During that time Sadie and I never kissed, never held hands, never even looked into each other’s eyes for longer than a passing glance. She didn’t talk about her busted marriage or her reasons for coming to Texas from Georgia. I didn’t talk about my novel or tell her about my largely made-up past. We talked about books. We talked about Kennedy, whose foreign policy she considered jingoistic. We discussed the nascent civil rights movement. I told her about the board across the creek at the bottom of the path behind the Humble Oil station in North Carolina. She said she’d seen similar toilet facilities for colored people in Georgia, but believed their days were numbered. She thought school integration would come, but probably not until the mid-seventies. I told her I thought it would be sooner, driven by the new president and his attorney-general kid brother.

She snorted. “You have more respect for that grinning Irishman than I do. Tell me, does he ever get his hair cut?”

We didn’t become lovers, but we became friends. Sometimes she tripped over things (including her own feet, which were large), and on two occasions I steadied her, but there were no catches as memorable as the first one. Sometimes she’d declare she just had to have a cigarette, and I’d accompany her out to the student smoking area behind the metal shop.

“I’ll be sorry not to be able to come out here and sprawl on the bench in my old blue jeans,” she said one day. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to start. “There’s always such a fug in teachers’ rooms.”

“Someday that’ll all change. Smoking will be banned on school grounds. For teachers as well as students.”

She smiled. It was a good one, because her lips were rich and full. And the jeans, I must say, looked good on her. She had long, long legs. Not to mention just enough junk in her trunk. “A cigarette-free society . . . Negro children and white children studying side by side in perfect harmony . . . no wonder you’re writing a novel, you’ve got one hell of an imagination. What else do you see in your crystal ball, George? Rockets to the moon?”

“Sure, but it’ll probably take a little longer than integration. Who told you I was writing a novel?”

“Miz Mimi,” she said, and butted her cigarette in one of the half a dozen sand-urn ashtrays.

“She said it was good. And speaking of Miz Mimi, I suppose we ought to get back to work. I think we’re almost there with the photographs, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And are you sure playing that West Side Story song over the slide show isn’t going to be too corny?”

I thought “Somewhere” was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska put together, but according to Ellen Dockerty it had been Mimi’s favorite song.

I told Sadie this, and she laughed doubtfully. “I didn’t know her all that well, but it sure doesn’t seem like her. Maybe it’s Ellie’s favorite song.”

“Now that I think about it, that seems all too likely. Listen, Sadie, do you want to go to the football game with me on Friday? Kind of show the kids that you’re here before school starts on Monday?”

“I’d love to.” Then she paused, looking a little uncomfortable. “As long as you don’t, you know, get any ideas. I’m not ready to date just yet. Maybe not for a long time.”

“Neither am I.” She was probably thinking about her ex, but I was thinking about Lee Oswald. Soon he’d have his American passport back. Then it would only be a matter of wangling a Soviet exit visa for his wife. “But friends sometimes go to the game together.”

“That’s right, they do. And I like going places with you, George.”

“Because I’m taller.”

She punched my arm playfully—a big-sister kind of punch. “That’s right, podna. You’re the kind of man I can look up to.”

9

At the game, practically everybody looked up to us, and with faint awe—as though we were representatives of a slightly different race of humans. I thought it was kind of nice, and for once Sadie didn’t have to slouch to fit in. She wore a Lion Pride sweater and her faded jeans. With her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a high school senior herself. A tall one, probably the center on the girls’ basketball team.

We sat in Faculty Row and cheered as Jim LaDue riddled the Arnette Bears’ defense with half a dozen short passes and then a sixty-yard bomb that brought the crowd to its feet. At halftime the score was Denholm 31, Arnette 6. As the players ran off the field and the Denholm band marched onto it with their tubas and trombones wagging, I asked Sadie if she wanted a hotdog and a Coke.

“You bet I do, but right now the line’ll be all the way out to the parking lot. Wait until there’s a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer.”

“I think you can manage those things on your own.”

She smiled at me and gripped my arm. “No, I need you to help me. I’m new here, remember?”

At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship. And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except for what happened during that halftime.

The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldn’t quite figure out. When they finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips. “Give us an L !”

We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with an I, an O, an N, and an S.

“What’s that spell?”

“LIONS!” Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.

“Who’s gonna win?”

“LIONS!” Given the halftime score, there wasn’t much doubt about it.

“Then let us hear you roar!”

We roared in the traditional manner, turning first to the left and then to the right. Sadie gave it her all, cupping her hands around her mouth, her ponytail flying from one shoulder to the other.

What came next was the Jim Cheer. In the previous three years—yes, our Mr. LaDue had started at QB even as a freshman—this had been pretty simple. The cheerleaders would yell something like, “Let us hear your Lion Pride! Name the man who leads our side!” And the hometown crowd would bellow “JIM! JIM! JIM!” After that the cheerleaders would do a few more cartwheels and then run off the field so the other team’s band could march out and tootle a tune or two. But this year, possibly in honor of Jim’s valedictory season, the chant had changed.