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
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