Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

Moments later, Lynn and I got in the closet and—bam!—we hooked up. It was astonishing. My hands grappled with her little tits as she squirmed and danced in sheer delight. Ecstatic about the sheer irony of the evening, I kept thinking: I’m at this party to get to know Jeff’s sister, and I’m fondling her better-looking best friend! Oh, what a feeling!

That one hook-up spelled the end of my short-lived relationship with Jeff’s sister. That was pretty obvious at the next school dance a month later, where she ignored me like the fucking plague.

But that next dance was where I really met Maria. Lynn and I had been dating for about four weeks by that point. I’d heard her mention Maria on the phone occasionally, but it wasn’t until the dance that I realized Lynn and Maria were good friends. Inseparable! And all I kept thinking was: How could Lynn like this bitch, this cunt who made fun of me at the last dance? I wanted to punch Maria for doing that to me; but, beginning that night, I wanted to kiss her even more. As crazy as it sounds, I liked her because she thought I was an asshole!

During the dance, Lynn wandered onto the gymnasium floor with Jeff and his sister. I didn’t feel like dancing at all, so I loitered all alone in the hallway. All of a sudden I was depressed. Guidos and hoods and preppies shucked and jived by with girls on their arms as I moped around in the hallway, staring at the beige and black-tiled walls surrounding me. Everyone was staring at me. Fright hit me like a bucket of cold water as I shivered with loneliness. I wanted to walk the hell out of that dance. I kept thinking: Maybe I’ll take the subway home and get mugged, and then Lynn’ll feel bad about abandoning me .

There was a person trailing me, a hunter. I felt him. At first in a brisk walk, I quickly picked up speed. I was being chased around my own school! Who the hell is it? I wondered. I ran up the stairs toward the coat check. I figured: If I get up the stairs quick enough, I’ll escape from this guy .

But as I reached the top of the stairs, I saw only my shadow.

I was scared for a just second more, and then the fear went away. Without warning, I was alone once again. Now less frightened, I sensed a presence. Of what, exactly, I didn’t know.

All I remember after that point is walking up and down the halls, doing nothing except looking behind me now and then. Talking to myself, wondering what to do now that Lynn was gone for a while, I thought about dancing with some other girl, just for the hell of it. But I really hated dancing. And besides, I had no idea how to ask a girl to dance. I always just somehow wound up doing it.

So I walked over to Zachary, the janitor at my school. Zachary was an Iranian immigrant. He’d see me after school, hanging out with my friends in the cafeteria or something, and he’d come over and ask us if we wanted some sloppy joes left over from lunch time. They served sloppy joes pretty much every day in high school.

So we’d eat the sloppy joes and all, even though they tasted like crap and caused diarrhea like a son of a bitch. We loved them, though. How often does somebody give you something for free, right? We all had a lot of respect for Zachary because of that. The poor guy, he didn’t have to give a shit about the kids that caused the messes he spent all day cleaning up. But he did. What a guy.

I approached Zachary in the hallway right in front of the girl’s bathroom. The school usually turned one of the boy’s bathrooms into a girl’s bathroom during the dances. He said to me something like: “Do you want me to open up the gym storage room so you can bring a girl in there?” I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him what he meant. He said that the gym storage room had all these soft mats inside, the kind we used when we worked out during Phys. Ed. I thought that was so cool. I mean, here was this lonesome immigrant janitor trying to help me get laid at the dance. As I said: What a guy!

Then, suddenly: Fate.

Just as I was about to tell him that my girlfriend was M.I.A., I spotted Maria coming out of the bathroom. She was so beautiful, I almost cried. I remember thinking: e ven better-looking than Rachel, the girl who whacked me off just down the hall . Mounds of sleek black hair draped over her bosom and down her back. Don’t ask me why, but I felt compelled to make her like me. Rachel and Lynn and Jeff’s fat sister and all these other girls had fallen all over me left and right, but here was this one girl who hardly paid attention to me. The night we first met, all she’d noticed was my open fly.

One month later, Maria didn’t even see me as she exited the bathroom. As sick as it sounds, that drove me wild.

Disregarding Zachary’s suggestion, I grabbed Maria by the shoulder with my sweaty fingers. She yelped out—“Uh!”—like I was assaulting her. At that moment, I guess, all I wanted to do was make Zachary think she was my girlfriend. In the back of my mind, however, something else was transpiring: I was making Maria mine.

I let go of her and she looked at me, startled as all hell. Even though we were a few feet apart I could feel her heart pounding. A vein in my temple beat like a drum. Before she had a chance to speak, I placed my arm around her shoulder as if she was my lover. I admit it: I was really turned on after all the commotion. She was so hot and startled that I wanted to kiss her right then and there in the goddamn hallway in front of the janitor.

Zachary winked at me and nodded as if to say “good for you,” and went back to mopping the floor. But he managed to catch a glimpse of her cleavage, the horny bastard.

Maria was wearing a low-cut scoop-neck blouse—a black one, I remember. God, her tits were enormous. How she managed to walk upright with those things hanging off her I’ll never know. I loved standing there with her in my arm for that brief second, like she really was my girlfriend. I almost started to bawl, however, when I realized that she wasn’t really mine, that she, in fact, hated me.

I pulled her near the wall and began explaining that I was only trying to impress the janitor. I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let me just explain!”

Maria was still panting, scared and out of breath. Each time she inhaled, I felt as if her soft breasts were getting closer to my face. But they weren’t. At least I have her attention , I thought, at least she’s not running away .

I explained to her, repeatedly and with bated breath, why I grabbed her, because she didn’t seem to get it. We shared a long, quiet, private moment. As I gazed into her eyes, I inhaled her beauty. She’s so lovely , I thought. Maria had the kind of eyes that sparkled in pitch darkness. She had soulful eyes that were searching—for a friend, for a confidant, for something—but to no avail. They reminded me of the eyes of this cartoon dog I used to watch when I was a kid, the way they drooped.

On the surface, she was just another slutty Guidette at the dance. But despite her tight, stylish clothing, she looked somewhat conservative that night. Any clothes covering Maria’s fabulous body at all made her look like a virtuous lady rather than a bimbo, just as a snow-white wedding dress turns a whore into a princess.

After she relaxed a bit, when she finally understood what I was saying about Zachary, Maria gazed up at me with her tremendous eyes like a little girl lost in a big mall who had just located her daddy. She pulled away from me briskly, and, in a frighteningly monotonous voice, said:

“Christ, you’re a maniac.”

I remember the exact thought penetrating my cranium as Maria said that to me: jet airplanes piercing the night sky. When I get excited to the point of bliss I always think about jets. Not commercial airliners like Boeing 747s. I mean real jets, the kind used in war.