The Last Noel by Michael Malone Page B

fairly certain he’d gotten wrong and opinions she knew she would have argued against if Bunny, for example, had expressed them, or if she’d heard them from Kaye. In fact, she was far more sympathetic to Kaye's views than Roland's—even if Kaye drove her crazy by the assertive way he insisted on knowing things. Roland, on the other hand, had an unsettling manner of making outrageous claims so coolly and blandly that they sounded like incontestable clichés.
    Roland's lack of investment in what he said was very different from Kaye's and Bunny's ardent quarrels with the world, and somehow Noni couldn’t bring herself to fight with Rolandthe way she fought with her friends. Somehow she didn’t want to. Roland took away her will to fight, the way her mother did, but without the tension and the anger. As if weight had lifted from her, she felt herself floating toward him, like a leaf blown against the side of a building, until she was pressed against his chest, warm and close, and with no desire to argue.
    But, at the same time, through the other lens of the binoculars, far way, she could see another Noni, the Noni she’d been before Roland, and that Noni was shrinking into someone small and quiet as a mouse. It was all very strange.
    The dance ended. Noni was saying good-bye to some friends when Roland sauntered back into the crowded lobby of the gym and draped her long coat around her shoulders. Then to her shock he suddenly moved his hand under the coat and cupped her breast in his palm. He squeezed, not hard enough to hurt, but not at all in a way she liked. He smiled until, frowning, she pulled away.
    â€œWhat's the matter?” he asked, staggering slightly against her. His blue eyes, she noticed, now had little red lines in them. Throughout the night, Roland had “stepped outside” with the other boys, although only when another boy had cut in to dance with her. And now as he whispered, “Noni, wear my varsity ring,” pressing his lips into her neck, harder and less pleasantly than when they’d been dancing inside, his words were slurred and she could smell the whiskey strongly.
    But it was a familiar smell to Noni, even loved.

    Kaye and Parker hadn’t had much luck with their evening, although it had started well. Still a few days short of sixteen, Kaye had borrowed his Uncle Austin's taxi by assuring him that it was legal for him to drive with a learner's permit as long as a licensed driver (Parker) was in the car. They’d driven intoHillston. Because state troopers were always pulling over young blacks, Kaye had put Parker in the back seat as if he were a customer; he figured that cops wouldn’t bother a taxi, because they’d assume there must be a white person in the back seat.
    But at the new mall, when they strolled through a department store where Kaye was looking for a present to give his grandmother, an old lantern-jawed guard began following them up and down the aisles. Finally, as Kaye was searching for an open cash register to pay for the purple down-filled coat in his hand, the man had growled at them, “Put it back and move along, boys,”
    Curses rose quickly to Kaye's lips, as strong as bile, but he stopped them before they escaped. Two years ago, he hadn’t always managed such control. And as a result, he’d once been physically shoved out of a store by a security guard. He’d once been forced by the Gordon Junior High football coach to stand on a chair in the middle of the boys’ locker room for an hour as a punishment for “back talk.”
    â€œPick your battles,” his grandmother Amma had told him after that incident. “Some things just not worth what they cost. Fight to win, Kaye, not to fight.”
    He heard her voice now as he restrained Parker with an arm, then with an elaborate shrug of his shoulders, tossed the down coat onto a table of sweaters. “Just cost your boss a sale,” was all