Chapter Three
I caught the professor the next afternoon. I’d seen him exit his house from the family room window, and sprinted to snag him before he got into his Saab and drove away.
“Professor Schnabel!”
He turned, and flashed the warm smile with which he had always graced me since that Halloween so many years ago. “Jack. Good to see you.” We shook hands like men. “You look like you’re in a hurry.”
I shook my head. “No. I just… I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Okay, shoot.”
And then I stood there like a dope, realizing that I had no question, that I hadn’t thought of a single tactful way to inquire about what I’d seen.
“Jack?” Kindly, intelligent eyes studied me. I decided to jump on in.
“The other night, I… I was in my dad’s room. Up there…” I pointed. His eyes followed. “I saw you. You were dancing. With…” My courage faltered.
Surprise, then worry, then gentle amusement passed over the professor’s face. “You saw me…” he began quietly. “And you saw someone else, too, didn’t you?” He waited until I managed to nod, and then he took a deep breath. “I can certainly understand why you’d want to ask me about it,” he said dryly.
A thin smile eked its way onto my face. If I’d expected any sort of reaction from him at all, this certainly wasn’t it.
“Jack.” The professor placed a hand on my shoulder. “I would love to talk with you about this. I would. I’ve got a game at my club, though, in ten minutes.” I couldn’t help but smile now. He was a member of the Gut’n Feathers Club, a quirky, gray-green edifice on Pleasant Street where older gentlemen played at badminton and traded lies about their youthful misadventures. “And tonight, I’ve got a lecture in Cambridge. How about this Saturday? Any time in the morning.”
“Nine o’clock?”
“Nine o’clock it is. Just ring the door, okay?”
I nodded, and he tousled my hair before jumping into the Saab and hurtling up Hooper Street.
And once again I found myself outside the professor’s home, buffeted by a chill wind and filled with unanswered, unformulated questions. I ran to my house, grabbed my jacket, and rode down to Five Corners.
As I coasted downhill on Washington, large drops of cold rain began to spatter my face. I pulled my hood up, and then instead of going down to Paulie’s, I parked the bike under OneStop’s large red awning and went in.
There was nobody behind the counter. The jangling bell had faded away, so I nailed it especially hard as I closed the door.
“Geez!” came a voice from right behind me. I practically jumped into a Fritos display. “What kind of angel are you trying to put wings on?” I turned around, and found the same girl I’d seen before, sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor and using a stickering machine to price soup cans. “Oh, it’s you,” she said softly. She smiled, and then stood up. “Abba-Zaba again?” She moved toward the candy shelves. I didn’t respond. “Or a Mounds, maybe?”
I stepped toward her. “How would you know I like Mounds?”
She grinned. “It’s what you bought most of last year. But then you switched.”
I stared at her. “But…” I couldn’t recall even seeing her before the other day, and here she was, telling me what my previous fave had been.
“C’mon, what’ll it be?” She gestured impishly between the two choices she had mentioned. “Please? I know, I know, you don’t want the darn sticker on it. It ruins the taste, right? I’ll take it off for you!” I continued to stare, and slowly her hand stilled and then dropped to her side. She looked at the floor for a minute, and when she looked back up, she was biting her lower lip.
My breath caught in my throat. I’d found her passable to look at before, but today… she was enchanting. Shiny black strapped shoes, gossamer white socks, black cotton pants, a shapely cream top underneath a peach-shaded cardigan. Clear, innocent skin, lightly reddened lips, dark hair spilling onto delicate shoulders, shimmering eyes that looked at me as though I were the only object in the room.
“I don’t want a candy bar today,” I heard myself rasp. Her teeth parted company with her lip, and then reunited with it in a new position. I could clearly see the indentation they made in the supple redness, and I swallowed, aware that what I was saying was somehow causing her anguish. “I think I’d prefer a sticky bun,” I said carefully. “From Ladycakes.” She didn’t move. “It’s right down the street,” I added, pointing vaguely. “They… they’re really good.” I couldn’t believe I was talking like this, as if every dweeby character in every movie I’d ever seen had been rolled into one enormous goofball!
I took a deep breath. My voice scraped outwards from between encroaching walls of doom. “Would you like to go with me? To get… a sticky bun? Or whatever you’d like? They have lots of things: bear claws, éclairs, ice cream, too.” I cringed inside. First, the words wouldn’t come at all; then, they spilled out as though poured too hastily from a milk jug.
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “Let me just tell my dad I’m going. He’ll mind the store.” She turned and stepped through an open doorway, disappearing from sight. And then, all of a sudden, I was faint with relief, without even understanding why I should feel relieved at all! I leaned against a frayed wooden shelf arrayed with a hundred varieties of shampoo, soap and skin cleanser. Outside, it was seriously beginning to rain, and the dismal gray light made the inside of the store seem even duskier than usual.
She appeared again, shrugging a dark woolen overcoat on over her clothes. Walking to within a few feet of me, she leaned forward a little to pull her hair out from under the coat’s collar, and then smiled shyly.
“I’m Tilly, by the way. Tilly Spence.”
My heart melted as the syllables of her name washed over me. “Jack Wharton.” We shook hands awkwardly, like a pair of amateur diplomats without a clue as to what protocol should be.
“I have a large umbrella. Shall we use it?”
I nodded.
The shop bell rang, the door closed gently behind us; we strode together in the rain toward the end of the block, where we had a good half hour until the bakery closed for the day.