“Every time you call me I’m here,” he said. “I don’t talk to anybody but Limon, and nobody talks to him either.”
“But why don’t you have friends?” she asked. “You’re really handsome and friendly and smart.”
“I don’t know why,” he lied. “But I’m happy now because I never knew I could feel like this.”
At nine they went to dinner down in Santa Monica.
Over roasted chicken and lasagna, Christie told Eric that Drew had broken his finger and that the school suspended him for picking a fight with a sophomore.
“They said that he’d be expelled unless he apologized to you.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“That he wouldn’t.”
“That’s stupid. He’ll lose his place in all those schools if he doesn’t.”
“His father won’t let him leave the house until he does.”
“That’s why you can be here with me?”
For some reason this embarrassed Christie. She ducked her head.
“You should call Drew and tell him that you talked to me and I said that he could tell the school that he apologized. If they ask me I’ll tell them he did.”
“You’d do that?”
“I don’t want your future husband to be a dishwasher.”
Christie and Eric saw each other at least twice a week until the end of the semester. All that time she warned him that she was going to marry Drew and live with him in the East. Eric didn’t mind. Now that he had experienced sex, he was aware of all the girls at school who wanted to be with him. When Christie left, he knew he would find somebody else.
And so he was surprised in the late summer when Christie came to his house crying.
They went out in the overgrown flower garden and sat on the marble bench there.
“What’s wrong?” Eric asked.
“I told Drew.”
“About us?”
“No. I told him that I wasn’t going to Yale with him.”
“Really? You’re not going to the East Coast?”
“No. I can’t leave you,” she said.
“But what are you going to do?”
“I’ll get a job at my father’s office and rent an apartment. Then we can spend more time together. I know you’re still in high school and you might not even want me, but I can’t go with Drew. I don’t love him. I haven’t since I saw you on the tennis court that day.”
Christie had on a small cranberry-colored dress. She stood up and took it off, revealing that she wore nothing underneath. It was four in the afternoon on a Friday. The sun was bright, and they were the only ones there. As they made love on the marble bench, Christie moaned and cried, dug her nails deep into Eric’s back, and begged him please, please, please.
“I’m yours,” she said at the door that evening, “if you want me.”
She drove off leaving Eric to think about the past semester. He wondered not about Christie but about Drew. The darkly handsome senior had everything before they tangled over Limon. Eric had borne no animosity toward the older boy. He hadn’t meant to take his girl away. On the school yard the boys had been civil. Drew appreciated Eric not making him apologize.
A week after his first night with Christie, she’d told him that Drew had seen a semen stain that Eric had made on the inside roof of the car.
“I told him that he made it, but you know his never shot out like yours does.”
Eric had felt embarrassed for Drew. He wasn’t competing. He just couldn’t say no to Christie’s surrender. He still couldn’t.
“Mine,” Eric said to himself, watching the red lights of Christie’s Honda recede down the street.
8
For three days six-year-old Thomas made his way to school using the abandoned alleyway. The gang of third-graders didn’t bother him anymore, and he loved the green, dewy wilderness of the walk. Going to school and coming home on the secret path were the highlights of his day.
But school itself was no better than on that first morning. The light in Mr. Meyers’s classroom still made him weep. He managed to keep everybody except Bruno from noticing. But the other children all thought that he was different, that he “talked like white people,” and that he was strange in other ways too.
Thomas had rarely watched television, not even very much with Eric. He never watched at all at his father’s house. He preferred looking at bugs and insects, and he fell a lot and lost his lunch money all the time and never completely understood what people were saying to him. And, worst of all, he seemed to have spells. On the playground at recess, he would sit by himself and close his eyes and talk even though there was nobody there.
“He talks to dead people,” Bruno said, sticking up for his friend.
But this only made the children more wary of the odd new “bug boy” that acted so weird.
The big boys picked on him, and the girls often screamed and ran if he came near. Mr. Meyers was bothered by the way he answered questions in class. The only good thing about school was Bruno and sometimes his sister, Monique, when she came to walk Bruno home after school.
Once in a while at lunchtime and recess, Bruno and Thomas would go to a far corner and talk about comic books. Bruno knew everything about the Fantastic Four. He studied them from old reprints and new comics that came out each month. At the library they had big hardback books that compiled the first issues released in the early sixties.
Bruno knew everything about them. Johnny Storm, the high-flying Human Torch; bashful Benjamin Grimm; Stretcho; and Suzie, the Invisible Woman. Every day he’d tell Thomas another story about their battles with Doctor Doom or the Mole Man. Bruno couldn’t read all the words, but his sister helped him sometimes. He told Thomas that in the old comics you didn’t need the words because the pictures told the story.
The worst thing about school was the sunlight in the first-grade classroom. He told Mr. Meyers that it hurt his eyes, but the teacher didn’t know what to do.
“We can’t put down the shades, Lucky,” he said. “Children need light.”
“You could get those green shades like the nurse has,” Thomas suggested.
“I’m lucky if I get a budget for pencils,” Meyers replied.
The sadness he experienced in that bright room became so unbearable that on Thursday Thomas “Lucky” Beerman made a decision.
“I’m not comin’ to school tomorrow,” he told Bruno.
“How come?”
“I’m not coming back anymore. I don’t like it here.”
“But where you gonna go?”
“Nowhere. Daddy goes to work every morning and doesn’t come back till late. He always goes out, and he doesn’t care ’bout what I’m doing.”
“But what if he stays home sometimes?”
“I’ll just go out in the back alley,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay back there.”
“Okay,” Bruno said as if the final decision was his. “An’ I’ll tell Mr. Meyers that your mother come and took you away. An’ if they send a letter to your house from the school, we could get Monique t’read it and then th’ow it away.”
The next morning Thomas went out the front door and then through the hole in the fence a few houses down. That’s where his journey both ended and began. He climbed around the broken chunks of concrete in the middle of the road directly behind his house, and then he went through the thick bushes that had grown up along the sides. The alley was lower than the yards that abutted it, and so it was always wet from people watering their gardens and lawns.
On the first day Thomas saw lizards and a garden snake, three mice, one rat, and a family of opossums living in the incinerator. He saw crows, redbirds, one soaring hawk, and a bright-green parrot that had escaped from some cage, no doubt. The parrot made his home in an oak tree half in and half out of Thomas’s little valley.