he could. He had looked into Nanda’s dark eyes, stared deep into the luminous pupils, shiny as if she had just shed tears, and he had seen her sadness. Instinctively, he had looked up at the sky, as it seemed to him that a part of Nanda had suddenly taken flight. She had stood in front of him that Sunday night when he was still in seventh grade and she was already in eighth. Just stood there, watching his hand on her breast, as if she was a mannequin, and he could have done anything he had wanted to do. Big Boy had gently smoothed back her hair and hooked the chain with the tiny silver crucifix around her neck. She had smiled at him then, and it was the first time Big Boy had seen the dimples on her cheeks.
Big Boy dismissed the memory of the silver chain from his mind … the one he had stolen at Woolworth’s. Another lie he had told Father Leo. The clerk had been right, he had indeed lifted things from Woolworth’s, including the silver chain he had given to Nanda. She had been happy wearing it, and Big Boy didn’t regret taking it.
Nanda wasn’t in school the next day, and nobody gave it a second thought. She had been absent many times, and Monday was one of her favorite days to stay home. There was talk that she wouldn’t be able to graduate, and would have to repeat the eighth grade. Big Boy hoped she’d fail, so she could be in his class, then he’d get closer to her, maybe be the one who took her behind the bathroom wall at Harmon Park.
Nanda’s parents were unconcerned by her disappearance, saying she had the habit of running away to her sister’s in Los Angeles and hiding out. She’d be back soon, they said. The truant officer from school stopped by, but could get nothing more from them. They weren’t worried, they said, she’d come back, this was normal for her. But the girl didn’t come back. She had simply disappeared and people in the projects talked about it every day for months. The girls were glad she was gone, now they had more control over their boyfriends, and their mothers were glad to be rid of her, now their daughters wouldn’t be plagued by Nanda’s loose ways.
“She’s probably pregnant,” Atalia told Big Boy one time when she visited with him at juvie. “She’s probably somewhere having a baby, and she’ll be back after she has it.”
“She never told me she’d be leaving,” Big Boy replied.
Atalia frowned at him. “I didn’t know you were that close to her. Why should she tell you?”
“We were kind of friends,” Big Boy said, squirming in his chair. Across the room he saw one of the boys who had touched Nanda one night, pulling down her underwear and making her cry. He looked away, remembering how she had run away, with the boy holding up her underwear like a flag and laughing.
Nanda didn’t come back to school, and Big Boy missed her. She had slipped her hand through his after he had linked the chain with the cross around her neck, and leaned into him. “You’re my best friend,” she had whispered. Big Boy remembered her voice, distant somehow, and still sensed the pressure of her hand in his, the palm warm, delicate to his touch. He’d thought of Nanda every night he spent at juvie, and now that Father Leo had asked him about her, he had started thinking about her all over again.
Being one of Father Leo’s altar boys meant there would be many rules to follow. Big Boy had to be sure there were enough hosts for the masses he served, and that the wine was ready in the chalice when the priest walked into the sacristy. The door to the priest’s closet containing his vestments was to be unlocked, the candles on the altar had to be lit, and the Bible Father Leo read from placed on the altar and opened to the reading of the day.
Big Boy felt as if Father Leo could look right through him. He sometimes saw the priest kneeling down in front of a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus before mass, his face in his hands. He seemed like he was praying, maybe listening to the voice of Jesus in his head. Big Boy felt as if the priest was watching him around the girls who came