eight
until five
A whole two dollars ' worth of tugging balloons . Red -- blue -- orange -- green -- silver , jerking in hollow-sided collisions , and one fat-faced pink one for ten cents , with a smile painted on one side and a tear on the other . And what if I were to tell you that this phantom of a delight of a Marylin , whose hair was a sieve for sun and whose laughter a streamer of it , had had a father who had been shot to death on the underslinging of a freight car in one of the most notorious prison getaways ever recorded , and whose mother -- but never mind right here ; it does n't matter to the opening of this story , because Marylin , with all her tantalizing capacity for paradox , while every inch a part of it all , was not at all a part of it . For five years , she who had known from infancy the furtive Bradstreet of some of the vertical city 's most notorious aliases and gang names , and who knew , almost by baptism of fire , that there were short cuts to an easier and weightier wage envelope , had made buttonholes from eight until five on the blue-denim pleat before it was stitched down the front of men 's blue-denim shirts . At sweet sixteen she , whose mother had borne her out of wed -- well , anyway , at sweet sixteen , like the maiden in the saying , she had never been kissed , nor at seventeen , but at eighteen -- It was this way . Steve Turner -- `` Getaway , '' as the quick lingo of the street had him -- liked her . Too well .