Object of Desire. William J. Mann

was hoping for was a chance to speak to him—no, even that wasn’t necessary. I think all I wanted to do was see his eyes. That was the extent of it. That night, the first time I saw him, my only goal was to see his eyes.

      If I saw his eyes, that would mean he had seen me.

      There was a boy in eighth grade, during that last halcyon year before my sister disappeared, whose name was Scott Wood. Scott had long, curly dark hair and a mole on the side of his cheek. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my entire thirteen years, and all the girls seemed to think so, too. Scott played basketball and hockey and was a huge fan of the Eagles. He’d doodled their logo all over his paper bag–covered schoolbooks and was always singing “Plenty of room at the Hotel California” to himself. Scott had stayed back in fourth grade, so he was a more mature fourteen, with a downy, dark mustache on his upper lip. When Scott walked into a room, everyone turned, even our teacher, Miss Waterhouse, a stick of a lady who might have been twenty-nine or forty-nine, so bland and gray were her face and her hands.

      Did Miss Waterhouse think about Scott the way I did? Did she hump her mattress at night the way I did, squeezing her eyes together to imagine Scott running around the basketball court or laughing in the caf? Did she go out and buy the Eagles’ Hotel California album and play it over and over, imagining it was Scott singing to her: “How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget…”

      When I sat behind Scott in class, I’d watch the way his thighs moved in his tight polyester pants. He’d idly twirl one of his dark curls around his finger, and I’d sit there, mesmerized. Once, at recess, he removed his shirt while playing basketball, and I stopped playing jump rope with my friend Katie and just sat on the asphalt, watching him. I didn’t understand it fully, this fascination I had with him, with the way his back muscles moved when he shot the basketball toward the hoop.

      Scott moved away after eighth grade; I never saw him again. But he stayed in my memory. Many nights I’d lie in bed at night, listening to my mother cry for my sister downstairs, and I’d rewrite my past, imagining how I might have become friends with Scott. I might have shown him my comic book collection; maybe he collected, too. Or maybe I should’ve learned as much as I could have about the Eagles and started talking about them one day. He would have thought I was cool, and then we could have hung out. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, whenever Scott turned around in his seat to pass me a test or a handout, my throat would tighten and no words would form. I don’t think he even saw me. I was completely off his radar screen. I think, even now, if someone said my name to him, he wouldn’t remember that we had ever been classmates.

      It was my turn at the bar.

      “Hi,” I said.

      The bartender turned to face me.

      Was it the dimness of the light? The sun had fully set by now, and the patio was lit only by the flickering lanterns. A greenish darkness had settled over the whole place, cheating me of a full glimpse of the bartender’s eyes.

      “Grey Goose martini,” I said. “Up, with a twist.”

      He nodded and turned away.

      The line behind me was growing again. I’d have to act fast. I felt my heart start to quicken.

      His back was to me as he shook the martini. I watched as the wings of his eagle tattoo stretched and retracted on his neck.

      “Did you say olives?” he asked over his shoulder.

      “Yeah, that’s fine, great,” I said. My brain had no control over my words. “No, actually, I said a—”

      But he was already plopping the olives into my glass. He looked up at me.

      And I saw them.

      His eyes.

      Dark, like black mirrors. Behind them burned an intensity that was both fierce and brittle, and barely contained. Some might look into those eyes and call them crazy. But all I saw reflected in them was myself.

      “It’s okay,” I said. “Olives are great.”

      And then his eyes were gone. I paid him, leaving an enormous tip, and once again missed the opportunity to speak to him. I should have turned the mistake about the olives into a joke. I should have been witty and flirty, and asked him his name. I knew how to play the game. Hell, I was an expert at it. Or at least, I had been, once. The zit-faced kid from eighth grade had blossomed into Danny the Stripper, the boy who drew in customers all down Santa Monica Boulevard, the boy in the yellow thong who shook his ass and flashed his jewels and at the end of the night routinely plucked tens and twenties out of his bulge. But I wasn’t wearing a thong anymore. Instead, I was forty-one years old, standing now on the other side of the divide, just one of the anonymous faces in the crowd, waving their cash. Whatever I once might have had, this boy behind the bar didn’t know about it. I had come, I supposed, full circle.

      It was time for dinner. Looking around for Randall, I couldn’t spot him. Had he gone home with Jake Jones? I tried not to be envious. I stood off to the side, sipping my vodka, watching the crowd.

      The night was no longer green. It was black. And I was hungry—hungrier than I had been in a very long time. On a black night, all illusions disappeared. Everything was real. And I could no longer deny how hungry I really was.

      EAST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

      Twenty-Seven Years Earlier

      If it weren’t for Chipper Paguni’s underpants, I would have turned around, hurried back along the path, and told my mother that my mission had been a failure. I hadn’t wanted to make the trip at all, so fearful was I of the poison ivy that grew along the path to the pond. The ordeal I’d gone through in the seventh grade, when I’d scratched the skin along the entire length of both legs until it was red and bleeding, had left me forever terrified of that vicious weed. But when I spotted the underpants ahead of me, a bright white pair of Fruit of the Looms shimmering in the midday sun, I knew I had to go on.

      A twig snapped. My eyes darted to the left, where a crumpled pair of black parachute pants had been dropped among a patch of ferns. I took another few steps along the path and discovered a trail of discarded clothing. Reebok sneakers. White socks. A lacy pink bra dangling from a wispy branch of a young maple tree.

      Another snap. I paused, sucking in my breath. And then, a voice.

      “Come on, Becky.”

      It was Chipper’s voice, somewhere up ahead in the woods, low and unemotional.

      “Come on,” he said again.

      I crouched behind a tall fern. As I did, my knees cracked. Mom was convinced I suffered from a calcium deficiency, and made me drink ten glasses of milk a day. Now I feared my knees had given me away. I held my breath. But around me only a heavy, humid silence filled the woods, broken now and then by the noisy squawk of a blue jay somewhere above me in the trees.

      Finally I heard a splash. And then another.

      Parting the fronds of the fern ever so carefully, I peered out over the water. Languid dragonflies hovered above the murky green surface. Ripples were just now lapping at the muddy shore, where a pair of brand-new Sergio Valente blue jeans, with the red stitching on the pockets, was rapidly turning wet and brown. I could imagine just how pissed Mom would be when she saw that.

      Suddenly the surface of the pond was broken. Becky emerged from the depths, shaking her long, dark hair and sending cascades of droplets from side to side. In an instant Chipper popped up in the water in front of her, his glistening back momentarily obliterating my sister from my view.

      They were kissing. My eyes grew wide as I crouched in my hiding place, keeping as still as I could. I watched as Chipper maneuvered Becky through the water toward the old wooden dock that jutted into the pond in a triangle. Lifting her up by her armpits, he sat her along the edge. For a moment I glimpsed my sister’s breasts, larger than those of most girls her age, with hard pink nipples that stood up like pencil erasers. I felt my face flush. I watched as Chipper now gripped