Aquanetta tried to carry on an instant message conversation with the boy she liked, but was intrigued when she came across the blog of one Leroy Blumkinstein, and found herself unable to tear her eyes away despite the obnoxious dinging and blinking of the small window in the left corner of her monitor. Philip would have to wait. As far as Aquanetta was concerned, there were two groups of people who dominated and characterized New York: the blacks, and the Jews. She didn't care about the whites, the wealthy, the celebrities, or the homeless gentlemen on the street corners, so covered and caked in grime that it was impossible even to tell their ethnicity, let alone their religious preferences. The point was, all of this fascinated Aquanetta and when it came down to it, delving into the blog-life of Leroy was a far better use of her time than chit-chatting with Philip, a white-bred, white-bread kid with a life as interesting as a bowl of vanilla ice cream, trying to think of cute and girlish one liners and peppering the conversation with emoticons and less-than-threes, while trying not to appear as if she liked him even the littlest bit. It was far less exhausting to click the "back" button repeatedly and learn about Leroy's life from end to beginning.
She imagined Leroy first thing in the morning, sitting down with his mother, reading Time and eating a bagel. There were no pictures of him on the blog, but she imagined him in khaki pants and big glasses, wearing a sweatshirt covered in sewn-on patches depicting his favorite bands and video games. She imagined him as a contradiction, because she loved contradictions. She imagined his outside as so messy and chaotic that his inside must be unexpectedly calm in order to balance it out. To put it simply - she imagined him to be unlike anybody else, and since despite the dim knowledge that he was, in fact, a real person, somewhere out in the same city as she, drinking a soda after school and dropping batteries on the hardwood floors while attempting to watch sports on TV, what she really saw was a framework for the Perfect Boy, a set of building blocks from which she could create her own vision and her own desires - she could make Leroy into whoever she wanted him to be, knowing that she would never meet him or speak to him, knowing that he would never know she had ever come across his blog in an attempt to research the differences between boy-brains and girl-brains for a science class that she detested, getting distracted and googling words like "boys" and "girls" and clicking link after link until she found herself in such a web, she wouldn't even know what to search for in order to get back there again.
Leroy Blumkinstein would become Aquanetta's obsession, like every teenaged girl has an obsession - some would be after Justin Bieber, others horses, but Aquanetta, with her mind matured to a point that she had missed some crucial steps in social etiquette and interaction and a name that she was aware came from a can of hairspray - something she would never understand, because her mother, when asked, would simply shrug - found herself instead drawn to people, and this one person in particular. And so it began that she forgot all about Philip, and the giggly flirting and fretting that most kids her age were into, and instead immersed herself in cyberspace and the people she found there, one person in particular, who began to guide her life in a way that no one would ever understand or even recognize, and move her to a point that threatened to derail her very experience as an adolescent in a big city - indeed, she became a mere onlooker in the life of another person, and began to lose her grip on the reality that there was indeed a world around her, a world in which she and Leroy happened to coexist in a way that she herself did not fully understand was real.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Chapter 1
When Leroy Blumkinstein arrived home from school, he systematically grabbed the mail from the cast-iron mailbox perched against the brick wall while unlocking the Victorian inspired white door to the foyer. As he walked inside he let nose adjust to the familiar smell of a vegetable stew roasting in the crockpot and left his backpack, jacket, keys, and mail in a pile on the kitchen table. It was 2:35 and no one would be home for another hour at least. For him, this was his free hour, his chance to relax and unwind.
He sprawled himself across the divan and reached for the remote on the marble-top coffee table. Not quite grasping it at first, it fell on the floor, making a tremendous THWAP on the cherry floors. The battery cover slipped off of the back and the batteries rolled capriciously under the legs of the couch.
“Christ!” exclaimed Leroy, showing off the maturity of his fourteen-year-old vocabulary as he stood up to get another set of batteries. He pulled out a drawer from the end table and stared at an ocean of batteries rolling around – most of them recovered from under the couch after the last time his mother had cleaned there. He found two that looked relatively new and carefully inserted them into their proper spots, making sure not to drop the apparatus a second time. He hit the power button and was greeted by a full-volume Spanish-language soap opera. The telenovela was the preferred genre of Raquel, the Cuban cleaning lady who came on Mondays and was paid by the hour. After lowering the volume, he took his spot again in the divan and found a baseball game that came in behind a lot of fuzz and white noise.
Within a few minutes, the annoying white noise and even more annoying commentary about the game got to Leroy, and he admitted defeat while he shut off the TV. He opted instead to grab a Sprite from the fridge and some Oreo cookies from the pantry before he headed upstairs to his room. In the early afternoon there was never anything particularly thrilling to do in his house, so he passed his time lying in bed hoping to find an excuse not to do his homework.
Not that Leroy was a bad student; he just didn’t much care for school. He hated reading a bunch of trite poems and letting some old quack teacher tell him what they meant. Who the hell gave the teacher authority to decide what they meant? After all, he had known how to read since he was a kid. He could decide for himself, and in his estimation, be perfectly correct. Honestly, he really wanted to write his own stories, then walk in on a high school English class and find a teacher discussing them, correcting some poor kid who tried to throw in his two cents. He’d tell the teacher that he was wrong and that the kid had it right all along.
But before he could do that, he had to face another boring and rainy afternoon. He finished his Sprite and threw the can into the trash bucket that he kept by his door, and then fell asleep into a light nap. Gray skies had that effect on him.
He sprawled himself across the divan and reached for the remote on the marble-top coffee table. Not quite grasping it at first, it fell on the floor, making a tremendous THWAP on the cherry floors. The battery cover slipped off of the back and the batteries rolled capriciously under the legs of the couch.
“Christ!” exclaimed Leroy, showing off the maturity of his fourteen-year-old vocabulary as he stood up to get another set of batteries. He pulled out a drawer from the end table and stared at an ocean of batteries rolling around – most of them recovered from under the couch after the last time his mother had cleaned there. He found two that looked relatively new and carefully inserted them into their proper spots, making sure not to drop the apparatus a second time. He hit the power button and was greeted by a full-volume Spanish-language soap opera. The telenovela was the preferred genre of Raquel, the Cuban cleaning lady who came on Mondays and was paid by the hour. After lowering the volume, he took his spot again in the divan and found a baseball game that came in behind a lot of fuzz and white noise.
Within a few minutes, the annoying white noise and even more annoying commentary about the game got to Leroy, and he admitted defeat while he shut off the TV. He opted instead to grab a Sprite from the fridge and some Oreo cookies from the pantry before he headed upstairs to his room. In the early afternoon there was never anything particularly thrilling to do in his house, so he passed his time lying in bed hoping to find an excuse not to do his homework.
Not that Leroy was a bad student; he just didn’t much care for school. He hated reading a bunch of trite poems and letting some old quack teacher tell him what they meant. Who the hell gave the teacher authority to decide what they meant? After all, he had known how to read since he was a kid. He could decide for himself, and in his estimation, be perfectly correct. Honestly, he really wanted to write his own stories, then walk in on a high school English class and find a teacher discussing them, correcting some poor kid who tried to throw in his two cents. He’d tell the teacher that he was wrong and that the kid had it right all along.
But before he could do that, he had to face another boring and rainy afternoon. He finished his Sprite and threw the can into the trash bucket that he kept by his door, and then fell asleep into a light nap. Gray skies had that effect on him.
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