit seemed to see a devolution in Burke Eggert’s life, a decline in status that might go on a long way; and felt a delicious pity. “So how are you spending all the free time?” he asked.

“I got a job at Robertson’s. Actually I just quit.”

“Huh.”

“And I baby-sit. You know.” Her heart suddenly filled with that hot clear blood and she said, “Actually I’m baby-sitting tonight. Right near here.”

“Really.”

“A Dr. Thorne. Pippi. Pippi Thorne.”

“No.”

“Yep. Hey, maybe you could come over later. They’ve got a big house. Big TV.”

He smiled at her in a way that she would come to recognize, after she’d seen it in enough men: a look of glee and uncertainty mixed, as though they’ve pulled off a trick but wonder if maybe they’re the butt of one too: even in this first instance of it she sensed what it meant, and that she had caused it. “We can catch up,” she said. “The old alma mater.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll show you where his place is. It’s on the way to my house.”

They both fell silent then, and watched the road till she pointed out the Tudor pile of Dr. Thorne’s house. “Pippi’s good,” she said. “She’ll be asleep by eight.”

“Hey. Good.”

“Okay,” she said. “So. My place is down that way. Take Elderberry Drive.”

He let her off—didn’t get out to open her door as she momentarily waited for him to do—and she went in and up the half-flight of stairs to her room.

“Kit?” her mother called. “You home?”

“Yes.”

“It’s early.”

She didn’t answer. On the back of her closet door was a mirror, a full-length one; by swinging open the door fast and wide she was able to take from the closet what she wanted without seeing herself in it, and close the door again before it caught her. She thought for a mad moment of calling down to her mother, asking her how it actually happened, this that was going to happen to her, for she knew it was going to happen, all of it or some part of it.