susan hayward photography : Romeo

Earlier in the week, my oldest son came home with body graffiti, penned by a girl in one of his classes. She had written "I love your face" on his left hand. I almost didn't notice it. But it was almost like he wanted me to see it, gesturing with his hand while he talked, lifting it to take off his glasses, all within inches of my face.

When I saw the blur of letters on his skin, I grabbed his hand to look closer. There was an outline of a heart where the word "love" should have been. And the exclamation point had been dotted with another, smaller heart, this one colored in with blue ink. The letters were written with the same plump handwriting that I used to have in junior high. "What's this?" I asked.

"What's what?" my son said innocently. I noticed that the first "what" sounded like a man's voice, but the second "what" sounded like a kid's. Clearly, I was making him nervous. And it made me glad for some reason, as if my mom power could stop this tide of testosterone.

As I sat there examining my son's hand, I traveled back in time to when he was little and I used to draw smiley faces on his thumb. He would giggle at the tickle of the pen against his skin, wiggle his nose at the smell of ink on his fingers. This is something handed down to me from my mother, who would draw smiles on my big toe as I lay on the floor reading. Even now in her letters she'll often pause in a sentence to draw a smile, and often she'll sign her name with a smiley face too. Those tiny smiles from my mother make me feel she is near somehow, and that I am still her little girl.

My son took his hand away from mine. But I wasn't done with the inquisition. "So who wrote this?" I asked.

"No one," he answered. He turned away to look out the window. "A girl."

"Which girl?"

He said a name I've heard him mention before, a girl I do not know. Then I realized that to write on someone's hand, you needed to hold it. And if you're going to draw hearts, you might just hold on to that hand for awhile so you can do a really good job of it. When I pointed this out to him, asking if that was his experience, he just laughed.

I laughed too. But not as much. It's harmless enough to write on someone's hand. She had, after all written I love your face, which is not quite the same as I love you. Yet I do sometimes worry that teenagers--especially girls--get carried away with the idea of love. I've read the Twilight series and I've seen the movies. I get how tenuous the line between love and infatuation can be, especially when you're young. But real boys are just that--boys. They are not one hundred year-old vampires wearing pasty-face makeup and amber colored contacts, driving sports cars, and feigning American accents. Girls are bound to be disappointed when they declare their attraction to the normal, non-vampire boys inhabiting their real world. "I love your face!" would most likely not be met with, "You are my Bella, my reason for breathing." Rather, I think my son would snatch his hand back (although the evidence indicates that the girl wrote a complete sentence without resistance--no smears, no wavy letters) as if bothered, but then read her words for the rest of the day, all the while marveling, "She likes me."

That night, he washed away the love note without any remorse. And by morning, we had all forgotten about it. Then I picked him up from school. And this is what I found when he got in the car:

"She's persistent," I told my kid. "Apparently she still loves your face."

He smiled. "Yeah," he said out loud. And by the way his eyes danced as he said it, there's a good chance he was also thinking, "Isn't it great?"

And that's when I remembered that he had dressed up as Edward Cullen for his sixth grade dance less than a year before. A few of the girls had shrieked with delight when they saw him. He had danced with some girls that afternoon while all of us mothers watched from the sidelines, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs mingling with the scent of perfume and sweat as the kids gathered in the middle of the room. He had not made eye contact with the girls as they shuffled in circles on the dusty linoleum floor. He had looked off in the distance as if considering something deeply meaningful to him. And when the music sped up, he closed his eyes and danced by himself, his long limbs swinging to the beat, his lips moving with the words. It was as if I was watching a stranger.

Back in the car, I pulled into traffic and headed home. My son was silent, perhaps contemplating the significance of the words on his hand. "So what are you going to do now?" I asked, referring to the face-love thing going on between him and this girl.

But he didn't get my meaning. "Probably go home and make a sandwich," he said. "I'm starving."

That's my boy.