home by ten, three whole hours before the prom ended. Amy always had
to be home by ten on weekends, nine o’clock on school nights. Tonight,
however, her father interceded on her behalf, and her mother grudgingly
compromised, Amy didn’t have to be home until one o’clock. Her mother
didn’t like making that concession, and later, in a hundred small
telling ways, she would make Amy pay for it.
If Mother could have her way, Amy thought, if Daddy didn’t stick up for
me now and then, I wouldn’t be permitted to date at all. I wouldn’t be
permitted to do anything except go to church.
“You’re dynamite,” Jerry Galloway whispered as he took her in his arms
for another dance. “You make me so hot, baby.”
Dear, dear Mother, Amy thought bitterly, just look at how well all your
rules and regulations have worked. All your prayers, all those years
you dragged me to Mass three or four or five times a week, all those
nightly recitations of the rosary that I had to take part in before I
could go to sleep.
You see, Mother? See how well all of that has worked? I’m pregnant.
Knocked up. What would Jesus think about that? And what will you
think about that when you find out? What will you think about having a
bastard grandchild, Mother?
“You’re shivering again,” Jerry said.
“Just a chill.”
A few minutes after ten o’clock, while the orchestra was playing
aScarborough Fair,” and while Jerry was pushing Amy around the dance
floor, he suggested they cut out and spend the rest of the night
together, in their own way, just the two of them, just (as he so
transparently put it) proving their love to each other. This was
supposed to be a special night for a girl, a time to store up good
memories, not just another cheap opportunity to screw around in the
backseat of her boyfriend’s car. Besides, they had arrived at the
dance only two and a half hours ago.
Jerry’s eagerness was unseemly and more than a little selfish.
But after all, she reminded herself, he was just a horny teenager, not
a real man, and certainly not a romantic. Besides, she couldn’t really
enjoy herself anyway, not with everything she had to worry about. She
agreed to leave with him, although what she had in mind for the
remainder of the evening was much different from the steamy makeout
session he was contemplating.
As they left the gymnasium, which the decorating committee had tried
desperately to transform into a ballroom, Amy glanced back wistfully,
taking one last look at the crepe paper and the tinsel and the
carnations made out of Kleenex tissues. The lights were low. A
revolving, mirrored globe hung above the dance floor, turning slowly,
casting down splinters of color from its thousand facets. The room
should have looked exotic, magical. But it only made Amy sad.
Jerry owned a meticulously restored, fussily maintained,
twenty-year-old Chevrolet. He drove out of town, along narrow, winding
Black Hollow Road.
Eventually he pulled off on a single-lane, dirt track near the river
and squeezed the car in among the high brush and the scattered trees.
He switched off the headlights, then the engine, and he rolled down his
window a couple of inches to let in a warm current of fresh night
air.
This was their usual parking spot. It was here that Amy had gotten
pregnant.
Jerry slid out from behind the wheel. He smiled at her, and his teeth
looked phosphorescent in the calcimined moonlight that streamed through
the trees and the windshield. He took Amy’s right hand and put it
firmly on his crotch. “Feel that, baby? See how you get to me?”
“Jerry–” “No girl has ever gotten to me like you do.”
He slipped one hand in her bodice, feeling her breasts.
“Jerry, wait a minute.”
He leaned toward her, kissed her neck. He smelled of Old Spice.
She took her hand off his crotch and resisted him.
He didn’t take the hint. He removed his hand from her bodice only long
enough to reach behind her for the zipper to her dress.
“Jerry, damn it!” She shoved him away.