“How does your mom afford all that stuff?”

“She’s a nurse. She makes a lot of money.”

And the silence just kind of hung there, because both of them knew Mario’s mother worked under the stage name Betsy Ann and that, on several occasions, Billy had lingered outside the Bama Club on Dillingham just to see a naked black-and-white photo of her, not in overalls or sloppy men’s shirts the way she looked in the apartment she shared with a redneck mill worker named George but made up like a Hollywood star in cowboy boots and a leather belt and stars pasted across her boobs.

“You wanna go back to the zoo?” Mario asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I don’t think she’s gonna show.”

“To hell with you.”

Billy still had a few dimes left, and, alone, he walked into the sweet air-conditioning of the roller rink and punched in some of his favorites on the jukebox. More Hit Parade. He tried out some Eddie Fisher and Tony Bennett, and “Come On-A My House” by Rosemary Clooney.

That’s when he heard her call his name.

Lorelei.

Billy smiled, his face turning red, and his voice shook as he said hello.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere.”

She was cute in her boy’s western shirt, high-water blue jeans, and saddle oxford shoes. She wore her black hair up in a ponytail; her bangs had grown longer since he’d last seen her and shadowed a good bit of her blue eyes. She didn’t have makeup on or anything like that.

“I wasn’t waitin’ around or nothin’.”

“I had to go home and change,” she said. “I’d been at the pool and had to put on something dry.”

And, man, that was a hell of a thing to say to a teenage boy, because the thought of Lorelei in a wet bathing suit – something Billy could imagine a great deal and had – was perhaps just too much for him to take. Her pale skin had a red, healthy flush to it, and she smelled like sunshine.