Jimmy Fahey

                        The best looking boy in my eighth grade class,

                        had a big Irish smile, perfect braceless teeth,

                        dark hair which fell across his forehead.

                        He’d   push it back with his hand

                        or blow it back while doing math problems.

                        His uniform shirts a white that dazzled against

                        black chinos which never wore or faded

                        and always had an impeccable crease.

                        Every girl I knew wished he’d bike slowly

                        by her house some Saturday, stop to ask

                        about the homework assignment, or

                        maybe how to dance.

                        One day that eighth grade spring

                        we became an item.

                        He’d buy candy bars at recess

                        walk by my desk and leave them there

                        write notes to me in code, pass them

                        when the nun’s back was turned

                        Sat next to me at the school picnic

                        took me on the ferris wheel.

                        People would say incredulously

                        “Is Jimmy Fahey your boyfriend?”

                        as though there was something

                        obviously impossible in that coupling.

                        He went to prep school, invited me to that first dance.

                        I remember our shadows on the marble floor

                        my slip hanging just a little below my dress

                        his hair brushing my forehead.

                        Then, I asked him to my dance.

                        That fall we rode home from football games

                        with gray and red pompoms,

                        handmade signs that said, “Go Prep.”

                        Winter Fridays he’d come to my house

                        we’d listen to records, sometimes dance

                        drink tea my mother made, eat peanut butter cookies.

                        Still people would say, “Are you really dating Jimmy Fahey?”

                        I’d think about my ethnic hair that bushed out any old way

                        my nose that was far bigger than everyone’s, my crooked teeth.

                        I’d say,  “Uhuh,” reveling in my good fortune.

                        He was Richard Cory, above us all.

                        Sometime in January or February he said,

                        “My Latin grades are bad.  I can’t date anymore.”

                        I was sure it was my innate frumpishness,

                        my immigrant ways, my unruly hair,

                        my inability to ride a bike with grace.

                        Pretended not to care, meanwhile made

                        a novena to the Madonna prayed

                        things would change that someday

                        we’d go steady, get married and I’d have

                        six beautiful dark-eyed Irish babies.

                        One day, that June,  the phone rang at seven A.M.

                        Half dressed, I listened at the stairs heard

                        my mother say,  “Oh no!  I can’t believe it!

                        I’ll tell her before she goes to school.”

                        Came downstairs determined to be controlled

                        when my mother told me that someone had died

                        probably one of my aunts.

                        She said,  “Jimmy Fahey has been arrested

                        for murdering a three year old girl.”

                        I said, “It was an accident.  He hit her with the car.”

                        “He tried to rape her and when she screamed

                        he strangled her, put the body in his toy box in

                        the basement .”

                        “No,”  I said.  “No.”

                        Later,  remembered the nun in seventh grade

                        called him a whitened sepulcher.  Said he

                        looked good on the outside but inside his

                        heart was filled with rot.  What was it she saw

                        we all missed? Was it something in the way

                        he diagramed sentences, wrote history reports,

                        swept the classroom floor?

                        The rest of my school days and long after

                        people would say, “You dated Jimmy Fahey,” in a

                        different but still incredulous way.”

Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino