The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [92]
“Easy for you to say,” Mom replied.
Lori and I did work out a budget, and we included a generous allowance for Mom to cover luxuries such as extra-large Hershey bars and cut crystal vases. If we kept to our budget, we believed, we could afford new clothes and shoes and coats, and buy a ton of coal at the cheaper off-season price. Eventually, we could install insulation, run a water pipe into the house, and maybe even add a water heater. But Mom never turned the money over to us. So even though she had a steady job, we were living pretty much like we had before.
I’ D STARTED SEVENTH grade that fall, which meant attending Welch High School. It was a big school, near the top of a hill looking down on the town, with a steep road leading up. Kids were bused in from way up in the hollows and from coal camps such as Davy and Hemphill that were too small to have their own high school. Some of the kids looked as poor as me, with home-cut hair and holes in the toes of their shoes. I found it a lot easier to fit in than at Welch Elementary.
Dinitia Hewitt was there, too. That summer morning I’d spent swimming with Dinitia at the public pool was the happiest time I’d had in Welch, but she never invited me back, and even though it was a public pool, I didn’t feel I could go to the free swim unless I had an invitation from her. I saw her again only when school started, and neither of us ever mentioned that day at the pool. I guess we both knew that, given the way people in Welch thought about mixing, it would be too weird for us to try to be close friends. During lunch, Dinitia hung out with the other black kids, but we had a study hall together and passed notes to each other there.
By the time she got to Welch High, Dinitia had changed. The spark had gone out of her. She started drinking malt ale during school. She’d fill a soda can with Mad Dog 20/20 and carry it right into class. I tried to find out what was wrong, but all I could pry from her was that her mother’s new boyfriend had moved in with them, and the fit was a little tight.
One day just before Christmas, Dinitia passed me a note in study hall asking for girls’ names that began with D. I wrote down as many as I could think of—Diane, Donna, Dora, Dreama, Diandra—and then wrote, Why? She passed a note back saying, I think I’m pregnant.
After Christmas, Dinitia did not return to school. When a month had gone by, I walked around the mountain to her house and knocked on the door. A man opened it and stared at me. He had skin like an iron skillet and nicotine-yellow eyes. He left the storm door shut, so I had to speak through the screen.
“Is Dinitia home?” I asked.
“Why you want to know?”
“I want to see her.”
“She don’t want to see you,” he said and shut the door.
I saw Dinitia around town once or twice after that, and we waved but never spoke again. Later, we all learned she’d been arrested for stabbing her mother’s boyfriend to death.
The other girls talked endlessly among themselves about who still had their cherry and how far they would let their boyfriend go. The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most, practically the only one that did matter. But I knew that boys were dangerous. They’d say they loved you, but they were always after something.
Even though I didn’t trust boys, I sure did wish one would show some interest in me. Kenny Hall, the old guy down the street who was still pining away for me, didn’t count. If any boy was interested in me, I wondered if I’d have the wherewithal to tell him, when he tried to go too far, that I was not that kind of girl. But the truth was, I didn’t need to worry much about fending off advances, seeing how—as Ernie Goad told me on every available occasion—I was pork-chop ugly. And by that he meant so ugly that if I wanted a dog to play with me, I’d have