Pat Boone Fan Club by Sue William Silverman Read Free Book Online Page B

plastic Hawaiian leis, strands of pop-it beads. I will add to it until the chain reaches six feet. Longer. It will hang sturdy as rope, a braid of straight-straight hair—more valuable than rubles or gold.
    Glen Rock Slumbers as West Side Story Rumbles
    Christopher holds my hand in the darkened theater. I breathe in unison with him, his shoulders’ slight rise and fall. Alongwith Maria (Natalie Wood), I long for Tony as much as I yearn for Christopher. My breath pauses only when Puerto Rican Maria sings “I Feel Pretty.” Can you be pretty, even without all-American skin and hair?
    Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, is the child of Russian immigrants, Nikolai and Maria. Therefore, she is a Russian born in San Francisco impersonating a Puerto Rican who wants to be like the white American girls.
    Years later, Russian string instruments play at her funeral.
    Glen Rock as Teenage Exploitation Film
    We play spin the bottle in rec-room basements, empty Coke bottles willed to revolve toward Christopher. Forty-fives plop on turntables: “I Love How You Love Me.” Or give me just “One Last Kiss.”
    Kiss me, Christopher  . . . in this whoosh of green glass whirling, clacking in concentric circles around the linoleum floor. Except tonight Christopher doesn’t look my way. He watches Lynn. So I feel like a “Poor Little Fool,” just as the lyrics say.
    Later in the evening, Coke spins into Rheingold, boys arrive in black leather with Chesterfield cigarettes and fake ID s. Lights dim. Bottles ricochet out of orbit. Sprawled on furniture, we look like refuse washed up on a foreign shore: jumbled arms, legs, and torsos. Christopher kisses Lynn. I kiss a different boy.
    My parents go out of town for the weekend, taking my grandmother with them. I mold my hair into a perfect flip, rigid with Aqua Net hairspray. Without my grandmother’s gnarled and wrinkled presence, the strands relax their frizz and straighten. With the scroll of pearly lipstick, the matte of pale powder, I emerge as if from a genie’s bottle in a different, exotic form: pure, unadulterated suburban teenager. One, moreover, with her mother’s car, which she uses to lure her would-be boyfriend.
    Christopher hotwires the Plymouth and drives us to Century Road, a few miles out of town. We join other kids also in parents’ cars. Lighting cigarettes, our wrists torque matches into flame. We drag race, headlights like movie projectors tunneling night.
    Our energy unsettles Glen Rock. Drag racing itself transports us to something more, different, better. When the race ends, I don’t know who, if anyone, wins. We are dazed by speed, having reached the end of Century Road, our destination, so quickly. A residue of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes lingers.
    Glen Rock as a Lost Chapter from Vladimir Nabokov’s Famous Novel Lolita
    This is a secret: Lynn’s father is Humbert Humbert. So is mine. Intersecting triangles of daughters, fathers, mothers. But these secrets are nighttime shadows slinking like black cats through suburban yards. Hope flattens, thin as bedsheets. Streetlamps blacken with gnats. The moon pauses behind a cloud.
    The breeze stalls. Night insects rub their legs. Skin bruises in constant friction. Only fireflies—following their globe-lit path away from czars—flee.
    Glen Rock as Illusion
    Summers, I taste time as it rises slow and yellow from morning skies. I watch for Christopher at the turquoise-tinted swimming pool, even though he doesn’t always watch me. We high school girls clump at one end of the patio area, boys the other. We slather Coppertone on wintry skin. We lie on our stomachs. We flip onto our backs. We wish on four-leaf clovers and shooting stars. We are stunned by warmth, thick and sweet with humidity, greening trees the color of Glen Rock grass. Chlorine seeds the air until I seem to swallow it. And when rain comes, it moistens summer and hydrangeas with possibility.
    No one can prove we aren’t more than we