Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

tree inside, and she lifted her head and stared into my eyes, an assertiveness like a tiny flame in each of her dark irises, and her small red mouth broke into a smile like a childishly happy and excited strawberry; that’s how I described it to myself later that weekend, silently going over every detail of what had happened. Holding hands, we slipped away through a row of tall evergreen hedges into a neighbor’s backyard where, in the nearly pitch-dark, we embraced and lowered ourselves, already kissing, down into the plush grass, me partly on top of her, and made out. I don’t remember for how long; it could have been five minutes or twenty. The lawn’s nutritious smell also held something stinky, a mix, I realized, of manure and moist soil that grew stronger the longer we lay there. There was just enough moonlight to see that her eyes were closed, her head turning side to side in tempo with the swirling of our tongues, her little hawk nose rubbing and bumping mine. I love you, Arlene, I whispered, I’ve loved you all this year. Arlene, with her lips against mine, murmured, Me too, me too, me too. A minute or so later she hoarsely whispered, We should go back. I remember how after we’d stood up, she reached behind her to rub her dress and brought her hand to her nose and sniffed it, but neither of us said anything about the fertilizer smell. We stepped back through the shrubbery, toward the torches and patio, and she stopped to put on her shoes. She laughed quietly and said, You have lipstick all over your face. She licked her fingers and rubbed them vigorously on my skin. You should go wash your face, she said. I obeyed, slipping quickly into the bathroom off the patio. At the sink I grinned in proud near disbelief at my reflection in the mirror, so smudged by lipstick that it looked smeared with red poppy petals.

Making out with Arlene meant I was going to have a girlfriend, I was sure of it. She was going away to camp soon, and I was headed into the underachiever program. We only had to make it through summer and by fall we’d be discovering love and sex together in the woods after school, over at each other’s houses when no one else was home. We’d stand making out on street corners oblivious to passing traffic like the teenage couples you saw all over our town, talking and laughing with their foreheads touching. Maybe by Thanksgiving we’d even lose our virginity together, like only a few of our classmates, not including Ian Brown, supposedly already had. When I got to school that Monday morning, just before the homeroom bell rang, it seemed like everybody was waiting for me, though that really couldn’t be true, there couldn’t have been that many seventh and ninth graders waiting for me. What I do remember is stepping through the doors into the wide lobby by the cafeteria and hearing howls and shrieks of excitement, laughter and shouts about a monkey and a banana. I saw Arlene standing between Ian Brown and his best friend, Jake Rosen, our middle school’s football star even as an eighth grader, and Ian was holding her by the bicep. Arlene’s face was weirdly distorted, like a rubber mask of her own face hanging in a tree, her usual sweetly shy smile replaced by a grimace-grin, as if she were about to explosively sneeze. Her hands flew up as if to pull that mask off, and she turned and fled, Ian spinning to watch, her friend Betty Nicholson chasing after her.

Supposedly, Arlene had said that when she was making out with me, she’d felt like a banana being chomped on by a monkey. That joke electrified the school. But I’ve never believed it was Arlene’s joke. It just didn’t make any sense to me that she would have said that. I think it was Ian who came up with it and that he and Jake told everyone it was Arlene. In all the classes I went to that morning, I elicited snickers, sharp grins of malice, looks that mixed pity and hilarity, a few just pitying. Kids made banana-eating gestures when they saw me coming in the corridors or made screechy monkey sounds, some jouncing their hands under their armpits. In one class after the next, I sat stiffly in my seat as if trapped behind the steering wheel in an invisible car crash, that dazed sensation of wondering: Is this really happening? I felt as if I’d walked out of myself, leaving behind an eviscerated container. That horrible sensation of a vacated hollowness that follows one of those enormous disappointments that can seem to take over and permeate everything. Whenever I have a day like that, I remember my first kiss.

Two teenage girls who I noticed when they boarded at Bridgeport—both Latina looking, one a short-haired sprite, bright lipstick, the other long-haired in an oversized scarlet hoody—are sitting a few rows behind me and talking about, as far as I can tell, another girl whose name is Pabla, their giggles foaming over like a boiling pot of squiggly pasta. And now one sings out, with more hilarity than mockery: Pabla! Who names their daughter Pabla? The other girl says: It’s her father who’s Puerto Rican. Her mother’s a white lady from here. And the first: But Pabla? So how stupid could her father be? Pabla! They laugh some more.

I’m grinning to myself too. Poor Pabla. I’ve never known anyone named Pabla. It sure is not the feminine version of Pablo, not in any common usage anyway. I once knew a Consuelo who told me that all her life in the United States people had been calling her Consuela. Consuelo literally means “consolation”—Consuela, “with shoe sole.”

But I’ve just remembered another Pabla, in Krazy Kat I think it was. Krazy, for once distracted from his spurned love