Bridge of Sighs

with Karen Cirillo took my breath away.
    “Them, too?” she said, again indicating her girlfriends.
    I said no, I had just enough for us, feigning greater regret than I felt, because being on a date with all three of them was a far lesser thing than being with Karen alone. Only when I showed them did they reluctantly dig into their purses.
    Preferring not to watch them fish for quarters, I turned away, just in time to see Perry Kozlowski, Jerzy Quinn’s best friend, come slouching up the street toward us. Only now, seeing Perry, did it occur to me that my being with Karen at the matinee would be reported to Jerzy. I turned back to my companions, but not before noticing an odd thing. Perry seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there, a fact he himself seemed to realize at that same instant. Stopping in his tracks, he retreated a few steps and appeared to study something in a shopwindow with urgent interest. I might have accepted all this—“at face value,” to use my mother’s favorite expression—had the window in question not belonged to a dress shop.
    Inside the theater, I followed Karen and her girlfriends to the very back row, where she and Jerzy always sat. It was understood that this row was reserved for them and that once the lights went down and the movie began you weren’t permitted to turn around and watch them make out. As I said, Jerzy seldom showed Karen any sign of public affection, but the dark theater on Saturday afternoons was the exception. The speculation about just how far those two went in that back row was endless, but nobody dared more than glance. Nan Beverly and whatever boy she was with always sat down front and when their heads came together for their first kiss there were as many interested spectators as there were for any kisses enacted on-screen.
    We were no sooner settled in the back row than I noticed we’d drawn the attention of kids throughout the theater, who were turning around in their seats to stare. Was that Lucy Lynch sitting with Karen Cirillo? The envy of the East End boys would have been deeply pleasurable had it been envy alone, without the fear I also recognized in their expressions. One East End boy actually got up and came over to where we sat, leaning down the row and whispering, loud enough that Karen and her friends could hear as well, “What’re you
doing,
man?”
    “Nothing,” I said, adding weakly, “we’re just friends. She used to live upstairs over our store.” And I was glad now that I’d bought popcorn for all three girls, not just Karen. That was the point I’d emphasize if anyone misunderstood. Still, I thought it might be wise to ask where Jerzy was, which I did now, trying to sound casual, like I was hoping he’d show up, in which case I wouldn’t mind moving down the row to sit between Karen’s girlfriends.
    “Who knows?” Karen said, like it wasn’t her job to keep track of her boyfriend. “Why? You afraid he’ll show up and find us here alone?”
    The girlfriends were leaning forward to grin at me now, and again I marveled that they seemed not to mind that their physical presence counted for so little.
    “Big guy like you,” Karen went on. “I bet you could take Jerz, no problem.”
    Replying to this comment was tricky, of course. If I gave the slightest indication I agreed with her, by Monday morning everybody in school would know I’d claimed I could whip Jerzy Quinn, and then there’d
have
to be a fight.
    “So, where are you living now?” I said, pretending the subject of who was tougher didn’t interest me.
    “Some dump,” Karen confessed cheerfully. “You wouldn’t know the place.”
    “I might,” I said, though I thought she was probably right.
    “You know Berman Court?”
    I sat up straight. “I used to
live
on Berman Court. Number seven.”
    Now Karen turned to regard me, as if curious why I’d lie about a thing like this. There was no doubt she was looking at me either, not some point over my shoulder. “That’s where
we
live,” she said. “Seven Berman Court.”
    I felt a chill, like you do when you encounter a coincidence that doesn’t really feel like one. I was almost afraid to ask the next obvious question. “Ours was the flat on the third floor.”
    “You’re shitting me,” she said. “Which room was yours?”
    I described my old room, with its small, high window overlooking the stream below.
    “That’s the one they gave me, too. Kids always get the worst one.”
    The idea