Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [115]
“What do you think?” I asked.
He bobbed his head.
“I agree.”
Enough was enough.
I found Anonymous working in the copy room.
“Lonnie, can I talk to you a second?”
He started. “Sure. Absolutely. I was just clocking out.” He rushed to clear a spot for me on the chair beside his. I sat down across the table, careful to keep a barrier between us.
“Working all summer?” I asked.
“Monday through Friday. I work at Blimpie’s now, too. You should come by. I give out free chips.”
I said I would have to think about it. In the ensuing pause, he took, predictably, to memorizing his sneakers.
“Since last semester started, I’ve been getting a lot of things in my mailbox—books and poems. I’m assuming they’re from you.”
“They’re not mine.”
“You’re the only person I know whose printer ink always fades two inches from the bottom.” I held up the poem, Exhibit A.
He bowed his head. His cheeks reddened, neck to ears. It was more a full-body hive than a blush. “I have to send them to a scholarship competition,” he mumbled. “I thought maybe you could edit them for me.”
I slid the poem across the table. “I’m not your English teacher anymore, Lonnie. And I think that—interacting—in this way is unprofessional.”
He snatched the poem. The folded paper disappeared under the table with his hands. “Ms. Gallagher, you shouldn’t think I meant anything. I didn’t mean anything, really … I like you and all, but I didn’t …” He blushed an even deeper shade of crimson.
Another professor walked in the room. Lonnie’s eyes darted nervously from me to the professor and back to the floor. I’d already thought of numerous ways to discourage this childish flirtation once and for all, but in the moment the rehearsed speeches failed me. I hated to shame him more than was necessary. “It must be ninety degrees in here,” I declared. “I was actually on my way downstairs for something to drink. Some company would be nice.”
At the snack machines Lonnie gave the off-brand animal crackers his highest recommendation. We took our crackers and Mountain Dews and sat beneath the overbearing oil portrait of Dr. Hoover, the building’s beneficiary and (some said) ghost.
“I have a theory about you, Lonnie.”
“Yeah?” He shook his hair out of his eyes. He was wearing a Ghost Busters T-shirt, stiff as the papers in the copy room and emanating a floral odor of Snuggle dryer sheets. My first kiss smelled of laundry. It was as if all the young men I’d known worked overtime to compensate for the funk of their bodies, that chemical party surging through their mind and limbs.
“You were born a romantic.”
He snorted. Either he disagreed or he thought the label funny. As usual, he was not a kid whose language—verbal or physical—I could translate.
“You want a girlfriend, don’t you?”
“More than anything,” he said with unabashed desperation.
“Have you ever had one?”
“In the second grade.”
“You don’t waste any time.”
“Annie Dobbins,” he said.
“What was she like?”
“Super smart. She had red hair and freckles. We got married on the playground. ”
“That must have been interesting.”
“Everybody came to see. At indoor recess we named our children. Spring and Autumn. Those were the girls. Lephen for a boy. We made that one up.”
“So what happened to Annie?”
“She moved. Her dad got a new job in Michigan. But I tracked her down in high school. Now she’s in Sacramento with her boyfriend.” He stuffed a few animal crackers into his mouth. “She works at a Clinique cosmetics counter at the Florence mall.”
Creepy stalker knowledge. Fleetingly, I imagined Lonnie in his dorm room Googling Amy Gallagher.
“Lonnie, the difficult thing about being a romantic is that there’s only one person out there for you. One. Out of millions. So you shouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few years to find her.”
“How will I know if I find her?”
I parroted what my mom always told me, because for the first time I think I understood what she meant: “You’ll know.”
He took a last gulp of his soda before tossing the empty can at the wall above the recycling bin. It