8.
Back then, I was not the only one in this Lindy fix.
In middle school, a boy named Brett Barrett fell so hard for Lindy that he mowed lawns for two summers just to buy her a ring. It was thin and gold-plated, with some blue stone in its center. Legend goes that she had bested him in a round of kiss-chase years before, a game we played in our youth, and planted one on his cheek. Then, as if this peck were a promise, or the culmination of some ancient courtship ritual, Brett Barrett assumed that he and Lindy were meant for each other, and he got immediately to work. He saved every penny. He thought of little else. Finally, in the eighth grade, he presented her with the ring underneath a live oak near the center of campus.
“Why would I want this?” Lindy said.
She wasn’t being mean.
The thing was, during his years of steadfast pursuit, Brett Barrett had forgotten to speak to her.
A boy named Kyle Wims also fell for Lindy when she stood up for him during a pickup basketball game at lunch hour. Chubby and pale, Kyle didn’t run much, and hovered instead near the three-point line, waving his arms. He fancied himself a three-point specialist, I imagine, and to be honest I remember him being decent. Still, he rarely got the ball as the more athletic kids drove the lane and made improbable layups. Lindy sat near the court in a row of girls who would later turn out to be the type to play volleyball, softball, and soccer, and together they watched the game. In the middle of their conversation, Lindy got so flustered that she called out to the boys, “Hey, dipwads! Why don’t you pass it to Kyle? He’s wide flipping open!” and Kyle lost his mind.
He dropped thirty-two pounds in the coming year, either through puberty or devotion, and asked Lindy to the back-to-school dance. She said yes to him out of pure kindness, which made it all worse. Lindy was beautiful and athletic, and at this time, she was still popular. There was never a chance between them. So when she posed for pictures with him in the gymnasium and asked him to hold her shoes while she danced with her friends, Kyle ate it up. The rest of us laughed. I believe it was Tommy Gale who eventually told him to open his eyes and get real, and so Kyle just stood in the corner for the rest of the night. Lindy rushed up to grab him for the last dance, however, and pulled him into the crowd. She put her soft hands on his shoulders, and Kyle flipped us the bird behind her back. That next week he taped their pictures up on the inside of his locker, but we never heard him speak her name again.
A boy from across town was also affected.
He had seen Lindy compete in a cross-country meet when they were both in the eighth grade, and he fell in love with her, too. She had won her heat easily, as he had his, and so he assumed it would be a natural fit. In his defense, at this time of her life, Lindy was easy to imagine yourself with. She seemed to walk that perfect line between a person you suspect you might not deserve and the prize life would be if everything turned out just right. She was playful but not silly, pretty but not exotic, and close but just out of reach. So, after the race, this boy took to frequenting the malls and movie theaters, looking for her. If he saw us wearing our school uniforms around town, he approached us as well.
“Do y’all know Lindy Simpson?” he’d ask us. “Tell her the guy that won the mile is looking for her.”
He gave us little slips of paper with his parents’ phone number on them and so we prank-called his house for years. We figured he deserved it, like some trespasser caught fishing our pond, and made sure nothing ever came of his love.
But not all of her suitors were so virtuous.
Clay Tompkins, an awkward boy with dandruff, was known to spend all his free time scribbling in a green composition notebook. He had few friends at school and didn’t seem to want them, although I know now that this couldn’t have been true. The last semester of our eighth-grade year, Clay made the mistake of leaving his notebook underneath his desk when he went to the bathroom, and since it was a burning mystery to all of us, we riffled through it. The first page contained a list about twenty names long, all girls at our school. The page was titled GIRLS I’D LIKE TO BANG, and was apparently a scientific ranking. I saw Lindy’s name at number 7.
A crowd gathered around the book as one of the boys flipped the pages. Each page had a detailed sketch devoted to one of the aforementioned girls in some pose that they had surely never assumed. Anna Jenks, for example, was drawn swinging from a vine with her breasts hanging out, a pair of skimpy animal-print panties barely concealing her backside. Katie Comeaux, number 2, was nude on her knees, her hands behind her head. She looked to be dancing to some pulsing music in the background, and her pubic hair was trimmed into a neat and thin strip. May Fontenot lay on her back with her legs spread before us, her hands gripping her inner thighs, and touched the tip of her tongue to her teeth. It was incredible stuff, all of it, and spoke to an imagination few of us appreciated at the time.
I squirmed in my seat at the sight.
When we finally got to Lindy’s page, there she was, more tastefully rendered than the others. Her back was to the artist, as it often was when she ran, and she peered over her shoulder at us. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, traced the soft valley between her shoulder blades, and she was topless. Below this, her gym shorts were pulled down to her knees, as were her panties. The only colors on the page were two bright splashes of blue: her Reebok running shoes.
I would have emptied my pockets for the document.
The boys kept flipping on, though, wondering what new miracles awaited us, and we eventually got to pages where Clay had practiced with anatomy. We saw detailed drawings of erect penises from all angles, numerous workups of vaginas with various patterns of hair. I learned more in those few minutes than in all my previous experience. And since we were currently blind to any other world but this one, none of us noticed Mrs. Berkowitz approaching to see what the fuss was about. Once she did, we surrendered the notebook instantly. We chattered to her of our innocence.
I was never the same after this, nor was Clay.
He was pulled out of school that day and did not return. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he was expelled or just could not face us, but we never saw Clay Tompkins again. We talked to people at other schools to see if he transferred, we looked around for him at sporting events and restaurants. Nothing. I long wondered where he went. How does a boy just disappear?
Decades later, I saw Clay Tompkins in USA Today. He was living in Seattle and, together with a partner, had started a company that designed video games. It was cutting-edge stuff, the article said, meant primarily for adults. These games are now called first-person shooters and are popular, so I know he makes no end of coin. I hope he’s happy. I feel sorry for people like him. He was just a curious boy then, with genuine talent, and his only mistake was expressing it.
But Clay Tompkins had also given me a strange gift, which was the inexhaustible joy of pornography. I was an immediate fan. When I got home that night, I rushed my way through dinner and ran to my room. I got to work beneath my sheets with a pencil and sketchpad and drew Lindy in every way I could imagine. Most of these early sketches were unrecognizable, of course, merely a collage of inappropriate stick figures, but the act of creation gave me tremendous satisfaction. I had her right where I wanted her, I figured, in my room, in my mind, at the tips of my fumbling fingers.
And then, in one of the first rushes of lustful inspiration I would experience in my life, I drew thought bubbles above Lindy’s head to get her emotion across.
The things I made her think. The things I made her want.
These would come back to haunt me.