by John Grogan
On the way out of school at the end of the day, I bumped into Mrs. Atkinson, our rebellious heroine, who was within days of leaving to become a lawyer. She asked me how sales had gone.
When I told her what had happened, she asked how much money we had lost.
“We had a little surplus left over from the first issue,” I said.
“I guess about twenty-five dollars.”
She opened her purse and pressed a twenty- and a five-dollar bill into my hand. “Now you’re even,” she said.
I wanted to throw my arms around her. I wanted to tell her how great she was, what an amazing teacher; what an inspiration and role model. I wanted to say I would never forget her and what she had taught me, not only about Greek columns and pre-
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historic pottery but about questioning the status quo and challenging authority. What I said was “Gee, Mrs. A., thanks.”
“Keep ’em sweating,” she said with a smile. “And don’t ever think you haven’t made a difference.”
Perhaps Mrs. Atkinson was onto something. The next fall when I returned to West Bloomfield as a senior, Innervisions was just a distant memory. But in the offices of the Spectrum something was distinctly different. The staff seemed to have more confidence, our adviser more interest in challenging us, and the stories more heft. We pushed the envelope more often and more aggressively.
Despite that, Mr. Cavin backed off. He deferred to our adviser’s judgment and no longer took it upon himself to impose his will on our content. Staff members published articles on birth control, teacher contract negotiations, and other hot-button topics without so much as a peep from the administration. I may have been flattering myself, but it seemed Cavin and the school board didn’t want to inflame any more passions among the student journalists. Why risk waking that sleeping bear again?
That fall marked another change at West Bloomfield, one involving the inseparable trinity known as Lorisueanna. When the first day of school arrived, the threesome was a twosome. Just Lorisue.
During the summer, Anna’s family had moved out of state. In the halls, Lori and Sue now walked in tandem, a hole between them where Anna had once stood. They seemed somehow not quite complete without their friend. I had grown closer to all three of them, and I, too, was sad to see her gone. Anna had a quiet intelligence and independence I admired, and I liked her crazy hair and shy smile.
One day after the leaves had fallen, Lori found me in the hall.
She was beaming. “Guess what,” she said, grabbing my arm.
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“Anna’s coming back to visit! She’ll be here for three days over Thanksgiving.” Anna had been so miserable in her new town and school that her parents had sprung for an airline ticket back to Michigan, where she would spend the holiday weekend at Lori’s house. Sue would be sleeping over, too. The threesome, however briefly, would be reunited.
“It’s going to be so great!” Lori gushed. “And it gets better. My parents are going to be out of town on the last night. We’ll have the house to ourselves. You must come over.” Her braces had come off over the summer and she flashed me her newly perfect smile.
“I must, huh?” I said coyly.
“You must.” More dazzling smile.
“Well, then, I’ll be there,” I said.
And I was. Unlike Pete Grunwald’s bash, Lori’s was small and discreet—a party of four. Months earlier, I had discovered a store where I could buy beer without being asked to show identifica-tion, and I arrived with a couple of six-packs. Lori made omelets.
The four of us sat around, talking and listening to Arlo Guthrie records. Sue was the first to drift off, waking just long enough to head upstairs to bed sometime after midnight. Lori was next, growing quiet and finally falling into a heavy sleep on the couch a few feet from where Anna and I sat side by side on the floor, talking and looking at album covers. She smiled at me. “Guess we’re the last two standing,” she said.
And then her hand was on my knee, and my hand was in her incorrigible hair, brushing it back from her face. She closed her eyes. I took a moment to study her face and realized how pretty she was—prettier than I had allowed myself to notice. I kissed her cheek, then her nose. Our lips found each other, tentatively at first and then without reservation. Almost instantly I knew I was experiencing something very different from that night the previous spring on the overturned canoe. As her mouth opened to mine, I paused momentarily to marvel, So this is how a kiss is supposed to feel. My heart raced and breath came in short, anx-
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ious jags. I forgot about everything but Anna. About the lights that were far too bright, about my already blown curfew, even about Lori softly snoring an arm’s length away.
“You’re shivering,” Anna whispered.
“I know,” I said and folded her onto her back on the floor and rolled on top of her. She slid a hand inside my T-shirt. As I kissed her, I began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse and eventually her jeans.
By the time we heard the yawn, we were in a fully compromised position. Anna’s shirt was wide open; her jeans were un-zipped, panties peeking out. My shirt was up around my shoulder blades. From behind us, Lori yawned again, this time louder and with a dramatic effect that reminded me of how the Cowardly Lion yawned in The Wizard of Oz. Anna and I froze, our mouths still sealed together, our hands locked in place where they had been roaming. It was as though we had been playing musical make-out chairs and the music had just stopped. Anna’s eyes were wide open now, and I knew she was wondering the same thing I was: how long had Lori been awake, trying to figure out how to extricate herself? I pictured her lying on the couch for the past hour debating her options. Should she attempt to sneak out silently and hope we didn’t notice? Feign sleep until we eventually left for a bedroom? Let out a big, casual yawn as if, ho-hum, she woke to these types of surprises every night? I heard Lori rustle on the couch and then her footsteps as she stepped over us and walked out of the room and up the stairs, pausing on her way to switch off the lights.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
“Oh well,” Anna whispered back and playfully nipped at my lower lip.
We continued where we had left off. In the vernacular of teenage boys everywhere, I was rounding third base and making the final sprint toward home plate when Anna pulled back almost imperceptibly and kissed me on the bridge of my nose.
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“John,” she whispered, “I’m not ready to go all the way.”
We were both virgins, both feeling our way for the first time.
Even as I explored her breasts and tugged at her underwear, I had been worrying, too. Maybe it was everything the nuns and brothers had preached about mortal sins and our bodies as temples of Christ. Or Mom and Dad’s constant ranting about the sanctity of what they called “marital relations.” Or the fears they all planted of unwanted pregnancies, dashed dreams, and ruined lives. I would never admit it, but I wasn’t ready, either.
“It’s just . . . ,” Anna began. “We’re just going so fast. Can we slow down a little?”
“I can respect that,” I said, feigning a worldliness I could only dream of, as if I bedded girls on a nightly basis and this once was willing to make a special exception. Secretly I was relieved beyond words.
We lay together on the floor, half naked, kissing and touching and giggling, until I thought to check my watch and was shocked to see it was 3 A.M. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I was supposed to be home hours ago.” I didn’t mention it, but it was also now officially Sunday morning, and Mom would be waking me in a few hours to get ready for Mass. We pulled our clothes together and Anna walked me to the door.
“Come over in the morning for a late breakfast?” she asked.
“That sounds good,” I said.
On the drive home, I plotted my strategy for sneaking upstairs and into bed wi
thout waking Mom or Dad. The trick was to make sure Shaun didn’t bark. He was a smart dog and could usually tell my approach from a stranger’s.
I pulled Dad’s big Monte Carlo into the garage and before opening the door to the laundry room let out a soft whistle, the whistle I had used with Shaun since he was a puppy. Then I silently turned the knob and stepped inside. Shaun was right there to greet me, stretching and shaking, his tags clinking. I knelt down and scratched his ears. “Hey, boy,” I whispered. “You miss me?” I
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slipped out of my shoes and tiptoed through the kitchen in the dark. As I silently passed the living room, feeling for the handrail to the stairs, Little Napoleon’s voice came out of the blackness.
“Where have you been?”
“Oh—hi, Mom.”
“Don’t ‘hi, Mom’ me. Do you know what time it is? Do you know how long I’ve been sitting up? Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?” In the dark, I could hear her rosary beads clinking.
I spun a tale about watching a late-night movie with my friends and all four of us dozing off and next thing we knew, gee, look at the time, and wow, can you believe how late it is, and oh man, where did the night go? In her nightgown and slippers, she stepped closer and peered up at me. I could tell she was trying to sniff my breath for booze or other illicit substances, and on that front I was safe. My last beer had been hours earlier. “Really, Ma, it was just the four of us hanging out all night.”
“For all I knew, you were lying dead on the side of the road,”
she scolded. Then, as if a whole new sordid scenario had just dawned on her: “Were her parents home?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon? The Sheldons? Oh, sure. Of course.
Where else would they be? Mrs. Sheldon made really great pop-corn. For the movie. Really buttery. Delicious.”
Mom stared at me, trying to divine where the truth lay. At least there were no visible gnaw marks on me this time. “I just don’t know what these parents are thinking letting boys and girls sit up half the night together,” she said. “It’s a recipe for trouble.”
“They were right there the whole time, Mom,” I said. “That Mr. S., what a night owl. Loves the Civil War. Sits up all night reading about the Civil War.”
“I was worried half to death,” she scolded. “Not even a phone number to call. Not even a last name.”
“I should have called, Ma,” I said. “But you know, we all fell
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asleep.” I could tell from the way her voice was softening that she once again would choose to believe me, or at least pretend to.
“Now up to bed,” she said, “before I blister you. You’re still not too big to turn over my knee, you know.”
I gave her a quick peck on the cheek and headed upstairs, my head swimming with the events of the night. Anna, Anna, my God, Anna. I repeated her name in my head like a mantra as I drifted off into a deep, happy sleep.
The next morning—or rather, several hours later that same morning—I dragged myself to the 9 A.M. with my parents, then headed back to Lori’s house for what I pictured would be a bois-terous group breakfast around the kitchen table, all four of us jabbering away like the good friends we were. But when I arrived, Anna answered the door alone. Lori and Sue were nowhere in sight. It was obvious they had cleared out to give us time alone.
Anna beamed at me, all swoony like, and I knew something had changed, something major. Somehow, over the course of a few hours, everything was different. We were no longer four pals, and Anna and I, without anyone asking my thoughts on the matter, had become a couple. I resisted a creeping sense of panic.
Anna made eggs and toast, and then I took her to one of my favorite places, a rambling, decrepit greenhouse on a remote country road where Dad used to take us when we were younger.
Walking in from the cold was like walking into a tropical rain forest. The air was so heavy with moisture it condensed on the glass and dripped onto our heads.
We walked through the rows of greenery, hand in hand, pausing occasionally to kiss or merely hug. At one point we caught our reflection in a steamy pane of glass and both burst out laughing.
Our hair had ballooned with the humidity, doubling in volume.
“Lotta freaks,” Anna said, mimicking Arlo Guthrie from his
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performance at Woodstock, and she reached up and smoothed my hair into a bulky ponytail, which she held in her hands briefly before releasing it to spring back over my shoulders. She was flying home later that afternoon, and we both knew we would not see each other, at best, for many months. Out in the parking lot, I leaned against Dad’s Monte Carlo, and she slipped her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. Neither of us wanted to say good-bye. I was not sure what real love was supposed to feel like, but I knew what I felt in my chest at that moment had to be close. I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in. Anna, Anna, my God, Anna.
“I’ll write,” she said.
“I’ll write, too,” I promised.
Chapter 17
o
As senior year progressed, Anna and I wrote less and
less often. At first our letters were twice a week, then weekly, then monthly, and finally, as we both prepared to graduate from our respective schools, not at all. I had a new circle of friends in addition to the old regulars; she had forged bonds at her new school.
Then, a week before commencement, a new distraction came into my life. She was a sophomore whom I had met late in the year through Rock, who was in the school play with her. Becky had inherited her father’s olive complexion and her mother’s almond eyes. She was a talented stage performer with a beautiful singing voice, a high soprano, polished by years of professional training her blue-collar parents really could not afford. But she wasn’t known for her acting prowess or her ability to hit high C on command. She was universally known, around school and town, and everywhere she went, for just one thing. Two, actually.
Becky had the largest, fullest, most magnificent breasts of any girl ever to walk the halls of West Bloomfield High School.
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They began just south of her collarbone and protruded more or less straight outward in open defiance of Sir Isaac Newton for what seemed, at least to the adolescent male eye, miles before curving gently earthward again. This normally would be considered a desirable characteristic, the type of chest some women spend thousands of dollars to achieve surgically. And it would have been for Becky, too, if only she had the body to accommodate it. If only she were a little taller. But Becky was just five feet one. The effect those expansive, gravity-defying breasts had on that compact frame was overwhelming. It was like cramming the Grand Tetons into Rhode Island. No matter what Becky did or said, how well she acted or sang or competed in softball, she was recognized only as “the girl with the big knockers.”
No matter what she wore—the baggiest sweaters, the most demure blouses, her father’s oversize blazers—she stood out in any crowd. Men of all ages would literally gasp aloud from fifty feet away as if they had just glimpsed Haley’s comet at close range. Women always noticed, too, and a surprising number of them were quick to deliver commentary beneath their breath.
Three days before classes let out for summer, Becky arrived at school with an armful of carnations, which she distributed to friends and favorite teachers. As I walked between classes she stopped me in the hall and held out a stem. “This is for you, John Grogan.”
I was surprised. I had met her only a few weeks earlier and then just to chat in the hall. I was one of the few boys in school who hadn’t thought to stare at her chest, at least not in an obvious way, or make lewd comments, and perhaps that helped me make her short list of flower recipients. I accepted the carnation and thanked her. Becky stood there in the crowded hall, beaming up at me as if waiting for a receipt. I had no gift to give her, not even a yea
rbook to ask her to sign. Until that moment, she had barely registered as a blip on my radar. It seemed only gracious to make a gesture of appreciation. I leaned over to give her
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a thank-you peck. But as my lips touched her cheek she turned her head so our mouths banged together. The next thing I knew, Becky’s lips were locked over mine. I always despised those exhi-bitionist types who made out in the hallway at school. Couldn’t they wait till they were alone? But I would be lying if I said I didn’t kiss back. By the time we finally broke apart, I was late for class, and my carnation looked like it had been run over by a steamroller.
“Call me?” she said, holding an invisible phone to her ear.
“Absolutely,” I answered and rushed off.
I graduated with a C-plus grade point average, exactly in the middle of my class. I had joined no clubs, played no sports, performed no community service. Undistinguished with a capital U. With that kind of academic record, I was not getting into the University of Michigan, where my father and sister went, or even into sprawling Michigan State University, which Rock was off to in the fall along with scores of other classmates. But I did get accepted into Central Michigan University, located three hours north of my home, in the middle of the Chippewa Indian reservation. Central was the kind of college willing to take a chance on a student with mediocre grades, so-so SAT scores, and scant evidence of ambition. The admissions officer seemed to like me, especially my gumption in starting Innervisions. And he seemed to understand and sympathize with the difficulty I had transitioning from nine years of regimented Catholic education into a laissez-faire public school.
At commencement, I did have bragging rights to one claim: I had the longest hair of any boy in the West Bloomfield class of 1975, with three or four inches to spare. My parents had learned something from their bitter and ultimately futile battles with Tim over the length of his hair. By the time I was in high school they had mellowed considerably, and on more than one occasion