Pigeon Feathers by John Updike

in switching up the aisle encountered a boy’s leg thrown into her path. She coolly looked down until it withdrew. She was used to such attentions. Her pronged chest poised, Mary proceeded out the door, and someone she saw in the hall made her smile, a wide smile full of warmth and short white teeth, and love scooped at William’s heart. He
would
tell her.
    In another minute, the second bell rasped. Shuffling through the perfumed crowds to his next class, he crooned tohimself, in the slow, overenunciated manner of the Negro vocalist who had brought the song back this year:
    “Lah-vender blue, dilly dilly
,
    Lavendih gree-heen;
    Eef
I were king, dilly dilly
,
    You would be queen.”
    The song gave him an exultant sliding sensation that intertwined with the pleasures of his day. He knew all the answers, he had done all the work, the teachers called upon him only to rebuke the ignorance of the others. In trig and soc. sci. both it was this way. In gym, the fourth hour of the morning, he, who was always picked near the last, startled his side by excelling at volleyball, leaping like a madman, shouting like a bully. The ball felt light as a feather against his big bones. His hair in wet quills from the shower, he walked in the icy air to Luke’s Luncheonette, where he ate three twenty-cent hamburgers in a booth with three juniors. There was Barry Kruppman, a tall, hyperthyroid-eyed boy who came on the school bus from the country town of Bowsville and who was an amateur hypnotist; he told the tale of a Portland, Oregon, businessman who under hypnosis had been taken back through sixteen reincarnations to the condition of an Egyptian concubine in the household of a high priest of Isis. There was Barry’s friend Lionel Griffin, a pudgy simp whose blond hair puffed out above his ears in two slick waxed wings. He was rumored to be a fairy, and in fact did seem most excited by the transvestite aspect of the soul’s transmigration. And there was Lionel’s female sidekick Virginia, a drab little mystery who chain-smoked English Ovals and never said anything. She had sallow skin and smudged eyes and Lionel keptjabbing her and shrieking, making William wince. He would rather have sat with members of his own class, who filled the other booths, but he would have had to force himself on them. These juniors welcomed his company. He asked, “Wuh-well, was he ever a c-c-c-cockroach, like Archy?”
    Kruppman’s face grew serious; his furry lids dropped down over the bulge of his eyes, and when they drew back, his pupils were as small and hard as BBs. “That’s the really interesting thing. There was this gap, see, between his being a knight under Charlemagne and then a sailor on a ship putting out from Macedonia—that’s where Yugoslavia is now—in the time of Nero; there was this gap, when the only thing the guy would do was walk around the office snarling and growling, see, like this.” Kruppman worked his blotched ferret face up into a snarl and Griffin shrieked. “He tried to bite one of the assistants and they think that for six hundred years”—the uncanny, unhealthy seriousness of his whisper hushed Griffin momentarily—“for six hundred years he just was a series of wolves. Probably in the German forests. You see, when he was in Macedonia”—his whisper barely audible—“he murdered a woman.”
    Griffin squealed in ecstasy and cried, “Oh, Kruppman! Kruppman, how you do go on!” and jabbed Virginia in the arm so hard an English Oval jumped from her hand and bobbled across the Formica table. William gazed over their heads in pain.
    The crowd at the soda counter had thinned so that when the door to the outside opened he saw Mary come in and hesitate there for a second where the smoke inside and the snow outside swirled together. The mixture made a kind of—Kruppman’s ridiculous story had put the phrase in his head—wolf-weather, and she was just a gray shadow caught init alone. She bought a pack of cigarettes from