Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/28

 remembered getting up from the shimmering foam, crying unintelligibly, only to be pushed back again. He recalled the gush of mud in his hands and the surprised look on the two boys' faces as he had let them have it, full force. He grinned to himself on recalling this but this satisfied feeling was brief. He remembered the tears of that night, and how he had wished to be back in the oil field, living in their three room house instead of in the new home his father had built in this wicked, cruel town. How often he had thought of his lost classmates who had always been so understanding, so loving. How could he bear those grinning faces after knowing those friendly ones?

Something had happened to him that morning long ago. Something had twisted his feelings and his mind had become confused and different from the past calendar of days. A wall began to grow between himself and other boys, mounting higher each day. Each year it stood stronger between his and their hostile world. He turned to girls, played dolls with them, built imaginary houses from the huge pile of firewood stacked at the rear yard of the school. After that first day of school he had steered clear of boys. He was not built differently than they, but he was … in some mysterious way … different.

Gaylord stared into space, and searched his mind for an answer. He wondered now about the impulse that had brought him here. Robert Blake was the unpalatable reason for it; the fact that, underneath all his bashful ways, he still had a powerful desire for Blake's friendship or just to see him. Where was Blake?

A girl pushed against him and he smiled at her. She wore a white sweater and grey skirt, with a little clasp of imitation pearls around her neck; her hair fell in soft rolls about her face; she was at her very prettiest. Gaylord stood and watched her, and two thoughts followed each other through his mind: "I wish I was in her shoes" … "Why, since I was born a boy, can't I be like the rest?"

Gaylord was seized with a feeling of vertigo, an actual dizziness, as though he were teetering at the edge of a precipice, looking into a turbulent sea, resisting an impulse to jump into it.

From this fog of bewilderment, he tried to free himself. He watched a girl skillfully paint her mouth. He listened to every word spoken around him, listened so intensely that they seemed printed on his mind. 18