went out with hoopskirts. I drink, don't I? Why shouldn't they?"
He perceived Dopey Lane, teetering in a doorway, and he hastened toward him. "Got any of that gin left?"
Dopey mumbled something unintelligible but affirmative, and together they retired to the corridor. Jock drank deep. Ah-h, this was the way! This was the way not to mind what you saw—not to see anything you would mind. Conviviality and the spirit of the occasion and death to uncomfortable thoughts, in a few swallows of this sharp white fluid. . . .
He handed the bottle back.
"Keep," said Dopey thickly. "May need. I—Ivadnuf."
Jock spent the ensuing hours in a nebulous haze warm and vague and very pleasant. Afterward he could recall only three things at all clearly: that Molly refused to dance with him; that he gave the orchestra a twenty-dollar bill to play Cry Baby just once more; and that he took a girl he didn't know outdoors for air, and walked her around and around the tennis courts, and was amused rather than disgusted when she gasped, "I can't help it!"—and didn't.
Prom broke up the next morning.
Molly went home still violently enraged at Jock, and rather proud of herself for being enraged. She would even boast about it a little to her friends. "Believe me, I told him where to get off!" And in years to come she would list him among the suitors who had
