There was a knock at the front door late one Sunday afternoon, and I was surprised to open it and find Cheryl Buksas, along with another girl I didn’t recognize, standing on the porch. My heart jumped; I was still quite smitten with Cheryl, and having her at my door, looking at me, was suddenly the high point of my day. The two girls sort of hopped around on the porch, glancing knowingly at each other and giggling. They had a note for me, they said. They were supposed to stand there while I read it, and bring back an answer.
I opened the note and read it:
Dearest Bill.
I really like you. Do you like me too? If you do, please put an X in the box.
Bye for now, Luann.
At the bottom of the page was drawn a large box, and printed next to it were the words, Yes, I like you.
Luann Hargrove was in the fifth grade. She was a fireplug of a girl with wavy dark hair and a strong voice you could probably hear clearly halfway across Allied Gardens. She lived directly across the street from Cheryl. I’d played many a game of hopscotch with Luann and Cheryl on the sidewalk in front of Cheryl’s house.
I noticed Luann hadn’t given me much of an option. I certainly liked Luann. But I didn’t exactly like her like her. My heart ached that the note wasn’t from Cheryl. Still, I hated to hurt Luann’s feelings. She was nice. And I figured any girlfriend was certainly better than no girlfriend at all. I took the pencil Cheryl offered me and drew an ‘x’ in the square. I folded the note and handed it back to Cheryl, who giggled and jumped up and down as if someone were tickling her feet inside her tennis shoes. The two girls left and I watched as they skipped excitedly up the sidewalk toward Luann’s house.
That night, I had a dream. Not about Luann, but about Cheryl. Her face hovered in front of mine, mere inches away. She was smiling that enigmatic, catch-me-if-you-can smile that had driven me crazy for the past several weeks.
Then she kissed my lips. “Now do you believe I love you?” she said. Something exploded pleasantly in my chest. I reached my face over to kiss her, but before I got there, the tinkle of a ringing telephone made both of us turn and look. Suddenly it was morning. The phone was ringing in the hall outside my bedroom door. When I looked back, Cheryl’s face was gone.
I heard Charlotte answer the phone. “Just a minute,” she said. Then she knocked on my door and said, “Billy, there’s a call for you.”
“Okay!” I called. I rolled out of bed and stumbled out into the hallway and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.
“Billy?” It was a young girl’s voice.
“Uh-huh.”
“Hi. This is Luann.”
“Uh. Oh, yeah. Luann. Hi.”
“Hi. I’m sorry if I woke you up. I was just calling to see if maybe you’d like to walk me home from school today? I’ll let you carry my books, if you want.”
I had to think about this for a second. I didn’t really want to walk a girl home and carry her books. But I didn’t know how to say no. “Yeah, sure, okay,” I said. “Where should I meet you?”
“How about in front of the fifth grade bungalow? Miss Fortner’s class? Do you know where that is?”
I tried to conjure a picture of the school in my brain. “I think I can find it,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you after school, then.” She apologized again for waking me, and then hung up.
I got dressed and ate some breakfast. Charlotte had been up for awhile, I gathered: the washer was already running and she was rinsing her own breakfast dishes. “Who was that?” she asked. I told her it was Luann, that she wanted me to walk her home and carry her books. Charlotte nodded and grinned and puffed on her cigarette, but didn’t say anything.
“What?” I said, suddenly embarrassed.
“Nothing,” she said, still grinning.
During lunch that day, while I was playing team ball with some of the other boys on the dirt field, I saw Cheryl and her friend, the same one I’d seen her with the day before, appear from the other side of the fifth-grade bungalow. The girl pointed in my direction, and they walked toward me. I started getting the same feeling in my stomach as when they were on my porch. I was still reeling from the dream I’d had the night before about Cheryl, wondering what it could mean. Had it been some sort of psychic premonition? Perhaps she was coming to tell me she wanted me to dump Luann, that it was her I should like, who should be my girlfriend, and that she wanted me to walk her home from school, carry her books.
“Billy!” she called to me, not noticing, I guess, that I’d been watching her approach for the past minute.
“Hi!” I said. “What are you doing here?” My chest heaved as I waited for the words I’d been hoping to hear for weeks.
“You knew that Luann was just kidding, didn’t you?” she said.
It took me a couple of second for the words to sink in, but I still didn’t understand. “Kidding? About what?”
“You know,” she said. I could see something behind her eyes, a sort of smile, mixed, I thought, with something a little sad. “The note. Walking Luann home today. It was all a joke. You knew that didn’t you?”
I looked around, thinking maybe Luann was somewhere close, thinking this was the joke, that she was looking at me to see how I’d react, testing me, or maybe just playing around with me. Some people, I was learning, had a strange sense of humor. I don’t see Luann anywhere. And there was nothing funny in Cheryl’s tone or her eyes, even though she was supposedly talking about a joke.
I smiled at her as best I could. “Sure,” I said. “I knew it all the time.”
Cheryl nodded and sort of half smiled, too. “Good,” she said. She looked for a second at her friend, who nodded. “Well, okay,” Cheryl said abruptly. “Goodbye.” They walked away. I watched them until they disappeared back around the bungalow. Then something tightened in my chest, and tears welled in my eyes. I turned and stood on the sidelines and tried to watch the other kids throw the ball back and forth, not seeing much of anything, until the bell rang telling us it was time to go back to class.
A month later, I was fighting Larry Stanfield, our next door neighbor Arlene Stanfield’s son, out in the street in front of his house, for that was where he’d dragged me, kicking and screaming, though anywhere would have suited him, just as long as it wasn’t on his grass (which adjoined my grass) or his driveway or even the sidewalk that wrapped around his family’s corner lot. He wouldn’t tell me exactly why he was mad at me, or if he had, I didn’t recall hearing it. He just said he would beat me up every time he saw me on his property.
And he did. Since I didn’t know how to fight worth a damn, and since I’d vowed never again to have Larry Cushman think of me as a coward (he’d called me as much after having witnessed me backing down from a fight, and it had devastated me) I stood there while Larry Stanfield pummeled me. He would do this every time we fought until I figured out the only way to beat him was to pull him to the ground and turn the fistfight into a wrestling match, which, for some reason, I found easier. But I wouldn’t discover this until after several of his beatings. Until then, he’d hit me in the face with his fists until I fell, then he’d kick me, gouge my eyes, pull on my ears and hair and nose, and finally kick me again before walking away, leaving me to blubber and bleed until I dragged myself into my house to have Charlotte dress my wounds and call Arlene to ask what the hell had gotten into these stupid kids?
That day’s beating was particularly harsh; most often what I did during a fight was to try to protect my face, though obviously this tactic wasn’t working. Larry had connected with several punches to my face, of which one, I thought, had broken my nose, something seemed to bust loose inside and it spouted blood like a geyser. For a second even Larry looked frightened. He soon recovered, however, and went on, holding my arm with one hand and delivering blow after blow to my face with the other.
I must have been screaming and crying pretty loud, because before either of us knew what was happening, I heard Luann’s voice, screaming at the top of her lungs from all the way up at her house: “LEAVE HIM ALONE!!” Larry and I both looked. Luann churned her chubby legs and in seconds had churned herself down the street to where we were and began beating on Larry with her hammy fists, her face red and wet with angry tears, yelling the same thing over and over again, LEAVE HIM ALONE, LEAVE HIM ALONE! I could tell Larry didn’t know what to do. He’d been taught, I think, that it wasn’t right to hit girls, but after Luann had clocked him a few times on his chin—and you could tell she was actually hurting him—he started to fight back. Pretty soon they were going at it like two guys, until finally Larry must have figured enough was enough, and scurried off inside his house. Luann stalked the sidewalk in front for a couple of minutes just to make sure he wasn’t coming back out.
I sat on my lawn, still crying, when she walked by. She was crying, too. Her dress was torn and smudged with dirt from the gutter, and her hair had been pulled loose from the barrettes she’d been wearing. We looked at each other as she passed. I didn’t know what to say. She paused for a second in front of the driveway, as if she might say something. Other than a few sobbing hiccoughs, nothing came out. Slowly, however, her face softened into a smile. Then she walked resolutely back up the street to her house and went inside.