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Molly and Jumper and Mambo
A Short Love Story by
Garrett Kaminaga
Jumper had known Molly Jensen since the moist-eyed
days of early youth. Charlie Rickford had teased Jumper
about hanging out with girls--until Molly beat him up
and made him cry in front of Arthur Jones, Jonathan Loo,
and even Quentin Clarke. And this was in _the second
grade_, where crying meant the end of hanging out, of chasing
each other at near light-speed on bicycles, +endless adventures
in the any-world of the fantastic playground. It was, in the
second grade, like another fall of man. But Charlie was
reunited with the gang the next day, his . . .unmanly tears
forgotten in the furious pace of a seven-year-old's life.
Jumper liked Molly because she never asked him to marry
her, never wanted to play house, was interested more in
transformers than in the fake Barbie dolls that you could cut
the hair off and it would never grow back. Not that Jumper or
even thought that girls were yucky; he liked them on the whole,
but they were so much less real than Molly was. Jumper still
got frightened at the movies, went swimming and play
get-dirty-get-scraped tag with the guys, but he reserved his most
fantastic adventures for playing with Molly. The any-world of
Charlie and Arthur and Jonathan always had the same machine-gun
fights (even when they played knights and dragons), the same
gory deaths, the same _everything_. Molly and Jumper created
worlds better than anything on TV, filled with the black-and-white
hopes and fears of second grade, because Jumper and Molly were
best friends.
When they reached intermediate school, and Charlie and Arthur
all eagerly pretended to be grossed out by spin the bottle and
the other "I'm curious games of adolescence," Molly and Jumper,
impossibly, grew closer together. One day at the park Molly
wanted to play on the swings instead of play four-square, and
she began to talk about the grayer hopes and fears of
thirteen-ness. And Jumper, amazingly, found that he really
didn't mind. So, they learned from each other--Molly talked
about training bras, about stupid slumber parties, about
unbelievable pain of braces. Jumper talked about his middle
name (Xavier), about not making the basketball team cut, about
the requisite machismo of being a teenage guy. And they both
got to sleep a little easier because of it. They stayed friends
even through the intense world of high school. Through the Nazi
history teachers who pulled pop quizzes and looked at someone
else but asked you a question, through class struggles that made
Sally Hart laugh at Jumper when he asked her out, through
Valentine's dances and Homecoming games, club fundraisers and
the slow invasion of the pressures of the outside world. Not
that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.
You never saw Molly and Jumper talking and crying or stuck
together like siamese twins. They didn't even go to prom
together--Jumper went with Sally, who was much nicer after she
stopped hanging out with the soc crowd, and Molly went with
Quentin. They exchanged pictures and signed yearbooks and talked
just like regular friends, right up through graduation. But only
Molly knew that Jumper came close to flunking out of school, and
only Jumper knew that Molly had slammed the door in Quentin's
face after prom (although Quentin told it differently.)
Then, while waiting in the registration line at State, wedged
between his roommate (who claimed to be an anarchist, making Jumper
go look the word up) and a huge woman who wore a hideous shade of
green and smelled of anchovies, Jumper realized that he loved
Molly. All it took was his roommate telling him, as Molly walked
into the gym, that his girlfriend had arrived. Jumper started with
the automatic response of "She's not my girlfriend," since he had
been asked that too many times to count in high school, when all
the memories of their time together pressured it back down his
throat and lodged it painfully in his chest. For the entire semester,
when Jumper was at Molly's dorm doing frosh english or just talking,
his mind was racing through thousands of scenarios of confessing
his love. "Molly, I love you" wasn't quite right, and the moonlit
walk through Bishop Yard was a little too saccharin (and dangerous).
When they fell to talking as they had been so used to, he lied when
she asked him about his love life. Jumper knew that if she didn't
love him (How could she, so beautiful, so warm, love me? he thought)
then that put their friendship in a precarious, awkward position.
Their 12-year friendship was too much to gamble. But then, the
pain that had stayed from his realization in the registration line
(Jumper thought it was indigestion at first) was eating him up from
inside and burning through his skin every second of the day.
Then one night Molly told him that she had a crush on Adam
Rawlings, the athletic water polo player down the hall. Jumper
died inside. Dammit! Jumper only wanted Molly to be happy, but
that meant her having Adam, and not having him. But Jumper, who
truly loved Molly, decided to get him for her. Jumper and Adam knew
each other from weekly physics problem sets, and through cajoling and
begging and innuendo, Jumper got Adam to ask her out. Then, as
Jumper was about to go drink himself into a stupor over what he had
done, Molly asked him to come over.
"Adam asked me out."
Jumper acted surprised. "Great! What're you going to do?"
"I'm not going. I told him no."
Jumper said nothing. "Jumper, I've known you since second grade."
Her words came slowly, choked. "I. . . ever since high school. . ."
And Jumper knew that she loved him too. He said nothing. He
grabbed her hand and ran outside, into the parking lot, where the
cold bit at the skin, but Jumper and Molly didn't mind because
they were warmed inside and the moon was coming out from behind the
clouds and someone, somewhere, was playing mambo music a little too
loudly, and they didn't have to say anything to each other because
saying anything would have been anticlimactic, and he slipped his
arms around her and amazed, felt her against him, and he lowered his
lips to hers, happy beyond all joys.
Then a truck ran over them both and smashed them to bits.
THE END
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