A Time of Predators

Friday. She’d made it a whole week as a sort of self-discipline. She went quickly to the door again, and looked out. Rick, erect and clean-limbed, was climbing into the Triumph. This was going to be some summer! She couldn’t tell her folks, of course, that she’d signed up for summer school because she’d suddenly realized that she didn’t want to spend the whole summer on the other side of the Bay, in San Leandro. Where Ricky wasn’t.

Debbie floated up the stairs to her room. The dorm was nearly deserted, except for the senior girls who would be graduating on Sunday, because the summer session classes didn’t begin until Wednesday.

She started to undress. It really would be a fight not to let Ricky do whatever he wanted to her; just his touch seemed to make fears and inhibitions and hesitations melt. She was glad she was going to be attending classes, because she always studied hard and that would help keep it from getting out of hand. She’d almost given in to him last July, out by Sear’s Lake that time when he’d gotten her blouse off and her bra pushed up and everything, and had almost lost him because of it. He’d dropped her completely for nine months, until he’d called in April about getting Professor Halstead’s address. She was glad, really, because it showed he wasn’t just interested in what he could get from her.

Funny. It had started over again with Professor Halstead, and now his wife was dead and the professor was living all alone out in that big house by the golf course. She remembered Paula from that faculty-student tea: a mature blond woman with a really marvelous figure despite her age. Debbie bet the professor really missed her. Look at the way Ricky, who had hardly known her, had reacted to her suicide.

Debbie stopped with her dress halfway over her head. Paula Halstead and... Ricky? That was silly, of course, but... But it would explain so many things that had bothered her in the past weeks. Like that sort of flimsy reason he’d had for wanting to see her alone. How broken up Ricky had been at her death.

He could have met her downtown, sometime... or in a bar. She knew he sometimes went into bars, because he had shown her the false ID that Heavy Gander had gotten for him somewhere.

She finished undressing very quickly, and got into her flannel pajamas. What if... She bounced into bed, sat with her arms clasping her up-drawn knees. What if Paula had killed herself because... because Rick hadn’t shown up that Friday? That would explain so much.

Debbie’s lips thinned and her eyes became calculating. Was she in competition for Rick with the dead woman? A mature, exciting woman who could have wrapped an inexperienced boy like Rick around her... well, around her finger?

Debbie might not be a mysterious, slinky, smoldering blonde: but she had a good figure if she did admit it herself, and she was right here, right now. Alive and warm and... yes, available, if that was going to be what it took to erase the image of the older woman.

Driving away from the dorm in his flashing red car, Rick pressed the cigarette lighter and turned the radio to a San Francisco pops station. His cigarette canted up at a jaunty angle as he approved his image in the rear-view mirror.

That Debbie, she was something else! Insipid, had he thought? Wow. When she’d Frenched him there, by the porch, he’d thought he was going to cream his jeans. Somehow he was going to get into her pants. A motel? She wouldn’t go to one with him. Not now, not yet. Maybe his folks’ cabin down by the ocean? Take it slow, talk her around to it? He shouldn’t have dropped her last summer, but she hadn’t been much then.

The lighter popped, he steered one-handed to light up, sending the car in squealing playful sweeps down the deserted drive. She really turned him on, old Deb; not like Paula Halstead had, of course, but...

His mood dissolved. He shrieked the car into the down-ramp to El Camino. Now, at nearly midnight, there were great black gaps in the traffic. The beat pounded out sure and strong from the radio. Paula Halstead. He still could remember that second time, her throwing her head back and forth while he’d been doing it. No other chick in his admittedly limited experience had come on that way with him.

Goddamn it, it wasn’t his fault, what she’d done afterward. At least now, with the ma of that kid on the bike scared shitless, they were safe. If only he could forget about what had happened afterward, to Paula. It shouldn’t have been that way. Shouldn’t have been at all. He should have met her someplace nice, alone, in a bar, maybe. Streaking down the highway, he let his imagination roam.

Sure, a fancy cocktail place with thick rugs and soft indirect light-would see her, send a drink down to her, she would move over and start talking with him. Her husband couldn’t satisfy her, she’d saying, where they put a little napkin down under each woman’s drink. He and then she’d invite him over to her motel room. In the room they’d...