The Journey Prize Stories 24 Read Free Page A

least from his devotion to our cause.
    I like to record these lists of clothing, and also all my related thoughts and observations, in a notebook, a Moleskin notebook like the kind Mr. Sears said Hemingway used.
    Also, sometimes in class his socks fall around his ankles and I want to duck down on to the half-peeled floor and crawl under his desk and pull them up for him.
    Because of all this pent-up sexual frustration, I’ve cultivated a new hobby, namely, interacting with pedophiles in Internet chatrooms. Or not pedophiles, but one pedophile in particular. His name is Ronald, and we’ve been talking online for about a month. He has asked me to think of him as my boyfriend, though he’s really more of a manfriend, because he is forty-one years old. When I told him I’m fourteen, he typed, “Your age is my age in reverse,” as though that means we are meant to be. He says he thinks I’m exotic because of my Indian background, so I didn’t tell him I was born in Canada. After I’m done with school and English Club meetings or band practice, I go home and go on “Internet dates” with Ronald the pedophile. We’ll Google important political figures and then discuss our findings, or we’ll furnish an imaginary home with furniture we imagine buying on eBay, and sometimes we’ll go to Freerice.com and spend hours defining words and ending world hunger.
    Usually while I’m doing this, my parents are either working late or in the basement praying. They have created a “God Room” in the basement, where all of our Hindu gods andgoddesses hang in rows around the blue walls, staring out with peaceful expressions.
    “You are as beautiful as a goddess,” Ronald said to me once, after describing himself as an agnostic. I’d added him on Facebook, though he’s on limited profile so he can’t see my address or anything, but I did allow him to see my photos, so he looked through all the ones of me and Amy and told me that I’m infinitely more desirable than she is.
    I regularly watch
To Catch a Predator
on
Dateline
and am amazed at how often the child molesters resemble the guys my dad works with. I told Ronald about this and he found a bunch of episodes of the show on YouTube, and so we watched those on another Internet date. We witnessed one predator wearing a large shapeless hat atop his large shapeless head, entering the house, unaware of the NBC cameramen drinking coffee behind the decorative curtain. Then the decoy thirteen-year-old chirps something about going to change into her bathing suit and the guy with the large hat smiles to himself and actually, literally starts rubbing his hands together in anticipation, and I bet he has really dry hands so bits of skin are flaking off them, and also he has this backpack on that’s maybe too small for a grown man, and he takes that off and started rifling through it, but before we found out what monstrous equipment he has in this backpack,
Dateline
correspondent Chris Hansen emerges from behind the decorative curtain and introduces himself, and the man with the hat removes his hat and uses it to cover his face.
    “Don’t worry, my darling,” Ronald said to me, “I am ten times the man he is,” which makes me wonder if Ronald knows how math works. Ten times a pedophile, I think, as I lookthrough his Facebook pictures. Unlike most people’s Facebook photos, Ronald’s feature no other people. Mostly they show him leaning against a blank wall, his head rounded in a way that indicates he took the photo himself with one outstretched arm.
    In my most recent conversation with Ronald, he asked me for my phone number. I was reading
Beowulf
while talking to him, and thinking maybe I should rent the movie instead, and I was caught up in thinking about Mr. Sears and whether the movie version would be significantly different from the book version and checking Wikipedia to see whether the movie script used quotes from the Seamus Heaney translation. So I’d pushed the Ronald