Odd Girl Out. Ann Bannon

said. Emily was watching her.

      “Laura made quite a hit with Jim,” she told Beth, stripping off her clothes. Laura let her talk, wishing all the while that she would go away. She wanted to be alone with Beth; to talk, to be comforted.

      Emmy kept them up for a while. Laura refused to go to bed until Emmy did, and finally she won the game. Emmy stood up and yawned.

      “Guess I’ll hit the sack, you guys,” she said. “I’m beat to the bricks, as my friend Bud would say. See you in the morning.”

      “Night, Em,” said Beth. She lighted a cigarette and settled back to gaze at Laura and when Laura could think of nothing to say, she walked over to the couch and sat down beside her.

      “What’s the matter, honey?” she said.

      “Oh, nothing!” The overemphasis rang false, and her head ached and Beth was so close to her that she was dizzy.

      Beth put an arm around her. “Tell me the truth, Laur,” she said. And when Laura remained silent, she added gently, “It’s not a disaster if you didn’t like the boy, you know.”

      Laura looked down at her lap, still mute, afraid her tears would start with her voice.

      “What did he do, honey?”

      “He—he— I don’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t anything awful. Emmy seemed to think it was all right. Only,—” her voice quavered—“I didn’t like it.” And suddenly she put her head down on Beth’s shoulder and wrapped her arms around her and let the tears come out. The pressure began to lessen a little.

      Beth held her and rocked her in her arms. “You didn’t like it, baby?” she said softly.

      “I hated it! I couldn’t help it.”

      Beth smiled down at Laura’s back.

      “Oh, Beth, I wish so much you had been with me instead of—of Emily.” She had been about to say, “Instead of Jim.” What a curious idea that was—to have a date with Beth!

      Beth held her closer.

      “I don’t ever want to see that boy again!” she said into Beth’s shoulder.

      Beth broke the date for her.

       Four

      The days began to fly in Laura’s life so fast that she lost them before she could reckon them. They got progressively brighter; she wanted to memorize each one but there was no time.

      A letter came from her father; he was a better correspondent than her mother, but all his notes reminded her of the fresh wounds of their divorce. Laura was ashamed, even afraid to mention it to anyone. Her father wanted to know if she had called Charlie Ayers and Laura revolted vigorously at the thought. She tried to picture herself getting him on the phone and saying stolidly, “Hello, this is Laura Landon.” Silence. He would get the point, of course. “Well—uh, gee, yeah, Laura, nice to hear from you. We’ll have to get together some time. Tell your dad hello for me.” Thanks, but no thanks.

      Laura wrote her father that she couldn’t get hold of Charlie. She gave the impression that she had given him up in favor of a clamorous press of beaux. Her father wanted her to be popular.

      Life with Beth, she soon discovered, was busy and unexpected and at the same time relaxed, as if nothing quite mattered enough to worry about. Beth was always occupied but somehow never in a rush. She had a phone installed in the room to accommodate her burden of calls.

      “I just don’t see how you do it,” said Laura one night when the visitor count was high.

      Beth stretched and came down from her stretch laughing. “It’s easy,” she said. “Lots of spare time. No social life. My God, if I had to mess with men I wouldn’t have time for anything. I know when I’m well off.” She laughed again suddenly, her eyes on Emily. “Look at Emmy,” she said. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”

      “Not that ‘well off’ stuff,” said Emmy. “Neither do you.”

      “Sure I do. Now and then. My God, I have to. I’d go nuts if I didn’t.” She winked at Laura.

      “Don’t listen to her, Laura,” said Emily in a motherly voice. “She’s depraved.”

      Beth shrugged and got up with a grin. “You see?” she told Laura. “Nobody understands me, not even my best friend.” She threw a pillow at Emily, who promptly threw it back. Beth dropped it elaborately on the floor.

      “You’re slowing up in your old age,” Emily said.

      “Oh, go play your piano!” Beth instantly regretted the remark. She knew why Emily spent most of her free time—and there was very little of it now, since she saw Bud every night—practicing on the old piano in the living room. There was an almost pathetic childish ingenuousness to her plan to capture Bud that made Beth feel sad and helpless. Aside from that, she missed seeing as much of Emily as she used to. Her peculiar schedule usually kept her out with Bud or down in the living room until bedtime. Emily was fun to talk to and gossip with.

      Laura carefully put the pillow back where it belonged and then said good night. Pledge rules forced her to go to bed at eleven, and left the other two to talk as they pleased. The curfew irritated Laura. She was afraid that as soon as she left the room her roommates talked about her. She always felt that it was too early for bed, that she was wide awake, that there was more studying to do. It didn’t occur to her for a long time that she was jealous of Emily.

      Laura was right, in a way. Her roommates did speculate about her. They marveled at her two baths a day. They watched her scrub her face until it was almost raw and red and they noted how she always volunteered for the most dreary and uninteresting tasks in the whole house.

      “Darn the girl,” Emily said after Laura’s polite good-night, “I wish she’d relax. You know, sometimes when you burp nobody hears you. If you say ‘excuse me’ everybody looks up and knows you burped.”

      Beth threw her head back in a strong laugh.

      “Well, that’s the way she makes me feel,” said Emily, grinning ruefully. She thought of Laura’s eagerness to please, her conscientiousness, as a sort of magnified normalcy that made Emmy uncomfortable. “I like the girl, I really do,” she said. “I can’t complain about anything she does, but—I guess that’s just it. I can’t complain. I wish I could. It’d make her seem real, somehow.”

      “I don’t think she understands herself very well yet,” Beth said. “That’s why she’s so careful of everything she says and does. She wants to be sure it’s right.”

      “Here we go again,” said Emily cheerfully. “The old psychology corner.” That meant gossip about a particular female. “What’s her family like?”

      “I don’t know. She won’t talk about them at all. I’m afraid I scare hell out of her when I ask about them.”