Page 45 of Guy's Girl
Ginny rounds the last corner onto Sullivan Street. The familiar signs flip past: Brigadeiro, Pepe Rosso’s, the Dutch. She didn’t know it was possible to feel this empty.
All her life, she sought emptiness by withholding food; she didn’t know that all she needed to do was give her heart to someone who didn’t want it.
Back in Chelsea, Adrian sits on the couch and turns on a movie. Tries to focus. Tries to take his mind off Ginny.
It doesn’t work. He can’t stop thinking about her. The flash of hurt. The sudden vacancy in her eyes. How fast she dressed to leave, as if she could no longer stand to be around him. He’d only meant to clarify where he stoodright now, not end things for good.
A terrifying ache blossoms in his breast. He clutches a hand to his shirt, bundling the fabric in his fist.What is this? What the hell is happening to me? Am I...?
No. He won’t even think the word. He can’t. He knows what happens when love enters the equation. He knows how fleeting it is. How slippery. Nothing is promised. Nothing assured.
He knows that better than anyone. His stepdad taught him years ago.
He just lost sight of the truth.
***
Adrian thought she married for love. That’s how it works, right? You fall in love, you get married. That was the equation that existed in nine-year-old Adrian’s brain. For that reason, when his mother announced that they were moving to America so she could marry a man named Scott, he assumed she was in love.
He was happy for her. All his life, Adrian’sanyahad done nothing but work. Work and attend church. Even at the age of nine, he understood her behavior to be a way of coping with his father’s untimely death. Hisnagyanyaoften said as much. And while he loathed the idea of leaving behind his beloved Hungaryfor a strange new country, he hoped that finding true love would finally make hisanyahappy. Perhaps a mother in love would stay home every now and then. Perhaps she would smile.
Back then, he believed in true love. How could he not? He spent so much time with hisnagyanyaandnagyapa, who had been married for fifty years and still held hands everywhere they went. Not to mention that they spoke near constantly of their late son’s love for Adrian’s mother. How pure it was. How perfect. How devastating when it was ripped apart. “Their love would have lasted a lifetime,”Nagyanyaused to say.
The wedding in Indiana wasn’t what Adrian expected. He thought there would be flowers, a tender exchange of vows, a crowd of joyous guests throwing rice. Not an empty cathedral. Not a grey Monday afternoon. Not a priest whose voice echoed off the hollow church walls, reciting the ceremony as if reading from a textbook. There were no flowers. No rice. Only a quick service and an awkward lunch afterward at a place with sticky wooden booths and plastic-coated menus.
Still, Adrian held out hope. His mother might not hold Scott’s hand or stare lovingly into his eyes, but, when she finally opened the door to his red-brick house on Meridian Street—when she set down her suitcase and looked around the entryway at the carpeted staircase and hanging still-life of three pears—Adrian thought he almost saw her smile.
A week passed. Two. Adrian settled into his bedroom and reread his favorite books. Beatrix left the house every morning and didn’t return until dinner. She was already making friends. Adjusting. Sometimes, he saw his sister through his bedroom window, pedaling down Meridian Street in a sea of children on bicycles. Her silver helmet and brown ponytail fit right in with the rest of them.
Too afraid to join, Adrian spent his days at home with Scottand his mother. Their marriage was a strange one. His stepfather spoke no Hungarian, and his mother knew only basic English. Their conversations consisted mostly of nods, hand gestures, and silence. On occasion, his mother would smile at something Scott said. Once, Adrian even saw her squeeze his hand.
At the end of August, school began.
Adrian and Beatrix slid out of the back seat of Scott’s car—driven by their mother, as their stepfather was too busy “working” at a vaguely described job that Adrian didn’t fully understand—with brand-new JanSports on their backs. Beatrix took his hand and led him across the street, toward the stone wall and wrought-iron fence that marked the entrance to Park Tudor. As they approached their new school’s front entrance, Beatrix with one hand wrapped around his, the other waving to all her new friends, Adrian thought that this place looked less like a schoolhouse and more like a place where a king would send his children.
Class was a disaster. His teacher made Adrian introduce himself, which consisted of stuttering out a few sentences that he had memorized in the bathroom earlier that morning—My name is Adrian Silvas, I am nine years old, I am from Budapest—before quickly taking his seat at the very center of the room. His classmates stared openly. Throughout the morning, he tried to take notes, but all he could do was stare at the teacher’s lips as she fired off sentence after sentence in rapid English. His pen hovered uselessly over a blank notebook.
At lunch, Adrian anticipated sequestering himself in a remote corner of the cafeteria. He would pull out one of his Hungarian novels and pretend to study. Instead, the moment he walked through the cafeteria doors, he was swarmed.
Girls. Dozens of them, all Indiana born and bred. They chattered at him. Grazed his shoulders and arms. When he picked up his tray and went to the lunch line, they followed. When hecarried that tray to an empty table, they followed. They filled the benches. Girls and girls and girls, all staring at him with wide, curious eyes. They whispered to each other. He caught a few English words, likeso cuteandthat accent.They fought for his attention. Batted their eyelashes. Played with their hair. He hadn’t a clue what to do with it all. Mostly, he smiled and nodded. When the bell rang, a pretty girl with short blond hair took his hand, and he thought he might have unwittingly acquired his first girlfriend.
He went to recess in good spirits. If the girls had accepted him so quickly, surely the boys would, too.
No such luck.
Out on the playground, the boys picked up a game of “soccer,” the American version of football. Adrian liked football. Back in Hungary, he often played one-on-one with his best friend, Jozsef. He strolled out onto the field, a smile on his face, ready to join.
When he asked in Hungarian if he could play, the boys didn’t answer. They kept their backs to him while dividing into teams. Shoved him out of the way when he tried to join, then ran off to their respective sides of the field. The only boy who acknowledged him was a gangly fourth-grader with green braces. He clenched his metal-covered teeth, hissed a word that sounded like a punch to the gut, and spat on Adrian’s shoes.
At home, Adrian struggled through his homework. Eventually, he gave up and switched on the television. He pressed the channel changer until a cartoon appeared. Then he settled in to watch, willing the program to magically project English into his brain.
A month passed. Two. At school, the girls continued to fawn over him like an object in a museum. The blond girl stopped holding his hand but was quickly replaced by a redhead with sparkling amber eyes. The boys continued to ignore him.
Slowly, painfully, he learned English. His notebook went from completely blank to half-filled with half-understood sentences. Some phrases he picked up more quickly than others, in particular the ones he heard over and over, like,Don’t worry, he can’t understand you,or,Give that one to the foreigner.
Every day after school, he completed his homework, watched a few hours of television, and ate dinner with Beatrix and hisanya.Scott was gone all the time. At work. Adrian knew he must do something important, given the size of their house, but he could never figure out what. When he asked hisanya, she never gave him a straight answer.
When Scott was home, however, Adrian carefully observed his interactions with his mother. Watched them circle each other, sleep in separate rooms, occasionally offer a quiet smile. He watched them, and he wondered:Is this love?
