The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [49]
She grabbed Sucker by the shoulders and began to shake him.
At first he held his jaws tight, but after a minute his teeth began to rattle. ‘You go home, Sucker Wells. You quit hanging around where you’re not invited.’ When she let him go, Sucker tucked his tail and walked slowly down the street.
But he didn’t go all the way home. After he got to the corner she saw him sit down on the curb and watch the party where he thought she couldn’t see him.
For a minute she felt good about shaking the spit out of Sucker. And then right afterward she had a bad worry feeling in her and she started to let him come back. The big kids were the ones who messed up everything. Real brats they were, and with the worst nerve she had ever seen.
Drinking up the refreshments and ruining the real party into all this commotion. They slammed through the front door and hollered and bumped into each other. She went up to Pete Wells because he was the worst of all. He wore his football helmet and butted into people. Pete was every bit of fourteen, yet he was still stuck in the seventh grade. She went up to him, but he was too big to shake like Sucker. When she told him to go home he shimmied and made a nose dive at her.
‘I been in six different states. Florida, Alabama--. Made out of silver cloth with a sash. The party was all messed up. Everybody was talking at once.
The invited people from Vocational were mixed with the neighborhood gang. The boys and the girls still stood in separate bunches, though---and nobody prommed. In the house the lemonade was just about gone. There was only a little puddle of water with floating lemon peels at the bottom of the bowl. Her Dad always acted too nice with kids. He had served out the punch to anybody who stuck a cup at him.
Portia was serving the sandwiches when she went into the dining-room. In five minutes they were all gone. She only got one--a jelly kind with pink sops come through the bread.
Portia stayed in the dining-room to watch the party. ‘I having too good a time to leave,’ she said. ‘I done sent word to Highboy and Willie to go on with the Saturday Night without me. Everbody so excited here I going to wait and see the end of this party.’
Excitement--that was the word. She could feel it all through the room and on the porch and the sidewalk. She felt excited, too. It wasn’t just her dress and the beautiful way her face looked when she passed by the hat rack mirror and saw the red paint on her cheeks and the rhinestone tiara in her hair. Maybe it was the decoration and all these Vocational people and kids being jammed together.
‘Watch her run!’
‘Ouch! Cut it out--’
‘Act your age!’
A bunch of girls were running down the street, holding up their dresses and with the hair flying out behind them. Some boys had cut off the long, sharp spears of a Spanish bayonet bush and they were chasing the girls with them.
Freshmen in Vocational all dressed up for a real prom party and acting just like kids. It was half playlike and half not playlike at all. A boy came up to her with a sticker and she started running too.
The idea of the party was over entirely now. This was just a regular playing-out. But it was the wildest night she had ever seen. The kids had caused it. They were like a catching sickness, and their coming to the party made all the other people forget about High School and being almost grown. It was like just before you take a bath in the afternoon when you might wallow around in the back yard and get plenty dirty just for the good feel of it before getting into the tub. Everybody was a wild kid playing out on Saturday night--and she felt like the very wildest of all.
She hollered and pushed and was the first to try any new stunt.
She made so much noise and moved around so fast she