3.

That was the October I turned seventeen, fell in love, and started taking birth control. I could hardly walk I was moving so much. I was insatiable.
I picked him from a small series of admirers for no real reason. He was a little younger than the rest of the boys – he was in grade eleven, and I was in grade twelve – and I found him curious and small and afraid. His hands were shy. He read a lot. The first thing he told me was that he’d never “been with a woman before.”
There was a stone memorial tower about the size of four people stacked on top of each other that stood on top of the Richmond Hill, right on Yonge street. It was in a small green “park” just off the sidewalk, sort of hidden by a few stubby maple trees. We would go there, to the foot of the tower, after school to just lay there and talk about the things we thought were important. When I was with him, I always felt like I was putting on a show, like he was observing me, remembering and preserving everything I said
We would walk to the sidewalk would put our hands flat on top of the pink city at the bottom of the hill, at the bottom of the long wide road, straight like the parting of his flat yellow hair in his third grade school portrait that sat on top of the television in his family room. We pretended like we were bigger than the city, like everything was small and unimportant down there, but really we knew that it was the opposite. The miniature set of glassy spikes and vague puddle of russet haze that stuck to the skyline was where we imagined ourselves strutting around some day, wearing pretty and expensive clothes.
We walked across the street to the diner and smoked a cigarette underneath the neon tubing, shaped to spell OPEN. The red hung on his face in a way so beautiful and transient – Hold still, I said, Hold still – and I took the camera from my bag and sat on his lap, holding the camera right up to his face to try and capture the redness, the glow that clung to his baby-skin.