“He was just mad,” Eric said. “He should have nailed me on that last shot, but the sun got in his eyes.”
“But he’s a senior. He should be more gracious. I bet you wouldn’t have thrown anything at him.”
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I mean, I was thinking how hard it must be on him because he always does the best. But you can see that he’s doing it for his father.”
“What do you mean?”
“His father’s all big and strong and sure of himself. Drew just wants to make him proud, and so losing to me like that means that everything else doesn’t matter at all.”
“How do you know all that?”
“You can see it in the way his father talks to him and the 1 0 4
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way he’s so serious. He makes Drew nervous. I bet if his father wasn’t there, he would have beat me easy.”
“And would you care?”
“Sure. I’d have to carry him around the track on my back.”
Christie laughed. Her voice sounded like chimes to Eric.
His erection came on without him knowing it.
“Whenever we go out he’s real worried about how I look,”
Christie whispered into the phone as if it were a big secret. “I can’t ever wear loafers or jeans when we’re on a date, even if it’s only at the pier.”
“Wow. That wouldn’t bother me. You’d look good in an overcoat and brogans.”
There were a few moments of silence then. Eric realized that there was something different in the way he felt. His mind wasn’t wandering away from the conversation. His attention was fully concentrated on Christie.
“Do you want to go get something to eat?” the senior asked.
“When?”
“Now.”
“I don’t have a license. I’m only fourteen, you know.”
“I have a car.”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“You won the match,” she said, and for the first time since Branwyn lived in the house with them, Eric felt his heart stutter.
At th e Pancake House Eric asked Christie about her aspirations for college. She’d been accepted to all the schools that Drew had and was making up her mind whether to go to the same school or one that was driving distance away.
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He wanted to know what she planned to study. Her strength was in science, but she loved poetry. T. S. Eliot was her favorite, “The Waste Land” in particular, but she worried that it might not be responsible to want to be a poet.
“Most kids in school never know what they want to be,”
Eric said. “I read an article once that the average college student changes majors three times, and a lot of them still take jobs in different fields from the ones they majored in.”
“You read that?”
“Yeah. In the Times. I like reading the paper in the morning . . . with my father.”
“Are you close to your father?”
Eric didn’t know what to say. He sat with Minas reading the paper every morning because his father liked the time together. The boy’s heart was thumping because of those violet eyes staring so intently at him.
“You want to take a drive with me?” Christie asked before Eric could formulate an answer about his father.
Th ey starte d k i s s i ng as soon as Christie parked at the lookout point in Topanga Canyon. Eric knew that he had never really kissed before that night. Christie told him that she loved Drew and so all they could do was kiss, but a moment later she was unzipping his pants. Eric thought of reminding her about just kissing, but instead, when he felt her cool fingers on his erection, all that came out was a deep, very masculine sigh. Christie echoed him in a higher register, and their kissing became more urgent.
She leaned back at one point and said, “Drew asked me to marry him and I said yes.”
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Eric nodded to show that he understood, but at the same time he thrust his pelvis forward, putting the straining erection near to her lips. She took it in her mouth and they both hummed.
When the boy came he roared out her name. She stared into his eyes, seeing both pain and gratitude. Her grip tight-ened until she worried that she might be hurting him, but she didn’t ease up or slow down.
After the tremors subsided, Christie lay down on top of Eric in the front seat.
“I’ve never met a guy like you, Eric Nolan,” she said, kissing the tip of his nose.
“Was that okay?” he asked.
“What?”
“I mean about Drew. You said we should just kiss.”
“That was like kissing,” she said. “I mean, we didn’t do it or anything.”
Eric noticed their breath misting chilly air.
“I think you should be a poet,” he said then. “I mean, people need poetry just as much as they need chemicals.”
Christie kissed him and reached down.
“You’re still hard,” she said, only slightly in awe.
“Let’s get in the backseat.”
She took her time rolling the condom down on his erection. He kissed the side of her neck and the cleft between her breasts while she did so. Eric felt awkward at first, but Christie didn’t seem to mind. She told him to be careful because she hadn’t had a lover so well endowed as he. When they came for the fourth time, they still shuddered as violently as the first.
“We shouldn’t do that again,” Christie told Eric the next night on the phone.
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“Okay,” he said, still feeling spent from the night before.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Isn’t that what you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you thinking I’m a slut who would do something like that with just anybody.”
“That was my first time,” Eric confessed. “I never even knew how wonderful it could be.”
“Oh. I didn’t know . . . you seemed like . . . I don’t know . . . experienced.”
“But we could see each other, right?” Eric asked. “I mean, we don’t have to do that. You know, I could ride my bike over.”
“Um . . . I think it would be better if we didn’t. You know, guys get kinda possessive after their first time.”
“Okay,” Eric said.
Christie didn’t reproach him this time.
“Well . . . I guess we should go,” she said.
“All right. Bye.”
For th e ne xt four nights Eric lay on his back in the bed for hours with his heart pounding and his mind on Christie.
He’d seen her in school three times. She always turned away when their eyes met. He didn’t know what he wanted more than to hold her again and to feel the release she gave him. He didn’t think he was in love. It was something else. Love for Eric had always been about smiling and swooning, about people who couldn’t live without each other. He lived without his mother and Branwyn too. He survived even when they took his brother away without a word of warning. He didn’t need anybody, but he sure wanted Christie.
That Friday, on the lunch court, Drew Peters confronted Eric.
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“I’m not apologizing to that little faggot because you didn’t really win,” the brooding boy said. Drew was a head taller than Eric and twenty pounds heavier, but the sophomore didn’t draw back.
“That’s your decision,” he said.
“It’s true,” Drew yowled. “The sun shined in my eyes.”
Eric noticed Christie on the other side of the court looking at him with a worried expression on her face. It was in that moment that his sleepless nights crystallized into knowledge. He could see that she was worried about him, not Drew. His heart began to race, and Eric took a deep breath to slow it down.
“The dog ate my homework,” Eric said, mimicking Drew’s whining. “My hand slipped.
I didn’t do anything.”
The quiver of the senior’s lower lip warned Eric. He was already ducking down when Drew threw the first punch. Missing completely, the senior stumbled. Eric’s blow connected with Drew’s chest. Then Drew hit Eric on top of the head.
Eric heard the finger snap and the cry of pain from the upper-classman. Then they fell into each other’s arms, wrestling and punching.
A sudden fear entered Eric’s mind. He didn’t want to be fighting. It wasn’t that he was afraid of being hurt but of the harm that might come from their fight. A moment later, Mr.
Lo, the gym teacher, was pulling them apart. Drew clutched his broken finger. Christie was looking directly at Eric.
S h e cal le d h i s house at four.
“Do you want to get together?” she asked.
“What about your boyfriend?”
“I’m still going to marry him.”
They made love in Branwyn’s old room, which had been left 1 0 9
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untouched since her death. Ahn was always away on Friday evenings, and Minas got home later every year. So they were alone from five that afternoon until late. Eric kissed Christie everywhere. She complimented his physique and his loving nature.
“No man has ever made me feel like this,” she said.
She confessed that she’d flirted with Mr. Mantel, the fired English teacher. Eric told her that Mantel was a grown man and should have known better than to proposition a student.
“How do you know so much?” she asked him.
“I don’t know a thing compared to you,” the fourteen-year-old said.
Christie put her hands over her breasts and said, “I’m still marrying Drew.”
“Can I still see you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and he kissed her covering hands.
She uncovered one nipple.
“You can’t tell anybody about us,” she said.
“That’s easy. I don’t know anybody.”
“You’re crazy. The whole class carried you off on their shoulders.”
Eric took the free hand and placed it on his erection. They both shuddered.
“Every time you call me I’m here,” he said. “I don’t talk to anybody but Limon, and nobody talks to him either.”
“But why don’t you have friends?” she asked. “You’re really handsome and friendly and smart.”
“I don’t know why,” he lied. “But I’m happy now because I never knew I could feel like this.”
At nine they went to dinner down in Santa Monica.
Over roasted chicken and lasagna, Christie told Eric that Drew had broken his finger and that the school suspended him for picking a fight with a sophomore.
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“They said that he’d be expelled unless he apologized to you.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“That he wouldn’t.”
“That’s stupid. He’ll lose his place in all those schools if he doesn’t.”
“His father won’t let him leave the house until he does.”
“That’s why you can be here with me?”
For some reason this embarrassed Christie. She ducked her head.
“You should call Drew and tell him that you talked to me and I said that he could tell the school that he apologized. If they ask me I’ll tell them he did.”
“You’d do that?”
“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.
Bruno knew everything abou
t them. Johnny Storm, the high-flying Human Torch; bashful Benjamin Grimm; Stretcho; and Suzie, the Invisible Woman. Every day he’d tell Thomas another story about their battles with Doctor Doom or the Mole Man. Bruno couldn’t read all the words, but his sister helped him sometimes. He told Thomas that in the old comics you didn’t need the words because the pictures told the story.
The worst thing about school was the sunlight in the first-grade classroom. He told Mr. Meyers that it hurt his eyes, but the teacher didn’t know what to do.
“We can’t put down the shades, Lucky,” he said. “Children need light.”
“You could get those green shades like the nurse has,”
Thomas suggested.
“I’m lucky if I get a budget for pencils,” Meyers replied.
The sadness he experienced in that bright room became so unbearable that on Thursday Thomas “Lucky” Beerman made a decision.
“I’m not comin’ to school tomorrow,” he told Bruno.
“How come?”
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“I’m not coming back anymore. I don’t like it here.”
“But where you gonna go?”
“Nowhere. Daddy goes to work every morning and doesn’t come back till late. He always goes out, and he doesn’t care ’bout what I’m doing.”
“But what if he stays home sometimes?”
“I’ll just go out in the back alley,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay back there.”
“Okay,” Bruno said as if the final decision was his. “An’ I’ll tell Mr. Meyers that your mother come and took you away.
An’ if they send a letter to your house from the school, we could get Monique t’read it and then th’ow it away.”
Th e ne xt morn i ng Thomas went out the front door and then through the hole in the fence a few houses down. That’s where his journey both ended and began. He climbed around the broken chunks of concrete in the middle of the road directly behind his house, and then he went through the thick bushes that had grown up along the sides. The alley was lower than the yards that abutted it, and so it was always wet from people watering their gardens and lawns.
On the first day Thomas saw lizards and a garden snake, three mice, one rat, and a family of opossums living in the incinerator. He saw crows, redbirds, one soaring hawk, and a bright-green parrot that had escaped from some cage, no doubt. The parrot made his home in an oak tree half in and half out of Thomas’s little valley.
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