But there was another before them. Before Hillsboro and the twins. Before Jimmy and the streets and jail. And years before Tony.
He was a one-off kind of thing. She had only seen him the one time, and that, from across a wide busy street. They had never exchanged words and she had no clue what his name might be. But there was one thing she felt sure of, however, and that was that he, after all these years, would have no recollection whatsoever of her. ‘Why would he?’ She always thought, rather sadly, on those ever increasingly less rare occasions when she thought of him. Yet he was the first. He was the first actual man; or actual male rather because neither he nor she was of legal age, to utterly capture her imagination.
She was close to being fourteen because it happened in summer and her birthday was in June. ‘I could not have been older than that.’ She thought. ‘For the entire episode with Jimmy including running away from home, and meeting up with him, and the crimes we committed together, and the moving around, and the drugs, and finally being arrested, and the months long adjudication process all happened before my sixteenth birthday.’ And how old was he? She could only guess at that. ‘Somewhere between thirteen and sixteen.’ She thought. She wanted to believe he was thirteen, maybe fourteen, for reasons she never gave much consideration to. ‘Intuition perhaps.’ But much like the first Man to have utterly captured her imagination; a man with a huge penis that she had seen portrayed in the pages of a Hustler Magazine which so fascinated her that she traced the outline of the mans penis on a blank sheet of paper before returning the pilfered magazine to her older brothers room, she had routinely thought of him over the years, especially when looking at her own nude body in the mirror and most especially of late given her sudden preoccupation with origins.
Much more to follow......
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