🎧 164: As Mr. Simone . . .

5

AS MR. SIMONE divided us into groups that morning in the auditorium, I began to guess what the groups meant. I couldn’t have guessed then all the implications of the division, but I guessed that the boys and girls in a group would be in the same classroom. Other rumors about the meaning of the groupings circulated through the auditorium, including the idea that one group would be sent to a reform school, and that another contained the finalists in the name-the-school contest, but I decided that the boys and girls who remained with me were going to be my classmates: these would be the boys and girls with whom I’d be closest, at least in school. In the very first division, I was separated from the Glynns and from Matthew Barber. When Mr. Simone finally stopped, I was in a group with all the Ls and the first half of the Ms. Raskol Lodkochnikov was in my group, and so was Veronica McCall.

6

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Veronica and I saw a great deal of each other, not only at school, but after school, usually at her house. I was pleased and flattered by Veronica’s attentions, and I enjoyed showing off for her when we studied together. I enjoyed less the domestic tone that Veronica gave to our afternoons. The McCalls’ neighbors, the Parettis, had an infant child, Frankie. Very often, when I arrived, I would find that Veronica had volunteered to give Frankie an airing. Walking side by side, very much as if we were his parents, we would push Frankie around the neighborhood in his carriage. We would stop when someone wanted a look at him, and Veronica would beam when he was praised (which wasn’t often, for Frankie was a singularly unattractive baby, the kind that makes people, when they poke their heads under the hood of the carriage, gasp and say, “Oh, my!”). Veronica worried about whether Frankie was too cold or too warm and whether he was developing as he should. I hid from her my conviction that he hadn’t a brain in his head. Now and then, Veronica, playing at our being Frankie’s parents, would nuzzle me and suggest that perhaps we should have “another baby” so that Frankie wouldn’t be lonesome. My stomach grew cold when she asked me if I thought we should give it a try. At the time, I thought that the coldness was caused only by the prospect of bringing into the world another baby like Frankie, but the truth is that the sexuality Veronica had discovered on the other side of puberty scared me to death. I was to begin to recognize that truth one afternoon late in September.

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