Puppy Love

"Outside your life waits everything you've never known," she said. "There are worlds, child. There are ecstasies."

I then recognized the allure that lit her eyes, the unspeakable longing that glimmered in their depths. It had seemed this whole time to be some fantastic, alien desire, reaching out to me from a distant world. Perhaps it truly was. But more simply than this, it was hunger.

Plain hunger.

That ancient, unsleeping hunger, older than the first furred thing that ever gave rise to the races of dogs and wolves and men.

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He's never felt entirely at home in his skin. Even before the adolescent procession of sweat and hair and dandruff and acne, he'd been timid when it came to the sort of exertions he'd watch other children handle with apparent grace and confidence. Scaling fences and jumping even short distances—to say nothing of swimming or sports—were to be attempted cautiously, if at all. And always out of sight if it could be helped. Even riding a bike had been a skill mastered late, alongside brothers two and four years younger. So on a late August afternoon, when the girl, bare foot, climbs over the railing of her father's back patio and onto the gently sloping garage roof, the boy hesitates just long enough for her to notice.

You okay?

Yeah.

The house is bigger than any he's ever lived in, in a nice neighborhood just a few bus-stops from downtown. The bike ride over had taken him first through side streets without walkways and occasionally without pavement, giving way to a busy four-lane road that made him—still an inexperienced cyclist—nervous, and would have given his mother a conniption. The sbr-rucking rent-a-cop at the gate had given him a look then waved him through when he'd surrendered code and destination. Hamstrings, glutes, and quadriceps still sore from their labor burn as he levers himself over the railing, falls forward, plants both hands on the hot grit of garage shingles, then pulls himself the rest of the way. Vertigo gone. She waits patiently for him, smiling, holding out one of the cornetto she's brought with them. He takes his and a seat next to her near the edge of the roof overlooking the driveway, their bare feet dangling. As the boy struggles momentarily with the plastic packaging, the girl reaches out, playfully planting a dollop of vanilla on the tip of his nose. Had he done that to himself, in a moment of carelessness, he would be wiping it away in a panic, images of the next day's swelling whitehead blinding out all other thoughts.

The September fires have come early again. From their vantage, one corner of the new construction, perfectly reflective, gleams.

They had the entire day with one another, her father away until evening or late afternoon, her sister at her mother's house, her baby brother in the care of some family friend or close neighbor. Down two flights of stairs and past a narrow section of basement crowded with boxes for the September college move, she parts the beaded curtain providing the only real privacy her bedroom is afforded. When he follows her through, she makes a show of stopping him, pushing him out, then making him walk through again, careful that the beads are evenly parted to either side of his shoulders. She does things like this from time to time. Nearly two years ago, one of the first things he'd noticed was the way she would pick things off him. Standing opposite her in a huddle of friends or even just the two of them together, if anything at all happened to be stuck or hanging from the fabric of his clothing—a piece of string or lint, or a long brunette hair bleached blond by the sun—her fingers would be there, quick and quiet, to pluck and discard the offending detritus. It never seemed to him a rude gesture, like she was desperately trying to make those around her presentable. She couldn't help herself, and apologized whenever someone took notice. For his part, it felt like being attended to by a little bird, gathering for its nest.