d stir his coffee like he
was going to make a hole in the cup."

"Tom was at NYU?" I ask. I don't know where I thought he'd been before he
turned up in the cellar. I guess I never thought.

"Sure," Hilda says. "He was in the Washington Square College for about a
year and a half. He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in
the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work.
He has people out in the Midwest somewhere--a father and a stepmother. He
was always sour and close-mouthed about them, even before he got thrown
out of NYU. Now he won't even write them."

This is a lot of information to take in all at once and leaves a lot of
questions unanswered. The first one that comes into my head is this: "How
come he got thrown out of NYU?"

"Well, it makes Tom so sore, he's never really told me a plain, straight
story. It's all mixed up with his father. I think his father wrote him not
to come home at Christmas vacation, for some reason. Tom and a couple of
other boys who were left in the dormitory over the holidays got horsing
around and had a water fight. The college got huffy and wrote the parents,
telling them to pay up for damages. The other parents were pretty angry,
but they stuck behind their kids and paid up. Tom just never heard from
his father. Not a line.

"That was when Tom began coming into the restaurant looking like thunder.
The college began needling him for the water-fight damages, as well as
second-semester tuition. He took his first exam, physics, and got an A on
it. He's pretty smart.

"He still didn't hear anything from home. He took the second exam, French,
and thought he flunked it. That same afternoon he went into the office and
told the dean he was quitting, and he packed his stuff and left. I didn't
see him again till a week ago. I didn't know if he'd got sick of me, or
left town, or what.

"He says he wrote his father that he had a good job, and they could forget
about him. Then he broke into that cellar on a dare or for kicks.

"So here we are. What do we do next?"

Hilda looks at me--me, age fourteen--as if I might actually know, and it's
kind of unnerving. Everyone I know, their life goes along in set periods:
grade school, junior high, high school, college, and maybe getting
married. They don't really have to think what comes next.

I say cautiously, "My pop says a kid's got to go to college now to get
anywhere. Maybe he ought to go back to school."