Chapter 2 #4
“I could,” Leonard said. “I could carry them, I mean.” He stood and picked them up like they weighed nothing.
I thanked him and stood as well. He was at least a foot taller than I was, and when he looked down at me, he was laughing a little, but not in a bad way, not at all.
He looked as happy as I felt. He knew what I was up to. He was just shy, not dumb.
On the way up the stairs, we passed Becky and a bunch of other junior-year girls coming down.
They stopped on the landing, blocking traffic, looking at us and then at each other.
Leonard and I kept climbing, but I turned my head and caught Becky still watching us.
And I was terrible, so cheeky: not only did I wave, I winked.
—
Leonard’s closest friend was Dale Marshen.
Dale was even taller than Leonard but terribly thin, with bright orange hair and pale skin that burned so easily he had to wear long sleeves on even the hottest days, and he could only go swimming after seven.
When I first started seeing Leonard, Dale wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I had the sense he was nervous around girls.
But I kept being nice to him whenever I saw him with Leonard, asking him questions, and we eventually found out we both liked movies.
Not so unusual, I know. But Dale knew all kinds of background information, like who directed what and how you could tell, and I liked learning these things from him.
He seemed to appreciate this, and soon enough, Dale and I got along fine.
Leonard was also friendly with other boys on the swim team, but because of his shyness, he wasn’t what you would call popular, except with teachers.
They were always saying hello to him in the hall, or coming up and asking if he’d read such-and-such.
The answer was usually yes, and when it wasn’t, Leonard would write the title in his notebook and thank the teacher for recommending it.
Because I was a year behind him, I had some of his former teachers, and Mrs. Rose, who taught American Literature, actually took me aside and said she was so glad I was spending time with Leonard Lifton, as he was such a thoughtful and sensitive young man.
I figured out the acronym: TASYM, and the next time I saw him, I called him by it. He took the teasing well.
“They don’t all like me,” he said. “Mr. Bladen doesn’t.”
Mr. Bladen taught junior-year history, and Leonard said he started the first class with a lecture about how the US dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had demonstrated our might and our American ingenuity, and that’s what won the war.
This opinion was received well by the class, as it would have been just about anywhere.
But Leonard raised his hand and asked if we could have demonstrated it some other way besides dropping a bomb on a city full of people, and then another city three days later.
“I wasn’t trying to be argumentative,” he told me.
“I was really wondering. He’d told us that some relative of his was connected to the making of the bomb in ways he could only hint at, so he therefore knew more than most people about it.
I thought he might know if they ever considered another way to show what a bomb like that could do. ”
“Like what, Leonard?” Mr. Bladen had asked him.
And Leonard could tell that he hadn’t liked the question.
Other people in the class had turned around to look at him, their faces unfriendly.
But Leonard answered. He said if they just wanted to scare Japan, they could have filmed a bomb going off at a test site, or invited somebody high up in Japan to come watch one go off somewhere that wasn’t a city.
Or if they wanted the people of Japan to see it, couldn’t they have dropped it close to a city, and not directly over one?
Just close enough that people could see it, how big and awful it was?
Mr. Bladen replied that if someone wanted to get all bleeding-hearted about it, someone might consider all the young American soldiers who would’ve died if we’d had to invade Japan, not to mention all the Japanese, who would’ve fought to the bitter end.
He said a high school student whose biggest problem was wondering what his mom was cooking for dinner probably shouldn’t spend his time second-guessing the US military.
No one actually applauded what Mr. Bladen said, but plenty of people snickered.
“He said that because he didn’t know,” I said. I thought back to Mr. Pile in Missouri. He and Mr. Bladen might have really gotten along. Or they’d just be mean to each other.
“I was so embarrassed,” Leonard said.
I was pleased that he’d told me anyway, that he knew he could.
“You’re brave,” I said. I meant it. Roberta and Irene were always calling me brave, because I could go up and talk to anyone.
But I wouldn’t have raised my hand in class and asked a question like that, knowing I was going against what most people felt.
Even then, I understood. Leonard and I were scared of different things.