Young Lucy Barrett passed the crowded drive-in a half-dozen times, turning around in the deserted parking lot in front of her family's department store, before she found the courage to drive into the car- packed lot and park beside one of the speaker-boxes. She had never come here alone except that night she met David, though she knew some of the people who hung-out here were pals of her boyfriend. Anxiously, she ordered a beer and a hamburger and prayed she was inconspicuous: David would probably be furious if anyone told him his girl had come to this place alone – the only stag girls parked around Scottie's were definitely on the make. But then, she couldn't just drive around all night and David was tied up on business; no, it was safer than wheeling around suburban Washington in the middle of the night.
Lucy's mind physically ached from the tormenting cross-current of painful emotion that swept through her thoughts like a rip-tide. She had to be alone somewhere, to think, to try no matter how much it hurt to sort out this tangled web of feelings that made it impossible for the young blonde to think clearly. The car-hop brought her order and she paid the busty tough-looking girl and left a tip on the tray. Absent-mindedly, she switched on the radio and let herself be bombarded with the raucous sound of a top twenty pop station. The acid-etched memory of her mother with that horrible Marlowe man blazed in her mind like a neon billboard … her own mother, John Barrett's widow, sprawled nakedly across the bedspread like a central character in some five-dollar porno movie … pot-bellied, balding Jerry Marlowe hunched over her, his head stuffed between her lewdly-splayed thighs, his back arching and bobbing as he salaciously licked and sucked there at the banquet-table of her naked loins! Even now, over the pounding rhythms of the rock music from her radio, she could still hear, in that private inner ear of her mind, the wetly lascivious sounds of that horrible man as his lips and tongue worked ravenously between her mother's willing thighs!
Why, oh why, she asked herself, did I have to see that? If it had to happen between them like that so vulgarly, why not some night when I was out? Dear God, how could she bring that man into her bedroom, there on the very bed, between the very sheets where she once slept with Daddy! He loved her, I know he did, and I always thought she loved him as well, but now … now I just don't know anything anymore! It's all so confusing, so filthy and wicked and so hard to comprehend.
Lucy had tried all the approaches open to her young and relatively inexperienced mind … she had thought of her own actions, her times alone with David. But somehow it just wasn't the same to her … how could it be, she asked herself again and again. Mother is a married woman! Widowed yes, and certainly still too young to exile herself to wearing black and living alone, but … «Oh, I don't know what I mean any longer,» she said aloud. «Nothing makes sense to me now … nothing!»
«They say that's the first sign of cracking up … talking to yourself, I mean.» It was Sally something-or-other, a girlfriend of one of David's friends, and she was peering into the open passenger window. Lucy wiped her eyes hurriedly and managed a wan smile. «Sorry to intrude, Lucy. I mean, I don't really know you that well, but you seemed upset. Anything I can do to help?»
«Oh … no, Sally, it's just some silly argument I had at home, nothing really,» Lucy said cheerily. «I feel better already. You know how it is … well, it's getting close to that time of the month, you know? I guess I'm just easily upset these days.»
The close-cropped blonde looked disbelievingly at David's girlfriend in her expensive car, a forced smile of concern on her red-painted lips, lips that had once been David's until this rich girl with her fancy clothes came along. Sure, I'm worried about you, all right, she said to herself, you could drop dead for all I care! You and all the rest of those Valley Farms swells! But Sally was not about to betray her real feelings to this stuck-up rich bitch, not on your life … she had something better in mind, something far, far better!
«I understand what you mean, honey,» she said in syrupy sweetness that nearly betrayed her acid tongue lurking beneath. «I get that way sometimes too; have to go running to my ol' man. Hey, how come you don't share all this worryin' with your boyfriend? You two had a fight or something?» Had Lucy been more keenly observant, she might have glimpsed the twinkle of maliciousness that flashed in the hardened bottle-blonde's eyes.
«Uh, no, we haven't been fighting … why?» she was nearly afraid to ask.
«Well, he's parked over there by the wall, been there for hours. I'll be running along now, can't keep the ol' man waiting too long or he might belt me!» The attractive young blonde girl, her pink schoolgirlish cheeks still streaked from crying, sat in stunned silence as the brassy platinum blonde, clad in cut-off jeans and a man's tee- shirt that was an easy size too small, strolled smugly back to her own car. A giggling pair of teeny-boppers, much younger but cut from the same case-hardened mold as the sex-toughened Sally, greeted their older friend's return with a chorus of shrill laughs … were they laughing at her? Lucy suddenly began to look around at the lined-up array of cars, all filled with the sort of people she had never known at the expensive girls' school her father packed her off to, people she felt no animosity toward, but she felt sort of uncomfortable with nevertheless. And there across the lot, backed against the brick wall of a motel next door, was David's tiny sports car. Now, more than ever, she wanted to be with him, to beg him to take her away from this place … anywhere! She leaped from her tiny compact car and made her way through the crowd of beer-guzzling boys that were clustered near the end of the parked cars, her unexpected prettiness and vulnerability a lure to their jeering catcalls and coarse invitations. She ran past them, blinking back the tears, closer with every step to David's car; it was parked so that it angled away from the crowded lot and she realized that he could not possibly see her coming. Perhaps that was why he didn't greet her or … but then an explosion of reality crashed into her already-dizzy senses … a business contact, he had said, something he couldn't break.
Lucy's running feet nearly slid out from under her in her vain effort to stop and turn back, but it was too late. She was only a foot or so from the passenger's side of the tiny MG and what she saw brought both her hands to her mouth in a useless gesture, a futile attempt to stifle the gasp of horror and surprise that burst from her throat. It took less than a second for Lucy's widened blue eyes to take in the lurid tableau of what was going on in that car, less than a heartbeat for her to realize what a fateful mistake she had made in coming to this seedy place alone. Her eye swept like the lens of a camera, etching yet another photographic image into her mind, one that, like the sight of her mother with Jerry Marlowe, would linger in her thoughts like the smell of death clings to all it touches. Only death would have possibly been easier to take than this!
There on the small bucket seat closest to her knelt a naked girl of not more than fifteen, her pert, girlish buttocks stuck up almost to the top of the sports car's door. Her naked ass-cheeks squirmed and wriggled with the intensity of her teenage passion; her face, framed by her hippie-length dark hair that spilled across David's lap, was buried tightly against his unclothed loins. David had pushed his driver's seat back as far as it would go and his pants and undershorts were crumpled around his knees; his head was back against the top of the bucket seat, his fingers knotted in the young girl's long hair. Even as Lucy watched, too paralyzed with shock to move, he gasped out the pleasurable cry of his orgasm, and Lucy saw the teenager's whole lithe naked body shudder as she frantically gulped down the viscous rushes of semen that were bursting into her mouth from David's wildly jerking cock.
David saw her first, glimpsing the movement of a shadow across the hood of his tiny car. He jerked around in surprise and the young brunette pulled her face away from his hair-matted pelvis as the ripple of startled movement frightened her as well; she spun around, incredibly fast in such a confined space, and Lucy's last sight, before she turned on her heels and ran, was the sight of that young girl's face, not much more than a child with budding girlish breasts nakedly exposed in the harsh glow of neon lights from the drive-in, her lips smeared and sticky with the cum-splattered remnants of David's adolescent sperm.
She saw or heard nothing on the endless run back to her car, for her mind refused to pay heed to the gauntlet of knowing laughs and rude noises she had to pass to reach the relative sanctuary of her own car. Tears clouded her vision so acutely that she could barely find the ignition with her nervously trembling hand; the car, mercifully, roared into life at the first turn of the switch, and she literally slammed it into gear, racing out of her parking slot without so much as a glance in either direction. An approaching hot-rod loaded with teenagers screeched to a halt to her left and a choir of angry voices derided her ability to drive, but Lucy Barrett cared not at all. What if they had hit her instead? Tonight, she didn't care if she lived or died … even death was better than living with the sordid memory of this torturous night.
David had pulled up his pants and was getting out of his car when she roared past; he stepped into her path with his arms upraised and she swerved wildly to avoid running him down, though her heart asked her why she bothered, and when at long last she reached the far end of the asphalt lot and was turning onto the highway, she could hear the honking of horns and the raucous cacophony of applause and laughter as the word of what had happened spread like a cancer through the crowded drive-in.
But for Lucy Barrett, the night had not yet begun.