Henry liked to spell multi-syllabic words, like dilapidated, one of the new words from a sixth grade Halloween vocabulary assignment. For extra credit, the teacher added maniacal. Henry looked up its meaning and rattled off the letters without looking. Very good, the teacher said.
Leukemia was a familiar word at the dinner table but Henry didn’t like to spell that one. It’s harsh ‘k’ sound signified something deadly. There was also chemotherapy, which his father mentioned nightly, another terrible word, because it meant his mother would be back in the hospital with the nurses, her new best friends, and needles in her hand.
The forbidden words had one syllable, like fuck and shit. He heard a new one. A boy said he had fingered a girl’s cunt. Henry didn’t know if it was the same thing as vagina and was too embarrassed to ask.
On the kickball field Henry asked Donna, his first crush, if she would marry him one day. Her friends laughed at him. They followed Donna everywhere but were too chubby to wear hot pants, like Donna, that staple of early 70s fashion.
Donna said Henry was too small to marry, that he was so small he was almost invisible. He called her a cunt. Then his first crush became his first enemy when she punched him in the face, a solid knuckle on bone shot. His eyes watered and her friends laughed, he’s crying, they screamed, and they began to shove and kick him, inside the swirling dust of the dry field, and he reached out for balance and pulled on Donna’s tube top, exposing her pink 10-year-old nipple, his first view of the female anatomy.
Rape, rape, they all screamed. Another single syllable word he wasn’t sure the meaning of.
At home he told his mother that the girls were mean. She was weak and caressed his hair, saying, you could be a movie star with that hair, then those girls won’t matter because the whole world will love you. His mother always told him his hair was so fine and golden it looked like Rumpelstiltskin had something to do with it.
He had no idea how to spell Rumpelstiltskin.
In school he finished the vocabulary exercise, which entailed writing a spooky story with the Halloween words. He wrote about a monster in a dilapidated haunted house who picked up an axe and chopped Donna into pieces. Pleased with his story, Henry looked at Donna and let out a maniacal laugh.
Weirdo, she said.
Many years later, long after the word with the harsh ‘k’ sound had killed his mother, Henry saw Donna working as a waitress in a diner. She went through high school dating popular boys who drove Trans-Ams and Camaros. She was even the prom queen.
He heard that she was divorced and had a child and still lived on the street named for a tree that never lost its color, the first street he knew the name of that wasn’t his own. It would’ve made a good love story, a relationship that started on a kickball field, and like the street name, never lost its essence.
He drank coffee and watched her taking orders. He wasn’t a movie star. And she was just a prom queen who smelled like western omelets.
He remembered how he was the first boy to ever see her nipple.
There was no maniacal laugh in that.