Chapter 3

The Labor Day holiday was the Monday two days after my birthday and Sweet Sixteen party. Adults were brooding about going back to work after the three-day weekend while kids were excited about school soon starting. I only had one week of summer vacation left and then I’d be going to a new school. High school. Starting as a sophomore, though, not a freshman. Kids who went to a parochial kindergarten-through-eighth grade elementary school entered high school for their ninth grade as a freshman. But the public elementary schools were from kindergarten through sixth grade, then junior high school for seventh, eight, and ninth grades, and then high school for tenth through twelfth grades. So I was entering high school as a sophomore, not a freshman, but it was a new experience for me nonetheless.

But that’s not what I was fixated on. I had been kissed by a boy for the first time. Well, Mr. Russo wasn’t a boy. He was a man. And was it even the kind of kiss lovers shared? Maybe he had meant to kiss my cheek like other kisses I had gotten over the years, but simply missed. Although his kiss got a lot of my lip. Unlike all those others. But not only did his lips touch mine, his lips seemed to have lingered longer than a usual kiss. It hadn’t been just a quick peck. Or had I imagined that? Had I imagined it all? No, not all. I didn’t imagine the butterflies in my tummy and the itch between my legs. Those had been real.

I was dying to tell Debbie and Gina about the kiss. We had no secrets from each other. But I was afraid to tell them. Mr. Russo was a grown-up and married. It wasn’t like telling them about a first kiss on a date. Anyway, it probably wasn’t even a real kiss. They’d tease me about it so I kept it a secret. The first of many.

I really liked the kiss, though. What would it be like full on the lips with someone my age? Maybe I’d find out if a boy asked me on a date.

School began and I got reacquainted with kids I knew from junior high school who I only saw in school. They didn’t live in the few blocks that made up my world outside of school. There were some new kids too, but I wasn’t outgoing enough to introduce myself. I did check out the new boys, though. How were boys going to know I was now allowed to date?

Always good in English, my guidance counselor placed me in an advanced English class. I didn’t want to be in a class without my friends, but my parents had given their approval. We had fought and I had cried, but it hadn’t made a difference. So my English class was filled with seniors all older than me. Talk about a shy girl’s nightmare. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t find the classroom on the first day of school so by the time I arrived to class the only unoccupied seat was next to a boy. The classroom was set up with two columns of desks side by side, an aisle, two more columns, another aisle, and so on. The empty desk was in the back row. I always sat up front. The troublemakers sat in the back, not me.

Trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but looking at everyone, I strolled to the empty desk wishing I was invisible. I swept my skirt under my thighs as I sat in the chair and let the hem of the skirt drape over my knees which I pressed together.

“Hi, I’m Joey,” the boy next to me said.

My breath caught. The inside of my mouth was cotton. He was talking to me. A senior. And he was cute. He had black hair like Elvis, but brown eyes. There was a little fuzz on his upper lip. He was able to grow a mustache! And he was talking to me. To me!

I tried to speak, but it came out as an embarrassing squeak. I cleared my throat, swallowed hard, almost a gulp, and said, “I’m Julie.”

“What’s in the case?” he asked.

I picked up the scuffed brown case that I had laid on top of my desk when I sat down and placed it on the floor at the side of my chair by the aisle.

“It’s my clarinet,” I said. “I have Band last period.”

He nodded while staring at me. “I don’t remember you being in any of my classes before.”

“I’m a sophomore.”

About to slap my hand over my mouth, I thankfully caught myself in time to drop the hand back down to my side. That would have been disastrous. So immature. Inside I was kicking myself for saying that. I was telling him I was young.

“Then you must be smart,” he said. “Glad you’re sitting next to me. I’m more into sports than books.”

The teacher saved me from replying by starting the class. When she took roll call and called my name, everyone turned around and all eyes fell on me. I was the new kid no one knew. Sizing me up, especially the girls, they probably thought I had transferred in from another school. My high school was huge, not like a school in a smaller town where everyone knew everyone. Brooklyn wasn’t like that. It had more than two million people crammed into seventy square miles. But once class began, I was forgotten.

My next period was lunch where I told Gina and Debbie about Joey. They wanted to know everything about him. There wasn’t much to tell other than he was a senior and even had a little mustache. They begged me to find out more about him. I told them I would, but I knew I was too shy to go through with it.

By the time I entered my last class of the day, I had fallen into the high school routine. In junior high school, the entire class traveled together from subject to subject, but in high school everyone had their own schedule of classes. That’s why I was able to be in an advanced English class. My last class was Band and I was excited. I loved music and wanted to be good at playing an instrument. They chose the clarinet for me in junior high school so that’s what I was learning to play.

In the Band classroom, I bumped into bandmates from junior high school so we chatted while others filed into the room. It was set up like my junior high school band room with the chairs in semi-circles facing the front. Except it was larger. It wasn’t until the teacher clapped his hands a few times that I even noticed him. But when I did, my jaw dropped. He was gorgeous. Mr. Roman was young. A Scandinavian god with longer than normal blond hair, blue eyes, and blond sideburns and goatee.

The teacher was dressed in all black. A black sport coat—not a suit—was draped over the back of his chair. It had leather patches on the elbows. His tie was also black and the knot was loose with the top button of his shirt open, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up halfway to his elbows. And even his shirt was black. I had never seen a teacher wear a black shirt. They always wore white or light blue. His pants were not like suit trousers. They were corduroy, and of course black. He didn’t look like any teacher I ever had. He got away with it because he was a musical genius. Classically trained, Mr. Roman had been a child prodigy who played Carnegie Hall at the age of fourteen. But when he got involved in the Beat culture which rejected economic materialism, explored Eastern religions, and experimented with psychedelic drugs and sexual liberation and exploration, he gave all that up and became a teacher. My Band teacher was a Beatnik.

I spent more time in class swooning over Mr. Roman than paying attention to him. That is until he caught me with the wrong sheet of music on my stand and told me to stop daydreaming and pay attention in class. If he had known I was daydreaming about him I would have bolted from the classroom, ran home, and locked myself in my bedroom until the semester ended. Maybe for the rest of my life.

Each day, Joey spoke to me in class. I actually spoke back and relayed everything to my lunch companions. As the days passed, I was more comfortable talking to Joey. I actually liked him. Debbie and Gina were jealous. To my shame, that made me feel good. Our priest said pride was a sin so I was committing a sin, but that didn’t dampen how good it made me feel.