During the long periods where no boys liked us and there weren’t even any decent boys for us to like, we made plans with Tommy. Tommy took me to see old movies at the Variety. He took Kim out in a canoe. He put his arm around me in the theater. He stopped paddling and kissed Kim, out there in the middle of the lake.
These were the Hazard core elements, agreed upon by both of us:
He never embarrassed us.
He did something more interesting than watching TV after school.
He was a great kisser.
He held our hands in public.
And he was utterly confident, but weak in the knees whenever he saw us.
Beyond that, we personalized him. My Tommy was always changing: surfer boy, skate punk, mod—those were only the top three. Sometimes he was a boisterous athlete; sometimes a quiet poet. He was the boy everyone knew; or the boy no one besides me ever noticed. Sometimes he had a tasty foreign accent; sometimes he played piano. He was muscled. Or he was slight. He was white, black, Asian, anything.
Kim’s Tommy Hazard was always the same. She refined him over the years, adding and subtracting minor qualities, but fundamentally he was consistent. Tommy Hazard a la Kim had traveled all over with his family; he was an adventurous eater (she loves spicy food and gets irritated by people who only eat pasta and peanut butter); he was a boatsman (she sails); a film buff; a good student. He was older, he was popular, he was tall.
“He’s out there, somewhere,” Kim said to me, the summer after ninth grade. We were walking through the open-air market, down by Puget Sound, looking at woven bags and bead earrings and handmade wooden puzzles. We had been talking Tommy Hazard for the past half hour. “I really do think so,” Kim went on.
“What do you mean, out there?”
“I don’t mean Tommy Hazard, like he looks the way I think he looks,” she said. “I mean someone who’s the one for me, and I’m the one for him.”
“True love.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She fingered a batik pillow, shopping while she talked. “But more like destiny. Or fate. I know it’s silly, but I kind of feel that if I keep thinking about him, someday he’ll show up.”
“How will you know? Love at first sight?”
“Maybe. Or it could sneak up on us. My mom says one day she ‘just knew’ that my dad was the one.”
“Really? How?”
“A feeling,” said Kim. “They had been dating for nine months. But they got married three days later. Once she knew, she knew.” I couldn’t picture the Doctors Yamamoto doing anything so romantic.1
“I don’t know if there’s a
In tenth grade, poor Finn the stud-muffin still had to compete with Tommy Hazard. Kim liked Finn, she did, but he was a bland-food eater (not even pepper) and had never traveled out of the Pacific Northwest. He wasn’t “the one.” He was “for now.”
In any case, after I told her the whole story about me and Finn in second grade, the sweet shrimpy looks and the “sittin’ in a tree” and all that, I did make an effort to talk to him like a normal person. On top of the weirdness of having avoided him all those years, though, it was strange trying to have a conversation when I knew stuff about him like whether he had chest hair (no, but a little on the stomach), what he smelled like (soap) and what his room looked like (he still had a stuffed panda on his bed). My first few attempts were failures.
“What’s up, Finn?”
“Not much. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Like that.
Tate Prep has all these charity initiatives—you have to do a certain amount of community service each term. In late October, all the sophomores grouped together to create a Halloween party for kids at a local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon. We had to come in costume. I was a cat in a black minidress, fishnet stockings, a fake-fur jacket and ears. Cricket was a cricket, which involved antennae and a green leotard. Nora was Medusa. Kim was a ballet dancer in a pink tutu.
Most of the boys were firefighters or cowboys or something else manly-manly, but Finn was a black cat too—at least that’s what he looked like. He wore a black turtleneck and black jeans, a long tail and gloves that had claws on them. His face was all black greasepaint, and he had a hood with ears coming out of it that looked like it was probably leftover from a Batman costume the year before. It was a very un-Tommy Hazard kind of outfit.
Mr. Wallace was organizing us. He had retained his dignity and dressed as Albert Einstein. This involved wearing a suit (he’s usually in khakis), graying out his hair and wearing a sign on his back that said “E=mc2,” in case no one could tell (which no one could, until we read the sign). “You kitty cats,” he said, pointing at me and Finn, shortly after we arrived at the YMCA, “you man the face-painting table.”
Finn and I sat down at a table filled with odds and ends of makeup heisted from the drama department storage room. “He called me a kitty cat. Can’t you tell I’m a panther?” Finn said to me. “Look at my claws.” He held his hands up.
“You’ll have to take them off to put makeup on the kids,” I said.
“Damn. Then I’ll look like a kitty.”
“What’s wrong with a kitty? I’m a kitty.”
