How They Met, and Other Stories(8)
Author: David Levithan

“C’mere,” she said to me now.

Curious, I obliged. She told me to sit down with my legs making a wide V. (Don’t worry: I was wearing pants.) Then she sat across from me and touched her feet to mine. She started to make a patty-cake patty-cake motion, and I knew that I was supposed to clap my hands to hers according to a certain order. So far, so good.

“It’s like this,” she said. And then she presented me with my last possible role model.

Miss Lucy had a steamboat

The steamboat had a bell

Miss Lucy went to heaven

And the steamboat went to

Hello, operator

Please give me number nine

And if you disconnect me,

I will chop off your

Behind the ’frigerator

There was a piece of glass

Miss Lucy sat upon it

And it went right up her

Ask me no more questions

And I’ll tell you no more lies

The boys are in the bathroom

Zipping up their

Flies are in the belfry

And bees are in the park

And boys and girls are kissing

In the D-A-R-K

D-A-R-K

D-A-R-K

DARK DARK DARK

It’s not a rhyme, because it doesn’t rhyme. It’s not a song, because there’s no real music. It’s not a limerick, because it’s not Irish. At some point, I guess I just started thinking of it as a biography.

By the time I got to senior year of high school, I figured I’d run Miss Lucy’s story through my head at least a thousand times. In the beginning it was a source of endless amusement. Then it was one of my earliest pieces of nostalgia—when I was a sixth grader, I used it to remember the fond innocence of second grade. Then it became a place my mind went from time to time. Science class boring? Well, Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Dying to get off the phone with the friend who won’t shut up? Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Stuck in the car while Mom runs in for the dry cleaning? Miss Lucy had a steamboat.

I had no idea what it meant. That was the beauty of it.

I could relate to Miss Lucy because her life made absolutely no sense.

I’d say I was itching to see Ashley again after our first brief conversation, but an itch is something you can scratch, while absence is something you can’t really do shit about. She wasn’t in any of my classes; since I was in all of the average classes, this meant she was either really smart or really dumb. There was a slim chance she’d just decided this place wasn’t for her and had left after homeroom. But that wasn’t the option I was hoping for when lunch began.

“You misplace your attention span?” my best friend, Teddy, asked when he caught me looking around.

“There’s this new girl,” I said.

Teddy snorted. “Now, that didn’t take long, did it?”

Teddy was once the new kid, too. He was born in California, but he spent most of elementary school in Korea. Then his parents moved back to California when he was in sixth grade. In tenth grade, they moved again, this time to our town. That’s when I met him—the first day of tenth grade. I hated him almost instantly.

His first words to me were “If you’re not a [not nice word for lesbian], you sure as hell dress like one.”

I must’ve immediately looked miffed, because he quickly added, “Hey, to me [not nice word for lesbian] is an affectionate term. After all, I’m a big ol’ [rather sexually explicit word for g*y man].”

I wasn’t ready for terms, affectionate or otherwise, from him. I was still coming to terms with myself, dealing with the anxiety and disappointment and exhilaration of being into girls. I tried avoiding him for months. It didn’t work.

“You got it bad, and that ain’t good,” he said to me now.

“She called me Miss Lucy,” I told him.

This made Heron, also at our table, perk up. She’d been reading. She was always reading. She was the only person I knew who’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome from holding books for too long.

“Miss Lucy is our thing,” she said. She wasn’t saying it out of jealousy or possessiveness. It was like she wanted to remind herself.

“Where is she?” I asked Teddy. “Use your g*ydar.”

“You know g*ydar isn’t like air-traffic control,” he tsked. “The person actually has to be in the room.”

“Well, she’s not here,” I said. “So I’m going to find her.”

“That’s ballsy,” Teddy said.

I looked to Heron for some help.

“Why not?” she said. That was her version of advice.

As I left the cafeteria, it became a test: If I found her, surely that was a sign that things were meant to be. Granted, the sign wouldn’t really spell out what those things were—it would be like a street sign that said STUFF AHEAD. But that was good enough for me.

I found her in the parking lot, leaning on a blue car, eating French fries.

“I had to reward myself for surviving the morning,” she explained, offering me some.

“That bad?” I asked, taking a few.

“Yeah, but not without its prospects.”

I was so used to being the brazen one that I just about flipped to have someone be brazen in my direction.

“Prospects, eh?” I said, fishing for confirmation.

“Yes, Miss Lucy,” she replied, stretching away from the car, toward me. “And I believe the afternoon’s already getting better.”

You should never kiss someone in the first ten minutes. I know that now, but back then it just seemed like nine minutes too long to wait.

“So, are you girlfriends or what?” Teddy asked me, three weeks after Ashley and I started our thing.

The only place I called her girlfriend was in my head. Sometimes I’d say it about a million dozen times in a row, staring at her in class. I wasn’t secret about it or anything. Hunger is something you can’t hide.

“I dunno,” I told him. “I think I’m her girlfriend, and I guess she’s mine. We don’t talk about it.”

“If you’re not girlfriends, then what are you?” he pestered.

I didn’t tell him the answer, because I was too proud of it and also a little embarrassed by my pride.

Even if I wasn’t her girlfriend, I was definitely her Miss Lucy.

“Come over here, Miss Lucy, and give me a hand,” she’d say, and I’d be over in a flash, whether it was to sort out her locker, fill in her homework, or unhook her bra.

“I like you, Miss Lucy,” she’d tell me, and I’d have to do everything I could not to lob a love back at her.