with a slight smile. “It was not a dramatic triumph.” She fell into step next to Jo, the top of her glossy head barely reaching Jo’s shoulder. Jo wanted to stare but contented herself with a peek.
Shelley Finkelbein was of average height, but delicately built, with light eyes and dark brows and small, uptilted breasts the size and shape of teacups underneath a soft sweater, its color somewhere between lavender and gray. She wore a pair of fitted pedal-pushers that zipped on the side and clung to the swell of her hips, and were cropped to display her dainty ankles, and a pair of pristine white sneakers. Up close, Jo could see that her brows rose in peaks at their center, giving her a quizzical look, and that her eyes were a pale, luminous gray. She had a narrow nose, slightly upturned at the tip, and lush pink lips, the lower one much fuller than the upper one, and skin that looked dewy. Even with her lipstick chewed away and her stunned, sorrowful expression, she was lovely.
“Hey, can you slow down a little?” Shelley asked. Jo stopped, looked down, and saw that, in spite of everything, Shelley was smiling. “Not all of us have legs a mile long.”
“Sorry,” said Jo. Even in her distress she felt her face flushing at the thought of Shelley noticing her legs. She slowed down. Shelley pulled a pack of Parliaments and a heavy gold St. Dupont lighter from her brown leather purse. She shook one cigarette free, tapped it on the pack, lit it, raised it to her lips, tilted her head back, and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings, one inside of the other, into the cloudy sky. “What do you think we’re supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Jo said. “Something. We have to do something.”
“You go to those demonstrations, right? SNCC, SDS?” Shelley pronounced the acronym for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as Snick, the way students in the know did. Jo nodded. Just like in high school, she’d protested most Saturdays, carrying an EQUALITY NOW sign outside of Woolworth in Ann Arbor, marching in a circle with maybe fifty other kids.
“Take me with you?” Shelley looked up at Jo. Her eyes had sooty rings of mascara underneath them, and Jo found herself, in spite of everything, noticing how sweet she smelled, and that Shelley’s cheeks were faintly freckled.
“Sure,” Jo said. “Sure.”
* * *
“Attention!” Doug Brodesseur had a high, nasal voice, pale skin pitted with acne scars and curly black hair, and was all of five feet, three inches tall. Doug was hosting the first meeting of the executive committee of the University of Michigan’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that had been convened since Kennedy’s assassination. Instead of the usual dozen students, almost a hundred kids had crowded into the living room of his off-campus apartment to listen.
Shelley had called Jo on the dormitory’s phone that morning, and had met her out on the Diag, in front of the Undergraduate Library, affectionately called the UGLI, dressed in a burnt-orange corduroy skirt and a white wool turtleneck sweater. A brown leather belt cinched her waist, and her knee-high brown suede boots matched the shade of her belt exactly. In her right hand was a cigarette; on her face was her typically amused look. “Howdy, Stretch,” she’d said, as Jo approached, and Jo had smiled.
“My dad used to call me ‘Sport.’ ” Up close, Shelley’s breath smelled like mint and tobacco. Jo wished she’d gotten dressed up, that she’d chosen something more flattering than jeans and a loose white shirt with blue stripes. Jo and Shelley had walked together to the house that Doug shared with three other guys, an off-campus residence that was easily the filthiest place Jo had ever visited. Dirty footprints and clumps of cat hair dotted the carpet, which had probably been cream-colored at one point and was currently the gray of sidewalks after the rain. Dozens of empty beer cans and pop bottles, some half-full, with cigarette butts floating in the liquid, stood on or near the coffee table. A stack of pizza boxes and newspapers teetered in one corner. A fly buzzed around the box at the top of the pile, and one of the walls looked like someone had punched a hole through it and patched up the damage with . . . Jo squinted to confirm that it was, indeed, crumpled-up pages of the Daily and duct tape.
Most of the meeting’s attendees