Molly and Jumper and Mambo
                       Strains on the FM Radio
               A Short Love Story by Garrett Kaminaga

Jumper had known Molly Jensen since the moist-eyed days of early
youth. Charlie Rickford had teased Jumper about hanging out with girls
-- until Molly beat him up and made him cry in front of Arthur Jones,
Jonathan Loo and even Quentin Clarke. And this was in _the second
grade_, where crying meant the end of hanging out, of chasing each
other at near light- speed on bicycles, of endless adventures in the
any-world of the fantastic playground. It was, in the second grade,
like another fall of man. but Charlie was reunited with the gang the
next day, his . . . unmanly tears forgotten in the furious pace of a
seven-year-old's life. 

Jumper liked Molly because she never asked him to marry her, never
wanted to play house, was interested more in transformers than in the
fake Barbie dolls that you could cut the hair off of and it would
never grow back. Not that Jumper pretended or even thought that girls
were yucky; he liked them on the whole. but they were so much less
real than Molly was. Jumper still got frightened at the movies, went
swimming and played get-dirty-get- scraped tag with the guys, but he
reserved his most fantastic adventures for playing out with Molly. The
any-world of Charlie and Arthur and Jonathan always had the same
machine-gun fights (even when they played knights and dragons), the
same gory deaths, the same _everything_. Molly and Jumper created
worlds better than anything on TV, filled with the black-and-white
hopes and fears of second grade, because Jumper and Molly were best
friends. 

When they reached intermediate school, and Charlie and Arthur all
eagerly pretended to be grossed-out by spin the bottle and the other
I'm- curious games of adolescence, Molly and Jumper, impossibly, grew
closer together. One day at the park Molly wanted to play on the
swings instead of play four-square, and she began to talk about the
grayer hopes and fears of thirteen-ness. And Jumper, amazingly, found
that he really didn't mind. So, they learned from each other -- Molly
talked about training bras, about stupid slumber parties, about the
unbelievable pain of braces. Jumper talked about his middle name
(Xavier), about not making the basketball team cut, about the
requisite machismo of being a teenage guy. And they both got to sleep
a little easier because of it. 

They stayed friends even through the intense world of high school.
Through Nazi history teachers who pulled pop quizzes and looked at
someone else but asked you a question, through class struggles that
made Sally Hart laugh at Jumper when he asked her out, through
Valentine's dances and Homecoming games, club fundraisers and the slow
invasion of the pressures of the outside world. Not that they were
boyfriend and girlfriend. You never saw Molly and Jumper talking and
crying or stuck together like siamese twins. They didn't even go to
prom together -- Jumper went with Sally, who was much nicer after she
stopped hanging out with the soc crowd, and Molly went with Quentin.
They exchanged pictures and signed yearbooks and talked just like
regular friends, right up through graduation. But only Molly knew that
Jumper came close to flunking out of school, and only Jumper knew that
Molly had slammed the door in Quentin's face after prom (although
Quentin told it differently). 

Then, while waiting in the registration line at State, wedged between
his roommate (who claimed to be an anarchist, making Jumper go look
the word up) and a huge woman who wore a hideous shade of green and
smelled of anchovies, Jumper realized that he loved Molly. All it took
was his roommate telling him, as Molly walked into the gym, that his
girlfriend had arrived. Jumper started with the automatic response of
"She's not my girlfriend," since he had been asked that too many times
to count in high school, when all the memories of their time together
pressured it back down his throat and lodged it painfully in his
chest. For the entire semester, when Jumper was at Molly's dorm doing
frosh english or just talking, his mind was racing through thousands
of scenarios of confessing his love. "Molly, I love you" wasn't quite
right, and the moonlit walk through Bishop Yard was a little too
saccharin (and dangerous). When they fell to talking as they had been
so used to, he lied when she asked him about his love life. Jumper
knew that if she didn't love him (how could she, so beautiful, so
warm, love me? he thought) then that put their friendship in a
precarious, awkward position. Their 12-year friendship was too much to
gamble. But then, the pain that had stayed from his realization in the
registration line (Jumper had thought that it was indigestion at
first) was eating him up from inside and burning through his skin
every second of the day. 

Then, one night Molly told him that she had a crush on Adam Rawlings,
the athletic water polo player down the hall. Jumper died inside.
Dammit! Jumper only wanted Molly to be happy, but that meant her
having Adam, and not having him. But Jumper, who truly loved Molly,
decided to get him for her. Jumper and Adam knew each other from
weekly physics problem sets, and, through cajoling and begging and
innuendo, Jumper got Adam to ask her out. Then, as Jumper was about to
go drink himself into a stupor over what he had done, Molly asked him
to come over. 

"Adam asked me out." 

Jumper acted surprised. "Great! What're you going to do?" 

"I'm not going. I told him no." 

Jumper said nothing. "Jumper, I've known you since second grade." Her
words came slowly, choked. "I ... ever since high school ... " 

And Jumper knew that she loved him too. He said nothing. He grabbed
her hand and ran outside, into the parking lot, where the cold bit at
the skin, but Jumper and Molly didn't mind because they were warmed
inside and the moon was coming out from behind the clouds and someone,
somewhere, was playing mambo music a little too loudly, and they
didn't have to say anything to each other because saying anything
would have been anticlimactic, and he slipped his arms around her and
amazed, felt her against him, and he lowered his lips to hers, happy
beyond all joys. 

Then a truck ran them both over and smashed them to bits.