Rocket City. Cathryn Alpert
Once, he'd pinned a calcified praying mantis to the lapel of his sweater. Another time, he'd consumed a handful of salt pills before a track meet, a dose that had caused him to faint halfway around the field.
Weird was the word most commonly used to describe Larry. He wore penny loafers without socks, and suspenders before they came back into fashion. He sang in the hallways. He wrote poetry. Marilee and Amanda Wiggins would watch him from the lunch quad: his shoulders butted against the trunk of some tree, his blond hair swept straight back, a copy of Howl propped up on his knees. The two girls would laugh as they ate their sandwiches and gossiped about couples, parents, teachers, and what Mary Ellen Kazloff was planning to do about that baby growing in her womb.
Larry, though bright, was a poor student. Occasionally, his teachers could be overheard discussing his wasted potential as if they were talking about some stock market tip they should have taken or a house they'd sold before the market boomed. Marilee thought school must have bored Larry. He got A's in English and C's in most everything else including German II, where he sat in the back corner directly behind Marilee.
"Achtung," he whispered in her ear on the second day of class. "Marilee, wie geht's?" Frau Göckermann, pert in her gingham shirtwaist dress and patent leather spike heels, stood face to the blackboard conjugating endless tenses of irregular verbs, which, when spoken in succession, had all the sonance of a Hitler rally.
Larry's voice had startled Marilee. She glanced over her shoulder, but he motioned for her to face forward. Robby Franz, who sat in the seat next to him, whistled softly through his fat lips. Robby thought himself cool. He played lead guitar in a band called Spew, did Ecstasy every weekend, and was the reason Mary Ellen Kazloff cried in the hallways.
Later, when Frau Göckermann once again had her back to the class, Larry parted Marilee's hair with his fingers. She felt his breath on the back of her neck like whiffs from a horse's nostrils. Her nipples stiffened. "Wer bist du, Marilee?" he whispered. The down on her arms rose; her heart pounded. Larry leaned farther over his desk and muttered again into her mass of red curls. "Marilee, du bist ein schöner Schmetterling. Ein Blümchen. Ein Stern in der Nacht." She froze, not knowing if he was being serious or making fun of her. Robby smirked. Frau Göckermann conjugated the verb "to click."
Convinced, after the first two weeks, that she was not the butt of some joke but rather the object of his true affections, Marilee Levitay began looking forward to sixth period. Larry's whispering had become a daily ritual she'd come to anticipate with ever-mounting states of arousal. Soon she began carrying heavy sweaters to school. On rainy days, when the windows were closed and the radiator knocked and spit with a vexing precision, Marilee would feel the warm, dry air; the heat from her body, rising; the rhythmic pulse of Larry's breath on the nape of her neck, and she'd feel dizzy and hot as a cat trapped in a spinning dryer.
That semester she did not learn much German. Indeed, all her grades suffered. During periods one through five, she spent her class time writing Larry's name on endless snippets of blue-lined paper, which she popped into her mouth, sucked beyond recognition, and collected in a ball in the zippered compartment of her notebook. Each night, after her mother left for work, she flushed the offensive wad down the toilet.
She did other childish things. She phoned Larry at home just to hear his voice, hanging up as soon as he answered. On the weekends, she spied on him at his job at Mojo's Books and Coffee Beans. From the sanctuary of the pizza parlor across the street, she watched him through the coffeehouse window, making cappuccino, slicing fruit pies and carrot cakes, microwaving bagels and lemon poppyseed muffins. At night, in bed, she mouthed her passion into her pillow in much the same way he directed his, by day, at the back of her head.
"He's a geek," said Amanda. Wearing an old pink bathrobe, she sat rolling her hair on empty jumbo-size cans of Swanson's Chicken Broth. Her face was covered in green cleansing masque. "Have you ever seen his poetry?" Marilee had to admit she hadn't, whereupon Amanda pulled open the bottom drawer of her dressing table and produced a stack of old Guardians. She tossed them onto the bed next to Marilee. "There's a real howler in there, toward the end of last year."
Marilee thumbed through the stack of school newspapers, somewhat wary of what she might encounter. She came upon pictures of the football team and the Home Club Bake-Off. She relived the crowning of Victoria Van Antwerp as prom queen and the Drama Club's production of Billy Budd. She leafed through articles about Spring Fair, college recruiters on campus, and National Merit scholars. Finally, in the May 23rd issue, she came upon a poem by Larry:
MY SPIRIT by Lawrence H. Johnston
tortured twisted thoughts
spin their web around my muddled mind
twisting, constricting
will there always be this darkness?
am I free to be
or am I caught
between the crumpled pages of a time-worn novel?
and yet, from some far-reaching destiny a pure white ray of light
filters in between the masses and the gases
swirling 'round
the tortured twisted visions
of this slumbering child
it is the ray of Hope
"It's not that bad," said Marilee.
Amanda swiveled on her stool and glanced at Larry's poem, wrinkling her nose as if she were opening a thermos that had been left in her locker all summer. "Read it out loud," she said to Marilee. "I dare you."
"I don't need to read it out loud."
"I want to see you keep a straight face when you get to the part about the masses and the gases."
"All right, okay," said Marilee. "So it's not Dylan Thomas. It's not dog doo either. There's some nice lines here, like this part about the pages of a time-worn novel. I like that."
Amanda shot her a tortured look. With her hair set on soup cans and her face the color of strained peas, she looked as if she might have stepped out of a first-season episode of "Star Trek."
Marilee walked home briskly that evening, annoyed that her friend could, at times, be such a brainless snot. The truth was, Marilee hadn't found Larry's poem all that objectionable, although she had to concede that the part about the masses and the gases was pretty awful. Still, he had a way with words, a sensitivity to the natural rhythm of language. She resented Amanda's making fun of him as if he were some tormented soul drowning in the quagmire of his own angst. That wasn't Larry at all.
But then, what was? For fifty minutes, five days a week, he whispered into her neck in German. This was strange, she had to admit. Stranger still was his habit of slighting her otherwise. Each day when the final bell rang, he was out the door before Marilee could even rise up out of her seat. If she passed him in the hall between classes, he'd refuse to acknowledge her. His behavior was baffling. Marilee understood his intentions to be sexual, but his style was so different, so utterly unnerving, that she was at a loss as to how to respond. She considered joining him at lunch some day, or milling about his locker, but realized she was simply too timid to carry through with either plan. So she played the game his way, pretending not to notice him when their paths crossed, ignoring him each time he whispered his guttural soliloquy.
"Mein süßes schönes Täubchen," Larry said into her hair one cold, drizzly Monday. Marilee scratched through her sweater at the trickle of sweat that ran down the length of her ribcage. "Mein Liebling," he whispered, then kissed the back of her neck. Marilee gasped. Robby snorted. Frau Göckermann spun on her heels, glaring toward the back corner.
"Who laughed?" she demanded. The room became abruptly silent. "All right," she said. "No one is leaving until I get an answer."
"I did," said Larry. Robby Franz relaxed in his seat.
"Please see me after class," said Frau Göckermann, who promptly assigned the class six pages of homework, which they were to begin immediately. Cindy Burris pivoted in