“I’m old enough. Don’t worry about that. I was left back three times,” I added, half in jest. He looked as if he believed it and smiled a little more warmly now. I could see he was very attracted to me, not that most boys weren’t.
I think that was a big part of what confused my parents and my teachers. I was, in all modesty, quite beautiful, with a terrific figure, but as Billy Barton, a boy in my class, was fond of saying, I was “hell on wheels.” The contradiction probably kept me from suffering more severe punishments. Whenever I had been brought before a judge, I could see the confusion in his face. Why would someone who looked like me be so bad? Who was I, the daughter of Bonnie and Clyde? I knew how to be sweet and remorseful, too. Each time, I was sent off with warnings. Most men, especially some of my teachers, were easy to manipulate. But not my father, never mon père.
“So what do you want to do afterward?” he asked.
“After what?”
“High school,” he said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s too far away to plan.”
He nodded. I had the feeling I was beginning to scare him now.
“No, I don’t know. I might go into fashion modeling.”
“You could.”
“Thank you.”
He glanced at his watch again and then surprised me. “How about some lunch?”
“Lunch?”
“That’s the least I could do for a girl who risked her reputation and her uncertain future for me.”
I shrugged. “Why not? Only, I didn’t risk my future. I reinforced it.”
He laughed. “You’re very funny.”
“I’m better when I’m really trying to be. So where’s this lunch?”
“I know this great sandwich shop on Fifty-Seventh.”
“Lead the way,” I said, and we started out together.
I suppose a relationship that began with a theft didn’t have a good prognosis, but I was never one to care about long relationships, anyway. Maybe my mother’s relationship with my father turned me off the idea. My guidance counselor, Miss Laura Gene, was an amateur therapist, and she often accused me of always looking for ways to blame my parents for anything and everything.
“One of these days, you’ll have to take sole responsibility for things you do, Roxy,” she told me. “That’s when you’ll know you have become an adult.”
“Oh, I thought that was when I had my first period,” I replied, and she turned a shade of purplish red.
She would definitely categorize Steve as an adult. He was obviously a very responsible person and serious about his schoolwork. He was not my idea of an ideal guy, anyway. I liked guys who weren’t uptight about their futures. When he told me he was very interested in international politics, I thought he was going to start talking about current events like my father and be boring, but he had a passion for what he liked, and I was attracted to that for a while. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was not terribly experienced when it came to romance, despite his good looks. He was an only child, born to parents who had him late in their lives. Cursing, sex, drugs, and drinking were so alien to him that I thought at first he was from another planet. But he didn’t prove too difficult to corrupt.
After lunch, we went for a walk in Central Park. He was going to go on to his apartment to work on a research paper. I asked him if he wanted company later.
“Later? When later?”
“I don’t care. You tell me,” I said.
“It’s Sunday. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
“I never let something like that interfere with my happiness,” I said.
He smiled, now far more relaxed. I could see he was intrigued with me, and for now, that was enough for me.
“I’m not much of a cook, but I’m good at putting out a ready-to-eat chicken with some vegetables.”
“I’m always ready to eat,” I said. “And other things.”