Eleven Girls

Eleven girls?” he said.

“Eleven,” said Stacie. “Eleven girls here think you’re cute.”

Josh leaned back against the wooden stall wall. They were in the stables, he taking a break from giving kids pony rides and Stacie having somehow escaped, in full Colonial-era dress, from the soft pretzel booth. With her walleyed look behind her thick glasses, people didn’t tend to ask her a lot of questions.

“Huh,” he said. Even with her glasses on, Stacie was leaning very close to him, as if she couldn’t quite make him out. “Huh.”

This was the summer Josh was fifteen years old, and he was still getting used to the idea that cute was a word that anybody could ever possibly think to apply to him. The first jolt happened when he had just started working at Independence Village, was standing fanning himself with his tricorn hat at the first post of the Paul Revere Pony Track, and a girl that wasn’t quite a teenager ran up and snapped a picture of him and ran off. Leron, one of his favorite guys at the pony track, had just laughed and whistled. It was baffling; at school nobody looked twice at Josh. Maybe his awkwardness had just been a long, long phase, and maybe that summer he was growing out of it. Or maybe it was the Colonial gear.

“Don’t you want to guess who?” Stacie said.

That was a delicate thing. Josh was pretty sure that Stacie was one of the eleven, and that so was her sister, and both of them were girls that made him a little uncomfortable, but he wasn’t going to say any of that.

“One of them is me,” Stacie said, expressionless. “Plus my sister thinks you’re cute, too.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s really nice.” He looked around the stall—hay, a full water bucket—like he might find the thing he should say next.

Luckily, she just kept going. “And there are nine others. You have to guess.”

Josh almost said Teresa, as casually as possible, but he just couldn’t get the name up out of his throat. Teresa Magiotti, who gave pony rides like him, was an unbelievable girl—a girl he actually had trouble believing existed. She had this tan skin and blue eyes and black curly hair and when she walked a pony ahead of him on the circular track all he could do, even though it made him feel nervous and guilty to do it, was watch her walk, watch the way one butt cheek firmed up and then the other, and then the first one again. And she was always, always smiling. He couldn’t handle the idea that she might be one of the eleven, and he couldn’t handle the idea that she wasn’t.

“Um,” he said. “Vicki, maybe.”

Stacie nodded, grinned. “Yup—Vicki.”

Josh already knew that. Vicki had looked his number up in the phone book and had called to ask him if he wanted to go to this church dance, and because nobody had ever asked him out before and probably also because he thought Vicki was not attractive, he somehow found himself asking the clarifying question, “With you?” It was awful. This was before cordless phones and as a kind of immediate, instinctive penance he turned around and around in the silence until he was pinioned by the cord. He almost said yes just because he felt so bad for asking With you?, but he really, really didn’t find Vicki attractive, so in a flash of inspiration he told her that it would be awkward as a Jewish person to go to a church dance. Josh later realized that excuse wouldn’t get him out of other dates, but Vicki had so obviously been decimated by his With you? that she hadn’t ever called him again. Every time he saw her at Independence Village he wanted to stab himself to death with his fake bayonet.

“Um,” he said.

“Do you want a hint?” Stacie said.

“Okay.”

“Christina does,” she said. “And Debbie.”

Josh...