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smiling, her arm around me, me staring straight ahead.
    Already, Perry was telling my mother about his morning at the Petrified Forest. "I should take you and Sam there. Even if you've been, that place is amazing! Sam, have you
seen
that petrified log called the Caveman's Bench?" I nodded and rolled my eyes again. Everyone in Jackson knew about the Petrified Forest and the Caveman's Bench, which was really a huge stone log from prehistoric times. But before I could say anything, Perry was already talking about something else. There was a writer he'd met at the grocery store, an older woman named Eudora Welty. He wanted to invite her to speak at the college. "She started off taking pictures for the Work Projects Administration—you know, the WPA—back in the 1930s. Great pictures of people out in the country, working, dancing, or leaning on a front porch."
    "People around here call her Miss Welty," my mother said. "I love her stories. Ed gave me a volume of them when we first met." My mother said my father's name so casually, so easily, it put a chill up my spine.
    It was like both of them couldn't wait to get rid of me so they could talk on and on.

    ***
    We all arrived at once. Ten girls and me. Mary Alice came to the door dressed up in a low-cut dress. She held an unlit cigarette in one hand and an empty wineglass in the other, and supposedly imitated her mother. "Darling, I really think this neckline sends a message, don't you?"
    She walked all us girls around her house, which smelled of lemon-scented Pledge.
    They lived in a split-level home, the only split-level home I had ever seen. Because of the stairs, the pool outside, the shag carpeting, and the television in their kitchen, I decided Mary Alice and her family were the wealthiest, most important people in Mississippi. Her father had something to do with furniture—sofas and bedroom suites, which Mary Alice called
suits.
She said her father traveled to Birmingham and Mobile a lot. All of their furniture matched.
    We toured their concrete fallout shelter downstairs. The two-room area was separated and walled off from the laundry room and the rest of their downstairs. As all us girls came down the steps, we saw him, the handsome boy from school, cycling on a stationary bike in a T-shirt wet with his sweat. He smiled when all of us came in, and he lifted his hand in a casual wave, as if he were cycling through the backstreets of France or Italy. Some of the girls giggled. I stopped breathing. A TV was on with local news about another Negro church burning.
    Mary Alice pointed out their new sectional sofa for when the Russians attacked. She showed us all the canned food they stored in there too: Sanka, Carnation instant dry milk, and a box of instant whipped potatoes, which nothing, not even a nuclear explosion, could get me to eat. But nobody much cared for Mary Alice's fallout shelter tour. We were too busy smiling at the only boy in the stuffy room.
    He had fun in his brown eyes. I saw too that his ears stuck out. So he wasn't so handsome after all. That made me like him even more.
    I wished I had my camera then, to take a picture and to hide behind. I'd keep one eye closed to focus, the way Perry said to do. To bring what you want to capture closer.
    "That's her brother Stone," one of the girls told me, because, I supposed, everyone knew this but me.
    Stone got off the bike and switched the TV channel to
The Twilight Zone,
where a man on a plane looked out the window and saw a gorilla monster messing with the plane's wing.
    My breath came back. "Oh. I thought." But I stopped myself. Mary Alice McLemore did not need to know that I thought her brother was her boyfriend.
    Nobody heard me anyway. It was obvious I was one big accidental invitation. Mary Alice was busy explaining to us how a family of five can live comfortably in their fallout shelter for two weeks until radiation decreased outside. Like some television host, she pointed toward the built-in