Pigeon Feathers by John Updike

you?”
    “Fine.” Her smile broadened out from the
F
of this word.
    What was so funny? Was she really, as it seemed, pleased to see him? “Du-did you just get through cheer-cheer-cheerleading?”
    “Yes. Thank God.
Oh
, she’s so awful. She makes us do the same stupid locomotives for every cheer; I told her, no wonder nobody cheers any more.”
    “This is M-M-Miss Potter?” He blushed, feeling that he made an ugly face in getting past the
M
. When he got caught in the middle of a sentence the constriction was somehow worse. He admired the way words poured up her throat, distinct and petulant.
    “Yes, Potbottom Potter,” she said, “she’s just aching for a man and takes it out on us. I wish she would get one. Honestly, Billy, I have half a mind to quit. I’ll be so glad when June comes, I’ll never set foot in this idiotic building again.”
    Her lips, pale with the lipstick worn off, crinkled bitterly. Foreshortened from the height of his eyes, her face looked cross as a cat’s. It a little shocked him that poor Miss Potter and this kind, warm school stirred her to what he had to take as actual anger; this grittiness in her was the first abrasive texturehe had struck today. Couldn’t she see around teachers, into their fatigue, their poverty, their fear? It had been so long since he had spoken to her, he wasn’t sure how coarse she had become. “Don’t quit,” he brought out of his mouth at last. “It’d be n-n-n-nuh—it’d be nothing without you.”
    He pushed open the door at the end of the hall for her and as she passed under his arm she looked up and said, “Why, aren’t you sweet?”
    The stairwell, all asphalt and iron, smelled of galoshes. It felt more secret than the hall, more specially theirs; there was something magical in the rapid multiplication of planes and angles as they descended that lifted the spell on his tongue, so that words came as quickly as his feet pattered on the steps.
    “No, I mean it,” he said, “you’re really a beautiful cheerleader. But then you’re beautiful period.”
    “I’ve skinny legs.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “Somebody.”
    “Well,
he
wasn’t very sweet.”
    “No.”
    “Why do you hate this poor old school?”
    “Now, Billy. You know you don’t care about this junky place any more than I do.”
    “I love it. It breaks my heart to hear you say you want to get out, because then I’ll never see you again.”
    “You don’t care, do you?”
    “Why, sure I care; you
know
”—their feet stopped; they had reached bottom, the first-floor landing, two brass-barred doors and a grimy radiator—“I’ve always li-loved you.”
    “You don’t mean that.”
    “I do too. It’s ridiculous but there it is. I wanted to tell you today and now I have.”
    He expected her to laugh and go out the door, but instead she showed an unforeseeable willingness to discuss this awkward matter. He should have realized before this that women enjoy being talked to. “It’s a very silly thing to say,” she asserted tentatively.
    “I don’t see why,” he said, fairly bold now that he couldn’t seem more ridiculous, and yet picking his words with a certain strategic care. “It’s not
that
silly to love somebody, I mean what the hell. Probably what’s silly is not to do anything about it for umpteen years, but, then, I never had an opportunity, I thought.”
    He set his books down on the radiator and she set hers down beside his. “What kind of opportunity were you waiting for?”
    “Well, see, that’s it; I didn’t know.” He wished, in a way, she would go out the door. But she had propped herself against the wall and plainly awaited more conversation. “Yuh-you were such a queen and I was such a nothing and I just didn’t really want to presume.” It wasn’t very interesting; it puzzled him that she seemed to be interested. Her face had grown quite stern, her mouth small and thoughtful, and he made a gesture with his hands intended to release her