Chapter 2 #3
Still, he did not speak. I glanced back at Roberta and Irene—a mistake, as they were both watching with wide eyes.
I’d said I was going to just go up and talk to him, but they didn’t think I really would.
Leonard didn’t say anything, just kept looking at me like I was scaring him, and I was about to get up and say Whoops, sorry, I thought you might be a friendly person.
Have fun with your horse. But then I saw that his neck was turning pink, and he was the one in the shade.
I glanced down at his book. There was a drawing of an angry-looking pig on the cover. The title was Animal Farm.
“It’s about animals?” I asked. I thought, snob or not, scared or not, he could answer a question.
He closed his book, lost his place. “It’s not about animals.” He had to stop to clear his throat. “I’m Leonard Lifton. Nice to meet you.”
I could tell he’d learned to talk in the north, his consonants sharp and clipped.
“I mean it is about animals,” he added. Under his chinos, one of his knees was bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. “But not really. It’s an allegory.”
Progress, I thought. “An allegory for what?”
He looked down at the book like he wasn’t sure. I was starting to feel the sun. I wiped my forehead, and he wiped his.
“They’re communists,” he said finally. The bouncing knee slowed, then stilled. “The pigs, I mean. They’re not all bad. One of them is really good.” He pointed at the angry-looking pig on the cover. “But the bad ones take over.”
Well, that was actually pretty interesting to me, so it was easy to ask him more questions.
But I admit the whole time, I was half paying attention to the suntanned skin of his arms. I’d seen in the yearbook that he was on the swim team.
It showed in his shoulders, even in his button-down.
And there was a softness to his voice I liked.
“Goodness, it’s hot,” I said. Not exactly breaking news. But he got it. He moved over and apologized for hogging the shade.
“Hogging it like a communist,” I said, which didn’t make perfect sense, but we both laughed, and I scooted into the shade beside him.
“I think I’d like to read it,” I told him.
Not a lie. “You get it from the library here?” I nodded upward.
The school library was behind us on the top floor, dark with oak trim, quiet. Nothing like the rest of the school.
“Oh no.” He lowered his voice, which gave me the opportunity to lean in. “It’s banned. You can’t even get it downtown.”
“Why? Why’s it banned?” I’d already spoken when I realized the ban might have something to do with sex, but he didn’t look embarrassed for me. Before he answered, I figured it out. “Oh. You said that one of the communist pigs is good. A good communist.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s my guess, at least. My dad said ‘because it’s Florida.’ But I think it’s the same all over.”
I laughed again, a little punch drunk. I could smell the bougainvillea behind us.
“Well,” I said. “Now I just want to read it more.” Another truth. But also strategic. One one thousand, I thought. Two one thousand. Three—
“You can borrow it from me when I’ve finished.” He was looking down at the book again. He moved it from hand to hand. Neat fingernails. Clean. “I’ll probably finish it tonight.”
We agreed to meet the following day at the picnic table. My friends, when I told them, were astounded by my quick success.
“That’s like a date,” Roberta said. “That’s like a date at school.”
Irene disagreed. “He’s not picking her up at her house. He’s not buying dinner or even a Coke. It’s an appointment.” She paused. “With potential.”
I agreed with Irene. The next day, when I went to the courtyard, I brought every book in my locker with me, and I set them beside me while Leonard and I talked.
I quickly got the feeling he’d prepared for the conversation, like it was a test he could study for.
He started off asking where I was from, and when I said Rolla, Missouri, he said he’d never been there, as if this was a surprise, or something sadly missing from his general education.
That made me laugh, which I soon regretted, as his throat turned pink again.
His earlobes, too. But we got back on track.
I asked him about New York, and he said he didn’t remember much about living there, but it turned out he did—he’d been inside the Empire State Building, and every Christmas his parents had taken him and his cousins to ice-skate at Rockefeller Center.
They’d lived in an apartment, and the building had a doorman named Lou who was old and grouchy but who once pushed a girl out of the way of a fast-moving car, right in front of their building.
I clapped twice and said, “Okay, Lou!” just before the bell rang. That was my cue. I sighed, looked at all my books, and said I didn’t know how I was going to carry all of them to my next class on the second floor.
This was true. I didn’t know for sure. But I had a pretty strong suspicion.