Duff grinned, grinned again when Marian, panting after running three blocks from the bus stop, dramatically announced she would be Titania in the play. He felt at home with the Yateses; there had been a troop of young Bogans.
Gazing into the mirror, still wearing the apron over his work-stained T-shirt, Duff thought about Eleanor’s description of his looks. Mother Hubbard and the Oz-book Scarecrow. His grin faded somewhat, but a glimmer remained. He certainly was on the bean-pole side. No girl like Eleanor would ever think of any guy like himself in romantic terms.
She was already Orange Bowl Queen. Why, if she just wanted to, she could be in the movies!
Perhaps she’d do something like that when she graduated — to compensate for being so poor, for endless cooking, washing, mending, cleaning and bargain hunting. And for the constant care of her mother.
In his small and rather dappled mirror, Duff saw that his eyes were shiny. “Nuts,” he said, and attacked his face with such energy that he cut himself.
Dinner was early. Eleanor had to leave at seven. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from eight to eleven, she did filing in the offices of the Florida Electric Company.
It was a job she’d got through a friend of her mother’s, which netted a welcome eighteen dollars and ten cents a week.
Duff wheeled Mrs. Yates up to the table. The Yates youngsters, both dark-haired and dark-eyed, like their father, were so excited over their respective successes that Harry Ellings didn’t notice the special looks directed toward him by Eleanor and Duff.
After dinner, after Eleanor had driven away in a station wagon as weatherbeaten as the house, Duff went to his room and made plans. He’d want one of the chemistry labs on a day when it wasn’t full of freshmen doing Chemistry 101-A. He could do the physics all right — that was in his de-department. He’d need advice about the microanalysis…
It took a week. But one week later — with shaky hands, because he had never done anything of the sort — he looked in the beat-up phone book beside a drugstore booth for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dialed and closed the door.