Wednesday afternoon.

Susan and fourteen other students – The Spring Ball Decoration Committee, no less – were working on the huge mural that would hang behind the twin bandstand on Friday night. The theme was Springtime in Venice (who picked thew hokey themes, Sue wondered. She had been a student at Ewen for four years, had after two Balls, and she still didn't know. Why did the goddam thing need a theme, anyway? Why not just have a sock hop and be done with W): George Chizmar, Ewen's most artistic student, had done a small chalk sketch of gondolas on a canal at sunset and a gondolier in a huge straw fedora leaning against the tiller as a gorgeous panoply of pinks and reds and oranges stained both sky and water. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. He had redrawn it in silhouette on a huge fourteen-by-twenty-foot canvas flat, numbering the various sections to go with the various chalk hues. Now the Committee was patiently colouring it in, like children crawling over a huge page in a giant's colouring book. Still, Sue thought, looking at her hands and forearms, both heavily dusted with pink chalk, it was going to be the prettiest prom ever.

Next to her, Helen Shyres sat up on her haunches, stretched, and groaned as her back popped. She brushed a hank of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a rose-coloured smear.

'How in hell did you talk me into this?'

'You want it to be nice, don't you?' Sue mimicked Miss Geer, the spinster chairman (apt enough term for Miss Mustache) of the Decoration Committee.

'Yeah, but why not the refreshment Committee or the Entertainment Committee? Less back, more mind. The mind, that's my area. Besides, you're not even -' She bit down on the words.

'Going?' Susan shrugged and picked up her chalk again. She had a monstrous writer's cramp. 'No, but I still want it to be nice.' She added shyly: 'Tommy's going.'

They worked in silence for a bit, and then Helen stopped again. No one was near them; the closest was Holly Marshall, on the other end of the mural, colouring the gondola's keel.

'Can I ask you about it, Sue?' Helen asked finally. 'God, everybody's talking.'

'Sure.' Sue stopped colouring and flexed her hand.

'Maybe I ought to tell someone, just so the story stays straight. I asked Tommy to take Carrie. I'm hoping it'll bring her out of herself a little … knock down some of the barriers. I think I owe her that much.'

'Whom does that put the rest of us?' Helen asked without rancour.

Sue shrugged. 'You have to make up your own mind about what we did, Helen. I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't want people to think I'm uh …'

'Playing match'

'Something like that.'

'And Tommy went along with it?' This was the part that most fascinated her.

'Yea,' Sue said, and did not elaborate. After a pause: 'I suppose the other kids think I'm stuck up.'

Helen thought it over. 'Well … they're all talking about it. But most of them still think you're okay. Like you said, you make your own decisions. There is, however, a small dissenting faction.' She snickered dolefully.

'The Chris Hargensen people?'

'And the Billy Nolan people. God, he's scuzzy.'

'She doesn't like me much?' Sue said, making it a question.

'Susie, she hates your guts.'

Susan nodded, surprised to find the thought both distressed and excited her.

'I heard her father was going to sue the school department and then he changed his mind,' she said.

Helen shrugged. 'She hasn't made any friends out of this,' she said. ‘I don't know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I don't even know my own mind.'

They worked on in silence. Across the room, Don Barrett was putting up an extension ladder preparatory to gilding the overhead steel beams with crepe paper.

'Look,' Helen said. 'There goes Chris now.'

Susan looked up just in time to see her walking into the cubby-hole office to the left of the gym entrance. She was wearing wine-coloured velvet hot pants and a silky white blouse – no bra, from the way things were jiggling up front – a dirty old man's dream, Sue thought sourly, and then wondered what Chris could want in where the Prom Committee had set up shop. Of course Tina Blake was on the Committee and the two of them were thicker than thieves.

Stop it, she scolded herself. Do you want her in sackcloth and ashes?

Yes, she admitted. A part of her wanted just that.

'Helen?'

'Hmmmm?'

'Are they going to do something?'

Helen's face took on an unwilling masklike quality. 'I don't know.' The voice was light, over innocent.

'Oh,' Sue said noncommittally.

(you know you know something: accept something goddammit if its only yourself tell me)

They continued to colour, and neither spoke. She knew it wasn't as all right as Helen had said. It couldn't be; she would never be quite the same golden girl again in the eyes of her mates. She had done an ungovernable, dangerous thing – she had broken cover and shown her face.

The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.

'I'm not supposed to,' Tina Blake said uneasily. She was a small, pretty girl with a billow of red hair. A pencil was pushed importantly in it. 'And if Norma comes back, she'll spill.'

'She's in the crapper,' Chris said. 'Come on.'

Tina, a little shocked, giggled in spite of herself. Still, she offered token resistance: 'Why do you want to see, anyway? You can't go.'

'Never mind,' Chris said. As always, she seemed to bubble with dark humour.

'Here,' Tina said, and pushed a sheet enclosed in limp plastic across the desk. 'I'm going out for a Coke. If that bitchy Norma Watson comes back and catches you I never saw you.'

'Okay,' Chris murmured, already absorbed in the floor plan. She didn't hear the door close.

George Chizmar had also done the floor plan, so it was perfect. The dance floor was clearly marked. Twin bandstands. The stage where the King and Queen would be crowned

(i'd like to crown that fucking snell bitch carrie too)

at the end of the evening. Ranged along the three sides of the floor were the prom-goers' tables. Card tables, actually, but covered with a froth of crepe and ribbon, each holding party favours, prom programmes, and ballots for King and Queen.

She ran a lacquered, spade-shaped fingernail down the tables to the right of the dance floor, then the left. There: Tommy R. & Carrie W. They were really going through with it. She could hardly believe it. Outrage made her tremble. Did they really think they would be allowed to get away with it? Her lips tautened grimly.

She looked over her shoulder. Norma Watson was still nowhere in sight.