Little Boy by Anthony Prato

yes. It was beautiful. The ride was bumpy and
noisy, and the subway had its usual stench of urine and garbage,
but I didn’t mind. As corny as it sounds, I felt like an angel
nestled on a cloud in the sky and quickly fell asleep on her
shoulder.
     
    She woke me as the train pulled into our
stop. I decided to be a gentleman and take her all the way back to
her house, instead of just letting her get on the bus by herself.
As we walked up her block toward her house, I leaned forward like I
was going to kiss her, and she poked her little head up, ready to
kiss me back. Then I sort of dodged her head and whispered into her
ear: “I want to kiss you, but I won’t until I break up with Lynn.
There will be time.”
     
    Gracefully, she smiled and said thank you and
then walked up to her door and went inside. I must have stood there
for twenty minutes or so before I actually left. I didn’t want the
moment to end because, deep down inside, I guess I knew that our
relationship had reached its zenith.
     
     

Chapter 6
    Cruising Altitude
     
    It was sort of around then, I suppose, that I
started to lose my mind. Not go crazy, but literally lose my mind.
Most teenagers, I think, were still learning stuff at that age. Not
me. I think that I learned up until around that time—around my
junior year in high school—and then, slowly and steadily, I
stopped.
     
    Thing is, my grades stayed about the same. As
you know, I’ve always gotten straight A’s. I excel in History and
English because I love to read and write and memorize interesting
facts. My vocabulary has always exceeded my years, and that’s
invariably helped me get terrific grades. Although I never liked
school much, it was always easy to get A’s because I knew how to
give teachers what they wanted. Until sixteen or seventeen, I was
always a great student.
     
    But it wasn’t just academics. Maybe a better
way to describe what happened is this: I stopped gaining knowledge.
The older I got, the less I wanted to learn. As a matter of fact,
maybe I never wanted to learn at all, even when I was five or six.
But by my late teen years I had experienced an emotion generally
reserved for the middle aged and elderly. The word I liked to use
at the time—and the word I can still use now, really—is jaded . I was jaded. I’d just about had enough with school
and tests and learning and all that bullshit. Like that time I
worked in the office over the summer. I was really excited to get
the job, because it paid a lot, and it was near dad’s office
downtown. But I remember the first thing I said to my dad as I
walked through the door of my house after my first day at work:
“This job sucks.”
     
    And I really did hate it already, after only
one day at work. When I got to work, my boss explained my
responsibilities to me—some photo-copying, some collating, some
phone calls, some errands, and what not. The usual office bullshit.
I knew it would be a boring job, but I also knew that Dad had
gotten it for me, so it was kind of important that I impress the
boss and my co-workers, and make my dad look good. I didn’t have to
kiss their asses or anything, I just had to do as I was told. I
couldn’t just go through the motions of working. I had to show them
I cared about getting the job done right.
     
    But I didn’t care. The moment I left
the office on the first day, I knew that I’d loathe every day I
spent at that place until it was all over. It wasn’t a matter of
simply hating the work. It’s why I hated it—because I’d mastered
all of it on the first day. I did some photo-copying, made a few
phone calls, faxed some documents, wrote some memos. And then I was
bored. I know how to do all this shit , I thought, so why
bother coming in tomorrow? And my goddamn boss expected me to
repeat these mundane tasks all summer long.
     
    Christ, I can’t tell you how awful that
summer was. I did everything to escape boredom. The office had an
airy bathroom with a huge window in