Little Boy (22 page)

But that summer we went down to the shore
right before school began. I begged my parents to let me stay home,
but they said no. Unlike previous summers, they’d decided to stay
in a hotel room to avoid causing my grandmother too much
trouble.

We left New York early Friday morning and
drove straight down. We arrived in Virginia at about two p.m. I sat
in the back seat of the car, staring at a book,
Romeo and
Juliet
, which Maria had given me before I left. She said it was
her favorite Shakespeare play. I know the basic story—a young
couple’s in love and they kill themselves at the end—so I thought
it would be easy to read. But all that old English was pretty tough
to digest. It was so difficult, in fact, that I stopped reading it
at about the seventh page. Instead, I just listened to my CD
player.

I’d brought
The Long and Winding Road
with me, and I’d planned on listening to it on the balcony of our
hotel room. I figured it would be a boring vacation, and I’d
probably be sitting there sucking down butts the whole week. The
previous summer my family and I had gone to Virginia, too. That
summer I didn’t have a girlfriend or anything. I met a few girls
down the shore, but I didn’t hook up with anyone. It was sort of
pathetic, actually. Because once I got home, I realized that I
probably could of hooked up if I really wanted to. The problem was
that I didn’t have the confidence to do it.

Before we even got out of the car, I spotted
seven or eight girls around my age, giggling and walking from the
clubhouse to the pool. They were gorgeous; but, then again, all
thin girls look sexy in bikinis. They weren’t like the girls in New
York. Most of the girls in the city that I knew had black or brown
hair, but all the beach chicks were blondes or redheads.

The first few night in Virginia was pretty
dull. But on Sunday, two days before we left, Tracey made friends
with some kids from Missouri. One of them was a girl named Lee
Anne, a blonde bombshell from St. Louis. I usually didn’t care for
that type, but for some reason I was attracted to Lee Anne.

Until I met Lee Anne, I never understood the
term “jailbait.” I didn’t get how older men could lust after
teenage girls. She was only fifteen, but Lee Anne could have easily
passed for twenty-one or older. She must have been at least my
height, with straight golden hair and a bronzed body. With tits
like cantaloupes, and long slender legs, there was nothing
adolescent about her. Like a Baywatch babe, she trotted along the
beach in a red bikini, sun tan oil dripped off her arms and thighs,
smelling like coconuts. She wore a pair of blue mirrory sunglasses
that blinded me when I looked at them. They gave Lee Anne a
mysterious air. I felt challenged to hook up with her.

Behind those sunglasses Lee Anne was a ditz,
a stupid hick who probably had never read a book in her life. I was
bored with her personality five minutes after meeting her. But she
was someone to hang out with, to pass the time with, to smoke with
as the summer days dwindled away. We splashed each other in the
ocean all day Sunday and Monday, and went for walks on the beach as
the sun set. Whenever a sea plane passed overhead, I’d tell her
about it, and about my love of planes and jets. She didn’t seem to
give a shit, but at least she didn’t interrupt.

Late Monday night, the night before we drove
back to Queens, Lee Anne and I were talking and smoking in a
stairwell. She clasped her cigarette unlike anyone else I knew,
between her thumb and forefinger, daintily, almost as if she was
trying to avoid burning herself. She took long drags, and didn’t
open her mouth all of the way to release the smoke, but instead
blew it out of the corner of her mouth in a thick stream. I was
disgusted by it, and yet I ached to rip her top off and suckle her
white breasts.

After ten silent minutes, she casually
dropped her cigarette on the cold concrete floor of the stairwell,
stomping it out with the heel of her sandals. Again: stupid, but
sexy.

“Hey, look,” I said, “it’s us.” I was
referring to our reflection in the chrome of the fire extinguisher
behind the closed stairwell door, right next to her. That was about
the most stimulating piece of conversation I’d had with her until
that point. She disregarded my observation and gazed wearily at the
fluorescent light above.

“You’re kind of cute,” she said, looking in
my direction but not at me, with a twangy accent that she probably
didn’t even realize she had.

“Well, thank you. You aren’t so bad
yourself.”

Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could fuck
her right then and there if I chose. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to
even kiss her, though. I don’t know, it was sort of weird. I wanted
to fuck her, but at the same time, I didn’t want to say another
goddamn word to her. And even though I smoked too, just the thought
of tasting her menthol cigarettes on my tongue nauseated me.

But Lee Anne was so hot, unlike any girl I’d
ever hooked up with in New York. Her hair was the color of a lemon.
She had hairless arms and milky white teeth. There were so many
stylish thready holes on her shorts that they revealed more than
they hid. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw pink panties
through one of the openings. Rock hard, I extended my arm toward
that hair and decided,
I’m gonna find out if she’s a real
blonde.

I was just about to kiss her when she asked,
“Do you have a girlfriend?”

I didn’t answer immediately. I thought about
it for a moment. I loved Maria. I really did. But at the same time,
I was jealous of all those boys she kissed. She was a year younger
than I was, yet she’d kissed more people than me. I detested the
thought. I also hated her friend, Guido. I kept thinking about
Maria cruising around in his goddamn car, laughing and joking with
her friends, her tits bobbling in her tight bikini top, and Guido
catching a peak of her cleavage in the rear-view mirror. I couldn’t
escape these memories of a time so long ago, a summer I wasn’t part
of. Her past was my present and there was no changing that.

I love her
, I kept saying to myself,
silently.
But maybe
, I thought,
if I kiss Lee Anne,
Maria’s past won’t hurt as much
.
I’ll just be replacing
Maria’s past with my own present. Nothing is wrong with just
kissing one more girl, a girl I knew I’ll never see again.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have one.” And,
without thinking a second thought, my tongue was twirling around in
her warm mouth, hers in mine. I yanked her bikini top off, and
exposed her perfect breasts. They were huge—even bigger than
Maria’s—and immaculate and chalky white, in contrast to her tan
body.

Like a piglet fighting his siblings for his
mother’s teat, I pressed my head into her bosom and sucked her
breasts not knowing where to begin or end. Leaning over, grunting
and groaning, I licked her stomach and poked her belly button ring
with my tongue. Desperate to impress her, but clueless as to why, I
slid my tongue up the middle of her belly, between her tits, and
ended by nibbling her chin.

As quickly as we’d begun, we stopped. I
figured that having sex with her in the stairwell was a crazy idea.
I’d already accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish. I wiped
her slimy red lip gloss from my face with the back of my hand,
kissed her on the cheek, and said good night. “Good night,” she
said with a smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

***

“What’s wrong, A.J.?”

That’s how Maria began our first phone call
after I returned from Virginia. Those words still echo in my mind.
I hadn’t even said anything yet, but she suspected something was
up. Of course, I was determined to conceal what had happened. I
hooked up with two more girls in the very next day, one in the
afternoon, one in the evening. Each was a member of a different
group of people hanging out there, so they didn’t know about Lee
Anne.

Vicki, a French-Canadian girl visiting the
beach all the way from Ottawa, was even sexier than Lee Anne. She
was also tall, almost my height, but with brown hair and blonde
highlights. But unlike Lee Anne, she was intelligent. I think she
said she wanted to be a doctor or something, I really can’t
remember.

The other girl’s name I forget. I think it
was something like Linda, or Melinda. Or it could have been Cindy,
I’m really not sure. She wasn’t too attractive, anyway. I’m not
into fat girls so I didn’t hook up with her for long. But it was
long enough to count.

So, by the time I’d returned to New York on
Tuesday evening, Maria and I had both kissed the same number of
people, and that was all that mattered. It was only a little white
lie. A venial sin. She didn’t need to know—not about the first
three, at least. In fact, I promised myself that if I ever cheated
on her again, then maybe I would tell her. Evening the score would
make me feel a lot better in the long run, I thought, especially
when I became jealous of her past. Whenever an image of Guido
popped into my head, or I thought about any of the guys she’d
hooked up with, I would just think of Lee Anne or Vicki, and forget
all about being jealous. I thought it was a pretty good plan.

In my mind, I was doing what I had to do. I
remember thinking:
I’ve actually matured. It’s not like I have a
back-up anymore.
See, before I met Maria, whenever I dated a
girl, I’d always have a back-up. Basically, I’d talk on the phone
with a girl that I knew liked me while I was dating somebody else.
That way, in case my girlfriend ever broke up with me, I could just
call up the other girl and ask her out. I can’t even remember
actually using a back-up. But I always had one, anyway. The last
time, of course, was when I was dating Lynn but working on
Maria.

I’m trying to think of the words to describe
how I felt about cheating on Maria. I really didn’t feel depressed.
I didn’t’ cry myself to sleep at night. Instead, I felt
frightened—frightened of myself, I think. I kept wondering what
else I was capable of doing to her. It was so easy to hook up with
Lee Anne, Vicki, and the other girl that I was afraid that someday
I’d break my promise to myself, and cheat on her again, and then
have to tell her. But I knew I had my reasons for cheating on her,
and I eventually forgot all about it.

When I arrived home from Virginia it was
pitch black outside. I ran up the stairs, fumbling with my
suitcase, trying to avoid the hunter. I hadn’t seen the hunter for
a while before that night. Of course, my shadow must of been there
all along; but I probably didn’t notice it. That’s all.
Nevertheless, the hunter reappeared that night. I guess that for
the few months prior I’d just forgotten about him.

For a moment—and I know this sounds
ridiculous—I almost thought he’d caught up with me. When I reached
the top step, I suddenly felt as if I was being pulled back, like I
was going to topple down the staircase. It was pretty scary. But, I
figured, it was just the weight of my suitcase pulling me back.

The first thing I did when I got to my room
and calmed down was call Maria. As the phone rang, I glanced over
at the World War II V-J Day poster on my wall. The aircraft is
depicted was sleek and dark; it was the type, I thought, that I’d
like to fly someday. Was it a North American T-6? A Supermarine
Spitfire IX? I made mental note to ask my father what model plane
it was, and to find out more about it. But before I had the chance
to do so, I heard Maria’s inquisitive voice.

“What’s wrong, A.J.?” Maria repeated. I was
still a bit shaken from almost falling down the stairs, and I
suppose she sensed it in my voice.

“Nothing, baby,” I said.

“Okay, but you sound a bit nervous.”

“It’s nothing, really. I just really missed
you. Did you miss me? You didn’t say that you missed me.”

“Of course I missed you, A.J. I was bored
here without you.”

“Did you flirt with any guys while I was
gone?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“What I mean is, did any guys flirt with you?
I’m just curious. You didn’t cheat on me did you?”

“No! Jesus, A.J.! What’s your problem?”

“Are you sure?” I asked. She seemed a little
defensive, so I became suspicious. “You didn’t talk to any boys
while I was gone?”

“No!” She was getting a little pissed off. I
kept wondering if she was hiding something. “You were gone for
almost a week and this is all you have to say when you call?”

Ignoring her logic, I pressed on. “So,” I
said, “you just sat at home all week, doing nothing?”

“I did the laundry,” she said. “Is that okay
with you, sir?”

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic.”

“Well you don’t have to be so nosy and
suspicious!”

“Please apologize for being sarcastic,” I
said.

She hesitated for a few moments. She said,
“Fine. I’m sorry. Happy?”

“Yes,” I said. “Me too. I just missed you a
lot, that’s all. Did you miss me? You didn’t say you missed
me.”

“Yes I did, A.J. I said it five minutes
ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. Next time say it
louder.”

Maria quickly changed the subject, and began
to ask me about Virginia. I told her it was nice, and that I had a
good time. There really wasn’t much to say.