Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

And hoods—forget about it! The worst thing about hoods is that they thought they were normal. They didn’t realize—actually, worse: they didn’t care—that they were a bunch of followers. Not only was Maria a beautiful Italian Princess, but she hated the two things I hated most. In the endless sea of adolescent negativity, we discovered that we had two crucial dislikes in common. How ironic.

My ears stood at attention and I knew I’d struck gold. What a break! I thought. The hardest part of getting acquainted with any girl was discovering some mutual interests. Already, we had important things in common.

I could always tell a good joke to get a girl’s attention, but anything beyond that was excruciatingly difficult to conjure up. Stuff that came so naturally to the hoods and jocks—the small talk, the chit-chat, the shit that followed “sup”—was a pain in the ass. I was a good conversationalist, but the trouble was in getting one started with people, especially girls, most of whom couldn’t care less about current events outside the newest shade of lipstick. Without realizing it, Maria had opened up a door to my true personality. It wouldn’t be the last such time.

“You don’t like dancing?” I practically yelled out to her. “Jesus, I despise dancing.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t despise it. I just don’t like it, okay?”

I was in heaven. This information hit me like a punch in the chest. I stood there silently for a few moments, in awe. You really don’t understand how hot dancing was, and how rare it was for someone to dislike it. When I look back on it now, I still think how amazing that one thing was.

She started to look bored, so I asked her what else she didn’t like. Maria thought it was a pretty dumb question, I could tell, so she didn’t really bother answering it. But even though she looked bored, she was sexy. Very sexy.

“Well, what I mean is, why don’t you like to dance?”

“It’s not that I hate to dance, it’s just that I hate it when I meet these stupid hoods and all they want to do is dance. I can’t meet a guy and start to like him that way. I have to talk with him first, and then I know if I want to dance with him.”

I wanted to propose to Maria right then and there. She wanted to talk first! I couldn’t believe it! What a stroke of luck. It was time to go in for the kill.

“So,” I said, “we’re talking right now, aren’t we?” That’s why I grabbed you before—I really wanted to talk to you before I asked you to dance.”

“But…” she said with a perplexed look on her face, and didn’t bother to finish. She restarted: “Well, we can talk, but I can’t dance with you because you’ re going out with Lynn. And you also like Jeff’s sister.”

Now this I couldn’t believe. Somehow, I had gone from speaking to Jeff’s sister on the phone to liking her.

“But I don’t like her!” I demanded. I had to get that crazy thought out of her head.

“Well, whatever, but you’re going out with my friend. And if you don’t like Jeff’s sister, then you’re a jerk for leading her on.”

She had me there. I was dating Lynn, and I did lead Jeff’s sister on. What could I say? I certainly couldn’t tell her that I didn’t really like Lynn, and that I didn’t plan on dating her for long anyway, because that would’ve made me look like an asshole. So I did the next best thing.

“But Lynn and me had a fight tonight,” I said. “And I don’t think we’ll be dating much longer.”

She didn’t believe me at first, but I pressed on and convinced her that Lynn and I did have a fight, even though I just hadn’t seen her in a while. It was only a little temporary lie, because I was angry with Lynn, and the next time I saw her, I was going to tell her how pissed off I was for leaving me alone at the dance. Hence the fight.

“Listen,” she said, “we can talk, but that’s it.” I was happy. I knew that once we started talking, and once I was on a roll, I could probably dance with her, or even get her phone number.

So we started to talk right there in the stairwell. We’d been talking for a few minutes already, of course. But now we were conversing ; now we were the only two teenagers at the dance actually talking and learning from one another. I told her about my love affair with jets, and that I was thinking about entering the Air Force Academy, which was only half-true. I couldn’t just join the Air Force. I wanted to become a pilot at the Academy in Colorado, and to do that you had to undergo a long, grueling application process.

”You remind me of the Curtiss P-40B monoplane fighter,” I said. I told her all about what it looked like, and how well it maneuvered. She was pretty impressed, not really because she looked like a plane, but because I actually knew what I was talking about. I wasn’t acting phony like all the other guys I knew. I figured if she likes my conversation, she’d like me. But I wasn’t about to make believe I was into something I wasn’t—like dancing, for example—just to impress her. This was a first in my otherwise boring teenage life: For a moment, I felt the best way to impress her was to tell her the truth . If only for a night, the door to my heart was open; only honesty could coax her into peeking inside.

We talked and talked and talked. The tension on Maria’s face melted off and gave way to a gentle, easy smile. We talked about the movies we liked and the sports we played and the music we listened to. It was the usual stuff, for the most part. But we were actually having a conversation, we weren’t just going through the motions of one. That conversation spawned a discussion, one between two mature, interested adults, not two high school kids.

She was flirtatious, and smart. “You look just like Al Pacino,” she said.

I wondered: Is that good?

I said: “You tawkin’ ta me? You must be talkin’ to me. I don’t see anyone else around.” Maria squinted her eyes and shook her head every so slightly. “Do you know who said that?”

“Yea,” I said, “Al Pacino in Raging Bull.”

Now she was squinting so hard she looked Chinese. And then: like a machine gun, she fired: “First of all, ya stunad , it’s Al Pacino I was tawkin’ about, and second, that’s not from Raging Bull. And third, that was Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver .”

“Are you sure?”

“About which one?”

“All of them.”

“I watch the movie with my father like every weekend,” she insisted.

“Which one? Raging Bull?”

“No!”

“Then why’d you mention Raging Bull?”

“I didn’t, you did!”

“I don’t get it.”

“Oh my goodness!” Maria exclaimed.

I was sort of playing with her, but I admit she

knew more about movies than me.

“I know you’re not a moron,” she said, as if she knew what I was feeling at that moment. “I’m just messin’ with you.”

What made Maria even smarter is that she wasn’t just one, but two grades behind me. A freshman. I thought that was weird, because she hung out with sophomores like Jeff’s sister. I asked her if she was left back a grade or two, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it, so I let it drop. Things were going so well, and I was so surprised that she’d told me so much already, that I didn’t want to ruin the momentum.

“You know something,” I said, “you’re beautiful.” I nudged her chin with my finger, the way my father used to nudge me when he called me Butch. Maria giggled.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said.

I was in heaven. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Both, actually. And we swung our arms, back and forth, in and out, joyfully like children.