Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  My eyes almost popped out of my head. A beautiful girl like that had never had a boyfriend! I was in heaven.

  “What I mean is,” she continued, “I’ve dated guys and stuff, but I’ve never actually had a boyfriend. No one was ever worth my time.”

  That sounded arrogant at first, but then I realized that she wasn’t being conceited at all. She genuinely felt that her time was important, and that most of the losers out there, like the hoods at the dances, weren’t good enough for her.

  “So, you mean you’ve never kissed a guy?” I couldn’t believe I asked her that.

  Squinting her eyes again, and grinning: “Uh, I didn’t say that”—

  —that was enough for me to feel my first bit of hatred for Maria—

  “ I’ve kissed some guys.”

  I saw red. “How many?” I asked.

  “What do you care?” I felt the happiness drain from my body. At the time, I had only kissed about six or seven girls. I really wanted to know how many guys she’d been with.

  “It’s no big deal!” I insisted.

  “Fine.” She finally gave in. Then she started counting the boys on each finger, mouthing their names in a voice just above a whisper.

  “You don’t have to say their goddamn names!” I yelled. Bad move, I thought. “What I mean is, just give me an estimate.”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten! I thought you never had a boyfriend!” I was really pissed off that she even told me. But I didn’t want to start a fight. We weren’t even dating yet.

  “I’m just kidding,” I said. “Ten’s not bad at all. I’ve kissed eleven myself.”

  “I didn’t ask,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “You ask too many questions,” she said. She then began running her fingers through the grass rather than my hair, like a cat clawing at its litter. Sensing her discomfort, I remained silent for a few minutes. I was angry at myself for questioning her, but equally angry at her answers.

  Then Maria started telling me about something that happened to her one day with one of the boys she kissed. She said that she was hanging out in the playground near her house and this guy came up behind her and tried to grab her ass. “Then, I grabbed a stickball bat and threatened to whack him in the balls if he tried that again. I fucking hate it when guys touch me.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. I hadn’t even touched her. In a weird way, I felt relieved, because what I’d said wasn’t nearly as bad as grabbing her ass. But then I thought: Is this a sign that I shouldn’t bother kissing her? I tried not to think about it, and calmed down a bit. Thankfully, we drifted to another topic.

  I remember lying there, gazing up at the green and yellow canopy of budding trees above. The sun was poking through, providing a bespeckled spotlight for us. I was happy. Our blanket was close to the pathway that the skaters and joggers were using. As they zipped by my head, I could feel the breeze graze my hair. I didn’t see any of the runners, just their shadows whizzing over me one by one. I started thinking about the hunter, the one that I always felt was chasing me up the staircase in my house. I thought about telling Maria, but I didn’t. This might sound cheesy, but that that day I felt like I didn’t have a shadow. Maria made everything glow around me. She was like the sun at the center of my universe, at high noon. And at high noon, there are no shadows.

  After laying in the park for about three hours, we got up, stretched, and walked around for a while. I didn’t put my arm around her, but we did hold hands. We talked about ourselves a lot, about our mutual interests, mostly. And, as usual, I talked about the bridges. Whenever I went to Central Park with someone, I told them about those bridges. There are dozens of pedestrian bridges in Central Park. I read somewhere that the guy who designed the park made sure that no two bridges were exactly alike. So I told Maria this, and she was impressed that I knew something about the park.

  She’d been to Central Park only a few times before, once on a class trip in elementary school, and twice with her grandfather years before. No guy she’d ever gone out with had ever thought of taking her to anything more than the playground near her house, never mind Central Park or Manhattan. That’s why I liked showing her the bridges that day, because I knew she’d never seen them before. Next to Rockaway Beach, Central Park was my favorite place in New York. And to be honest, I’d brought other girls there, too, and told them all about the bridges. But I told Maria that I’d never been to Central Park with a girl before. She didn’t even ask me, I just told her. I was so caught up in the excitement of being with her that it just slipped out.

  We walked all the way up to the obelisk in the park, somewhere around eighty-second street, right above the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I decided it would be a good time to impress Maria with my vast knowledge of Central Park again, so I told her that the obelisk was called Cleopatra’s Needle, that there was one just like it in London, and then there was the Washington Monument in D. C., and that I’d seen them all in pictures. Her eyes glowed and she looked at me like I’d actually been to these places. “Wow! She said, genuinely. “You’re like a Renassiance Man.” She tugged at my shirt and smiled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you know a lot about so many things. You’re on the debate team at school. You’re into sports. You know all about New York City.” And you’re cute, she said with her eyes.

  I didn’t know what to say. “The one in D. C. is new, but this one and the one in London are originals, dating back to ancient Egypt. Actually, there hundreds of engravings on the two original obelisks,” I said, pointing at Cleopatra’s Needle, hoping what I saw matched what I said. “But a lot of them have been worn away by the weather and the pollution. The one in London is nicer than the one in Central Park, even though I wasn’t really sure if it was. She was so sweet that she thanked me right then and there for bringing her to see a part of the park she’d never seen before. And then the weirdest thing happened. Suddenly, Maria really started to open up to me.

  “You know, I’m really having a nice time,” she said.

  “That’s great. So am I.” I was so happy to hear her say that.

  “But I can’t help but be a little bit suspicious of you.”

  “Suspicious? Why suspicious?”

  “Well, you’re treating me a lot better than all of the other guys I know treat me. Remember when I told you about the guy that tried to grab me in the playground? Well, that’s the way most guys are. But you’re really not like that at all.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. If I said something like, “Oh, I know, I’m much better than all those guys,” it would sound really conceited. But before I could think of what to say, she continued.

  “What I’m saying, A.J., is that I feel like I can trust you. I mean, I feel like I can tell you anything. Anything at all.”

  “But you can,” I said.

  “But that’s the thing. I can’t. I mean, I hardly know you, and it just wouldn’t be right.”

  “You shouldn’t be afraid. I wouldn’t think less of you if you opened up to me.” That’s where I really put my foot in my mouth, because Maria didn’t mean it that way at all.

  “No, no,” she said, “it’s not that. I’m just afraid that the more I tell you, the more vulnerable I am, and the more you have to use against me. What if this doesn’t work out? What if we wind up never going out again? Or if we only date for a while? How do you think I’d feel if we started dating and I told you about my life and my family, and then you just left me, or, even worse, hurt me and made me leave you. That would kill me, A.J. That would kill me more than it would if a guy raped me.”

  I felt like I was having a heart attack, but I had to keep my cool. “I understand,” I said. She continued as if I hadn’t even interrupted.

  “I told you before that my father’s Italian, right? Well, he’s one of those really strict Italian fathers. Real old-world, ya know? He got his citizenship when he was young, because he wanted to be an American very
badly. He actually wanted to be in the military”—this comment piqued my interest but I didn’t want to interrupt—“but he never lost his old world ruggedness or whatever, ya know? Still, even though he’s strict, I love him, because I’m his little girl. And that’s what he calls me to this day—his little girl.

  Well, one day, in the seventh grade, I came home from school crying, because all the kids in my class had stood up in front of everyone and read poems. But when it was my turn to read my poem, I got so nervous that I just ran out of the room crying.

  “But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was after school all of my friends made fun of me. Even my best friend Rosie said, ‘You can’t read, Maria.’ And she laughed at me. And that wasn’t the last time she laughed at me, either.

  “I got left back a whole year because I was so afraid of speaking in front of the class.” She paused and gathered her thoughts. Again, I was dying to interrupt, but thought better of it, and encouraged her to continue. “I never told anyone this before. But that’s the thing, A.J.: I want to tell you. I really do. I want to tell you all of my secrets. But I keep thinking about what my father said to me that day when I came home from school crying. He said, ‘Maria, no matter what happens, always remember that your only true friends are your family. You can’t rely on anyone else but your family. Me and mommy will help you read better, okay? And you’ll be the best reader in the school.’ But I was still sad. I kept thinking, Rosie and I are friends, so why did she make fun of me? And then my father pulled me close and looked right in my eyes—I will never forget how serious he was—and he said to me, ‘Always remember: Amici con tutti, confidenza con nessuno.’ I didn’t speak Italian back then, so I asked him what that meant. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘friends with everyone, confidence with nobody. Just remember that, my little girl. Remember that you should always be polite and friendly to everybody; but the moment you tell someone outside your family—even a close, close friend—a secret, the moment you let them see the weakness within you—that’s the moment that you give them power over you.’”

  I was dumfounded, so I let her keep talking.

  “Amici con tutti, confidenza con nessuno,” she said, in the most perfect and beautiful Italian I’d ever heard. “And that’s why I’m suspicious of you. That’s why I’m afraid. I’m afraid you’re like Rosie, and that guy in the playground, and all the people my dad warned me about. I’m afraid that the moment I allow you to get close to me, you’ll turn your back on me. But not before you plunge a dagger into my heart.”

  I wasn’t just dumfounded. In shock is more like it. I pride myself on being able to communicate pretty well in all situations, but I had no idea how to respond to Maria’s revelations. She seemed so serious, so ominous. She stared at me intently, anticipating a response. At first I thought that the date was simply shot to hell, that we’d never, ever go out again. But then I realized that she was trying to send me a message. That the words she’d just used were very important. I think it was the first time a girl had said something to me like an adult, and the first time I’d ever understood something like that. It was pretty amazing.

  “Maria,” I said, “I’ll never hurt you in any way. Trust me, there will be time, and in that time you’ll learn that even your father can be wrong, and that there is someone out there you can trust and believe in.” I didn’t say that that person was me, but I sort of implied it, I guess.

  She took a deep breath and paused for a minute. “I’m really happy to be here with you,” she said with a huge smile.

  “I’m happy to be here with you, too,” I said, and then took a deep breath. And then I did the strangest thing. I grabbed her hand and placed her palm against my face. I felt like I’d just gotten off a roller-coaster and needed the reassurance, I guess. She smiled. Again. Come to think of it, other than during her story, she smiled the entire day. I’ll never forget that smile, and the feeling of making someone smile all day. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling.

  Suddenly, it was six o’clock. The air cooled, as the sun began to set in the orange sky above the pond. We sat in silence for a few moments, and then held each others hands on the walk back to the subway.

  On the ride back to Queens I was exhausted, even though I’d spent so much time laying down by the pond. So I asked her if I could lean my head against her shoulder and close my eyes, and she said yes. It was beautiful. The ride was bumpy and noisy, and the subway had its usual stench of urine and garbage, but I didn’t mind. As corny as it sounds, I felt like an angel nestled on a cloud in the sky and quickly fell asleep on her shoulder.

  She woke me as the train pulled into our stop. I decided to be a gentleman and take her all the way back to her house, instead of just letting her get on the bus by herself. As we walked up her block toward her house, I leaned forward like I was going to kiss her, and she poked her little head up, ready to kiss me back. Then I sort of dodged her head and whispered into her ear: “I want to kiss you, but I won’t until I break up with Lynn. There will be time.”

  Gracefully, she smiled and said thank you and then walked up to her door and went inside. I must have stood there for twenty minutes or so before I actually left. I didn’t want the moment to end because, deep down inside, I guess I knew that our relationship had reached its zenith.

  Chapter 6

  Cruising Altitude

  It was sort of around then, I suppose, that I started to lose my mind. Not go crazy, but literally lose my mind. Most teenagers, I think, were still learning stuff at that age. Not me. I think that I learned up until around that time—around my junior year in high school—and then, slowly and steadily, I stopped.

  Thing is, my grades stayed about the same. As you know, I’ve always gotten straight A’s. I excel in History and English because I love to read and write and memorize interesting facts. My vocabulary has always exceeded my years, and that’s invariably helped me get terrific grades. Although I never liked school much, it was always easy to get A’s because I knew how to give teachers what they wanted. Until sixteen or seventeen, I was always a great student.

  But it wasn’t just academics. Maybe a better way to describe what happened is this: I stopped gaining knowledge. The older I got, the less I wanted to learn. As a matter of fact, maybe I never wanted to learn at all, even when I was five or six. But by my late teen years I had experienced an emotion generally reserved for the middle aged and elderly. The word I liked to use at the time—and the word I can still use now, really—is jaded. I was jaded. I’d just about had enough with school and tests and learning and all that bullshit. Like that time I worked in the office over the summer. I was really excited to get the job, because it paid a lot, and it was near dad’s office downtown. But I remember the first thing I said to my dad as I walked through the door of my house after my first day at work: “This job sucks.”

  And I really did hate it already, after only one day at work. When I got to work, my boss explained my responsibilities to me—some photo-copying, some collating, some phone calls, some errands, and what not. The usual office bullshit. I knew it would be a boring job, but I also knew that Dad had gotten it for me, so it was kind of important that I impress the boss and my co-workers, and make my dad look good. I didn’t have to kiss their asses or anything, I just had to do as I was told. I couldn’t just go through the motions of working. I had to show them I cared about getting the job done right.

  But I didn’t care. The moment I left the office on the first day, I knew that I’d loathe every day I spent at that place until it was all over. It wasn’t a matter of simply hating the work. It’s why I hated it—because I’d mastered all of it on the first day. I did some photo-copying, made a few phone calls, faxed some documents, wrote some memos. And then I was bored. I know how to do all this shit, I thought, so why bother coming in tomorrow? And my goddamn boss expected me to repeat these mundane tasks all summer long.

  Christ, I can’t tell you how awful that summer was. I did everything to escape boredo
m. The office had an airy bathroom with a huge window in it. For some reason, it remained open throughout the summer, sucking an air conditioned draft right outside where it met the humid New York air. Occasionally, I’d race into the bathroom not to take a shit, but to elude the sheer boredom of the job. Staring out that window, gazing up at my dad’s building in lower Manhattan, I’d light a cigarette and blow the smoke into the hazy exhaust rising from the streets below. Occasionally, I’d spot a Concorde jet racing over the Manhattan skyline across the East River, en route to Europe, or some other faraway place. Dreaming of the excitement of sitting in that cockpit, longing to be a pilot with an exciting mission to conquer each new day, I’d smoke and smoke and smoke, wondering how the hell I’d ever survive at the Air Force Academy if I couldn’t even tolerate the most simplistic office tasks.