Chapter 2: Prytania

I lived just outside the city during my childhood. While the heart of downtown New Orleans was reserved for Sunday post-church outings for ice cream or shopping, my home was nestled in a quiet suburb right outside the city. Mild winters and humid orange summers characterized most of my memories in that tiny yellow house planted amongst a row of other tiny houses on the street.

As a child, I was not well socialized. I was born in the middle of the second World War, and that war took my father before I could ever meet him. My mother was into her third trimester when a man in uniform came to her doorstep and told her that her husband and the father of her unborn child had been killed in battle on the French coast. My mother named me Rebecca after my father's mother to somehow keep him connected to me, and it was only Mama and I for my entire childhood.

Mama had no choice but to become a shopgirl for a local drugstore immediately after hearing the news, both to support herself and I, and to keep her mind off her husband's death. I believe that for the rest of her life, she lived in a waiting period and constantly busied herself so that time would pass faster, and her husband would return home. For a while, when people asked, she would tell them he was stationed wherever America was focused on and that she couldn't wait for his furlough to come home. Eventually, people stopped asking.

It never bothered me that much since I never met the man. Father to me was the striking young fellow in the black-and-white picture sitting on the radio in the living room. He was Mama's guardian angel about whom she would tell stories to me at night before bed.

"You know, your daddy could fly," she would tell me as she pulled my floral duvet up to my chin, as if it got cold enough in Southern Louisiana to warrant tucking your children in tight at bedtime to keep them warm.

My eyes would alight with wonder as she told me about how he could take a running start and then jump straight up into the air, spreading his arms outright like an airplane and flying through the clouds. She told me that one time he went so high that he touched the sun and came back down with a summer tan.

By the time she got around to vividly describing the aerodynamics of imaginary human flight mostly to ensure I couldn't see through her fib, my eyes would be closed. I would always make myself stay awake enough to feel her kiss my forehead and hear the sound of her turning my bedside lamp off.

As an only child whose mother worked long shifts, I excelled in school for the primary reason that I simply had nothing else to do. When the school day ended and I walked home, I would read my textbooks. By the end of a school year, I had read through my textbooks five times each and nearly every single new book in the small school library.

I was an only child who spent recesses reading or doing homework, so you can imagine how quiet and reserved I was. I didn't know how to interact with the other children at school. The only friend I had besides my imaginary ones was a little boy who lived across the street and was about the same age as me. His father had died in an accident at the factory where he worked, so his mother and he were in the same situation as my mother and me. The start of our friendship was nothing more than "Hi, my name's Rebecca" and "Hi, I'm Greg" when we crossed paths in the street.

In the summers, Greg and I would ride our bicycles all around the neighborhood from morning until dark. One time, we went so far that we ended up in downtown New Orleans, coasting through the streets and gazing up at all the lights as the sun set. We got back home late into the night, and after a beating from our mothers, we stayed within neighborhood limits when on our bikes from then on. If one of our mothers wasn't working, we would make her join in on playing skip rope. It was usually Greg's mother, and she would hold one end of the rope while one of us held the other end and the other kid jumped the rope. Sometimes, when she was jolly enough, we both would hold the rope and she would jump until we purposefully tripped her.

Greg was my only friend and my best friend. Our mothers said that we would get married when we were older, and every time Greg and I heard that we would screw up our faces and pretend to barf.

We mostly got ourselves into trouble. We had a game with each other where we would see how many pieces of candy we could steal from the candy shop without getting caught. Greg would always win, coming back with pockets full of taffy and gumballs, and I would get too scared and guilty and only manage a few pieces of bubblegum. Later, we found out that the store owner, an old man whose family had owned the store for years, eventually discovered that we were stealing but let us continue because Greg was so good at it that it amazed him.

The Great Depression had kept its cold grasp on our families. While big ballers and lucky gamblers walked the streets of casinos downtown, the middle class of the suburbs diminished. Money was never something we had, and it wasn't something we ever really dreamed for. We had roofs over our heads, and our mothers had enough to feed us dinner every night. We went to school, played outside, ate, and slept. It was a weekend night in October when I was 12 years old that my mother had enough loose change in her pocket that she wanted to go to the city and see a movie at the popular theater. I had only ever seen cartoons and news programs on Greg's little television in his house and listened to shows on the radio. I had never been to a movie theater before and had only seen their glistening buildings downtown from the outside view.

That night, my mother took me to the Prytania Theatre uptown. Our movie tickets were 50 cents apiece to see the newest film released called Oklahoma!

It was a western musical that affected something deep in my heart and cemented my trajectory towards becoming a cinephile. While my life had mostly been made up of skipping rope and studying books, sitting in that dark movie theater and watching the film in Eastmancolor unleashed the realization that there was a bigger world out there than the tiny nucleus of a life I had lived in. It wasn't necessarily the movie itself that I loved, but it was the idea of creation. I had never grasped that all the books I've read had to be written by someone, that the music I listened to was sung and recorded by someone, that films were written and directed by someone. It seemed magical, the world of creation. Throughout the movie, I was in awe about how it was made with my inexistent knowledge about filmmaking.

That was when I decided to take up a job at the candy shop Greg and I used to steal from so I could earn enough money to go to the theater on the weekends. The owner paid me 25 cents an hour to bag candy for customers and count cash. I would work on Saturdays during the day for a few hours, and once the owner would dole out a few coins from the register, I would take them, without even counting, and jump on my bicycle to go home and get Greg so we could bike our way to the Prytania to see whatever was playing that night.

The movie theatre was my escape from reality. I watched great romances, great tragedies, great cities, and great worlds on that silver screen. I lived through the characters and lived in whatever city or country the plot took place. When Greg and I went home, I would get in bed and dream about the movie. I would pretend I was one of the characters, living an illustrious life in a grand city as a detective or a singer or a housewife. I eventually started writing my own "movies" that stayed on the pages of my journal and lived in my mind.

In high school, I excelled in English and French. Most people who lived in New Orleans could speak a little French, but by the time I was 16, I could speak the language almost fluently. I tried my best to teach Greg, but he was more of a mathematics person and could hardly grasp the complexities of the English language. Nonetheless, I felt a sense of rightness as I paced Greg's bedroom and hammered as many French words into his mind as I could.

When the University of New Orleans opened its doors in 1958 as the first racially integrated university in the South, I decided that I would become the first person in my family to get a college degree and that I would pursue teaching French. This came with much fuss from my mother, who thought that a higher education would indoctrinate me into Communist ideals and that women were more fit to be homemakers than college students. She was satisfied that I was at least pursuing teaching, so that my career prospects were fit enough for the female standards. With tuition concerns on my mind, I had to stop spending my savings on going to the movie theater with Greg.

Greg and I remained best friends throughout high school, and while he was still my only friend, I found that Greg had made a new friend. Roger was a black boy in our grade who met Greg during one of the science fairs. Since I was not in Greg's science class, he didn't have any friends to partner up with, and the teacher had to clump the outcasts together into teams. Greg and Roger were two of these outcasts that were clumped together into one project, and they found that they got along very well.

Eventually, Greg and I's movie trips, which had been rescheduled to only once a month rather than every weekend, were now in the company of Roger. I found that Roger was one of the funniest people I have ever met. When I spent Saturday nights with him and Greg, I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt.

One school night within the beginning of our senior year in high school, I realized that my French notebook was missing. After a few minutes of trying to think about where it could have been, I realized that I had left it at Greg's the night before, and since his mother was working a night shift, I helped myself into his house across the street.

"Greg, it's Becca, I think I left my—"

When I opened his bedroom door, my eyes landed on Roger and Greg scrambling away from each other on the bed and standing upright. In the flash moment between opening the door and seeing them jump to their feet, my brain had caught the image of the two boys kissing each other, and it permanently burned into the confines of my skull.

Dumbfounded isn't even enough to describe my reaction. I stood there with my hand still on the doorknob, looking between Greg and Roger who had both went very pale and started to sweat.

"Becca," Greg breathed, his brown bangs already sticking to the sweat on his alabaster forehead. All he said was my name, but I knew exactly what he was asking of me. Roger gulped hard and looked to the ground, and before he could start vomiting everywhere, I stepped forward with a  sort of cool resilience that I didn't know was inside me and placed a firm hand on both his and Greg's shoulders.

They both looked at me with wide eyes, awaiting whatever horrible thing they thought I was going to say to them, until I gently and casually asked, "Have you seen my French notebook?"

Their shoulders eased under my hands, and their faces softened. Greg chewed on his lip as he turned to glance around his room until he spotted my notebook sitting where I had left it on his desk. He grabbed it and gently handed it to me, and I noticed how much his hand was trembling.

With one hand, I took the notebook, and with the other, I took his clammy, shaking hand. I wasn't sure what to say. These conversations did not exist in 1959.

After the walk back across the street which felt a million miles long, I dropped onto my bed. My heart was racing for Greg. I always knew Greg was different, but there was hardly even a word for what he was back then other than slurs and derogation. Growing up, we had occasionally heard adults whisper things as they walked past a certain person on the street. Kids in school would throw the word around to each other to piss each other off. Personally, I had no mind to it. I had never even considered it before, but now that I knew Greg's secret, I loved my best friend even more and inwardly swore to keep it for the rest of our lives.

Keeping Greg's secret was easy because I didn't even think of it as something to hide. It was just who he was and who Roger was, and who they were together. They never made any notion of their romance in public or at school, but somehow, rumors in our small high school started to fly. We thought they were just jokes, as all the guys joked with each other.

It was a Monday in February of senior year that Greg didn't show up to school. I figured that he must have been sick, but as the day went on, I noticed that Roger was also absent.

Something cold and sick twisted in my stomach when I sat in class and looked at the two empty seats next to me. My heart raced and pounded in my chest, and my hands and feet went cold. Chains of paranoia locked around me, but what I instantly disregarded as paranoia was actually my intuition.

As soon as the school day was over, I raced home, not even bothering to take my bike. When I saw my mother and Greg's mother in the yard, and my eyes caught the worried, anxious look on his mother's face, that pit in my stomach dropped even further.

Greg had went out to the park with Roger that previous Sunday night, and he had never come home. When Greg's mother called Roger's parents, they said that Roger was also missing. I couldn't go to school for the three days that the police were looking for them. I sat in Greg's bedroom on his bed, hands clasped, body tense, eyes watery, shaking back and forth. I looked at the papers on his desk where he had been practicing the French I was teaching him. I looked at the movie tickets he was collecting from every film we had gone to see together. He had kept some of the taffies we had stolen from the candy shop as children. Beside his cup of pens and pencils were two pictures taped to the wall. One was a school picture of Roger. The other one was a black and white picture of Greg and I as kids that his mother had taken. There was Greg with his bowled brown hair, standing on his bicycle and smiling at the camera as the sunlight washed out his face. There was me on my bicycle right next to him, my arm slung around his shoulders and my long brown hair blowing over half of Greg's face. We were about ten in that picture.

Three days after Greg went missing, the police found his and Roger's bodies sunken in the pond at the park. A later autopsy proved that they had been beaten and drowned.