Marijuana Girl (2 page)

Joyce, with experience born of custom, halted at Miss Ellsworth's desk first, waiting politely in front of it as though Dean Shay's desk were not a scant three feet away. The girl was a little frightened, now, but trying hard not to let it show.

Miss Ellsworth, rather young for a school secretary, looked up sympathetically. She tried to smile reassuringly as she said.

"Miss Shay has been expecting you, Joyce?"

Joyce smiled back, somewhat feebly, and stepped the three paces which brought her to the older woman's desk. Miss Shay turned from the ruled-off schedules that lay on the green blotter; her white hair and bleached blue eyes staring through black-rimmed spectacles, lent her a semblance of cold harshness she did not really possess.

"Sit down, Miss Taylor," the dean said. Joyce felt the tremor in her stomach increasing. Whether a student were addressed by her first name or as "Miss" was an accurate index of the dean's attitude. She put down her books on a corner of the desk and seated herself in the hard wooden chair beside it, holding herself rigid and erect under the older woman's scrutiny.

After a moment the dean returned to her schedules, calmly adding up a column of figures before saying, "Miss Ellsworth, would you give me Miss Taylor's record, please?"

The old witch; Joyce thought, feeling the fright growing as she sat waiting for whatever was going to happen. Behind her, atop a shelf of books, she heard the cruelly regular ticking of a pendulum clock that had once been presented to Dean Shay and which, Joyce knew from other sessions in this office, bore the inscription: To Iris Shay, our beloved mentor, from the Class of 1943. She had an impulse, swiftly crushed, to pick up her books from the desk and throw them recklessly at the clock.

"Now, Miss Taylor," the dean said when Joyce's record card was given her, "I'm sure you know why you're here." Joyce said nothing. "How old are you, Miss Taylor?"

"It's right there on the record card."

The dean grimly compressed her lips. "Ah, yes. Just turned seventeen and you're a senior."

"Can I help it if I'm smart?"

"Miss Taylor," the dean said, controlling herself with an effort, "we have two thousand students in this school. Obviously, it is impossible for us to watch all students all the time. But with a school population of two thousand--of both sexes--it is essential that we maintain some kind of discipline. I'm sure you agree with this, Miss Taylor?"

Joyce vouchsafed a nod.

"Thank you. I had hoped you would." The dean paused and at Miss Ellsworth. "Terry," she said, "would you mind going to Mr. Mercer's office and asking him for--ah--for the freshman class list for nineteen-forty-seven?"

Ellsworth, taking the hint, hastily picked up a newspaper lying on the radiator beside her desk and scuttled through the door, closing it quietly behind her.

"Now, look here, Joyce," Dean Shay said, "I don't want to make this seem like a courtroom, but you're in serious trouble."

"So I gather." The tremor in Joyce's stomach seemed to reach out and seize her knees.

"Here at Paugwasset, we rely on seniors to discipline themselves for violations of the school rules. The honor system, you know," the dean continued sarcastically. "We permit seniors to write their own absence excuses, for example. I'm reminding you of all this because I think you're an exceptionally clever girl--"

"Dean Shay," Joyce said, managing to muster a tone of bored annoyance, "just what is the trouble?"

"Don't act cute with me, young lady," the dean said. "You're not old enough for it and you're not big enough for it. You know what I'm talking about. I've already spoken to your instructors about you ... That's why you weren't called in yesterday. I wanted a little time to think this over."

"That's not what I mean," Joyce insisted. "I have a right to be accused of something, instead of just having you go at me like this." She could feel a fine edge of hysteria rising within her.

"If you insist," the dean said.

"I do," Joyce said. "I can't think of any school rules that I've broken of which you have any knowledge."

"You show a fine candor, Joyce, and your argument would do you a lot of credit if you happened to be a lawyer. Unfortunately, we are running a school and not a court of higher jurisdiction. Our purpose here is to train people to live in an adult world. We try to teach not just mathematics or history, but a self-discipline which will make our graduates capable of handling themselves in the community. We expect you to conform not just to the school rules, but to the rules of good taste, and that exhibition of yours in the auditorium yesterday was--well, hardly in good taste!"

"Oh." Joyce said, "that."

"Yes, young lady. That! I know you're going to argue this is limply the prudery of an old maid. Well, maybe I am an old maid. But I firmly assure you that there isn't a high school in the country, and probably in the world, which would tolerate having a student get up on the auditorium stage and--ah--begin to--ah--shed garments. Frankly, I think the study class watching your little performance was as much at fault as you were. We've let the seniors use the auditorium for study periods without any teacher being present because we thought we could depend upon seniors to show self-discipline. Evidently we were wrong. If one of the teachers--no, I won't tell you which one--hadn't just happened to look in unintentionally we would never have known what was going on."

Joyce held her rigid posture in the chair. "Don't you think it would have been fairer," she said, holding on to herself to keep her voice from breaking, clutching at the strange, adult dignity the could sometimes keep in time of stress--"Don't you think it would have been fairer if the teacher that saw me had kept her mouth shut."

"Truthfully, Joyce, I don't know. I can't tell you what I would have done myself. I might have done what that teacher did--it was a man, by the way--or I might have spoken to you personally. I don't know. But this teacher went to Mr. Mercer, and spoke to several other teachers. Naturally, the fact that this is public information leaves me no alternative ..."

2 ~ Reaction

Joyce stepped out of the side door of the school into a long narrow yard where two hundred feet of bicycle racks paralleled a cinder sprint track. She stood for a moment on the stone steps, worn by generations of scuffing feet, letting her mind go on by itself. Joyce, this is a difficult thing to say, but I believe you need psychiatric help... Old Iris. A talent for doubtful limericks does not suffice to earn good grades in English. The witch. The physical is important, young lady, but not the only thing in life. I can't prevent you from experimentation--I understand most of you girls, nowadays, have your own theories about that kind of thing--but I can prevent you from carrying on inside the school. Filthy-minded old maid ...

Then she discovered herself standing still, and set her feet in motion. Ruth Scott was waiting for her at the street gate. Ruth was shaped like the familiar potato sack, and had honey-colored blonde hair and blue eyes constantly wide with shock at ideas too big for her small mind.

"What happened?" Ruth demanded.

"She kicked me out."

"Out of school!"

"That's right."

"Oh, how could she?"

"She did."

"What will you tell your aunt?"

"I won't."

"But, Joy, you'll have to."

"Why?"

"Because what will she think when she finds out you're not going to school?"

"She won't."

"How can you keep her from finding out?"

"I'll just leave the house in the morning and come back at night."

"Aren't you afraid of what will happen if she finds out?"

"She won't. That's all."

"But, what happened? What did Dean Shay say?" demanded Ruth.

"She told me they wouldn't even bring a thing like this before the Senior Court, and I'd have to bring my father in before they would let me come back to school. I told her my family was in Europe, and she said, well, somebody would have to come in to see them. I said I wouldn't bring anybody in, and old Iris said, I'm really very sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm afraid you will have to remain suspended until you bring in either your parents or your guardian." She mocked the dean's accents.

"Are you going to write your folks?"

"No. I'm going to get a job. The same as I had last summer, if I can fix it. I'll be a copy-girl on the Daily Courier." Joyce pointed over Ruth's plump shoulder. "Hey, isn't that Tony's car? Let's get him to take us for a ride!"

Ruth almost ran toward the convertible parked halfway down the block. But Joyce walked slowly with her odd adult grace.

"Want to drive us home?" Ruth asked as she reached the car.

The dark-haired boy in the front seat, slowly disentangled his much involved limbs and straightened himself up in the seat; looking at Ruth with a steady, appraising gaze of his brown eyes. "I might," he said. "Where's Joy?"

"She's coming."

"All right. Get in back." He kicked at the door handle and the door swung open. Ruth scrambled into the rear seat, and when Joyce reached the car she got in and seated herself calmly in front, drawing her skirts tight about her legs.

"Take Ruth home first," she said. "I want to talk to you."

There was a loose-jointed ease about Anthony Thrine that lent his every movement a feline flexibility that also contained something of beauty, and his manner was as easy as his movements. He had the assurance and poise of absolute security--his father was the largest stockholder in the Farmers and Mechanics Trust company of Paugwasset. He was not the president of the senior class, but he could have been. He was not the editor of the student weekly, because he had refused the job as ill-suited to his indolent nature. His grades were high in the subjects that attracted him, and barely passing in the ones that didn't. He had been going, in a tentatively steady way, with Joyce since the beginning of the senior year. He had not been the first of the student body to get a drivers license, but he was the first to own his own car.

His driving was faultless--but in the California manner. He started the car with much tossing of road-shoulder gravel, and took the corners of the narrow tree-lined streets in a squeal of tires. He stopped the car in a long slither before Ruth's house and had the door open before the momentum had ceased.

Ruth got out and closed the door behind her, then hung on it for a moment "Joy," she said hesitantly, "hadn't you ought to talk to your aunt?"

"What for? She'll only nag."

"But don't you want to graduate?"

"I don't give a damn," Joyce said. She tossed her hair. "Come on, Tony. Take me out to Chester's. I need a drink."

Chester's was a roadhouse that led a sheltered existence off the main highway about three miles outside of Paugwasset. Its income traced almost exclusively to the fact that the line of demarcation between the ages at which high school students may drink or not drink is unapparent to the naked eye, so small is the visible difference between seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds. Once its dance floor had been the rendezvous of the respectable middle-class citizens who directed businesses in New York and lived in Paugwasset--the upper middle class which kept accounts at Tiffany's, cruisers at Manhasset and lady friends in Greenwich Village.

But somehow this adult trade had waned, to be replaced with, first, a collegiate set--the sons of the middle-class, down for the summer from Harvard, Yale and Princeton, down from M.I.T. and in from Chicago. By a subtle contamination these had given place to their younger brothers and sisters, the near-collegians, who attended high schools in Paugwasset and Glen Cove and Mineola, until at length weekly or semi-weekly intoxication at Chester's had become as essential to social prestige in the senior class as the use of Dad's car on a Saturday night.

The place boasted a high raftered ceiling, a long, much-mirrored bar. A juke-box stood near a dais which, on Friday and Saturday evenings, supported a good hot trio. The upper panes of the windows were of stained glass which, with the ceiling rafters, gave a vaguely cathedralesque atmosphere to the gaudy whole. And, in a way, Chester's was a cathedral. It was a religious edifice in which youth might worship, by imitation, the adulthood so soon to come.

Friendly voices greeted Tony and Joyce as they entered. Chester said, "Hiyah, folks. What's your pleasure?" He was too good a businessman to say, "Kids." You saved that for the older generation.

Tom Houlihan raised a languid hand from his rum-and-coke for a gesture of welcome. Harry Reingold said, "How're things?" Sandra Hart winked at Joyce and said, "Chin up, old man." Mickey Kramer, in one of the booths with a boy just a shade too young for her, pointedly disregarded Joyce and nodded brusquely to Tony before turning back to her escort and her Scotch.

Tony pulled out the table so that Joyce could slide into the booth, but himself strode long-legged to the bar. Joyce watched him without really seeing. With her fingernail she gouged shapes into the cork coaster on the table. Old Iris was like her aunt! No attempt to understand the justification that might explain the act. There had been no point, even, in attempting to tell why she had given that silly little exhibition there on the auditorium stage, because old Iris in her prudery would never have been able to understand. Oh, there was a reason--or there had been. A clear, sensible reason. But now, thinking about it, it was also clear that the reason was something old Iris should have understood from talking to Joyce's teachers. Maybe Iris did understand, but just couldn't condone. Because the real reason, and Joyce knew it well enough, was a compulsion for defiance. Just as the biology paper she had written had been a defiance. They had asked for a general study of a disease. Joyce picked venereal infection. All right, so she was a "bad" girl. A defiant girl.

But the injustice in her punishment, she felt, was that defiance was no crime. Why, lots of famous heroes had been--well, just defiant. Even her mother and father, it seemed to Joyce, were pretty defiant when someone was stepping on their toes ...