Dirty Faces - Book 2

Chapter 9: Girls

Chapter 9: Girls

Adam lay in his squeaky, old bed Thursday night, pouring over the past days in his mind. The bed, which had been squeezed in Kody and Ginny's room along with their bunk beds, slept much better than the couch. Ralph had left out on a run the day before and Ginny had taken up residence in Aunt Susan's bed in his absence; Adam was pleased with both. He didn't really like Ralph and Ginny talked too much before falling asleep.

The house wasn't much bigger than the apartment in Cleveland, and on cold mornings he would have gladly traded the slightly larger dwelling for indoor plumbing. He had decided that Jack was hard to dislike, but he talked a lot and Adam couldn't be quite sure just how much of what Jack said could be believed. He really liked Jack's parents and his mother made a phenomenal chocolate cake.

Because it seemed someone would always have to ride in the back of the truck, Aunt Susan had said the church was too far away for cold months and they wouldn't go until Spring. No one had been particularly upset to hear that. In the mornings, Aunt Susan drove them to the schoolhouse in town, where he caught the bus with Jack and Kody. In the afternoons, though, they had to walk back to the holler because she had gone back to work at the company store. The Irishman with the bushy mustache  who ran the store was more than happy to get his paid help back; apparently things hadn't gone as smoothly with his litter of kids filling in for Susan in her absence.

He'd found that Ginny actually had several friends, and not surprisingly, all but one of them were mischievous-looking boys. And the one girl looked like trouble, too. Ginny had been happy to introduce him to all of them, but he was terrible with names and couldn't remember any of them.

The town itself was pretty depressing. There was coal dust on everything, from the rows of allegedly white-washed company houses, to the groups of worn-down miners coming and going, to the steeples on the various little churches. Many of the children that came and went from the schoolhouse were perpetually dirty. And if there was anything to do, it required crossing the mountain on that awful, bumpy road.

On his first day at the high school, Kody had taken him to the front office to pick up their class schedules. He'd helped him get to his first couple classes and given him directions to his third, but Adam was as terrible with directions as he was with names. The hallways weren't nearly as crowded as the ones at his school in Cleveland had been, but nonetheless, he hadn't the slightest clue where to find Kody when he stepped out of that second period class. Besides, he'd told himself he wouldn't bother him for every little thing but would figure his own way around.

He'd scanned the hallway for Jack, since he was pretty tall and would likely be relatively easy to spot, but he was nowhere to be found, either. Finally, he'd asked a group of boys how to get to Mrs. Hitchcock's English class. They'd told him it was on the third floor, just past the pool. As he was preparing to wander around until he found the swimming pool, a pretty blonde girl intervened. She'd seemed rather irritated with the other boys when she'd told him that was an old trick they played on Freshmen on the first day of school. She'd said her name was Leslie and that she was on her way to that class herself.

It just so happened that Adam was assigned the seat behind Leslie, and they became fast friends. In talking to her, he'd managed to gather that she was the writer of the letter Kody received in Cleveland. He couldn't fathom why it was that Kody wasn't talking to her. Adam didn't know much about girls. They talked to him probably more than they did other boys because they either felt sorry for him, or perhaps they just figured he knew well enough to expect nothing more than friendly conversation. But he supposed that if one like Leslie actually wanted to be with Kody, he was a fool to not want her in return.