Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,23

around their shoulders, the potential for greatness.

Sitting across from me was the photographer from the Cathedral High newspaper, a boy named Charles Benton—“Chip.” I’d seen him before at pep rallies and school functions, lurking at the edges of the scene with his camera. A fair boy with a goofy smile and tight curly hair that fitted like a bushy helmet on his head, he was almost indistinguishable from half the other boys at CHS, who were, by and large, polite, dull, middle-class Southern teenagers. Armed with his camera, though, Chip became bold and full of purpose.

I’d been so sheltered at Sacred Heart that the last boy to flirt with me was Tim, on the night we’d met at the Freshman-Senior Get Acquainted Dance in Zachary. So when Chip began making jokes at my expense, and overusing my name, and generally acting like a pest for most of the day, I hardly recognized what he was doing.

“He likes you,” Kim had said, pulling me aside during the conference.

“Who? Chip? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Oh my god. He’s nuts about you.”

Now at the restaurant, even before we ordered Cokes, he uncapped his camera and started taking pictures of me across the table. He narrated the whole time, too, as if imagining the captions that would appear under the photos in Life magazine.

“Laura Jenkins seen relaxing with her society friends at the world-famous Little Italy in Baton Rouge. Laura Jenkins sips her water through a straw.”

“You’re wasting your film,” I said.

“Laura Jenkins screws up her face in annoyance at the paparazzi who trail her every move.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Laura Jenkins—Hey!—throws a napkin at the hapless young photographer who ducks out of the way at the last minute. Missed me!”

Before the evening was over, and two large pizzas and several pitchers of Coke later, we girls from SHA had made enthusiastic promises to collaborate more frequently with the boys from the CHS newspaper. They would help us, we would help them. Sharing resources, cross-campus exchanges, regular visits to one another’s staff rooms—that kind of thing.

“I am so psyched,” Kim said back in her car. Never mind the newspaper. Visits to the CHS campus were about the most thrilling thing a SHA girl could wish for. “You walk down the hallway between their classes and, oh my god, it’s like you’re Marilyn Monroe or something. The boys positively drool.”

“I’ll send you prints!” Chip shouted from his car as he pulled away in the parking lot. “Signed!”

“You do that!” I shouted back.

“Told you,” Kim said, punching in the cigarette lighter on her dash. “He’s crazy about you.”

• • •

I tripped up the stairs to my room, feeling light-footed and happy, like I was drunk from too much Coke and pizza. I thought, in a flush of amazement, that maybe the way I was feeling now was the way high school girls were supposed to feel. Did girls like Kim Cortney feel this way all the time? And why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t I as much right as anybody to be happy?

Rounding the corner of the corridor, I ran into my roommate, Melissa, standing at the hallway telephone. She was holding the receiver, looking annoyed.

“Okay, never mind, here she is,” she said into the phone. She thrust it at me. “Finally. He’s been calling every half hour.”

I took the phone. “Tim?”

“Laura? Where you been? Honey. I been trying to call you all night. I got … Where you been?” He sounded upset, or drunk, or both.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I mean, a conference. A newspaper conference. With some people. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m leaving. Shipping out.”

“You’re leaving? To where?”

“Where do you think? Vietnam.”

Vietnam? It seemed too soon. Hadn’t he just started training? What about the intelligence school and all that? The radio classes?

But no, he was right on schedule. He’d been at basic training nine weeks, seventeen weeks at advanced. Only thing was, he told me, they weren’t giving him any leave time. His unit had special orders to ship out ASAP, direct from the base.

“I don’t want to go. I miss you so much. Honey, honey. Where you been?”

“Oh—I miss you, too. When do you have to go?”

“Tomorrow. I went out and got something for you. I did it for you.”

“What’d you do?”

“It’s right … Ouch.” There was a clunk, like he’d dropped the phone. “Got it right here,” he resumed. “‘Laura.’ It’s all bloody and shit now. Not supposed to look at it.”

“What?”

“Tattoo.”

“Oh, no. Oh, Tim. No.”

“Yep. Got it right here. Inside my rifle arm. Every time I