Valentine’s Ghost

George smelled. It wasn’t a sour, organic body odor; instead, it possessed a sort of staleness, as if his mother had left his clothes hanging too long on the line or stockpiled mothballs in his drawers. He was skinny, too. We were all skinny back then (except Ray Boudreau), but George was gaunt, hollow-eyed, like a skeleton with a skim of gray plaster. So, we made fun of George. Some of us were less brutal than others, but we all sang: “Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry…” Which didn’t make sense because George wasn’t pudgy and hadn’t tried to kiss any of us girls, although most would have bawled had he dared.

George should’ve been long buried in the recesses of my memory, tossed in with overlooked and nameless faces. Yet there he sits, at the edge of the class picture, his sunken eyes haunting me, his name chained forever to one cold February day.

George presented me with a valentine – not any little card, but a heart-shaped box of chocolates. We waited single-file, at the back of the slide, eager to blast down and bump off the kid stationed at The game was a recent invention, created after a snowstorm and the magical emergence of the long, glassy slick at the bottom of the otherwise forgotten slide.