thought of him as grown … everyone still called him a boy. Damn them … all of them … every damn, damn one of them.
At times there was an ugliness about him that pressed on his heart, suffocating him. It was like that now. There were people around him but they seemed to be playing by themselves in a grey mountain world. Gaylord caught himself wondering whether the auditorium really existed; the cramped porch, the dirty windows, the dreary lights with their tattered cobwebs and the circle of rust above their dingy glass bowls—the whole combination. He closed his eyes from the fevered dream, except that he knew that the dream lay only in his mind. It was all real as a stone, and all he had to do was open his eyes and re-enter the nightmare.
He opened his eyes and returned to reality. To the bright young faces running from pale pink to deep tans. The dresses of the girls patterned the scene before him with whites, blues and yellows. A boy laughed and affectionately placed his arms around his girl, his white teeth showing against large red lips. How young and happy he seemed. Gaylord wished he might do the same thing with such ease.
Across from him a girl was fingering her eye, her lovely face drawn and frowning while her escort tried to help get the something from her eye. Gaylord watched the two, remembering the time something had gotten in his eye. There had been no one to help him remove it. In fact, a chubby youth had laughed at him. That had happened not too many years back, right beside these walls. He turned and looked at them. Walls … walls that brought back unpleasant memories. Memories of this building.
Inside the wall at which he was staring, he had gone to school. Around its grounds he had cried many times. Tears of fear had filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks after his mother had left him there that first day. Left him alone with strangers. His eyes were resting unseeingly on the wall while he turned over that day in his thoughts. It was chaff blown into his memory never to be forgotten. How cruel they had been at recess, pointing to his white starched suit, teasing and calling him names because he didn't want to play ball with them. For the first time he had been called a sissy. His curly hair had been laughed at; they had pulled at it … hard. He had tried to fight back, but had been pushed into a puddle of muddy water. He
