My father was home when Jackson came over to pick me up. The restaurant was only a few blocks away. Jackson wasn’t wearing a jacket, but he had on a dark blue shirt and a light blue tie and a pair of blue slacks, not the typical dress clothes other boys in my school wore. Anticipating the way he would dress, I had put on one of my nicer pink blouses and a black skirt. All fathers were normally suspicious of the boys taking out their daughters, but my father’s training and his work made him more so. Anyone but Jackson Marshall would have been nervous when my father scrutinized him with that intense gaze of his that was like an X-ray, but Jackson was so sure of his own good intentions that he couldn’t imagine being accused of anything.
“Let me ask you something, Jackson.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you aware that those girls were doing drugs?”
Jackson glanced at me and then nodded. “I think most everyone in the school is aware of that, Mr. Simon.”
“But you didn’t think to warn Corliss about them?”
“Stop it, Daddy,” I snapped. “It wasn’t Jackson’s fault. It was mine. I should have realized the possibility. I told you. They distracted him.”
“Um,” my father said. “Well, you be more aware of what’s happening around you, Mr. Marshall, when you’re with my daughter. We live in a dangerous world.”
“Yes, sir. I will.”
“Have a good time,” my mother said.
My father just nodded, with a face still full of warning.
I felt ashamed and apologized for my father’s behavior as soon as we stepped out, but Jackson insisted that my father had a right to be suspicious and critical.
“He’s right. I shouldn’t have been so oblivious. Anyway, he’s got a right to say it, Corliss. No one is supposed to protect you more than your father.”
As we walked to the restaurant, he continued explaining and justifying the way parents, teachers, and even other students could be skeptical about what had happened at the dance. But I wasn’t in the mood to hear good logic and be understanding. His reasonableness was annoying me. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I began to toy with him.
“Doesn’t that mean that you have suspicions, too? Maybe there was nothing in the punch. Maybe I did take a pill in the girls’ room and accused them, just to get away with it.”
“No. I just can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Why not? I get bored, too, you know. Those girls always seem to be having a better time than I do, no matter what it is.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“You don’t know what I believe. No one really knows what’s in someone else’s mind. You know what? My father’s right about that. Be suspicious, and you’ll be safer.”
He looked at me oddly. I smiled to myself, happy that I was having some fun being a little mischievous.
At dinner in the restaurant, I pursued it. “Don’t you feel like taking a pill or drinking a little too much sometimes? Don’t you want to see what it’s all about?”
; “No. I don’t need to do it to know what it is,” Jackson insisted. He tried to change the topic by talking about the food, the college he was going to attend, and a novel he thought I might like to read. But I wouldn’t change the subject.
If he wants to go out with an angel, he should stay in church, I thought.
“I can understand why Lily and Marsha used your cousins in their story. I bet they did drugs in college,” I said.
“If they did, they didn’t tell me,” he said, a little petulant now.
“I’ve done some research since the party. Upward of eighty percent of college students abuse alcohol. Use of tranquilizers has gone up more than five hundred percent since the nineties. Last year, more than one hundred thousand college-age kids were arrested for drug- or alcohol-related crimes.”
“Stupid. They deserve to suffer.”
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” I threw back at him.
He laughed. “Okay, okay. Let’s just make sure we’re not in the statistics,” he replied. “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”