Cress Delahanty by Jessamyn West

Author:Jessamyn West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Spring 2

“WHO IS this Ina?” her mother asked Cress. “Where does she live? And I thought Honor Gallagher was your friend of the moment?”

“Honor is,” Cress said, “but she can’t be thinking of me every minute. And Ina’s full name is Ina Inez Wallenius,” Cress answered. Cress didn’t care whether her mother said yes or no about this visit. Without telling her mother, she had assigned to her for the moment the role of Fate, and Cress was perfectly willing that Fate should know everything she knew about Ina, and then decide.

“If her initials had been I.W.W. instead of I.I.W., she would have stood for International Workers of the World,” Cress said as an afterthought.

“It’s Industrial Workers of the World, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Delahanty.

“Anyway, it’s wobblies,” Cress said.

“Wobblies!” exclaimed Mrs. Delahanty. “Your friend Ina isn’t a wobbly, is she?”

“As a matter of fact, she isn’t even a friend,” said Cress.

“Not a friend?” said Mrs. Delahanty, puzzled. “I thought you just said she was. I thought that was why you wanted to visit her.”

“What I should have said,” Cress told her mother, “was that Ina wants me to be her friend.”

Cress didn’t think it would be good taste to say just how much Ina seemed to want her for a friend, or of any use to try to explain to her mother the high school’s complicated social structure—a structure upon whose upper level she was now located, but not established, and upon whose lower level Ina stood, reaching upward. A visit could put Ina up where she was, or just as easily put Cress down where Ina was. Cress thought it was her duty to give Ina her chance. This was one of the reasons she preferred to leave everything to Fate. There was more responsibility in the visit than she cared to assume.

“She’s a nice girl, is she—this Ina?” Mrs. Delahanty asked.

“Oh, she’s a very nice girl!” Cress said. She didn’t say that in her opinion Ina was too nice. She didn’t know how that could be possible, but some people were certainly too nice. Ina wasn’t too nice in the sharp, old-maidish way to which some girls are born—handkerchiefs in clean triangles, salt for their hard-boiled eggs in little waxed-paper envelopes, hair ribbons in ready-tied bows. These girls, whatever their ages, seemed like aunts to Cress and she got on very well with them all.

Ina hadn’t been born too nice; she was that way because she chose to be. And one nice habit she had was just about the most unpleasant Cress had ever heard of. She carried a toothbrush to school with her and every day after lunch she brushed her teeth in the girls’ rest room. And when she had finished, she would smile at herself, so that at least half her teeth, softly shining, were reflected in the basement’s gloomy mirror. Then she would slowly close her full, pink lips over her clean teeth. Why did that seem a bad thing to do? Cress couldn’t say, but it did, and, watching her, Cress would shudder.

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