See Jane Date by Melissa Senate Page A

her capped teeth. But I did. I’d been there.
    The first time I’d clapped eyes on Natasha Anne Nutley was in the sixth grade at P.S. 101, when Mrs. Greenman had introduced her as a new student to our class. The Gnat and her family had moved into an apartment building around the corner from my own. Aunt Ina, Uncle Charlie and Dana lived in a building a few blocks away, where Ina and Charlie still lived, a few more blocks over from Grammy—and Ethan Miles, Incinerator Man. Natasha’s father had inherited his father’s pharmacy and moved the Nutley family to upscale Forest Hills from Flushing. To this day I remembered Mrs. Greenman introducing Natasha with the pleased smile that had been previously reserved for the class president.
    Natasha had scored more invitations for roller-skating and McDonald’s and slumber parties on her first day at P.S. 101 than I’d had in the history of my grammar school career. All the girls had wanted to be her best friend. And all the boys had salivated over her. Unable to take their eyes off her, they’d constantly failed tests or lost track of what the teacher was saying. Robby Evers included. I was always staring at him, so I was very well aware that he was always staring at Natasha and her budding breasts. She’d had her eye on Jimmy Alfonzo, the sixth-grade equivalent of James Dean or Dylan from Beverly Hills 90210. By science hour, day two, she and Jimmy were a couple. That was when I realized I could have a shot with Robby. Because the girl he wanted was already taken. There was nowhere for him to go but down.
    I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem in grammar school.
    Robby Evers, who’d dreamed of being a hard-hitting journalist like his hero, Walter Cronkite, hadn’t been interested in the skinny, quiet girl with the dark eyes and dark hair who hung around with the quieter and skinnier Miner twins. Not in sixth grade, or seventh, or eighth. Or even ninth, when my current C-cup-sized breasts had begun to make themselves known. In eleventh grade, Robby and I had been paired as partners in biology class. He’d been sickened by the idea of slicing open the dead frog, so we’d held the little knife together, my hand guiding his. With the first prick, he’d looked into my eyes, terror and discomfort forcing shut his own sweet brown eyes. I’d made him feel understood, and I’d made him feel right. And so Robby Evers began to notice me. Or my C-sized breasts, more likely. He still stared at Gnatasha, but she was involved in her on-again, off-again long-term relationship with Jimmy Alfonzo.
    In biology and English, the two classes we shared,Robby would show me newspaper clippings that he’d brought in to discuss in his social studies class and at meetings for the high school newspaper, which I’d joined to be near him. He’d go on and on about the injustice and the horror in the world around us and declare his intention to travel that world and document the atrocities so that everyone would be alerted and do something about it. I was in love. Robby Evers cared about everything. No other boy in Forest Hills High School gave a hoot about the ozone layer, let alone apartheid in South Africa. He was known for his intensity, and girls liked that, but the intensity combined with his awkwardness worked against him. He was going to be a foreign correspondent, and most girls at Forest Hills High had no idea what that was. I was going to be a poet. He liked that. Once, while I’d been passionately agreeing with him about the devastating photos of children starving in America, Robby had touched my hand. For three days I washed around the spot where his flesh had touched mine.
    I’d been so sure he was going to ask me to the junior class semiformal, which was in two weeks. It would be my first dance. Every day after school I’d stop at Macy’s and try on the pink gauzy dress I’d spotted while on a forced family