The Boy Who Loved Too Much by Jennifer Latson

Author:Jennifer Latson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Thirteen

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Eli’s hormones attacked almost as soon as he returned from camp. Once an equal-opportunity hugger, he was now targeting women almost exclusively and especially favoring the curvaceous. The first time he hugged a woman and walked away with an obvious erection, Gayle was mortified. Then it seemed to happen every time. He would stand there chatting happily with the woman, unaware of anything objectionable about his appearance, and Gayle would blanch and usher him away.

The secret life of teenage boys slowly revealed itself to Gayle, who had grown up without brothers and was unschooled in the particulars of male adolescence. She turned to Google to find out what half the population knows by high school: teenage boys have as many as ten to fifteen erections a day (plus another seven to ten in their sleep). She was relieved to read that her son’s reactions were normal. In this area of development, at least, he was on par with his peers, despite being so immature in almost every other respect. The problem was that, lacking the social inhibitions and the sense of shame that drives most teenage boys to devise subtle methods of covering up, Eli was a stage on which puberty played out for all to see.

His body is developing, but his brain isn’t, Gayle thought. When school started, she bought him longer shirts and looser pants, hoping to camouflage what he never bothered to conceal. He couldn’t help it, she knew. But she worried both about his changing preference in whom to hug and how he went about doing it. He had always given bear hugs, but now he seemed to press himself more deliberately against the women he singled out, and for as long as he could get away with. He took advantage of his stature, which put him exactly at breast height on most women, to lean his head against their chests. The new technique catapulted his behavior over the line between innocent and offensive.

One of Gayle’s greatest fears was that Eli would be seen as a predator, the way she’d heard others with Williams had sometimes been. One young man, while waiting with his parents at a bus stop, hugged a woman he didn’t know and was nearly arrested on assault charges. The woman called the police; the man’s parents called Dr. Pober. When a police officer arrived, the geneticist was able to explain the details of Williams syndrome, and the young man wasn’t charged. But he could have been, Gayle thought when she heard the story. If the man’s parents hadn’t been there, or if the officer hadn’t been patient enough to consider the extenuating circumstances, he could have ended up in a jail cell. Worse, the woman—or an irate boyfriend or husband—could have responded violently. These were the dangers waiting on the other side of the Great Divide between children who hugged everyone and adults who did.

Of course, people with Williams were much more likely to be taken advantage of than vice versa.

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