I climbed up on the stage before the students filed out. "Mr. Yeager," I said, holding out my hand. "I'm Jeannette Walls with The Maroon Wave."
Chuck Yeager took my hand and grinned. "Jes' spell my name right, ma'am," he said. "so's my kin'll know who you're writin' about."
We sat down on some folding chairs and talked for nearly an hour. Mr. Yeager took every question seriously and acted like he had all the time in the world for me. When I mentioned various aircraft he'd flown, the aircraft Dad had briefed me about, he grinned again and said. "Heck, I do believe we got an aviation expert on our hands."
In the hallways afterward, the other kids kept coming up to tell me how lucky I was. "What was he really like?" they asked. "What did he say?" Everyone treated me with the deference accorded only to the school's top athletes. Even the varsity quarterback caught my eye and nodded. I was the girl who had actually talked to Chuck Yeager.
Dad was so eager to hear how the interview went that he was not only home when I got back from school, he was even sober. He insisted on helping me with the article to ensure its technical accuracy.
I already had a lead figured out in my head. I sat down in front of Mom's Remington and typed it out:
The pages of the history books came alive this month when Chuck Yeager, the man who first broke the sound barrier, visited Welch High.
Dad looked over my shoulder. "Great," he said. "But let's juice it up a little."
LORI HAD BEEN WRITING to us regularly from New York. She loved it there. She was living in a hotel for women in Greenwich Village, working as a waitress in a German restaurant, and taking art classes and even fencing lessons. She'd met the most fascinating group of people, every one of them a weird genius. People in New York loved art and music so much, she said, that artists sold paintings right on the sidewalk next to string quartets playing Mozart. Even Central Park wasn't as dangerous as people in West Virginia thought. On the weekends, it was filled with roller skaters and Frisbee players and jugglers and mimes with their faces painted white. She knew I'd love it once I got there. I knew it, too.
Ever since I'd started eleventh grade, I'd been counting off the monthstwenty-two of themuntil I would join Lori. I had my plan worked out. Once I had graduated from high school, I'd move to New York, enroll at a city college, and then get a job with AP or UPI, the wire services whose stories unspooled from the Welch Daily News Teletype machines, or with one of the famous New York papers. I'd overhear the reporters at The Welch Daily News make jokes to one another about the highfalutin writers who worked at those papers. I was determined to become one.
*
In the middle of my junior year, I went to Miss Katona, the high school guidance counselor, to ask for the names of colleges in New York. Miss Katona lifted the glasses that dangled from a cord around her neck and peered at me through them. Bluefield State was only thirty-six miles away, she said, and with my grades, I could probably get a full scholarship.
"I want to go to college in New York," I said.
Miss Katona gave me a puzzled frown. "Whatever for?"
"That's where I want to live."
Miss Katona said that in her view, this was a bad idea. It was easier to go to college in the state where you had attended high school. You were considered in-state, which meant acceptance was more likely and tuition was cheaper.
I thought about this for a minute. "Maybe I should move to New York City right now and graduate from high school there. Then I'd be considered in-state."
Miss Katona squinted at me. "But you live here," she said. "This is your home."
Miss Katona was a fine-boned woman who always wore button-up sweaters and stout shoes. She had gone to Welch High School, and it seemed not to have occurred to her to live anywhere else. To leave West Virginia, even to leave Welch, would have been unthinkably disloyal, like deserting your family.
"Just because I live here now," I said. "doesn't mean I couldn't move."
"That would be a terrible mistake. You live here. Think of what you'd miss. Your family and friends. And senior year is the highlight of your entire high school experience. You'd miss Senior Day. You'd miss the senior prom."
*
I walked home slowly that evening, thinking over what Miss Katona had said. It was true that many grown-ups in Welch talked about how senior year in high school was the highlight of their lives. On Senior Day, something the school had set up to keep juniors from dropping out, the seniors wore funny clothes and got to skip classes. It was not exactly a compelling reason to stay on in Welch for one more year. As for the senior prom, I had about as much chance of getting a date as Dad did of ending corruption in the unions.
I'd been speaking hypothetically about moving to New York a year early. But as I walked, I realized that if I wanted to, I could up and go. I could really do it. Maybe not right now, not this minuteit was the middle of the school yearbut I could wait until I finished eleventh grade. By then I'd be seventeen. I had almost a hundred dollars saved, enough to get me started in New York. I could leave Welch in under five months.
I got so excited that I started running. I ran, faster and faster, along the Old Road overhung with bare-branched trees, then on to Grand View and up Little Hobart Street, past the barking yard-dogs and the frost-covered coal piles, past the Noes' house and the Parishes' house, the Halls' house and the Renkos' house until, gasping for air, I came to a stop in front of our house. For the first time in years, I noticed my half-finished yellow paint job. I'd spent so much time in Welch trying to make things a little bit better, but nothing had worked.
In fact, the house was getting worse. One of the supporting pillars was starting to buckle. The leak in the roof over Brian's bed had gotten so bad that when it rained, he slept under an inflatable raft Mom had won in a sweepstakes by sending in Benson & Hedges 100s packages we'd dug out of trash cans. If I left, Brian could have my old bed. My mind was made up. I was going to New York City as soon as the school year was out.
I clambered up the mountainside to the rear of the housethe stairs had completely rotted throughand climbed through the back window we now used as a door. Dad was at the drafting table, working on some calculations, and Mom was going through her stacks of paintings. When I told them about my plan, Dad stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and climbed out the back window without saying a word. Mom nodded and looked down, dusting off one of her paintings, murmuring something to herself.
"So, what do you think?" I asked.
"Fine. Go."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. You should go. It's a good plan." She seemed on the verge of tears.
"Don't be sad, Mom. I'll write."