Little Boy (10 page)

“There will be time,” I said to her,
nonchalantly.

“Time for what?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about how
I’d like to kiss you.” And I smiled. She didn’t respond, opting to
smile back at me.

I didn’t know what else to say, really. We’d
been talking for several hours, but I was stuck for a moment. Don’t
get me wrong—it was a comfortable silence. But I had to think of
something quick. I wanted to know so much about her. Her hopes, her
dreams, her fears. Everything. I wanted to be an expert on Maria,
earn a doctorate of her mind. And I wanted her to love me for my
curiosity.

Desperate for something to break the silence,
my mind began wandering. And then a question hit me: I wondered,
Does she come her with other guys?
Briefly—ever so briefly—I
hated even the thought that she may have had a boyfriend besides
me. And I wasn’t even her boyfriend!

“So tell me about your boyfriends,” I asked
her.

“What boyfriends?” she said with a contempt
for the question. But we had talked so much that day, and revealed
so much, that I couldn’t help but press on. I needed to know
more.

“You know, tell me, have you had a lot of
boyfriends?”

“Well, not really,” she said. “I’ve never
really had a boyfriend.”

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.