“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Well, your face is turning funny colors.”

“No, it’s not.”

The corny organ music came from over in the skating rink, and they heard people clapping in time with it.

“You want a shake?”

“I just had one.”

“I’ll buy,” she said.

“Sure.”

He’d met Lorelei just a few weeks before school had let out, over on the Upper Bridge from Columbus, and helped her carry a sack of groceries home. Billy figured her for the daughter of a mill worker – a Linthead, is what they called them – and they ended up talking till it grew dark out back of the Riverview Apartments, nothing but government housing, smoking cigarettes on a swing set. He’d never felt more comfortable with a girl in his entire life and finally got up enough nerve to ask her to a picture show at the Broadway.

“I went to that house where you were staying last week,” he said.

“We don’t live in the Riverview no more.”

“Where do you live?”

“My folks’ over in Bibb City,” she said. “Got some good mill jobs.”

“How ’bout you?”

“I’m over there some, too,” she said.

“You gonna go back to school?”

“Not now,” she said, rolling her eyes and pulling the straw from the shake. She sucked out the frozen bit of shake and tucked it back into the glass. “It’s summertime, dummy. It’s all as cool as a breeze. You ain’t supposed to do nothin’ now but swim and skate and not worry about a thing.”

Billy looked at her and rolled up the white T-shirt over his skinny bicep and wished he’d had a pack of cigarettes to tuck inside.

“What movie we going to see?” she asked.

“Hondo,” he said.

“What’s it about?”

“Apaches.”

“I like Apaches,” she said.

IT WASN’T LONG UNTIL BILLY AND THE GIRL SAT IN THE cool air-conditioning of the Palace Theater watching Hondo, Wayne playing a cavalry rider protecting a woman and her son from some Apaches.