Linda McClinton sat in front of him in fifth grade, and every day he hoped she might turn all the way around to hand him a mimeo or, if she wouldn’t turn around, look at him with her peripheral vision the way he’d heard her tell a friend she could. Had she smiled at him or touched his hand, he might have puddled under her desk.
He didn’t know if Linda McClinton was interested in eleven year-old boys, but he knew she wasn’t interested in him. The grapevine told him, and the way she stared past him in the hall when he waved at her told him. They’d been teammates during the badminton unit and enjoyed a victory or two together, but those were all Linda McClinton. She played tennis. She seemed surprised each time he swatted the shuttlecock over the net, but it wasn’t a redemptive pleasantly surprised surprise. It was shock.
His friend asked her friend’s neighbor—who asked her friend to ask her—if she liked him, and the answer returned, “No.” So he sent another question. “Why not?” he asked.
A long day later her response arrived, “She thinks you’re a cry baby.”
She was right. Fifth grade had been a leaky year. Everything made his eyes well—a disappointing test, a picture ruined at the last moment, an unkind face, losing at everything, being told he was a cry baby, knowing he’d lost his chance with Linda McClinton forever when he realized he wanted to cry over that too.
Fifth grade is a bad time to be okay with crying. Dennis Sewel, whom he suspected to be Linda McClinton’s true love, didn’t cry. He made others cry when he pulled them into the hand slapping game or threw the battleball at your face after Coach O’Connor called, “Two minutes to the bell. Cross over!”
One morning Dennis and he rode to school together when Dennis jumped from behind a bush and asked with his clenched fist if there were room on his stingray bicycle seat to give him a ride to school. The only voice on the way was Dennis half-singing in his ear how lucky he was not to have a kicked ass.
When he learned that Linda had seen him cry, his first thought was to convince her she’d never really met him, that he was as tough as Dennis, that he was athletic and mean—cool too. If she’d only be his girlfriend, he’d give up crying forever.
He found himself on his bike. He found his bike steering into Linda’s subdivision. He found himself ditching his bike beside the driveway and standing at her door.
She wasn’t home. Her dad told him she was out playing in the neighborhood and asked him if he wanted to wait while they called her friend’s house.
“Do you have homework together?” he asked.
Mr. McClinton wanted to know his name and offered him lemonade or soda. After he thanked-but-no-thanked him, he turned around to look for his bike, suddenly worried some bully might’ve taken it. Mr. McClinton called at his back, “I’ll tell Linda you were here,” and, just to seal it, used his name.
On his bike, he woke as from a dream and felt the air rushing toward him, his eyes stinging in the afternoon air.
At the end of the street, someone emerged from a just-slammed front door, Linda McClinton. He hoped to ride past her unnoticed, but she looked up just in time.
His hello was too loud. As he sped by her, she half-waved the way you might if you saw a math teacher in the mall.
She never spoke of his visit. He stopped trying to speak to her. They never spoke again.
Filed under: American Life, Childhood, Education, Gender, Hope, Human Nature, Life, Longing, Memory, Thoughts, Writing
I would read the story based on the story in outline. The grapevine — that’s how it worked, isn’t it? I wonder if it still does. I used that gravevine to find out that Callan didn’t love me, didn’t even like me. My friends started the rumor, and being as how Callan was the first boy who I understood to even know I existed, I was ecstatic. The grapevine is prone to inaccuracies.
What gets me is how the story ends. It was a moment frozen in time, and then it’s over. An early lesson learned about love. Just move on.
I have no gift for fiction because, past a certain point, it becomes embellishment for me. It’s challenging for me to find a story organically, to feel it unfolding itself. Instead, it becomes The Author—just me, the man behind the curtain—clumsily and obviously constructing it.
Which is another way of saying this outline may be all there is—all I can manage now, anyway.
Lately, I’ve been fascinated with young love and have no idea why. Maybe I’m unconsciously drawn to the novel feelings that are less common at my age. Before this post, my memory of those feelings were mostly nostalgic. But they also sting a little, as your memory of Callan may. So much of what were are was forming then, and I’m still not sure I’ve entirely dealt with what I discovered. That’s scary when you think of your own children that way. Inevitable too, I suppose—and fodder for future writing! —D