Hearts in Atlantis(85)

'Bobby,' she said. 'How are you?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'Okay, I guess. I haven't seen you around.'

'You haven't come up my house.'

'No,' he said. 'No, I - ' What? How was he supposed to finish? 'I been pretty busy,' he said lamely.

'Oh. Uh-huh.' He could have handled her being cool to him. What he couldn't handle was the fear she was trying to hide. The fear of him. As if he was a dog that might bite her. Bobby had a crazy image of himself dropping down on all fours and starting to go roop-roop-roop.

'I'm moving away.'

'Sully told me. But he didn't know exactly where. I guess you guys don't chum like you used to.'

'No,' Bobby said. 'Not like we used to. But here.' He reached into his back pocket and brought out a piece of folded-over paper from a school notebook. Carol looked at it doubtfully, reached for it, then pulled her hand back.

'It's just my address,' he said. 'We're going to Massachusetts. A town named Danvers.'

Bobby held out the folded paper but she still wasn't taking it and he felt like crying. He remembered being at the top of the Ferris wheel with her and how it was like being at the top of the whole lighted world. He remembered a towel opening like wings, feet with tiny painted toes pivoting, and the smell of perfume. 'She's dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop,' Freddy Cannon sang from the radio in the other room, and it was Carol, it was Carol, it was Carol.

'I thought you might write,' he said. 'I'll probably be homesick, a new town and all.'

Carol took the paper at last and put it into the pocket of her shorts without looking at it. Probably throw it away when she gets home, Bobby thought, but he didn't care. She had taken it, at least. That would be enough springboard for those times when he needed to take his mind away . . . and there didn't have to be any low men in the vicinity for you to need to do that, he had discovered.

'Sully says you're different now.'

Bobby didn't reply.

'Lots of people say that, actually.'

Bobby didn't reply.

'Did you beat Harry Doolin up?' she asked, and gripped Bobby's wrist with a cold hand. 'Did you?'

Bobby slowly nodded his head.

Carol threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so hard their teeth clashed. Their mouths parted with an audible smack. Bobby didn't kiss another girl on the mouth for three years . . . and never in his life did he have one kiss him like that.

'Good!' she said in a low fierce voice. It was almost a growl. 'Good!'

Then she ran toward Broad Street, her legs - browned with summer and scabbed by many games and many sidewalks - flashing.

'Carol!' he called after her. 'Carol, wait!'

She ran.

'Carol, I love you!'

She stopped at that . . . or maybe it was just that she'd reached Commonwealth Avenue and had to look for traffic. In any case she paused a moment, head lowered, and then looked back. Her eyes were wide and her lips were parted.

'Carol!'

'I have to go home, I have to make the salad,' she said, and ran away from him. She ran across the street and out of his life without looking back a second time. Perhaps that was just as well.

He and his mom moved to Danvers. Bobby went to Danvers Elementary, made some friends, made even more enemies. The fights started, and not long after, so did the truancies. On the Comments section of his first report card, Mrs Rivers wrote: 'Robert is an extremely bright boy. He is also extremely troubled. Will you come and see me about him, Mrs Garfield?'

Mrs Garfield went, and Mrs Garfield helped as much as she could, but there were too many things about which she could not speak: Providence, a certain lost-pet poster, and how she'd come by the money she'd used to buy into a new business and a new life. The two women agreed that Bobby was suffering from growing pains; that he was missing his old town and old friends as well. He would eventually outlast his troubles. He was too bright and too full of potential not to.

Liz prospered in her new career as a real-estate agent. Bobby did well enough in English (he got an A-Plus on a paper in which he compared Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to Golding's Lord of the Flies) and did poorly in the rest of his classes. He began to smoke cigarettes.

Carol did write from time to time - hesitant, almost tentative notes in which she talked about school and friends and a weekend trip to New York City with Rionda. Appended to one that arrived in March of 1961 (her letters always came on deckle-edged paper with teddy bears dancing down the sides) was a stark P.S.: I think my mom & dad are going to get a divorce. He signed up for another 'hitch' and all she does is cry. Mostly, however, she stuck to brighter things: she was learning to twirl, she had gotten new ice skates on her birthday, she still thought Fabian was cute even if Yvonne and Tina didn't, she had been to a twist party and danced every dance.

As he opened each of her letters and pulled it out Bobby would think, This is the last. I won't hear from her again. Kids don't write letters for long even if they promise they will. There are too many new things coming along. Time goes by so fast. Too fast. She'll forget me.

But he would not help her to do so. After each of her letters came he would sit down and write a response. He told her about the house in Brookline his mother sold for twenty-five thousand dollars - six months' salary at her old job in a single commission. He told her about the A-Plus on his English theme. He told her about his friend Morrie, who was teaching him to play chess. He didn't tell her that sometimes he and Morrie went on window-breaking expeditions, riding their bikes (Bobby had finally saved up enough to buy one) as fast as they could past the scuzzy old apartment houses on Plymouth Street and throwing rocks out of their baskets as they went. He skipped the story of how he had told Mr Hurley, the assistant principal at Danvers Elementary, to kiss his rosy red ass and how Mr Hurley had responded by slapping him across the face and calling him an insolent, wearisome little boy. He didn't confide that he had begun shoplifting or that he had been drunk four or five times (once with Morrie, the other times by himself) or that sometimes he walked over to the train tracks and wondered if getting run over by the South Shore Express would be the quickest way to finish the job. Just a whiff of diesel fuel, a shadow falling over your face, and then blooey. Or maybe not that quick.