6. Sad Stories
She looks so beautiful to me that I realize this is not just infatuation or a teenager crush. This must be love, my first true and deep love. It’s not like what happened with Gina when I just started school and she was all smiles with me and her prominent nose didn’t hide her beautiful olive skin and her big black eyes and her short black hair that reminded me of a beautiful Liza Minnelli and she invited me to her house to study with her friend Wanda and she had a beautiful modern house that my Dad drove me to and there she had a very cool bar with a neon light and tall stalls and I tried to be alone with her and when the moment came and I was so sure I was going to do it, going to have my first real girlfriend, she tells me she brought me here because Wanda had the biggest crush on me and I felt like someone shot my head and my brains flushed down my throat and I felt dizzy with a pain in my chest imagining how many hours until my Dad came to pick me up and to avoid the now incessantly looking Wanda with her plump body and her pink braces and later find out that Gina was going out already with the dumbest and most annoying in class Fernando Genova who was tall, skinny and had the worst acne and teeth that stuck out like a rabbit and bad breath and a huge Adam’s apple and kept making fun of me until one day we almost got down in a fight, which of course I would have lost, because I’ve only fought with another guy once and the fight lasted exactly three seconds, which was the time it took for Marlon to hit me in my neck, making me so woozy I fell down on the floor almost passed out and the other classmates gathered around me laughing, speaking in another tongue I couldn’t understand and from that point on I was the class clown for the remaining two years I was there which made my chances of getting a girlfriend close to zero.
I really have a deep connection with Elizabeth. Her eyes sparkle as she begs me to forgive her. She doesn’t know why she’s asking it, but it seems like she really cares for me. This is nothing like Vivi, my crush in Morón who was the most beautiful girl in class and I was new in that school and it seemed she was attracted to me and she had blond short hair and green eyes and her lips were like a little fish’s blowing bubbles in the water and she had the tightest jeans and everyone in class, everyone in school had a crush on Vivi and one day she turned around and started talking to me and of course I couldn’t even hear her words because my heart was pounding so loud it blocked every noise in that classroom and the teacher asked “Julio” once and Vivi was asking me something about question number two and I was just completely high with the drug of her perfume and Vivi asked me again what was the answer to question number two and the teacher repeated “Julio” and suddenly I saw a huge bumblebee coming straight to Vivi and shouted watch out and all the silent, test-taking class turned around to see me at the exact moment I saw the bumblebee land on the window next to me and I had taken my test paper from my desk and smashed it against the window which broke under the force of my palm and out the window I went as Vivi screamed and jumped back and then, for the longest time, I was just outside of the ground floor classroom, laying on my back, looking at the kids from second grade laughing at me and getting my chances of getting a girlfriend on the remaining two years I was in that school close to zero.
Elizabeth was crying already and I was silent just remembering all these things and thinking how fortunate I was to have a girl care for me that much and thinking how special can one person be that another person cares for him or her, especially in the last day of the last year of high school, when you have run out of options and no other girl was willing to give you a chance and no other girl really liked you for some strange reason that you’re constantly trying to figure out which involved changing hair style two times, changing deodorant three times, getting Mom to buy the coolest clothes, or at least you thought were cool, only to find them hidden in the closet because you had no social activities to go to and school had a uniform like every other school in Venezuela in the nineteen eighties which consisted of a light brown shirt with the logo of the school in your breast pocket, dark blue jeans and black leather shoes, and trying to become cool in school wearing a single bicycle glove in your left hand and when people asked what I was wearing I would reply back that I was a big fan of Michael Jackson who had had an accident in a Pepsi commercial and after that he started wearing one glove on his burned left hand and when people laughed at me and pointed at me I would yell that I was born the same day as he was, just ten years later so I did have a real connection with him and they’d laugh even louder and then I told Elizabeth I was in love with her.
