Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

I used to call him up a lot. Especially the night before a big math test to ask him to teach me everything he knew that I didn’t. I never had anything to teach him, though, because he always paid attention in math class and I rarely did. And he used to take all these extra math classes—really hard ones, too—so that he could have some college credit when he graduated high school. But I must have been pretty smart to have gotten the same sort of grades he did, when I didn’t even pay attention half the time. Looking back on it now, I don’t even know why I paid attention at all in high school. I mean, I worked my ass off most of the time, especially before a test, and got good grades. But what the hell was the difference, because, in the end, nobody gives a shit about high school grades anyway.

At the time, though, I did care. Grades were only of slightly secondary importance to girls. When I slacked off in school, Paul was always there to help me out. And because we were good friends, and because he always helped me with math, he was the first person I told about getting Jeff’s sister’s phone number. But like I said, I didn’t mention that it was Jeff’s sister at all.

I still can’t believe Paul lied about dating those girls. I mean, one little white lie is okay, but making up entire relationships was another. It only gave me more ammunition to use against him, more things to make fun of him with. He was one sorry bastard, that Paul. But he’s doing okay now. He got a summer job with some big company in the city. He’s out there, working hard, doing what he always wanted to do. He’ll graduate from college a year early, I’m sure, because of all those extra classes he took in high school.

A few days after the dance I called Jeff’s sister. By then I’d figured that at the very least I could get to know other girls through her. Everybody knows that ugly girls usually hang out with hot ones. You can’t blame them, though. When all you got is dog food, you’d better hang out with filet mignon. Naturally, sexy girls attract the better-looking guys. Why not hover around that sort of magnet?

I might’ve felt bad about using Jeff’s sister to get girls, but I figured what the hell. As Kyle and I always say, we don’t make these rules, we just abide by ’em.

And besides, at that point in high school, I didn’t have that much experience with girls, and I needed all the help I could get. I’d made out with a few, probably six or seven, and that was better than average among my friends. But I’d never had sex before.

Sex .

S-E-X!

The word itself sounds so exciting to me. It’s a goal that everyone knows he’ll eventually reach. It’s just a matter of when ; and, more importantly, how . So much of high school was spent pondering these two concepts—when and how to have sex—that I hardly remember thinking of much else.

I knew a lot of guys at school had done it already, but not most of them for sure. I despised the bastards that would loaf around before class discussing the details of their latest score: Where’d you meet the girl? At a bar? A club? Was she buzzing? Drunk? Bullshit like this surrounded me daily throughout high school. What’s weird is that I loathed the guys who didn’t get laid—the losers, the nerds, the Pauls—almost as much as I hated the assholes who did. And yet, in a sense, I always sort of wished I could be like both. It was easy to be either of those two extremes, it seemed, and difficult as hell to find that elusive middle.

Wait , I thought. No way in hell was I going to call Jeff’s sister. She’d have to call me. Oh sure, she didn’t have my number, but I didn’t give a shit about that. I knew that she liked me enough to somehow get it after I waited for a while. Sure enough, about five days later she called.

Actually, it wasn’t her, but her friend, Lynn. It turned out that Lynn was silent yet present at the dance. She said she’d seen me in the stairwell, as Maria pointed to my crotch, but we hadn’t talked other than hello. When she described what she looked like—tall, greasy, tons of make-up—though she didn’t use those words—I vaguely remembered seeing her, too. So I spoke with Lynn at first, because Jeff’s sister was too nervous to talk to me. Frightened’s more like it.

Lynn and I talked for about ten minutes. The usual B.S.: “What music do you listen to?” “Are you a Yankees or a Mets fan?” That sort of thing. And every once in a while, I’d hear cackles and gasps in the background as Jeff’s sister whispered to Lynn, trying desperately to conceal her nervous laughter and listen in. Finally, Jeff’s sister got on the phone and we talked for a while. Long story short, she bored the living shit out of me. I don’t remember if it was Lynn or Jeff’s sister, but one of them gathered the guts to invite me to Jeff’s party the following weekend. I said I would come and got the hell off the phone, confused. Hooray! Two girls called me! Fuck: I don’t want to go!

What could be worse than dancing the night away with the Jeff and his pudgy sister at that high school dance? Dancing the night away with Jeff and his sister in Jeff’s basement, that’s what.

That following week was hell. Each day Jeff would ask me if I liked his sister, if I wanted to date his sister, yada, yada, yada. I was dying to tell Jeff that the only difference between him and his sister was he had bigger tits and shorter hair.

I didn’t know how to respond to Jeff’s persistence, so I pretty much ignored him. I was already contemplating the prospect of dating Lynn, believe it or not. Although I hardly remembered what she looked like, I knew that the laws of teenage friendship mandated that she be better-looking than Jeff’s sister. And one member of Jeff’s orbit of friends, I recalled, reminded me of a horse the night of the dance, if only for a brief moment during her laugh. Was Lynn the sexy, super-tall girl that hee-hawed when Maria embarrassed me? I hankered for answers to this and other questions. I thought about speaking to Jeff about Lynn. But he was so high on me dating his sister that I had to maintain his friendship to get closer to Lynn. Pissing him off was the last thing I needed to do.

My inquiries could have aroused suspicion and Jeff might’ve uninvited me to his party, right? But that’s what I thought I wanted—until I became fixated with Lynn. And it wasn’t so much that I liked Lynn—hell, I hardly remember what she looked like—but I knew that she liked me, and that was all that mattered. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Lynn’s phone call was not a girly front for her fat friend but an implicitly flirtatious petition for my presence at the party. Lynn knew she was prettier than Jeff’s sister. And man, did she have me by the balls. It’s kind of sick to think about in retrospect, that for the entire week, as Jeff’s sister probably grew more enamored with me by the moment, I was simultaneously falling for Lynn, and her, probably, for me.

Fast forward to the party the following weekend: Surprise, surprise, I wound up hooking up with Lynn. I couldn’t believe it. We played this game called Seven Minutes in the Closet, where somehow a guy and a girl wound up being put in this closet together, while everyone else waited outside, wondering if the chosen two were making out.

First I got in the closet with Jeff’s sister. I didn’t do a goddamn thing but feel nauseous. “So, whaddaya wanna do?” she kept pestering me, with a nasaly voice that warranted no less than death by strangulation. Desperate to evade her paws, I jammed my finger up my nose in an effort to disgust and hopefully repel her. But she tried to kiss me anyway! “Bitch, I got my finger up my nose!” I said. Or at least I wanted to say that. Luckily, the seven minutes transpired quickly and the door flung open to a gasping crowd which included not only Jeff, but Lynn, too.