Tommy became our boyfriend from seventh grade on, and we’d hold him up as an ideal whenever we talked about actual boys. For example, Kim went out with Kyle for two weeks in eighth grade, and when she broke up with him, she said, “He was okay. But let’s face it, he was no Tommy Hazard.” Or I’d catch sight of a cute boy in a movie theater, and say, “Kim! Look over there! I think it’s Tommy Hazard!”
During the long periods where no boys liked us and there weren’t even any decent boys for us to like, we made plans with Tommy. Tommy took me to see old movies at the Variety. He took Kim out in a canoe. He put his arm around me in the theater. He stopped paddling and kissed Kim, out there in the middle of the lake.
These were the Hazard core elements, agreed upon by both of us:
He never embarrassed us.
He did something more interesting than watching TV after school.
He was a great kisser.
He held our hands in public.
And he was utterly confident, but weak in the knees whenever he saw us.
Beyond that, we personalized him. My Tommy was always changing: surfer boy, skate punk, mod—those were only the top three. Sometimes he was a boisterous athlete; sometimes a quiet poet. He was the boy everyone knew; or the boy no one besides me ever noticed. Sometimes he had a tasty foreign accent; sometimes he played piano. He was muscled. Or he was slight. He was white, black, Asian, anything.
Kim’s Tommy Hazard was always the same. She refined him over the years, adding and subtracting minor qualities, but fundamentally he was consistent. Tommy Hazard à la Kim had traveled all over with his family; he was an adventurous eater (she loves spicy food and gets irritated by people who only eat pasta and peanut butter); he was a boatsman (she sails); a film buff; a good student. He was older, he was popular, he was tall.
“He’s out there, somewhere,” Kim said to me, the summer after ninth grade. We were walking through the open-air market, down by Puget Sound, looking at woven bags and bead earrings and handmade wooden puzzles. We had been talking Tommy Hazard for the past half hour. “I really do think so,” Kim went on.
“What do you mean, out there?”
“I don’t mean Tommy Hazard, like he looks the way I think he looks,” she said. “I mean someone who’s the one for me, and I’m the one for him.”
“True love.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She fingered a batik pillow, shopping while she talked. “But more like destiny. Or fate. I know it’s silly, but I kind of feel that if I keep thinking about him, someday he’ll show up.”
“How will you know? Love at first sight?”
“Maybe. Or it could sneak up on us. My mom says one day she ‘just knew’ that my dad was the one.”
“Really? How?”
“A feeling,” said Kim. “They had been dating for nine months. But they got married three days later. Once she knew, she knew.” I couldn’t picture the Doctors Yamamoto doing anything so romantic.1
“I don’t know if there’s a one for me,” I said. “I think I might like variety.”
In tenth grade, poor Finn the stud-muffin still had to compete with Tommy Hazard. Kim liked Finn, she did, but he was a bland-food eater (not even pepper) and had never traveled out of the Pacific Northwest. He wasn’t “the one.” He was “for now.”
In any case, after I told her the whole story about me and Finn in second grade, the sweet shrimpy looks and the “sittin’ in a tree” and all that, I did make an effort to talk to him like a normal person. On top of the weirdness of having avoided him all those years, though, it was strange trying to have a conversation when I knew stuff about him like whether he had chest hair (no, but a little on the stomach), what he smelled like (soap) and what his room looked like (he still had a stuffed panda on his bed). My first few attempts were failures.
“What’s up, Finn?”
“Not much. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Like that.
Tate Prep has all these charity initiatives—you have to do a certain amount of community service each term. In late October, all the sophomores grouped together to create a Halloween party for kids at a local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon. We had to come in costume. I was a cat in a black minidress, fishnet stockings, a fake-fur jacket and ears. Cricket was a cricket, which involved antennae and a green leotard. Nora was Medusa. Kim was a ballet dancer in a pink tutu.
Most of the boys were firefighters or cowboys or something else manly-manly, but Finn was a black cat too—at least that’s what he looked like. He wore a black turtleneck and black jeans, a long tail and gloves that had claws on them. His face was all black greasepaint, and he had a hood with ears coming out of it that looked like it was probably leftover from a Batman costume the year before. It was a very un-Tommy Hazard kind of outfit.
Mr. Wallace was organizing us. He had retained his dignity and dressed as Albert Einstein. This involved wearing a suit (he’s usually in khakis), graying out his hair and wearing a sign on his back that said “E=mc2,” in case no one could tell (which no one could, until we read the sign). “You kitty cats,” he said, pointing at me and Finn, shortly after we arrived at the YMCA, “you man the face-painting table.”
Finn and I sat down at a table filled with odds and ends of makeup heisted from the drama department storage room. “He called me a kitty cat. Can’t you tell I’m a panther?” Finn said to me. “Look at my claws.” He held his hands up.
“You’ll have to take them off to put makeup on the kids,” I said.
“Damn. Then I’ll look like a kitty.”
“What’s wrong with a kitty? I’m a kitty.”
“No insult to kitties,” said Finn, smiling. “That’s just not what I am. I’m a panther.”
“I have to tell you,” I said. “You look pretty kittyish to me.”
“Hey, did you know a panther is really a black leopard?” he asked. “If you look closely, you can actually see the spots underneath the black.”
“You got that from me,” I said. “From the nature book.”
“Nuh-uh. I got it from watching the Discovery Channel.”
“Finn! I told you that in second grade. Don’t you remember, in the library?”
He changed the subject. “How can I be more panthery?” he mused, sorting through the makeup on the table. “Do you think I need whiskers?”
“Your face is black. You can’t put whiskers on.” Kim and Nora were across the way from us, setting up a pumpkin-carving table.
“Red. What about red whiskers? Then I’d be scary.” He took off his gloves and picked up a lipstick. “Where’s the mirror?”
I handed it over. He opened the lipstick and started drawing fat red lines across his face. He had no idea how to do it. It was a disaster. “You look like Freddy Krueger,”2 I said. “Especially if you put the gloves back on.”
“Damn! Now I’m some Freddy Krueger kitty cat.” He was laughing. “Maybe I should give up and be a dude in black.”
“Let me help.” I took a tissue and some cold cream and wiped the makeup off Finn’s cheeks. Then I redid his black greasepaint and used a makeup brush to draw thin red whiskers on his face. “Much better. Now you’re so the panther.”
I finished with his face and looked up. Kim was staring over at us from the pumpkin table, her eyes narrowed. “Mine,” she mouthed, pointing at Finn.
I put the makeup brush down and busied myself organizing the greasepaints.
Finn and I didn’t talk much the rest of the day—or ever again. I pretty much ignored him. It didn’t seem worth it. But even so, on the bus ride back he and Kim got in a whispered argument in the seat behind me and Nora.
“So thanks a lot,” she hissed at him, as the bus pulled out of the parking lot.