Across the street there used to live this girl. Actually she only sometimes came on weekends, thanks to the divorce scenario that we all know and love. Her name was Amy. She was a year younger than me and beautiful. Sometimes I would have to go away for weekends, too, but when Friday afternoon came around I prayed my dad would not call and then I prayed that her dad had called and that soon enough I would see her. I could never cross the street to her house. No, it was not because I was too young, needing an adult’s hand to hold; there was this invisible barrier, a fear of rejection that I could not face. This point was and is irrelevant, because she would come to me; at least that is how I would like to remember it. She would never knock or ring the doorbell, but rather she would play basketball, and the constant banging of a ball against the house alerted me to her presence.

I had this big fantasy then. I had seen this movie (or movies, my memory fades) about young kids, and in this one, late at night, the beautiful girl in the movie gently tossed rocks at the bedroom window of the guy she liked, and she woke him up and he climbed out and they were together. To me the night was always this time, this foreign time, in which I was relegated to my room and my dreams. I would dream that one day I would have someone in the night, too. Maybe one day someone would throw rocks at my window. My room was good for it, too. It was right on the corner of the house, behind our fence, and next to it was the neighbor’s smaller, foot-high fence that anyone could climb and stand on, and as fate would have it, their front yard was covered in small-dare I say "tossable"- rocks.

Amy liked another guy, though. His name was Tony, and through the neighborhood rumor mill I heard stories about Amy waking Tony up at night and them walking to the nearby park. My bedroom was in a much better position to have rocks tossed at its window. Tony’s room was way in the back, and there were no small rocks at all near his house. She must have got the rocks from my neighbor’s house on the way over. Amy never told me anything about this occurrence and so I never believed it, and I always hoped and listened for her. She stopped coming around on weekends. I figure her dad lost interest in her, like my dad did in me, and so she never did wake me up and walk with me to the park. Even with her gone, I still listened nightly for her.

It is weird when a dream or fantasy comes true, because sometimes when it comes into fruition, the reality of it does not quite match the picture built up in one’s mind. This was not the case with me and mine. Years and years later, when I was like 17, I had a girlfriend. She did not live near me at all, and this childhood fantasy was way gone from my cognizance, but I still had a girlfriend. Luckily, she was the most beautiful girl in the world, much more beautiful than Amy.

She is hard for me to describe, but beyond any physical description that I could convey, she always seemed to glow. Her face was radiant and could always brighten a dark night; and she smiled at me. That was the big one: above all her radiance, she smiled at me. (Please, just hit me or something when I get too sentimental.) Her name was Antonia Mancino.

One night I was asleep, and somehow I awoke to faint and then harsh taps at my window. I was scared and I almost ran and alarmed my mom, but I did not. I got up and did not even get dressed. I just went outside in my T-shirt and boxers to see what the noise was. My house had been tee-peed. It certainly was not the best job ever, and there was this girl trying to make it look like she was hiding behind a bush in my front yard. It was Antonia. She was wearing two small tank tops, one solid black, the other solid green; solid navy blue shorts, and brown socks. She did not match at all, and actually it seemed like she was testing the limits of fashion to see how bad she could dress and still look pretty–she had not reached the limit. She used her superhero-like powers and lit up the dark night. Asleep or awake, my dream was in front of me.

I actually had dreamt of Antonia before. In my dreams I could never quite hold her. Certainly a foreshadowing of events to come, but this night, in this dream, I could hold her. Words were few. I did not even care that my front yard was now half-full of toilet paper. I held her in my arms. I felt her shoulders, her skin, all the way down her arms until our hands met and we held hands, fingers interlocked, and we kissed. She left soon after. We did not even get a chance to walk down to the park in the night.

She did not move away, but like Amy she too went out of my life too soon after that night.

Now I am twenty-one years old, just turned twenty-one actually, and I have even met a girl in a bar. She is not the most beautiful girl in the world and she will never throw stones at my window, awakening me in the night.

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