Can I?
He Takes a Step Closer to Me
And brushes his lips against my forehead.
“Flynn,” I whisper.
“Yeah?” he whispers back.
I swallow hard,
trying to force my heart back down to where it belongs.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“What is it?” he asks softly,
giving my hands an encouraging squeeze.
“I . . . I don’t know how to tell you,” I say.
“It’s okay, Bria,” he murmurs,
folding me into a knee-wobbling hug.
“You can tell me anything.”
“But this is so awful,” I whisper.
“Because I . . . I . . .”
I can’t tell him—I can’t!
I sneak a peek at Flynn’s face
and see the light that’s in his eyes
flicker and start to fade away.
“What is it, Bria?” he asks.
“Is there someone else?”
“No,” I say, closing my eyes tight.
“It’s nothing like that. . . .
It’s . . . it’s about your . . .
your . . .”
Suddenly,
something brushes against my ankle.
I leap back and then I see it—
it’s something furry,
something soft,
something tiger-striped !
“Bitsy!”
Flynn cries, “Where have you been?”
scooping her up and burying his face in her fur.
“We’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Bitsy . . . ?!” I gasp.
“But . . . but I thought . . .
Ohmigod! Bitsy! It’s you!”
“Mew,”
Bitsy says matter-of-factly,
gazing at me with her big yellow eyes.
I lean in to rub my cheek
against the softest fur in the universe
and then I find Flynn’s lips
and kiss him!
The Day I Turned Chickenhearted
Steve Almond
I was sixteen when I started dating Jodi Dunne. It astounds me now to think of myself at sixteen. It astounds me to think of sixteen. I see these kids in my neighborhood, scuffing along in their giant boots, their hair all sculpted with gunk, like they’ll never take one on the chin. It makes me sad.
Jodi was a year behind me. We sat across from each other in second-period art. The class was taught by this old guy, Mr. Park, who was famous at our school for being a flamer. He walked around in a beret and called us children.
“Children,” he would say, “who on earth is going to pull down those shades?”
We were all totally terrified of him. The whole class was just us looking at slides of paintings while Mr. Park walked around and talked about how delicious they were. So, what I’m saying, there was a kind of intimacy to that class. You can’t put a bunch of teenagers in a dark room and show them Gauguin’s nudes and not expect the sap to rise.
Jodi sat pretty near the screen, and I can still remember the way the colored lights from the paintings revealed the subtler aspects of her beauty, the articulation of her nostrils, the pink curve of her underlip. She had a small, exceptionally expressive mouth. If I close my eyes I can still see those things. And her hair. She had the greatest hair I’d ever seen, a pale orange that turned blond in summer, and if you examined each individual hair (as I later did), what you saw was that the color went from rust, at the roots, to a burnished gold.
The one thing about Jodi, she was a pretty big girl. Not fat. Not even close to fat. But wide-bottomed and fleshy. The problem was that in high school, as you know, you’re either thin or fat. There’s no real in-between category. Also, she played volleyball and hung out with the girls who played volleyball, many of whom were dorks. She sometimes wore sweatpants to school. She wasn’t interested in trying to doll herself up, which suggested some kind of inner strength, which, of course, most boys wanted nothing to do with. We wanted the pliant ones, who wore makeup and flipped their hair and chewed gum at all times so their breath wouldn’t stink. The main thing, the thing I’m most ashamed to mention, is that Jodi’s family didn’t have a whole lot of money. I knew this because I’d asked Sean Linden about her one time and he told me she lived over by Los Robles, which was this crappy part of town with one-story ranch houses.
None of this should have mattered, especially her finances. But it did. You should know this: From the beginning, I was making certain kinds of judgments about Jodi, holding myself above her a little. It was a kind of disease in our family, a way of casting out weakness by assuming superiority.
I knew I was attracted to Jodi the first week of class. But I put off asking her out. I started to second-guess myself. I’d see her and her friends camped in front of the gym in kneepads and think, She is kind of heavy, her friends are sort of lame. Four months of this nonsense. I did manage to stare at her every day. And she stared back. So that was kind of our courtship. We sat in that darkened room staring at each other. There was even kind of a language that developed between us, an initial stare that was like, Hello, good morning! then another one, with a little more smolder, which meant Lookin’ good! and some eyebrow work if Park said something especially swishy, or, if one of us made a comment in class, a respectful little nod, like Nice goin’! The whole thing was so Hello Kitty.
I remember one day I got caught cheating in my math class, first period, and I was so ashamed that all I could do was glare at Jodi, which of course confused the hell out of her, and she looked back at me with such tenderness—Are you okay? What’s wrong?—which made me even madder, so I did this silent scoff, and she got fed up and turned her eyes away, then I panicked and tried to stare an apology at her— Oh hey, I’m sorry, just having a rough day—but she wouldn’t look at me, the bitch. So then I didn’t look at her. Fine. We had this whole week-long spat, a really dramatic little emotional event I mean, without having actually spoken.
Lord knows this episode should have goaded me to ask her out. It did not. What happened was this: Brent Nickerson pulled me aside one day after class.
“Your girl’s got herself a sweet new ride,” he said. “A Ford Mustang.”
“She’s not my girl,” I said.
“Check it out,” Nickerson said. “Some very cherry shit.” Then he punched me in the shoulder.
Nickerson was a popular kid, one of those guys who finds himself in the pursuit of girls. He had gone all the way with Melissa Camby and Holly Kringle, allegedly at the same party. That he had taken notice of Jodi placed her on a different level in my mind. And the Mustang. These things suggested that she wasn’t just what she seemed, that she existed outside the little box I’d placed her in and puzzled over day after day.
I can’t remember how it all started, how I finally broke through my own doubt, only that at some point we were in the parking lot behind Swensen’s with our shirts off. We spent a lot of time in parking lots, kissing, touching each other. We weren’t experienced, but we were eager to learn. We understood that sex was our surest path to intimacy, to being able to feel more sure of ourselves in the world. And we were kind to each other. That’s what I remember most vividly. We had things to talk about—friends, classes, plans for college—but we were too young to talk about what really mattered, the secret miseries our families inflicted on us, our half-realized plans for escape.
We loved our families, after all. Jodi loved that my dad had once sung opera, that my mom wrote books for a living, that my older sister was in the Peace Corps. I couldn’t explain to her that there was something merciless in their achievements.
The Dunnes were a joyride by comparison. Jodi was their youngest child by ten years, a happy mistake. You got the feeling that raising the other three had worn them out. They seemed delighted to have this sweet young woman around to keep them company. Bill spent most of his time in his workshop, designing the boat he ho
ped to build when he retired from Ford, where he was an engineer. (This explained the Mustang—he leased a new one every year.) He’d served in the navy long ago and he moved like a sailor, with a wide, rolling gait. He was missing certain teeth. He had big, rough hands, stained yellow from his Newports, and a sardonic way of dealing with the world that obscured the fact that he was actually shy and socially awkward. I guess the word crusty applies. Jodi’s mom, May, watched her TV shows and laughed a lot and hugged me whenever I came over.
They were both alcoholics. I didn’t see this, of course. They just seemed more relaxed and affectionate than my parents, a little more sentimental when they got going, Bill with his tumbler of whiskey next to the cigarettes on his workbench, May with her glass of red wine. Happy drunks. So what? Most of the world is happy drunks.
Jodi’s older brothers and sister were a little less happy. They were all divorced, and they had money problems. Sometimes, later on at night, when I was sneaking out of her room, through the little courtyard next to the Dunnes’ bedroom, I would hear May on the phone, singing out in her wine-blurred alto: “I know, honey. It’s hard. I know.”
Jodi’s older sister, Sue, spent a few months at home, with her two boys. Jodi and her mom loved this at first. They got to fuss over the kids. But these guys were out of control. They drew stuff on the walls, pooped in the bath. Sue took one of those multilevel marketing jobs, selling health products made from apricots and seaweed. This made her desperately happy for about a week. She’d bought six hundred dollars’ worth of the stuff and was going to make ten times that. I can still remember her sitting at the dining-room table with a bottle of wine, stabbing at her list of debts. She had the same beautiful hair as Jodi, though her face had gone puffy.
Jodi had a brother, Dave, but I didn’t hear too much about him. He’d gone to Europe with a Belgian woman and her son. They were street entertainers, jugglers or something.
Billy, the eldest kid, lived on a houseboat up around Half Moon Bay. He invited the family for lunch one time and we trolled to this little lagoon near the harbor so Sue’s kids could angle for sunfish. Billy was a handsome guy, a charmer, but he had that same agitated quality as his dad. After lunch, those two went down into the galley. He wanted Mr. Dunne to go in on a charter boat with him. That had been the whole point of the invite, it turned out. We could hear Billy setting out the plan, his voice rising through the registers of imploration. But his dad wasn’t sure. Billy’d had some scrapes with the law, some problems with drugs, whatever it was.
Billy reappeared, surly and squinting, and everyone gave him a wide berth. One of the kids, Devin, complained about the fruit plate Billy had set out. He didn’t like pineapple. Billy walked over and picked up the platter—it was one of those plastic deals you get from the grocery store—and hurled it over the side of the boat.
“No more pineapple,” he said.
So then Devin pitched a fit and Mr. Dunne started to holler at Billy to settle down and Billy snapped back at him, then Sue got in on it and Jodi’s mom, who was in her cups by this time anyway, went downstairs to cry. Jodi and I took this opportunity to paddle the dinghy out into the cattails, where we groped at each other. It was what we did when the family traffic got too thick.
This was the life of the Dunnes, besotted and needy and a little tumultuous. At their parties, people got drunk and sang songs and flung the dip around. They flirted with one another. I secretly loved the mess of their lives, the brazen displays, the emotion flowing sloppily from one human to the next. When my parents had friends over it was for intellectual discourse, little concerts, linzer torte. They were people of the mind, not the flesh, and incredibly boring to a teenager.
The Dunnes liked me. They understood that I was leading their daughter into the deep sexually, but they also understood that somebody was going to get to her eventually, and they could have done a lot worse than me. I was from a good family. They could smell the ambition on me, though, and it always made them stiffen a little when I showed up.
My family really wasn’t so much richer than hers, by the way. But I guess it’s important to know a little bit about the town I grew up in, how much attention was paid to the subtle gradations. There was a rich part of town, and a super-rich part of town, and a big, prosperous university where my mother worked. There was a set of kids who had their own cars and others who were destined for the Ivy League. There were mansions with lawns so green I wanted to eat them. Some afternoons, I pedaled through these neighborhoods on my way to work and felt that old American itch to pull a Gatsby.
I didn’t want to be rich. (It’s not what Gatsby wanted, either.) What I wanted was the sense of ease that I imagined the rich kids possessed, of being able to relax, not having to try so hard all the time. I wanted to be loved, of course, but more than that I wanted to be able to receive love.
Jodi did what she could to help. She rescued me from what might have been a terrible misery. All around us, we could see the cruel theatrics of our classmates, the breakups and minor betrayals, the public humiliations of unsteady love. One night Jodi and I hung out with Sean Linden and his girlfriend, Tess, and it was terrible to see what he did to her, how he tore her down a little bit at each turn. She’d gotten a new perm that hadn’t set quite right and he kept calling her Shirley (as in Temple), pretending it was affection. He stroked the soft flesh of her stomach and made a blubbery noise. She drank a bit too much and wound up spilling some Chex Mix on the fancy new rug and Sean made her pick up every piece. Or, actually, it was worse than that, because Tess did this herself, without his prodding. I can still see her down there, on her hands and knees, a pretty girl in loose curls, digging around my feet for Rice Chex.
One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun-loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don’t want to face what a bunch of sadists teenagers are, wounded narcissists, killers. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged about Columbine—where the hell did they go to high school?
My point is only that Jodi and I protected each other from a lot of that. We were in that dinghy, floating away from the tribulations of our friends and families. We were the bodies in that dinghy, streaked in sweat, tender from the sun, braced against the gunwales, taken up by the awkward contortions of love.
I can remember Jodi walking into the music room one night as my father was rehearsing his lieder. It was something I would never have done. To intrude on such a moment of vulnerability—that was not how we did business. My father had failed as an opera singer, after all. That was why he sold sheet music. But Jodi didn’t see him as a failure. She sat primly on the piano bench as my father released the somber notes that lived within him. He was a baritone, though he often sang in the low tenor ranges, and when he did his face tilted up and his eyes took on an almost unbearable yearning (my sister called this his Figaro face). His nostrils flared, as if he could smell his lover racing toward him through the Schwartzwald.
When he finished the song, my father looked up. He hadn’t realized Jodi was there.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Your voice.”
My father smiled shyly. He smoothed the wisps of hair onto his brow. “I was just warming up.”
“What’s he saying?”
“That he loves too well and not enough, something like that.”
“He’s singing to his lover?”
“Yes.”
“Beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” my father said, “I didn’t write it.”
Jodi leaned forward on the bench. She looked as if she might want to touch his arm. “John told me you used to sing, in New York.”
There was a moment when I thought my father might relent, might open his chest of shy memories and lay them before Jodi. But he seemed to catch himself. He took a step backward and lea
ned against the piano and inhaled through his nose. “You’re sweet,” he murmured. “A sweet young lady.”
She had this effect on people, an optimism that struck me as close to magic. And there were moments when I felt ready to receive the full weight of her love, when I believed that we could live quite happily together, one of those lucky couples who find the cure early. We breezed through junior year and into senior year, and when it came time to apply to college, I chose five schools, four schools back East, plus UC Santa Cruz, Jodi’s intended first choice.
In our town, among the bright young sires and dames of the landed gentry, where you got in carried the weight of a life sentence. Several years earlier, a kid had tried to kill himself when he got wait-listed at Harvard. I myself tried to affect an air of nonchalance about the whole thing. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I was simply avoidant. Whatever the case, I took it harder than expected when, on a single afternoon in early May, I got rejected by three of the East Coast schools.
My mother, who had gone to great pains not to appear overly concerned about where I applied, called me into her study that evening.
“I hope you’re not going to take this personally,” she said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s not like they rejected me personally.”
“I’ve sat on these admissions committees, Johnny. It’s all a formula. I don’t mean to denigrate the process, but it’s riddled with quotas. Diversity is the new mantra.”
“I guess Lisa was more diverse than me.”
This was a somewhat self-pitying reference to my sister, who had been accepted by every school on the eastern seaboard, including the ones she didn’t apply to.
“Your sister—” my mother said. Then she stopped herself. “It’s gotten more competitive, significantly so. I see the application figures, kiddo. I know about this stuff.”
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