Whatever. It’s not like I was licensed yet. I may as well get this kind of thing out of my system.
“I almost lost my virginity a few nights ago,” I blurted, the words tumbling out of my mouth so fast there was no taking them back. I could feel my face turning red.
Myriad emotions crossed Rebekah’s face—interest, disgust, disdain—before she settled on nonchalance. “So?” She shrugged. “I’m not your hairdresser, and you ain’t my best friend, so it’s none of my beeswax.”
“I couldn’t go through with it,” I said.
Finally, a flicker of interest. “Oh, yeah?” she said. “Why not?”
“No condom, for one thing.”
Rebekah made that smacking sound with her lips again, the one that sounded like the perfect onomatopoeic expression for ‘scorn.’ “I get it,” she said. “Safe sex, don’t do drugs, rah-rah-rah.”
I shook my head. “This isn’t an after-school special, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I couldn’t get it out of my head that something might go wrong.”
Suddenly Rebekah sat up straighter. “Wait a sec,” she said, “just a few weeks ago you were on the pill. You showed it to me. So, what’s up with that?”
Perfect. She couldn’t get into R-rated movies yet, and suddenly she was Nancy Drew. But at least she was engaged in the discussion, and maybe there was a chance she’d open up a little. “I was—I am,” I corrected. “But that’s not one hundred percent foolproof, you know. And there’s still—”
Linda had been strolling around the room, and she chose that moment to pass by Rebekah and me. She raised her eyebrows at us, and for a minute I worried she had heard the whole thing. I didn’t need a sixth sense to tell me she wouldn’t exactly do a jig over the idea of us talking about sex.
Then she moved on, and I let out my breath. I waited until she was across the room before leaning in to finish my sentence. Rebekah leaned in, too.
“There’s still the problem of, you know, STDs,” I whispered. “And some of them aren’t curable, either.”
Rebekah snorted. “In ten years we’ll all have STDs,” she said, blowing it off as though she were saying Taco Bell will come out with the eight-layer nachos. “Who was this guy you were hookin’ up with, anyway? He a player?”
“No, we weren’t hooking up. I told you, he’s my boyfriend since high school. For over a year, actually.” There, that should impress her. In middle school, we used to refer to people who were together for longer than a week as “married.”
Another snort, this one louder. “That don’t mean he’s not a player.”
Such cynicism in one so young. This is the point where most people would lament today’s youth, waxing poetic about innocence lost or something like that. A part of me did find it sad. But another part of me found it almost…refreshing. Can cynicism be refreshing?
“Well, we’ve been together awhile,” I said. “And he’s not a player…I don’t think, anyway.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Trust Rebekah to cut to the chase. “I told you,” I said, feeling a little defensive now. “He didn’t have a condom, and even though I doubt he has any diseases and there’s very little chance I’d get pregnant, it just seemed like a bad idea to take the chance.”
Rebekah stared at me for a long time, and then she shook her head. “Nu-uh,” she said. “You’re a liar.”
“No, I’m not,” I said automatically, although I didn’t even know which part of the story she objected to.
Rebekah cocked one scarily arched eyebrow at me. “Oh, yeah?” she challenged. “So your boyfriend, who you’ve been with for a while and who you say ain’t a player, wants to do it with you. You’re on the pill. But you chicken out. Ain’t no way that was just ’cause you were worried about a little ol’ STD.”
Okay, so I didn’t really think that Andrew had any communicable diseases. Rebekah had seen that for what it was—a badly constructed veil to cover up the real issue. What that issue might be, I didn’t even know yet.
“I guess I was scared,” I admitted. “But I don’t know why.”
Rebekah nodded sagely. “I was scared, too, my first time.”
Her first time? “How old are you? Thirteen?”
“Fifteen!” Rebekah corrected, affronted. “I started school late and was held back a bit, that’s all.”
I realized I didn’t know this girl very well at all, and so far my plan to get her to open up had yielded more about my sex life (or lack thereof) than hers. “So when was your first time?”
“Last year,” she said. “In the woods behind a Kmart by my house. It wasn’t the greatest. The second time was better.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Same guy?”
“No.” Rebekah cleared her throat, as though uncomfortable. “This boyfriend of yours, he ain’t a player, but is he all right?”
She didn’t give me an operational definition for “all right,” but I assumed she was asking whether or not he was good to me. “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes—most of the time. I love him a lot.”
“And what about him?”
I looked at her, as if to say, what about him?
Rebekah twirled her finger impatiently. “Does he love you?” she said, as if to a child.
I froze. “He says he does,” I said slowly. “But I…don’t know.”
Linda clapped her hands to bring everyone back to attention, and I barely registered anything else as she adjourned the meeting and dismissed the girls. Rebekah scooped up her backpack and hesitated, as though unsure if she should say something else. But then she mumbled a brief good-bye and ran out the door, leaving it swinging behind her.
I came out of my daze only when Linda came to stand by me. “Leigh?” she said. “You can go home now.”
I looked up at her. “Why are these girls here?” I asked.
Linda paused, as though not considering the question so much as my motives for asking it. “They were referred by their guidance counselors,” she said finally. “For being ‘at risk.’”
“At risk for what? Teen pregnancy?”
“Not necessarily. Just at risk for…developing problems.”
I guessed we would get to the other problems later, once the unit on teen pregnancy finally concluded. I still didn’t feel like I was any closer to understanding Rebekah, and I was starting to feel further away from understanding myself.
I gathered my stuff and headed out in the hot afternoon sun toward the parking lot. I got into Gretchen and started her up, oblivious of the searing heat of the ignition as I turned the key.
Rebekah clearly had her own problems, and I was determined to figure them out. But I still couldn’t believe I had been that honest with someone I barely knew, who hadn’t even entered high school yet. After deciding I wanted to study psychology, it was only now that I had even begun to get the point behind therapy.
CONFIRMATION BIAS: The tendency to seek evidence to support one’s hypothesis rather than to look for evidence that will undermine the hypothesis
AMI was the one who discovered the results of the contest. She instant-messaged me from her desk, which was right next to mine. This is one of those things Ami does. She’ll IM me to tell me we should walk to the campus store and get Dippin’ Dots, to tell me when she’s tired and going to bed, and to refer me to funny links she finds on the Internet. She does this even when leaning back in her chair, turning her head, and talking to me would work just as well. Better, even, since everything she types looks like it’s gone through a scrambler.
Her message was one word, or rather, almost-word: COGNARULATIONSS. I looked over at her and rolled my eyes, but I typed back. THANKS…FOR WHAT?
It was only a few seconds before Ami’s reply popped up. She’s a fast typist, just not a good one. WINING 2END IN THE CNTETS.
That one took me a while to get. When I finally deciphered it, I swiveled my chair in one swift, outraged motion.
“Second place?” I said. “Second
place? How could I get second place?”
Ami held up her hands in surrender. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said. “I thought second place was good. Just think, you weren’t even going to enter until you threw something together in, like, an hour. So, second is not too shabby.”
“You don’t understand,” I pressed. “I talked a big game at that stupid psych clique meeting that I was going to win it. This is a catastrophe.”
Ami shrugged. “Politics,” she said. “Everyone thought Andreea Raducan would get the gold medal, too, until she tested positive for drugs.”
For my persuasive writing sample for English composition class, I’d written about the 2000 Olympics scandal involving the Romanian gymnast who won the gymnastics all-around competition, only to have her gold medal stripped when she tested positive for some common substance found in cold medicines. It totally traumatized me when I was a kid, but for some reason, Ami loves this story, and tries to work it into a lot of conversations where it doesn’t really apply.
“I didn’t take drugs, Ami,” I pointed out. “Not even accidentally. Where did you read about the contest, anyway?”
“Here, I’ll send you the link.” Ami rapidly typed out a new message and sent it over to me. After correcting the spelling of one of the words, I was directed to a campus news site.
There it was: “Students take Second and Third Places in State Writing Contest.” I clicked on the article and skimmed it just enough to know that, sure enough, I had won second place in the underclassmen research division for my paper on cognitive-behavioral therapies for treating bulimia. At least Ellen hadn’t won anything, but still. The jackass who had taken first was some Northern California girl for her paper titled “Religious Imagery and Symbolism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
Was she kidding? I had read Heart of Darkness in, like, tenth grade, and it didn’t take a genius to catch the reference to asceticism that appeared on the first page. I believe the exact words were that Marlow “resembled an idol.” What do you need, a two-by-four?
“I’m so dead,” I muttered.
Ami came to stand behind me, reading the text over my shoulder. “Don’t be such a drama queen,” she said. “So you didn’t win—big deal! You still get to go to a sweet awards ceremony in San Francisco. With…” she squinted at the screen. “Some guy named Li Huang. Who is Li Huang?”
I didn’t have the faintest idea. Apparently he had won third place in the underclassmen creative writing portion for his poem, “Cherry Blossoms,” and he was the only other person from my school listed.
“You realize his name is Li, right?” I said. “We’re going to be name twins. Oh, my God, I am so dead.”
Ami sighed. “I thought Chinese people switched their names. Is he Chinese? If he is, he’d be going by Huang, not Li.”
“Still,” I said. “Someone will pick up on it, and we’ll be Leigh and Li for the rest of the trip. We’ll sound like a moving company, or a personal injury law office or something.”
“When is the ceremony?”
That was the other thing. The awards ceremony was this weekend. That meant in only a few days! Who gives only a few days’ notice? I guess they figured that people would be so overjoyed by winning their stupid contest that they’d just cancel plans.
“Maybe if you could come with me,” I said. “Then the whole thing wouldn’t be so bad.”
Ami pursed her lips, considering it. “I’d totally do it,” she said. “But what reason could we possibly give for me crashing the party? It’s not like I won anything.”
I checked my e-mail and, sure enough, there was an e-mail already sent by Tim Dell, our special events coordinator/admissions officer/director of student affairs. (When I say Stiles is a small liberal arts college, I mean small.) I had never personally interacted with him before, but I guess he was the one who handled this kind of thing.
Dear Leigh and Li (hey, isn’t that funny!)
It was already starting.
First off, congrats on your achievements! I’m sure both of your works were stellar to receive such recognition! As you may have already gleaned, the awards ceremony is coming up on us fast—which means we must act quickly!
“Is this guy on speed?” I asked.
I figure we can all caravan to San Francisco together—who can say road trip! Don’t worry about hotel accommodations—I’ve already booked two rooms at the hotel that’s hosting the ceremony. Leigh, you can stay in one and Li and I will stay in the other. Don’t you two get mixed up, now!
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Anyhoo, e-mail back with whether or not you can make the ceremony—although I expect you both to be there! It’s not often we are so honored—much less twice honored!
Yikes. A road trip with this guy was going to be like watching a cheerleading competition on fast-forward. I was more determined than ever to get Ami to come with me.
“Look,” I said, “it even says right there in the e-mail—I have my own room. So, what would be the problem with you staying with me?”
“Hey, like I said, I’m all for it,” Ami said emphatically. “But I’m not so sure about this Tim guy. Don’t you think the school would care that they were giving a free trip to someone who wasn’t even supposed to be there?”
I glared at Ami. “You just don’t want to be cooped up in a van with Tim ‘anyhoo’ Dell.”
“Well, yeah.” She shrugged. “Who would?”
Neither Ami nor I was superexcited at the prospect of spending a whole weekend with my name twin and the most exuberant forty-year-old man on earth, but I did eventually wrangle a way for her to come to San Francisco with me.
At first, Tim, who I thought couldn’t be down on anything, wasn’t really going for it. He seemed very reticent in a reply e-mail to my question regarding Ami, evidenced by the fact that there was only one exclamation point in the whole thing. And it had come at the end, after the word thanks. Not a very promising start.
But then I reminded him that it wasn’t like I’d be sharing a room with him and my name twin, anyway, and that it was probably dangerous for a girl to stay in a hotel room by herself in the City. That’s right, I capitalized it. As if Stiles were totally rural, being just outside of Los Angeles and all. Ha.
So Ami was coming to San Francisco with me, which was the only thing that made the trip palatable. I was even beginning to look forward to it a little as a welcome break from everything else in my life.
The night before we were to leave, I went over to Andrew’s to say good-bye. We hadn’t spoken much since the night of the party—a brief conversation or two on the phone, a single uncomfortable cup of coffee grabbed at the Toad’s Monocle a few days ago after we ran into each other. He said he had just been really busy, and I claimed the same, and I wasn’t sure if neither of us was lying or if we both were.
Nathan was the one to let me in the suite again. Only this time, he was wearing a shirt. I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.
“Where’s Andrew?” I said, holding my purse in front of me as if it were made of Kevlar and the common room were unfriendly gang turf. Which, face it, it kind of felt like right now.
“Shower,” Nathan said. He sat down on the couch, and he seemed almost surprised when I took the chair across from him.
I blushed as I realized what he must be thinking. It wouldn’t be that abnormal for a longtime girlfriend to just poke her head in the bathroom and say hi. Maybe he even thought I would want to join Andrew in the shower. I wondered suddenly what Andrew had told him about our relationship. I wondered what, if anything, Andrew had said about our one aborted attempt at sex. Did Nathan think it was weird that here we were, freshmen in college, and Andrew and I didn’t even sleep in each other’s rooms?
Because I did. Think it was weird, I mean. But the alternative had just seemed so much stranger.
“Congratulations, by the way.” Nathan’s words jolted me out of my thoughts, and it took me a few moments to re
alize he must be referring to the contest.
“Thanks,” I muttered. I didn’t bother to ask how he knew about it. After that article, everyone seemed to know about it.
“You must be pissed,” he said. And then, at my blank face, added, “since you told all those girls that you were going to win it.”
How did he know that? I assumed it was from Sydney—that girl had a big mouth. Then, as if reading my mind (or my uncomfortable posture), Nathan said, “You mentioned it in the car on the way to the party.” Now it was his turn to look ill at ease. “Never mind. All I meant to say was, congratulations on the second-place thing.”
“Fake it ’til you make it, right?” I said. It was supposed to sound like a really cool, breezy thing to say, but it came out sounding a little bitter. Nathan started leafing through a Fender catalog as though I had ceased to exist.
Finally, Andrew emerged from the shower, looking like some kind of Ralph Lauren towel commercial and smelling like the sandalwood soap he uses. He paused as Nathan and I both looked up.
“Leigh,” Andrew said. Try as I might, I couldn’t analyze his tone. Was he happy to see me?
“Hey,” I replied. Then, because the sight of him in a towel was a little distracting, I cleared my throat. “Um…is it a bad time?”
“No,” he said, and then as if to emphasize his point, he repeated it again. “No, not at all. Let me just get changed and I’ll be right out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Andrew changed quickly, sparing me much more interaction with Nathan. When he came out of his room, he inclined his head for me to come to him. I rose from the couch and slid past him, but not before I caught his words to Nathan.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Andrew said, one hand braced against the doorjamb. “Sydney called earlier. She wants you to return her call ASAP.”
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