A
year is a very long time when you’re fourteen.
Especially when Jimmy had graduated the year before and I was yearning
to see him again in the hallways
and
at lunch. Now it would be another
year. I day dreamed about us meeting
outside the high school at lunch time, sitting on the iron pipe that surrounded
the grass while all the girls noticed us and were jealous of me.
But
when I finally arrived at the free academy the next year, Jimmy was lost to me
in a cloud of older girls who swarmed around him constantly. Often he came down the hallway surrounded by
a group of girls, all giggling and talking.
If I wasn’t so in love, I’d have been angry with him. He just got more and more handsome and
grownup while I got pimples, eczema and often had sporadic times of the month,
which Irene called peek-a-boo periods.
I
remember one afternoon after school when I started up Elm Street for home and Jimmy Bean came toward
me, walking in a group of eleventh grade boys and girls. He recognized me and
ordinarily would have stopped to say hello, but the crowd dragged him along
with them. He quickly glanced at me but
kept going along with his friends. I
felt ignored and I knew that even if I were in the same grade as those kids,
I’d never be invited along with them and Jimmy.
They wore the latest clothes and said smart things. I never thought of anything to say. Maybe I should have given up on being with
him, but instead I became even more determined to somehow take him away
and have him all to myself.
There
wasn’t much chance of me pulling it off, not with a boy so popular that, even
after he graduated and went to work in the fish pole factory on Whitesboro Street, the senior and junior girls still
talked about Jimmy.
When
church let out on Sunday morning I got a half a minute of his time out on the
street after Mass.
I kidded him about being so popular.
“Pretty
soon you’ll be in the newspaper,” I said as I caught up to him outside of Saint
Francis de Sales Church.
But instead of being embarrassed or even trying to look a little humble,
his face lit up in a winning smile. I
never met a boy who made me love him more by loving himself. He was like his own cheerleader and I
couldn’t help to not stand up and cheer him on.
I
wasn’t very good at small talk, but I always felt completely comfortable with
Jimmy, even though my heart was pumping a mile a minute whenever I was near
him. And although he always said
something nice to me, I knew he was
looking at me as a little girl. That was
disappointing, because I was aware of boys in my grade starting to stare at me
with that weird look in their eyes.
“Mary,
you’re just the swell-est kid on Steuben Street,” he said to me. I went home and rolled this pronouncement
over and over in my mind, trying to find a hint of interest from him.
