Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

And this feeling only got worse. One day she told me that her and her mom talked about a problem she had in school. I went ballistic. “Why were you talking to your mom about school?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I thought you confided in me about that stuff.”

“A.J., I tell my mom things, too.”

“Yeah, but who’s your best friend?”

“My best friend? I don’t know. My mother is, I guess”

“What do you mean? I think you’re my best friend. Not my mother. I’d take you over my mother any day. So, am I your best friend, or what?”

“A.J., what’s your problem?”

“I’m just saying that a girl can’t be best friends with her mother. I mean, your mother has to be your best friend, because she’s your mother.”

“Huh? You’re acting really weird, A.J. What’s wrong with you?”

What’s wrong with you? As those words echo in my mind, it’s hard to believe that they came from Maria’s lips, long before the shit hit the fan. She asked me that a lot, now that I think about it. I never bothered answering. I felt bad that I was barraging Maria with my questions. I really did. At the same time, it was almost as though she didn’t remember what had happened between us, and how much we’d shared. Maybe she did and I just didn’t notice it. I don’t know. I just changed the subject, hoping the feelings I had within me would just go away.

As always, for Labor Day Weekend, my parents and I drove down to my grandmother’s timeshare in Virginia. It was sort of my family’s house, meaning that my grandmother and my parents and sister, as well as my father’s entire family, all shared the place year-round. One time we went down there for Christmas, but we couldn’t go in the water because it was too damn cold. It was cool, though, to look out the window and see the waves crashing ashore as we sat around the fireplace.

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.