Evil Eye by Joyce Carol Oates

possibly for a moment this was disappointing to him; but then he smiled his quick dimpled smile as if he were forgiving me, or finding a way he could accept my age, “—you could be, like, thirteen.”
    This was so. But I had never thought of it as an advantage of any kind.
    â€œLife becomes complicated when living things ‘mature’—the apparatus of a physical body is, essentially, to bring forth another physical body. If that isn’t your wish, ‘maturity’ is a pain in the ass.”
    I laughed, to show Desmond that I knew what he meant. Or, I thought I knew what he meant.
    Though I wasn’t sure why it was funny.
    I said, “My mother tells me not to worry—I’ll grow when I’m ‘ready. ’ ”
    â€œWhen your genes are ‘ready,’ Lizbeth. But they may have their own inscrutable plans.”
    Desmond told me that his family was descended from “lapsed WASP” ancestors in Marblehead, Massachusetts; he’d been born in Newton and went to grade school there; then he’d been sent to a “posh, Englishy-faggoty” private school in Brigham, ­Massachusetts—“D’you know where Brigham is? In the heart of the Miskatonic Valley.” Yet it also seemed that his family had spent time living abroad—Scotland, Germany, Austria. His father—“Dr. Parrish”—(Desmond pronounced “Dok-tor Parrish” in a way to signal how pompous he thought such titles were)—had helped to establish European research institutes connected to a “global” pharmaceutical company—“The name of which I am forbidden to reveal, for reasons also not to be revealed.”
    Desmond was joking, but serious, too. Pressing his forefinger against his pursed lips as if to swear me to secrecy.
    When we parted finally in the late afternoon, Desmond said he hoped we would see each other again soon.
    Yes, I said. I would like that.
    â€œWe could walk, hike, bicycle—read together—I mean, read aloud to each other. We don’t always have to talk .”
    Desmond asked me my telephone number and my address but didn’t write the information down—“It’s indelibly imprinted in my memory, Lizbeth. You’ll see!”
    I have a boyfriend!
    My first boyfriend!
    A passport, this seemed to me. To a new wonderful country only glimpsed in the distance until now.
    He hated the telephone, he said: “ ‘Talking blind’ makes me feel like I’ve lost one of my senses.”
    He preferred just showing up: after school, at my house.
    For instance, on the day after we’d first met, he bicycled to my house without calling first, and we spent two hours talking together on the rear, redwood deck of my house. So casually he’d turned up, on a new-model Italian bicycle with numerous speeds, his head encased in a shiny yellow helmet—“Hey, Lizbeth: remember me?”
    My mother was stunned. My mother, to whom I hadn’t said a word about meeting Desmond the previous day, for fear that I would never see him again—clearly astonished that her plain-faced and immature younger daughter had a visitor like Desmond Parrish.
    When my mother came outside onto the deck to meet him, Desmond stood hastily, lanky and tall and “adult”: “Mrs. Marsh, it’s wonderful to meet you! Lizbeth has told me such intriguing things about you.”
    â€œ ‘Intriguing’? Me? She has? Whatever—?”
    It was comical—(cruelly, I thought it was comical)—that my mother hadn’t a clue that Desmond was joking; that even the gallant way in which he shook my mother’s hand, another surprise to her, was one of his sly jokes.
    But Desmond was sweet, funny, affectionate —as if the adult woman he was teasing on this occasion, and would tease on other occasions, was a relative of his: his own mother perhaps.
    â€œD’you believe in serendipity,