Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  I had booked a week in London before I was scheduled to do an appearance in Italy, and Sean was going to be there the entire time as well—it was supposed to be our vacation. The next day, though, he decided to fly out early due to an undefined “schedule change,” leaving me alone in London. There were paparazzi camped outside the hotel, and I couldn’t do anything. I don’t mind being alone in cities, and normally I would have just shopped and gone to see the sights, but I didn’t want to be photographed “living it up” when my friend had just died, so I camped out in my hotel room, like Eloise, drinking tea and eating biscuits and crying.

  Everyone deals with death in their own way, and some are better at it than others. In showbiz they always say “the show must go on,” and that’s true, but with Glee, we barely got a moment to breathe at all. Filming “The Quarterback” episode was one of the hardest, most emotional things I’ve ever done. I understand that the episode was created from a place that meant well—it was supposed to be our way of paying tribute to and mourning Cory on-screen, but most of us hadn’t gotten a chance to go through that process yet offscreen. Everything just happened so fast—after one take several of us were bawling and trying to pull ourselves together when someone popped their head in the room and said, “At least you guys are acting, right? It’s not like it’s real life. Great job!”

  The one thing that did make me feel good about this episode was that Santana had a big part in it. I think that was the writers’ way of acknowledging the friendship Cory and I had, and since Lea was in no place emotionally to take the lead, they thought I was the next choice to step in. Mike O’Malley wrote me a very sweet note, telling me how he felt that people looked up to me on set, and that I needed to be extra strong to help pull everyone else through it. That was really comforting, and I tried, Mike, I tried.

  From the outside, Cory’s life looked perfect—money, fame, beautiful girlfriend, millions of adoring fans—but I guess his same old demons were still there, raising as much mental and emotional hell as they always had. Maybe even more, now that everything was supposed to be okay. I think this is a common misconception about fame, or any kind of marker of “success” in life, be it landing your dream job, getting married, or having a kid: people think that you achieve these goals, you check off certain boxes, and all of a sudden life’s perfect and you don’t have any problems. That’s not true. You’re still going to wake up every morning, and your problems will still be there unless you figure out a way to make them go away. And more often than not, new ones will show up in their place.

  I still think that Cory had so much to live for, and for me that’s the worst part about his death—that it was so unnecessary. I miss everything about him. I just miss his life, and I wish that he was here, experiencing in his own life the kind of things that I’m experiencing now in mine. A calm after the storm, if you will. Everything about his death seems unnecessary.

  • • •

  I doubt I’m alone in feeling a lot of regret about his death. Since he died, a lot of us have spent time wondering and talking about what would have happened if someone had stepped in or confronted him about what was going on.

  Or what if he’d been trying to talk to someone about what was going on and just thought no one cared? Like, maybe that one time when it was just the two of us walking out to our cars, maybe if I would have just walked a little bit slower and hadn’t been in such a hurry to get home, maybe he would have seen it as an opportunity to bring something up. You can drive yourself crazy thinking like that, because no number of ifs will ever make anything different. Yes, we were a close-knit cast that loved a good session of real talk, but we were also all busy, stressed, and wrapped up in our own lives. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

  Cory’s gone, and I miss him, and that is what it is. The only consolation I have is that I’ve always trusted that God has a plan for me, and he must have had one for Cory too, even if I don’t understand it.

  GLEEFUL AND GRATEFUL

  I recently went back and started watching old episodes from the beginning, and I’m proud to say that a lot of them made me laugh out loud. And as soap-operatic and afterschool-specialish as some of the plot lines were, there were also a lot of truisms in the show, like when Santana declares, “Life is very high school, just with bigger stakes.”

  If I had a dollar for every time my mom reminded me that God had a plan, I’d probably use them to buy a new Prada bag. But, point being, I didn’t always believe her, especially in some of the harder moments, when I was broke and hadn’t booked a role in years. Even when I was up for something that I didn’t really think I wanted, I’d be devastated when I didn’t get it, crying at the kitchen table about how I was doomed to just be a Hooters waitress for the rest of my life.

  She’d just shake her head and tell me not to worry, that if God was shutting some doors, it was so I’d pay attention to the ones that were open. And she was right. If I’d gotten even just one of the roles I had thought I wanted, I might never have auditioned for Glee. And that’s where I truly believe I was destined to end up.

  It would be an understatement to say that Glee changed my life. It overhauled it. It got me out of debt. It helped to cement my career. And before the show, I’d never had a group of people I was that close with. I think a lot of the other cast members would say the same thing (except, maybe not about the debt . . .). But while Glee changed our lives, it didn’t necessarily change who we were. We started the show as a ragtag group of misfits, and six seasons later, when we filmed the last episode, we were still the same bunch of misfits. Just now wearing more expensive jeans.

  SORRY:

  Cory passing. Nothing was ever the same without him.

  The crunchy ringlet curls in my ponytail from seasons one to three.

  What felt like day 12,157 in a cheerleading uniform.

  NOT SORRY:

  Working hard and playing even harder.

  All the lifelong friendships I made: Heather, Chris, Amber, Dianna, Kevin, Jenna, Harry, Telly, and too many more to name all of them here.

  Playing Santana Lopez—a character who meant so much to so many people—and watching her grow up on-screen while I grew up offscreen.

  Spending six years dancing, singing, and working my ass off as part of something memorable and amazing.

  6

  FROM BOYS TO MEN

  Learning the Difference Between Lust and Love

  MY FIRST CRUSH was Bel Biv DeVoe. Not one in particular, but all of them. One of my mom’s friends had given me a BBD tape as a present at my fifth-birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. It was in no way an appropriate gift for a kindergartner, but I was instantly obsessed. I watched their videos and fell in l-o-v-e. I had an inkling that this was possibly inappropriate, so I’d only listen to their songs in my room and imitate the grinding dance moves by myself in front of the mirror.

  Once, my parents and I ran into DeVoe in the mall. My dad, knowing I was a fan, picked me up and took me over to say hi. I was too embarrassed to even make eye contact, though, and as they chatted it up, I buried my head in my dad’s shoulder and snuck secret glances at DeVoe, all the while thinking, “I have sexy dreams about you, and in them we’re living together!”

  I also definitely remember refusing to nap at preschool, preferring to stay wide awake and chase boys around the playroom. I don’t think I was particularly boy crazy—I think I just wanted what a lot of girls want, which is a boyfriend, but I guess maybe I’ve just wanted one since I was a toddler.

  Since things never worked out with me and DeVoe, my next crush was more attainable, and age appropriate: Tahj Mowry, Tia and Tamera’s little brother. Tahj and I did a print shoot together when we were four. Our moms became friends on set, and, soon after, my family started attending the same church as them. After a few years of seeing each other every Sunday morning, Tahj was my number one crush, and I suspect that I was his.


  Tahj had made several appearances on Sister, Sister, but when we were preteens, he was cast to star in his own WB show, Smart Guy, playing a child genius who skips ahead six grades and into high school. When my thirteenth-birthday party rolled around, I told all the girls at school that Tahj was going to be there, and the reaction was akin to what you would expect if Channing Tatum made a surprise appearance at a bachelorette party. Tahj showed up a little bit late, at which point his arrival had been thoroughly hyped, and every female at the party, sans me, freaked out. Bitches were thirsty, immediately decamping to corners and whispering and giggling at one another. We had a basketball hoop in the backyard, and when Tahj said he wanted to play, all the girls did too.

  There wasn’t a one of them who could throw a ball even anywhere near the basket, but this didn’t stop them all from thronging the court. It was nonstop double dribbles and air balls until one of them would “accidentally” brush up against Tahj and then run off the court screaming, “I touched him, I touched him!” Some hair was going to get pulled if they didn’t stop rushing up on my man, but a disaster was averted when we slow danced in front of everyone, including our moms—er, when our moms made us slow dance, if I’m being totally honest here . . .

  We had our first kiss not too long after that, when we were on a chaperoned date with—who else but—our moms. We’d gone to see a Denzel Washington movie, and our moms had made the mistake (or maybe it was deliberate?) of sitting in the row in front of us. This left me and Tahj free to hold hands behind their backs, and even, gasp, make out! I’d never kissed anybody before, and I’m pretty sure he hadn’t either, because our teeth kept knocking together so frequently, and so loudly, that I thought one of our moms would turn around and go, “What the hell is that noise?!” Finally, we stopped attempting to kiss and just sat and quietly held hands in the dark.

  After that, I considered Tahj to be my almost boyfriend, as he was certainly the closest I’d ever come to having a real boyfriend as a teenager, though we were really more like best friends. We had the same sense of humor and shared that actor’s tendency to always be on, entertaining each other by dramatically resinging every song we heard on the radio and adding tons of runs. I liked that he was a nice, Christian boy, and we genuinely had fun whenever we were together, even though we rarely did more than awkwardly slobber on each other’s faces and hold hands.

  I was his date for his winter formal at a private school that was way fancier than Valencia High, and also even his date on the night when he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. It was my first red carpet. I wore a white two-piece number, a matching shirt and skirt that almost could have been sexy, or at least cute, if my mom hadn’t made me wear a long slip underneath it like I was a freaking Mormon.

  Like something straight out of the embarrassing stories in Seventeen magazine, that also happened to be the day I got my period for the first time—the same day as the biggest date of my life, when I’d been planning for weeks to wear all white. My mother, bless her heart, had always explained menstruation to me as an afterthought, saying things like, “Oh well, when you get your period . . . ,” as if I was somehow just supposed to know what getting my period was all about.

  So that day, when I went to the bathroom and found blood in my underwear, I immediately told my mom, who just screeched, “Naya, oh my God, you’re a woman now!” then handed me a pad to stick in my panties and pretty much pushed me out the door and into the limo where Tahj and his mom were waiting.

  Pads are not the most technologically advanced period protection. They feel like you’re wearing an XXL diaper all bunched up between your legs, especially when you’ve never worn one before. As I walked down the sidewalk to get into the car, I was terrified that I was waddling, and that Tahj would take one look at me and be able to immediately tell what was happening, and that, worse, he’d be totally grossed out by it. I felt like I had a secret but wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad secret. “Oh my God,” I wondered, as I took my seat next to him, “can he smell the blood?” But he didn’t seem to notice anything, and barely even noticed me, as he spent the entire ride there practicing his acceptance speech for an award he did not win.

  Tahj and I continued to “date” off and on for the entirety of our teenage years. During one of our off periods, I lost my virginity to someone else. Tahj later ended things once and for all by telling me he thought he needed to date someone more on his financial level. Dick. We’re still friends.

  LOSING IT

  One day, toward the end of high school, it seemed like I just woke up and none of my friends were virgins anymore. Tahj and my whatever it was, was pretty much a sexless union, and there had never been anyone else who seemed worth having sex with. The senior who’d taken me to prom when I was a sophomore had tried to have sex with me that night after the dance, but I rightly turned him down. After all, he had a nose ring and was rumored to have once gotten a blow job while sitting on the toilet, taking a shit. What a prince.

  Some of my friends had been doing it for a long time; others professed to like having sex but love giving BJs. They’d just be like, “What? I like it!” Whatever. I was sick of not being able to participate in these girl-talk sessions and figured it was high time to hand over my V card. But who was going to be the lucky guy? There was one thing that I did know, though—this guy was not going to be special.

  As much as my friends claimed to just love having sex, I’d seen the same thing happen to all of them: they’d give it up to a guy they really liked, get dumped, and then spend the next two months blubbering and crying, “But he took my vir-gin-i-tyyyyyy! Wahhhhhhhh . . .” I was damn certain that was not going to be me.

  One day not long after high school graduation I was working an afternoon shift at Abercrombie when my target came in, just shopping for sweat shirts. It was a guy I’d gone to junior high with and hadn’t seen in years. He was half-white, half-black, somehow Mormon, and had morphed into a pretty hot dude since the last time I saw him, in eighth grade. “That’s it,” I thought. “Good enough.” We exchanged numbers, and I hit him up a few days later. I don’t think he had any idea what was coming (pun intended).

  Mixed Mormon and I went on a few dates that weren’t too bad but weren’t too good either. I told my best friend, Madison, that I was going to lose my virginity.

  She was shocked. “What?! Do you like him? Do you love him?”

  No and no, I told her, and that was the whole point.

  One night, MM was at a friend’s house, playing video games, and I texted him that I was coming over. It was getting late, like nine at night, and I drove myself and parked outside. I took a deep breath before I walked in, and if I could have high-fived myself, I would have.

  We hung out for a few minutes, me watching him play Grand Theft Auto, when I suggested that we go into his friend’s bedroom. Maybe he was starting to catch on at this point, because he readily agreed. We made out for a few minutes, and then I pushed him down, stared him in the eyes, and said, “Okay, let’s get this over with, because I don’t want to bleed on someone I actually like.” For a teenage boy, sweeter words of seduction have never been spoken, I guess, and then I climbed on top and proceeded to get it over with.

  As soon as I was back outside and a safe distance from the house, I called Madison.

  “I did it!”

  “That’s it?!”

  “That’s it!” I never talked to him again, and to this day I’m pretty proud to say that I lost my virginity on top.

  THE WHORE YEARS—AND WHY EVERY GIRL NEEDS THEM

  After that, Tahj and I got back together for a bit, but I still wasn’t getting much action. When he dumped me, I took it as my cue, and was like, “Okay, well, I guess I’ll start fucking now,” and commenced what I now refer to with nothing but fond memories and affection as the “whore years.” Abercrombie was a great place for hookups, because the guys all had great bodies and, well, you didn’t
have to go very far. You’d basically bump into someone running clothes from the fitting room and think, “Okay, you!”

  After that, I set my sights on my longtime high school crush, who was a super hot, six-foot-one white boy with long hair and muscles. I’d had my eye on this guy—we’ll call him A—since freshman year, but he was popular and only went out with the prettiest girls in school. He never looked at me, but now that we were out of high school (and, I’m sure, because I now had C-cups), when we ran into each other, it seemed like we were finally on the same level.

  I started my long and complicated plot to get to him by dating his best friend (if you haven’t picked up on it yet, this is where I started getting real whorish). His best friend was a similarly hot black dude who looked like Michael Jackson pre–plastic surgery and skin bleach. This guy—we’ll call him B—and I dated for a while and would hook up at my best friend’s house because I was still living at home with my dad. Madison still lived with her mom, but she was never home, so B and I would sneak away every chance we got and do it in Madison’s bed. She was less than pleased about this, understandably.

  “Naya,” she’d say. “This is not cool. I sleep here!” She had a point.

  Then all of a sudden, out of what seemed like nowhere, B dumped me, with little emotion or explanation. Well, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so I decided to get B back by hooking up with his other best friend, C.

  Somehow none of these guys seemed to know who their best friends were banging (which I’m not sure I really believe), and the next time I saw A he asked for my number. Of course I gave it to him. This long and convoluted plan seemed to be working after all. A and I texted back and forth for a while, and by that time I was living in my own ill-fated apartment, so when he texted one night asking if he could come over, I said yes immediately. He came over, we watched TV for a little bit—as you do—and then did it, as you do. He left a short time later, and for some reason, as soon as he left, I couldn’t find my keys.