A Summer of Kings (31 page)

In late October, after giving it a try for one month, Pip left Hackley, and he's now going to school with me again. He claimed that the March on Washington gave him the courage to challenge his father's decision to place him in a private school. "I stood up for my rights and I won," he declared.

Pip and I are informally going steady. I don't know what that really means, and neither does Pip, so we discuss it while we run through the woods beside my house. One day, I'm determined to beat him again in our race around the pond.

Now it's November and I have finished my story. It's not a play, as I had promised Monsieur Vichy; it's just my story of this past summer. I thought when I had come to the end, I would understand the world more. I thought I would be able to make sense of King-Roy's death and his sister's death and the death of the four church girls, but I can't, and most of the world is still a mystery to me. What I have learned through telling my story is that I understand myself more. Monsieur Vichy says that it's only through knowing ourselves that we come to understand the world. If that's the case, I've still got a lot of me I have to figure out.

Today President Kennedy was shot while riding in an open car through Texas. In school we had our moment of silence. Afterward, when I went to the bathroom to get some tissue, I saw Kathy and Laura sitting up on the sinks, putting on makeup, two cigarettes balanced
on the edge of the porcelain soap dish and their purses on the floor with the contents of them spilled out onto the tiles.

When I came in, still crying from the moment of silence and with my nose running, they looked at me and then at one another, and they giggled.

I looked at them and wondered,
When did I get so old?