Chapter 7: Hank Starts High School

About a week before I started high school at Bronx Science, Molly gave me some advice about female nature. We were just chatting as we sat in her living room. Both of us were aware that once the school year started, I wouldn’t be able to go to her house in Alpine as often as I had been over the summer.

She said, “If by chance some girl there asks you if you already have a girlfriend, don’t just say a flat-out no.”

“Why does that make a difference?”

“Women sort of like to deal with guys who are already, well, at least somewhat involved with others, or at least in the game by dating I should say.”

“What if I’m not interested in whatever girl is asking this?”

“I’m just trying to get you in the right frame of mind, for future reference. And she will probably talk to her friends about what you said to her. Women like to know if a guy is already going out with some other women. Believe it or not, it actually makes him seem more interesting if somebody else, or maybe several of them, are at least dating him.”

“So how do I respond if asked about that?”

“Instead of looking lame, you can equivocate, or even make a joke out of it. You can say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got lots of them,’ or something like that. It doesn’t have to be true, it just shows her that you are not intimidated by the issue. Just saying some bullshit, even if she can figure out that it’s not true, is better than looking like a loser.”

“You didn’t ask me that when you met me.”

“I’m thirty-nine, so that’s sort of a special case! What I’m trying to tell you is that women will try to test men, see if they can get them rattled, although it may not be obvious what’s going on. Even they may not be fully aware of what they are doing.”

“But you told me not to get involved with somebody too soon.”

“Yet you’ll still be talking to these girls at times. It’s just a good habit for you to get into, I mean appearing confident around them. A sense of humor is one way to do that. It’s a little hard to explain. You have to show that you are not that impressed with them because you have other options and yet you don’t want to look too off-putting either.”

I tried to process what she was saying. “I’m not really sure I get it. And these girls are just going to be freshmen like I am.”

“It starts early, I’ve seen it. My advice is helpful in the longer run as you get older too. Just be relaxed, let things roll off your back. You probably learned a lot from me; let’s face it, you’ve gotten used to having a woman in your life.”

“But I won’t mention you directly, of course.”

“Sure, but you have learned how to be discreet, which I’ve appreciated.” I hadn’t mentioned my friend Mark and what I had already told him.

“Molly, am I still going to be, ah, visiting you this fall?”

“If you want to, yes I’d like that.” Then I saw her frown. “Hank, we both know that you are growing up and, well, eventually you’ll have to move on from me.”

I felt sad even thinking about that, and she must have seen that in me. “Don’t dwell on it, we have to live in the moment. Things will work out, somehow. The advice I’m giving is a bit advanced for someone your age, but you will eventually see that I am right.”

I was tempted to ask her, but Molly, what are you going to do when that happens and I’m no longer around? Then I decided not to say that. As well as I knew her, and as much as I liked her, there were certain sides to her personality I would never know and couldn’t talk to her about. Our age difference was too large, even though she rarely mentioned the implications of that.

She smiled at me and said, “There are certainly some things the Scouting handbook didn’t prepare you for.”

“It doesn’t explicitly say this, but they would probably advocate chastity before marriage. In any case, it was written for some very young guys.”

“But the book probably hasn’t kept pace with how fast things are changing now.”

“Well, the present edition was mostly written in 1965.”

“Then I’ll tell you this, Hank. If you get a chance to go on some dates, even casual ones, that’s fine. Even the school cafeteria would be an okay place to start. Some guys go through the whole four years of high school without ever asking a girl out.”

I wondered why she would care about that. She must have read my mind because she continued. “I was the one who initiated you into the adult world. I feel I should be responsible for looking after your best interests.”

Saying thank you seemed wrong, so I struggled to find something to say. She probably could see that. “Hank, your Aunt Molly is not going to steer you wrong.”

Molly knew that I was not the same guy that I had been in June; she had said as much. I had spent most of a summer pleasing and interacting with a mature woman. And she was correct in that the freshman girls at my school didn’t faze me as I had expected. I didn’t realize it right away, but that was exactly the kind of attitude those chicks were looking for.

It also turned out that Molly had miscalculated somewhat about what else would happen when I got to my new school. Or maybe she knew the truth but didn’t want to admit it, even to herself. But at Bronx Science, I did meet a girl by my fifth day there and that one made a serious play for me. Or maybe it was me who had started things by what I said.

My school drew in students from all over the city, although I suspect Staten Islanders were underrepresented. A few other high schools had borough-wide catchment areas, although most covered smaller areas than that. The specialized high schools like mine were open to any city resident who could meet the requirements to get in. One of those hurdles was a fairly challenging admissions test.

In later years, most city high schools were reformed into smaller units even if they often shared the same building. Whether that actually improved the quality of education is difficult to say. Back then, many of those places had huge – unwieldy really – student bodies of five to six thousand. Mine, with about 3,200, was considered to be on the small side.

One of the freshmen girls was Arlene Keller, and she was in two of my classes, English and Social Studies. By coincidence, she wound up sitting next to me in the English class. It was one of those classes in which we didn’t have assigned seats, so most students by habit gravitated to whatever place they had fallen into on the first day. She would sit just across from me to my left.

She seemed somewhat fidgety, and she spent a considerable amount of time looking out the window rather than paying attention in class.

Otherwise, there was little about her that caught my attention. Like most high school students of that era – including me – she dressed very casually. A few of the girls did go out of their way to look good, but Arlene wasn’t one of them. I couldn’t tell from her last name what her ethnic identity was, always an important topic among New Yorkers.

She was about five-six with dark hair that she didn’t do much to take care of. It was usually pinned back in a seemingly random fashion. The few times I looked at her face, I picked up what was called a vibe back then. I got the impression that she was unhappy, morose even, about something. Probably being around Molly so much had made me more alert to other people’s emotions than I would have been otherwise.

On that Friday the class was dismissed just before one of the lunch breaks, but Arlene stayed in her seat. Her clothes that day were basic, as usual for the majority of girls at that school: an open button-down shirt, a white blouse underneath, blue jeans, and sneakers. Some instinct told me to stay there too. I guessed that she was going to say something to me, and I was right.

She made a show of looking bored or annoyed or perhaps both, and then she said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, I mean at this school. What are you doing here?”

“That’s pretty simple. I’d rather be here than at one of the regular Bronx high schools.”

“And which ones were those?”

“For one thing, I was right over the line into Theodore Roosevelt’s district.”

“Yeah, that school is kind of rough,”

“It used to be the home base of the Fordham Baldies.” In the 1950s, that was a mostly Italian gang from the Belmont neighborhood. They were long gone by 1969. By then, Roosevelt was changing to a predominately Black and Puerto Rican student body.

Arlene didn’t know what I was talking about. “The Fordham what?” She didn’t seem like the type to know anything about New York history.

I briefly explained it. “They were a gang from the 1950s. Anyway, my other choice was Clinton.” Any boy in the Bronx could attend that school. “And of course, there is our Bronx Science. I wasn’t sure I would get in, but here I am.”

Arlene responded, “I could have gone to Columbus; I’m in their district. Maybe I should have done that instead of coming here.” Now I knew that she lived somewhere in the East Bronx near Pelham Parkway.

Instead of mentioning that, I said, “You mean after five days you already have an opinion of this place? I know it’s supposed to be a better than the average New York school.” Well, that was obvious; it only accepted a small number of the eighth-graders who applied.

“I don’t know, everybody here seems kind of stuck-up.” I wasn’t that surprised that she had a sour outlook on the world. She had formed her view about the school in less than a week. Before I could respond, she asked me, “So, do you have a girlfriend out there someplace?”

In just a couple of minutes, I had gotten just the question that Molly had warned me about. I blurted out, “Yeah I do, I met her in July.” I should have regretted what I then did, but I said her name was Molly, although I changed her age from thirty-nine to fourteen.

Fortunately, there were no cell phones back then so I didn’t have to produce a photo of her. But I already had said her name; I couldn’t take that back. Maybe it didn’t make that much of a difference.

Arlene sounded skeptical, “How did you manage that, I mean meeting this chick?”

“It’s going to take a bit of explaining. Do you want to hear this?”

“I asked you, didn’t I?” God, this girl is rude. I soon figured out that the reason she had started this conversation was that she wanted to toy with me, amuse herself by seeing how discomforted she could make me.

But I remained calm. I frankly didn’t care what this insolent girl thought about me or what I had been doing. It wasn’t completely clear to me then, but that was precisely the approach that was going to work with her.

But I did need some cover story to go with my statement. I decided to use the real tale of what happened in Alpine, with Molly being a teenager instead of an adult. There was no chance that Arlene would know anybody in that town. And it gave me a chance to boast a bit about the actual plot of what had happened.

I said, “All right, it was during my last two weeks in the Boy Scouts.”

Arlene found that amusing, “What were you doing in the Boy Scouts?”

“I joined two years ago when I was twelve. It seemed better than just hanging out on my block. But now I’ve outgrown it.”

She kept asking me questions, so she must have been interested in how I was spinning my story. “Okay, so what does all that have to do with this girl you’re trying to tell me about?”