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  “Is Julie okay?”

  “I guess so, George. See you later. Pick up a loaf of bread on the way over. Italian bread.”

  “Understood.” I hung up.

  Chapter 4

  Julie’s father took another serving of lasagna and passed the dish to me. “Thanks, Mr. Walsh.” He had his cuffs rolled back so you could see the blue snake tattooed around his wrist, the head on the inside curling toward his palm.

  “Is it good, George?” Beth said.

  “Why do you ask him?” Julie said. “He’ll eat anything. Ask me.”

  Beth had made supper. She was four years older than Julie and completely different. Beth never stopped joking, and she was totally uninterested in school. (“I was lucky to get out of high school alive.”) She worked nights at Sperry Products as a packer.

  “It’s really good, Bethy,” Julie’s mother said.

  “You should see the timbers we pulled out of that building today.” Mr. Walsh held out his arms. “Twenty-four inches across.” He did demolition work in the city. There was a picture of him in the hall showing him standing high in an empty window on the side of a building, wearing his safety hat and goggles and holding a wrecking bar. He tore down buildings during the day, and at night he’d sit in his reclining chair and read history.

  Julie was proud of her father, but, for no reason I could ever understand, she was always arguing with her mother. I liked both Julie’s parents. Her mother was friendly, relaxed, an unpretentious person. Mrs. Walsh worked in a sports club, and Julie and I used her free court time a lot.

  “They put a new man on the clam,” Mr. Walsh was saying, “and I had to snake timbers around all day.”

  I liked hearing Mr. Walsh talk about his work. I sometimes thought about apprenticing myself to him. We’d go to work together every day in our jeans and work boots, carrying lunch pails. I’d work hard, develop my muscles, sweat a lot. I’d shower every day when I got home. Julie and I would be married, and I’d want to smell good for her. We could live with her parents at first.

  I touched shoulders with Julie. Did she know what I was thinking? I leaned against her, but she didn’t press back. I didn’t think anything of it then, just went on fantasizing about being married to her, living with her family. We all got along. We’d gone places together lots of times. Sundays, when my father liked to relax at home with music and his shoes off, Julie’s dad liked to drive around, usually over to the city.

  We never drove through the Lincoln Tunnel without my thinking it was going to spring a leak, so I was always glad when Mr. Walsh drove over to the city on the G. W. Bridge. That way, you saw the river down below, the skyline of the city, and the bridge itself, cables against the blue sky, like a skeleton, every bone and sinew in perfect tension and harmony.

  In the city Mr. Walsh would take the West Side Highway downtown. Julie and I would always try to spot their house on the other side of the river. Sometimes we’d go over to the Museum of Natural History. Or we’d walk around the park. People everywhere on the grass and rocks. It was like going to the shore. Wall-to-wall bodies. And watch your step! Dogs and dog droppings. I never got that excited about New York.

  Julie, though, loved the city. She was always discovering things. I remember one day in the park, she found a wooden pavilion way up on some high rocks. Her parents didn’t want to make the climb, so the two of us scrambled up and sat in the pavilion with the sun in our faces and talked about the kind of house we’d live in someday.

  “Julie.” Her mother looked at her watch. “I have to go to work.” She had on a tan jogging suit with the logo of the club on the pocket. “Do you mind cleaning up tonight?”

  Julie was up like a shot. “I’m gone,” she said, and she left.

  “You’ll help her, won’t you, George?”

  “Understood.”

  Mrs. Walsh passed me the bread basket. “What colleges are you applying to, George?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “Are you applying to the same schools as Julie? I think it would be nice if you kids end up in the same school.”

  “Why?” Julie said.

  “The first year of college is hard, honey. It’ll help if you know someone.”

  “Don’t you think I can make friends?”

  “What are you getting upset about? Of course I do.”

  “You don’t sound like it. You sound like you think I need George as my nursemaid.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Julie.”

  “No?”

  “All right, you two,” Julie’s father said. “I want a peaceful supper. Mary, how’s your knee?”

  “It bothered me when I ran.” She glanced over at Julie, who was frowning down at her plate.

  “You told me you weren’t going to run every day.”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” Mrs. Walsh said. “I feel like such a slug if I don’t do something.” She touched Julie’s hand. “I don’t want us to be fighting, honey. I just want you to be smart and happy. You and George—”

  “Mom!” Julie’s face was on fire. “Stop deciding my life for me.”

  There was a tense silence. Then Julie’s mother sighed. “Let’s talk about something else. Apple pie and French vanilla ice cream for dessert. I know George is one taker. Who else? Chuck?”

  “When did I ever pass up dessert?”

  “Julie?”

  “No, thanks.” She got up and started clearing the dishes.

  Later, while Julie and I were doing the dishes, she got going on her mother. “She acts like she knows my future. Mary and her crystal ball. Go to the same college George is going to. Where does she get that stuff?” She dipped a glass in the sudsy water. “She doesn’t know where I’m going, she doesn’t know what I’m going to do. What if I don’t even want to go to college?”

  “Don’t you?” I put a dish away in the cupboard.

  “Of course I do. You know I’m premed. But what if I change my mind? Maybe I’ll go into something else. Something I haven’t even thought of yet. Maybe I’ll be an actress! My mother thinks my life is going to be just like hers. A little bit of school, then get married to George, have kids, bring them up, get a job, go from one day to another day, mess around in my kids’ lives the way she does. God!”

  “Julie. Your mom just wants things to be good for you.”

  “Great! And I just want to strangle her. But I’m going to do what I want to do, no matter what she says.” Julie looked over at me and smiled, faintly. “Right?”

  “You know, you could talk to her a little bit more, though, the way you do to your father.”

  “The voice of reason,” Julie said.

  “Well.…”

  She sighed and leaned against me for a moment. “No, you’re right. You’re a nicer person than I am, George.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes, you are,” she insisted. “You don’t fight with your parents. You’re loyal, you’re not like me.”

  There was something about the way she was looking at me that scared me. She said I was one way and she was another, that we were somehow divided. Dividable. And a moment later, she said it.

  “You know,” she said. “I’m sure you know.… George, we’re not going to be together forever.”

  People always said things like that. You’re young. Things change. Things aren’t going to stay the way they are. I heard the words, I knew what they meant, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  I pulled Julie around and looked at her face. I held her tightly and thought, I must have kissed those lips ten thousand times. And I knew that I could kiss them ten thousand more times and never get tired of it.

  The first time we ever kissed was on the cliff. We were thirteen years old. It was our place by then, not just Julie’s. Below the platform, we’d found a level spot where we were making a garden. That day we’d slid down to the garden and were working on chopping steps into the slope up to the platform.

  It was a hot day. No wind. I had my shirt off. Jul
ie’s face was shiny with heat. She had her shirt tied up in front. Sweat was running down my face and my neck. “Oh, are you wet,” Julie said.

  “How about you?”

  “Whew.” She fanned her face and sat down with her back against the cliff. “I’m sweaty, too.”

  I sat down next to her. We looked at each other and kissed. Then we looked out over the river. A hot wind stirred the leaves around us. Far below there was the hum of traffic and machines, and the river like a leaden, silent snake.

  Our lips touched again.

  “George,” she said. “What does it make you feel like?”

  I wiped Julie’s face with my T-shirt. Then I wiped her neck and under her shirt. “Why don’t you take that off?” I said. My voice stuck in my throat.

  “Take off my shirt?”

  “You have a bra on.” She took off her shirt. She was wearing a white bra. We kissed again, wet, salty kisses. My lips slid around her mouth. I put my hands on her bare shoulders. I was surprised how bony they were.

  “No hands,” Julie said and we put our hands behind our backs. For the rest of the summer, that was the way we kissed—without shirts and no hands.

  For a long time, the cliff was the only place we kissed. Sometimes we’d kiss for what seemed like hours, kissed and talked. We felt we were extraordinarily mature. We were handling things. Sex wasn’t taking us over.

  “We could be friends and not kiss,” Julie said one day.

  “No, that wouldn’t be as good.”

  She agreed. “We can do both, be friends and kiss. And we’ll tell each other things about how we feel. It’ll be like a science course.”

  “All right, students,” I said, “our lesson today is sex. What is the purpose of sex? Why is there sex? Why do we have male and female? Julie Walsh, you have your hand raised. Why do we have male and female?”

  “So we can have kissing.”

  “Correct!”

  By the end of the next summer, when we kissed, Julie was taking off her bra. This is the way it happened. One day, she said, “Wait.” She turned her back and unsnapped the bra. I watched her, my eyes fixed on the slope of her shoulders, her elbows jutting out, her shoulder blades outlined against her back. She turned around. “What do you think?”

  There was her face. And there were her breasts. I couldn’t speak. I had seen breasts in magazines, but this was the first time I’d seen the real thing on a real girl. And it wasn’t any girl, it was Julie.

  Kissing her like that was hypnotic. The feeling was so thick and intense it made me dizzy. We were close, closer than we’d ever been, but I wanted to be closer. Wanted to slide down on the ground with her. Wanted more.

  My pants were stained when we stopped. She noticed. She said, “Let’s never do this again.” But her cheeks were shining and her lips were shining like red candies. “We’re not going to do anything dumb. Are we, George?” Her eyes were large, bright, as if there were a light shining from behind them, a light fixed on me, searching my face and my mind and reaching into my heart.

  It was that look, that shining light in Julie’s eyes, that kept me from doing “anything dumb.” We could wait. I could wait. I could wait for as long as I had to for Julie, and I wouldn’t love her any less or any more for waiting.

  “You know what I’m thinking about?” I said now, standing in her kitchen, my lips against her hair. “I’m thinking about the first time we kissed.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “You think we’ll ever forget it?”

  “We were just dumb kids.”

  “Not so dumb. We knew something about us, something we still know.”

  She moved away from me and felt around in the water for another dish. “George, we’re not twelve years old anymore.”

  “There are some things that never change,” I said. “You and I are never going to change.”

  “Oh, George, do you really believe that? How can you? Everything changes.” She was facing the window, not looking at me, peering out into the dark.

  I kissed her neck.

  “Not now,” she said.

  “Yes, now.” I pulled her against me, kissed her until she kissed me back and her cheeks were shining and red the way they’d been the first time we kissed.

  Chapter 5

  “You should have heard Marsha Feldman today in the cafeteria,” my sister said.

  I had my head in the freezer, trying to decide between macaroni and cheese, or chicken pie.

  “She started on me, ‘You know, Joanne, you think you’re so clever all the time.’”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Maybe chicken pie. Last night had been macaroni. Most nights, supper came straight from the freezer into the microwave. By the time my mother got home, all she wanted to do was grab a tray and collapse in front of the TV.

  “And so I said to her, ‘Look, Marsha, you call yourself my friend—’”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” I said. On the other hand, chicken pie was so boring.

  Joanne punched me in the back. “Hey!” I turned around. To look at my sister, you’d think her bones were made of water, but she packed a good punch. “What was that for?” I said.

  “For not listening. ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’” She was wearing pink tights and green shorts, had her hair in pigtails. “You can’t fool me, George. You weren’t listening.”

  “Very good, very good,” I said. “Attack, attack. That’s the first rule of a good defense. Strike the first blow.” I’ve been teaching Joanne the basics of self-defense. She’s twelve years old and twice as smart as anybody in our family, but she doesn’t use her body enough. She spends too much time reading and sitting in front of her computer.

  “You know, George, you don’t listen when I’m talking.”

  “Joanne, I was thinking about what I’m going to eat—”

  “No, you don’t pay attention, you don’t care how I feel.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive, Joanne.”

  “I’ll stop being sensitive when you stop being dense.”

  I danced around her on my toes, shadow-boxing. “In the ring, ladies and gentlemen, in the khaki chinos, we have Tricky Dense. And in the pink tights, So Sensitive, two able opponents. This is a fifteen-round championship fight. No punching below the belt, no clinching, no hanging on, and may the best hu-man win.” I thought that would get a smile out of Joanne, but she stood there, frowning at the floor.

  “You know, today I had two different-colored ribbons in my hair, and Marsha said it was too cute for words. Why does she say things like that?”

  “Probably jealous. Isn’t her hair short?”

  “It’s cute, very cute. I’m stuck with these dopey braids.” She grabbed a braid and made snipping motions.

  “Mom doesn’t want you to cut your hair.”

  “I think that’s ridiculous. It’s my hair.”

  I decided on the macaroni, after all, and put it into the microwave. “You going to eat?”

  “I’m not thinking about food right now. I have other things on my mind.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There you go again! You don’t know anything about women, do you, George?”

  “I didn’t know we were talking about women.”

  “Hilarious!” She walked out.

  “Don’t go away mad,” I called after her. She didn’t answer. I took the macaroni out of the microwave, poured soda into two glasses, got a couple of forks and napkins, put it all on a tray, and brought it up to Joanne’s room.

  She was in front of her computer. “Go away.”

  “Peace. I bring food. And a fork so you can share my macaroni.”

  “Okay, in a minute.”

  I sat down on her bed and ate and watched her. Joanne had had a PC since she was nine years old and it became clear to Mom and Dad that she and computers had a special relationship. My sister was one of those computer whiz kids. She was never far from that machine. I didn’t have any doubt that computers were in her future. Anything in our house that was elect
ronic and beeped and burped and sometimes talked back belonged to my sister. She was probably a genius, and it was either going to make her rich someday or get her locked up. My hunch was she’d make a million before she was thirty.

  For Joanne’s birthday a few weeks before, Mom and Dad had updated her computer and bought her a modem. She had figured out how to use it in a few hours, and overnight got herself a computer pal in California, a kid named Kevin. For two weeks, the two of them were playing cross-country computer chess. Then the phone bill came in and Dad flipped.

  “Joanne, you can’t do this to me. You want to send me to the poorhouse?”

  “Dad, you can afford it,” she said.

  “No, young lady. And neither can you. When you earn your own money, then you can spend it any way you want.”

  “All right, I’ll restrict my communication to local access,” she said. That was real hacker talk. Hackers didn’t talk English. They talked Computer.

  “You want some of this macaroni or not?” I said.

  “Hold it.” Her fingers were going a mile a minute.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Chatmode.”

  There were a bunch of cheeps and squeaks coming from the computer. It sounded like she was talking to chipmunks. I went over and watched her. She typed, “WERE YOU IN SCHOOL TODAY? I DIDN’T SEE YOU.”

  Back came the answer: “I DIDN’T SEE YOU, EITHER. WHERE WERE YOU?”

  “I CAME IN LATE,” Joanne typed. “DID YOU DO THE HIDEOUS HOMEWORK?”

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  “Ernie Paik. He’s in my UG. User Group,” she added before I could ask. “ERNIE, DID YOU SOLVE PROBLEM IO?”

  “JOANNE, I THOUGHT YOU’D GET IT EASY.” An algebraic formula appeared on the screen.

  I leaned over Joanne’s shoulder, put my paws on the keys, and typed, “ERNIE PAIK, HI, THIS IS GEORGE. I ALWAYS MEANT TO ASK IF YOU HAVE A SISTER IN HIGH SCHOOL.”

  “NO. AN AUNT.”

  “LILLIAN?”

  “YES. SHE PLAYS THE FLUTE IN THE ORCHESTRA, DO YOU LIKE HER, GEORGE?”

  “SHE’S A GOOD KID. SHE’S IN MY AMERICAN HISTORY CLASS.”