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Show 9. So after all I did fall into deep water, over my head and down to the muddy bottom of my squishy ego. Could Kate have saved me? She was still going steady with Pat, yet her grey eyes looked straight into mine in a way that made me feel special above all others. On her exceptionally white skin lipstick and rouge were vivid. A little eye-shadow was an explosion. At school I could see her black hair from one end of the main hall to the other; half of us boys would have followed that cheerleader butt anywhere. Between classes we clustered around her until she clung to Kate Bradley and they went racing shoulder to shoulder down the hall to avoid us. I know her popularity was hard on Pat Donahue, he liking it so much and hating it so much. But she belonged to him, his girl. No one else dated her. Then one Saturday night Dom Falsetti got the family car and we were going to get his girl and go to the dance at Oak Grove, another four-room, yellow-brick, country school house, except at Oak Grove near to the school was a large, frame hall with a stage at one end where the boys and girls presented their plays and pageants and speeches on Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, and where on Saturday nights the Grange women held dances. They brought cakes and pies and sandwiches and stacked them in the kitchen; they brought their children and deposited them backstage on the coats, if it was winter children flung about there like the coats, cozy under them and new arrivals piling on more coats so that at two or three in the morning the women had to dig them out, pulling coats aside to find the right kids to bundle up and carry off still sleeping to the cold cars. The music was made by a broad-backed woman at a piano and a man who held his violin in his lap as if it were a child: he sat on a chair on |