Johnny Read online

  But that’s just a theory.

  As for the Ramsey family as a body, we started crossing that street a few times a month for dinner.

  My mom and Iliana became fast friends after that first dinner. I was sure that I’d gone to heaven that same night, or that I was having an early Christmas. Scents of butter and garlic and onion filled their home so fully that my mouth had watered the moment I’d walked in the door.

  Johnny had some toy cars and he and I played with them on the ground while everyone else spoke over wine in the living room. I paid little attention to their conversation. I also paid little attention to the cars, but after Johnny said “vroom vroom” a few times, I got into it.

  The next time we had dinner there, I brought my dolls. Johnny didn’t get into the dolls. After a while he accepted that he would go “vroom vroom” while I would cradle and sing to my baby.

  Months later, after my father first ragged Patricio about his “posh accent,” I knew he had accepted Patricio into his circle of friendship. Pat and Dad never grew quite as close as mom and Iliana, but they grew close enough that Pat always came over when the Giants were playing, and dad always went over when Benfica were playing—Pat’s Portuguese soccer team. Dad continued to hate soccer, but he liked the Sagres beer which Patricio kept a healthy stock off. According to Patricio, he didn’t like American Football or American beer, but he could live with a few Heinekens, so dad always made sure he was stocked up when game night approached.

  Because Johnny didn’t speak English, I started learning bits of Portuguese, and he started learning bits of English. Soon I was spending entire afternoons at his place, and the Abreus would say small phrases to me in their language.

  I picked it up quickly.

  And Johnny picked up English quickly.

  Of course, after Johnny’s new little sister was born (“Daniela”), she was the ultimate “doll” for me, and I would additionally be at their house just to rock her to sleep or to change her diapers and do all those motherly things that little girls like to do with newborn babes.

  By the time I was eleven, a day without Johnny was like a day without sunshine or air or trees or anything else that’s normal and expected and usual in your day-to-day life. A day without him just wasn’t...complete. We were friends. Best friends. Inseparable.

  Dad liked Johnny very much by the time we both turned eleven.

  That is, until he kissed me.

  -4-

  It’s pretty funny when I think back to it. And dad’s face was a study in human terror. I was on the front lawn, watering the grass, the hosepipe in my hand spraying absently while I thought about a necklace I’d seen with all the letters of my name on it and wouldn’t it be cool to wear it now?

  Johnny was sitting on the front steps of our porch, chin in hand, sulking, wanting me to finish because he’d just gotten a new bicycle and he wanted to go riding with me and I was wasting his time now! I’ll never forget the sulking look plastered on his face, the twist of his lips. He was going almost blue with suppressed fury, which is saying something considering the natural tan of his skin.

  After half an hour of this, he’d had enough. He got up, started storming across the lawn toward the street, but just before he got to the sidewalk, he made an abrupt about-turn as if he were in the military, stomped over to me, barely bending his knees as he walked like those old Nazi guys...and out of nowhere...plastered his wet lips on my right cheek!

  I was stunned.

  I was shocked.

  “Ewwwww!”

  I was so out of it that the hosepipe I was holding was suddenly aimed at him while I wiped furiously at my cheek! I almost cried.

  “Ew, Johnny, that’s disgusting!”

  “Hey, stop wetting me!” By now he was drenched.

  “Daddy, daddy, Johnny kissed me! GROSS!” I dropped the hosepipe and it sprayed wildly around like a dying snake. My dad had stormed out the house now, probably thinking I’d hurt myself or something. I rushed over to him on the porch, wiping my face so hard that I felt the abrasion of it!

  Dad’s face went pale. He stood there staring at me, PBR can in hand, mouth agape. I think he even had to hold himself up on the porch railing. By now, Johnny was strutting off across the street, shouting petulantly, “I’ll just go cycling alone then!” I think I even heard him mutter, “Girls!”

  I remember complaining about how I was gonna get boy-germs and would this mean I’d start playing with cars now and was it contagious?

  Five years later, after I turned sixteen, it was all I could do to hope for the feel of those lips on my skin once again. Or on my lips, or wondering about the flavor of his tongue.

  By the time I was sixteen, the haunting appeal of Johnny’s green eyes had found its way into my dreams, my nightmares, my thoughts, and my diary.

  But by then, Johnny had his finger in another pie.

  Her name was Nicole.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ~ Reputation ~

  -1-

  It was really my fault that Johnny started dating Nicole.

  Nicole Ferman was a redhead bombshell with large enough tits to make a man’s (or a boy’s) eyes goggle. She wasn’t a D cup, but she was larger than me. She also had somewhat of a “reputation,” if you catch my drift.

  It was Vivian, the closest thing I had to a best friend in the female department, who’d first caught wind of said reputation. Vivian had been chatting to the only other two girls I ever spoke to at school (Lee-Anne, Nancy), and Nicole Ferman had walked past, swinging her straight red hair as if its scent would spread pheromonal pollen into the nostrils of all virile boys in the hallway. Nicole had then strategically let slip that she’d, uhm, “tasted it.”

  At our age, that was just gross.

  Johnny and I had tried the dating thing for all of three months the year before (just a little before the time Vivian had come to know of Nicole’s culinary desires). We’d even made it official, given it the proclaimed name of “Boyfriend and Girlfriend,” as if giving it a name would somehow institutionalize the thing and push it beyond all the awkwardness and discomfort of learning to deal with one’s hormones.

  The plain simplicity is that Johnny “developed” a lot faster than I did, and when I did finally catch up to him physically, he was getting his cookies from someone else.

  The year before had played out like this:

  At fifteen I started having the first signs of womanhood. I’d gotten my blood already a year and a bit before that, but very little else had changed with me physically. Yes, as I’ve hinted, I was a late bloomer, and that blooming took all of several years to finally complete.

  People like Nicole didn’t bloom, they mushroomed. One day to the next.

  I went through the pimply phase and the self-conscious phase and the nervous phase. My and Johnny’s friendship had suffered slightly as a result of it. I became difficult to talk to when he’d be around. I hid in my room, but Johnny always came by and threw stones at my window and just bugged the hell out of me to let him in! And when I didn’t, he’d climb the trellis and then bang at the window with his fists until I opened! “What the eff are you doing here?” (I still said eff and effing in those days, thinking, probably, that to utter a simple “fuck” might send me over that dire cliff of adulthood that I was subconsciously shunning.) “I might be getting dressed!”

  “So?” he’d say. “I’ve seen you naked before.”

  Yeah, but I didn’t have boobs then.

  Johnny’s own body had also changed. He was firm and strong and filled with the athletic energy of youth. He was sinewy, and he never missed a chance to take his shirt off when working in the lawn. His pecks had filled out, his arms bulged. His green eyes had changed to include a depth and surety that tightened my chest whenever I was near him. There were days when I’d look at him from the kitchen while he mowed the lawn of his house, just staring, looking, watching, wondering...

  Once, my mom caught me, and that’s what finally got the ball rolling
. I was washing dishes. Or, more appropriately, not washing dishes. My hands had paused, the water was running, and I was gawping out at Johnny’s muscles gleaming under the sun. I wasn’t even thinking anything lewd! I was thinking of stupid things—us holding hands, walking under the trees in one of those kitschy Hallmark-style scenes where the sun shines down gold and the girl smiles under soft light while the boy holds her head to his shoulder—

  “Have you told him yet?”

  My heart went into overdrive!

  I spun!

  There was my mom!

  Dishes clattered and clanged and water splattered and fell everywhere! “Mom! I— What— I—”

  My heart was an army of horses, galloping, charging!

  Does she know?

  She had a smirk on her face that made me believe she knew, she so knew—and that mortified me!

  Her dark golden hair was tied up in a ponytail. She was leaning on the kitchen counter. Even though she was wearing a tee and some jeans, Alice Ramsey carried a beauty about her that I always admired. And that I wished I would one day grow into. Mom wasn’t a supermodel, but she was elegant, and lovely.

  “Have you told him yet?” she repeated with a grin.

  I felt my cheeks flush. The whir of the lawnmower across the street flowed into the house. I could still see Johnny from the corner of my eye and, indeed, kept looking at him. To look at him—

  “You should tell him.”

  “Mom! I— I— It’s not like that!” My cheeks were cooking! I’d broken out into a sweat!

  “OK, well, I’m just saying...you should at least...talk to him about it.”

  There was an eerie silence, except for the lawnmower. It felt like forever, but in reality was probably not more than a few seconds. I swallowed and picked up my courage. “B—but I’m...” And then the word came to my lips, a word I hadn’t yet realized, and with it came an onslaught of tears and emo shit that I hadn’t yet experienced but which was bound to happen the moment I confessed to someone that I, completely, and utterly, loved the boy next door.

  The word was this: “...scared.”

  And then I wept.

  I wept like someone had died, like the world had ended. The truth of it, the idiotic, childish, immature truth of it all was that this was my first love and I was, simply, scared that Johnny didn’t feel the same about me! That he’d stand on my fragile heart and go off with some other girl or, heck, maybe even...sleep with someone! Yikes! That would be disastrous! And he’s too young to do that anyway, but if I told him that then he’d think I’m only saying it because I like him and I don’t want him to know I like him but I really do—

  Whoa! I was a wreck. A total wreck.

  Mom held me. I sobbed onto her shirt and soon there was snot and spittle and tears all over it and it was wet and soaking and I was shivering, and weeping, weeping, weeping.

  “I (sob, sob, sob) think I (sob, sob, sob) love him, mom!”

  People can be so melodramatic at fifteen.

  She held my head, rubbed it, and said, “I know you do, honey. He’s a good boy to love. So, why don’t you tell him? I mean, not...in so many words...you know how boys are. But, uhm, maybe start with, uhm, just asking him if, y’know, he’d be interested in, well, a date?”

  The room stopped spinning. My mom’s hand stopped caressing my matted hair as she let the concept sink in.

  Ask him...on a date? In other words, not put my heart on my sleeve but simply, well, play it cool, and, uhm, see where it goes?

  Mom was a genius. An absolute genius! Why hadn’t I thought of that before!

  Still shocked at the simplicity of it, I mumbled into her shirt, “Aren’t, er, guys supposed to be the ones asking girls out on dates?”

  I felt her shrug. I moved away from her. Her face was calm, relaxed. A few small lines of age had formed around her lips over the years, not unsightly. “Well,” she said nonchalantly, looking out the window at Johnny riding the lawnmower like a NASCAR racing car, “times have changed.” She looked back down at me. “So, when will you do it?”

  In my hormonal state, I got the sudden idea that “it” meant something...else, and it took me a second to catch my wits. “You mean...ask him out?”

  “Yeah?”

  I shrugged. A weight the size of earth was gone from my chest. I felt I could breathe, I felt...

  I looked out the window. Yeah, I could do this. It’s me and Johnny. We’ve known each other for years! I could just go over there and, y’know, tap him on the shoulder and say, Hey, Johnny, so, uhm, you wanna be my boyfriend or something? No strings. Huh? Wanna do that? Huh? I mean, not that I’m wanting to be your girlfriend or anything, but, y’know, you’re a guy and I’m a girl and— So? Will you answer me? Will you?

  I said to mom, “I’ll ask him now!”

  Luckily she grabbed my elbow before I could run out the door and make a fool of myself! “Maybe you should...clean up your eyes a little bit. And, well...” She pointed to my nose. Some snot was falling from it.

  “Right,” I said.

  Like I said, my mom was smart in this area.

  In fact, I suspect she spoke to Iliana that afternoon, who in turn spoke to Johnny or at least hinted as much to him. But that was never proved.

  I waited for him to come to my room that night while I planned my attack for the next day. He often came over at night and climbed in the window.

  I opened the sash before he got up to the top of the trellis and he looked up at me, surprised.

  I chewed gum, and leaned coolly on my elbows out my window. I was wearing a baggy t-shirt, but I’d pulled my hair back and dabbed on a bit of lip-gloss.

  Johnny stopped and stared up at me. “Cath—Catherine.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time he’d used my full name. The utterance of it stopped my heart.

  When it resumed beating, I said, “You sound surprised.”

  “Well, you always make me bang on the window for thirty minutes, so yeah, I’m a little surprised.”

  He looked utterly beautiful. How could a boy be so perfect, I thought. The moonlight on his black hair, and the glow of his eyes as they beamed up at me, made my heart tremor.

  “I, uhm, wanted to ask you something,” he said. “Something, uhm, important.” Johnny had never completely lost his Portuguese accent. And even though it was tiny, some words were occasionally “overpronounced,” some under.

  It did nothing to help me forget him in the romantic sense.

  My heart fluttered at his request to ask me something “important.” It floored me, I confess. I started to sweat and feel nervous. Hormones, hormones, hormones! Why did God or whoever made us, decide to make us go through all this shit!

  “Y—yeah?” I said, my voice quivering.

  “Yeah, uhm...” He leaned back on the trellis. If he fell, he wouldn’t die, but he’d hurt himself pretty good.

  “Don’t lean back, Johnny. You know I hate that.”

  He grinned his confident grin.

  He leaned back some more.

  “Hey, I said don’t do that!”

  He was playing with me, leaning back and forth and back and forth—

  I snatched at his head when he came close and held him so he couldn’t go back any more!

  The heat that radiated from him made me tremble.

  And then he dropped the bomb on me. Just like that, no warning.

  All mirth in him suddenly disappeared, replaced by something I didn’t recognize, something I had never seen or felt in anyone but which, in Johnny’s eyes, felt normal and natural and...intense.

  We were kids, but the intensity of what he would become as an adult was already inside him. The intensity that I would hunger for in later years, reared its head for the first time with Johnny hanging on the trellis to my window.

  “Go out with me,” he said. “Not as a pal but...” He bit his bottom lip. “...as, like, on a date.”

  My hand released his head. He was still looking at me, still boring
his eyes into me, waiting, waiting.

  My heart danced, my head spun, my tongue went so freaking dry that I felt I needed a gallon of water just to moisten it!

  He still waited, confident, staring.

  I tried to stay cool, tried to remain calm, but my lips tugged and pulled up and before I knew it I was smiling and...Oh, God, my cheeks are going red, I know it.

  I looked away, giggled like some stupid little girl. “You asshole,” I said, looking at the floor, not being able to look at him anymore!

  “Is that a yes?”

  There was a warmth that filled me like a hot pot of chicken soup, every part of me, inside me, every muscle. I turned, sat on the floor, put my back against the wall.

  Love, that’s what this feeling is. Real love. Real, true, and honest love. And it’s warm and kind and caring and happy.

  In a moment, Johnny was next to me, sitting with his back to the wall as well. I had no idea what to do! Should we kiss now? Touch? Hold hands?

  We sat there, looking at my bedroom door, the bed in between us and it.

  My mind was whirling, daydreaming, thinking of that Hallmark scene again! (I had no control of these daydreams; they just occurred!) And then he sealed the deal. He did it, the perfect move, like he’d known instinctively what to do by some special male part of the brain or whatever. It must have been several minutes before it happened, but it was perfect.

  Perfect.

  His arm went around my neck, his hand to my shoulder, and he pulled me toward him. I rested my head on his shoulder. After an age, my neck hurt like hell. I think he was also uncomfortable—either his arm or maybe even his ass because we stayed like that for easily an hour.

  Like I said, it was perfect.

  Finally, he said, “So, the date. What should we do? Go to a movie?”

  “Sure.”

  Before he left, he moved in to touch his lips to mine. I instinctively moved away, then realized I wasn’t eleven and so I moved into him. But by then he’d started moving away because he was unsure if I wanted to kiss! Left, right, trying to meet the lips, palms sweating, stomach buzzing!