“I don’t want your future husband to be a dishwasher.”
C h ri st i e and E ri c saw each other at least twice a week until the end of the semester. All that time she warned him that she was going to marry Drew and live with him in the East.
Eric didn’t mind. Now that he had experienced sex, he was aware of all the girls at school who wanted to be with him.
When Christie left, he knew he would find somebody else.
And so he was surprised in the late summer when Christie came to his house crying.
They went out in the overgrown flower garden and sat on the marble bench there.
“What’s wrong?” Eric asked.
“I told Drew.”
“About us?”
“No. I told him that I wasn’t going to Yale with him.”
“Really? You’re not going to the East Coast?”
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“No. I can’t leave you,” she said.
“But what are you going to do?”
“I’ll get a job at my father’s office and rent an apartment.
Then we can spend more time together. I know you’re still in high school and you might not even want me, but I can’t go with Drew. I don’t love him. I haven’t since I saw you on the tennis court that day.”
Christie had on a small cranberry-colored dress. She stood up and took it off, revealing that she wore nothing underneath.
It was four in the afternoon on a Friday. The sun was bright, and they were the only ones there. As they made love on the marble bench, Christie moaned and cried, dug her nails deep into Eric’s back, and begged him please, please, please.
“I’m yours,” she said at the door that evening, “if you want me.”
She drove off leaving Eric to think about the past semester.
He wondered not about Christie but about Drew. The darkly handsome senior had everything before they tangled over Limon. Eric had borne no animosity toward the older boy.
He hadn’t meant to take his girl away. On the school yard the boys had been civil. Drew appreciated Eric not making him apologize.
A week after his first night with Christie, she’d told him that Drew had seen a semen stain that Eric had made on the inside roof of the car.
“I told him that he made it, but you know his never shot out like yours does.”
Eric had felt embarrassed for Drew. He wasn’t competing.
He just couldn’t say no to Christie’s surrender. He still couldn’t.
“Mine,” Eric said to himself, watching the red lights of Christie’s Honda recede down the street.
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8
For three days six-year-old Thomas made his way to school using the abandoned alleyway. The gang of third- graders didn’t bother him anymore, and he loved the green, dewy wilderness of the walk. Going to school and coming home on the secret path were the highlights of his day.
But school itself was no better than on that first morning.
The light in Mr. Meyers’s classroom still made him weep. He managed to keep everybody except Bruno from noticing.
But the other children all thought that he was different, that he “talked like white people,” and that he was strange in other ways too.
Thomas had rarely watched television, not even very much with Eric. He never watched at all at his father’s house. He preferred looking at bugs and insects, and he fell a lot and lost his lunch money all the time and never completely understood what people were saying to him. And, worst of all, he seemed to have spells. On the playground at recess, he would sit by himself and close his eyes and talk even though there was nobody there.
“He talks to dead people,” Bruno said, sticking up for his friend.
But this only made the children more wary of the odd new
“bug boy” that acted so weird.
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The big boys picked on him, and the girls often screamed and ran if he came near. Mr. Meyers was bothered by the way he answered questions in class. The only good thing about school was Bruno and sometimes his sister, Monique, when she came to walk Bruno home after school.
Once in a while at lunchtime and recess, Bruno and Thomas would go to a far corner and talk about comic books. Bruno knew everything about the Fantastic Four. He studied them from old reprints and new comics that came out each month. At the library they had big hardback books that compiled the first issues released in the early sixties.
