Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  I remember thinking that even with an age difference of three years, she seemed infinitely older than me. I wanted her to teach me to be like her. I wanted to sleep on a mattress on the floor in a windowless basement and demonstrate my cursory knowledge of art history and decorate with glamour shots of myself and steal perfume from the mall. I wanted to have to walk through someone else’s living room to take a shower. And then.

  “So,” she said, looking contemplatively at one of the photos of herself as I wondered at the vastness of her thoughts, “let me take your bag.”

  I handed her my backpack, weighed down with textbooks and flash cards and binders and even a stapler because you never know, etc.

  She looked momentarily confused. “Did you bring toys?”

  I looked at her and recalled that our entire interaction since the beginning had been a delicate series of facial expressions indicating I knew what she was talking about when I absolutely did not. I considered for a moment and concluded there was no way to fake this one. “Pardon?”

  “Yeah,” she said as if it were obvious, “vibrators, dildos, anal beads, handcuffs?”

  “. . . What?”

  She grinned from ear to ear. “I told you we were going to study with that guy from class. You didn’t think I meant we were going to actually, like, read textbooks, right?”

  “No! No, of course not,” by which I meant, I’ve never even seen my own vagina. I laughed extra long to buy some time. I could hear my heart beating between my ears. They were going to have sex with him! All at once! With me. The only thing more terrifying than losing your virginity in front of older, hotter people seemed like being the prude who declines the orgy because it’s a school night. What the fuck was I going to do? I fumbled. I worried. Time was running out. I laughed again, feigning more nervousness. “. . . I’ve just never used handcuffs.” Oh, me.

  She lit up. “We’ll fix that. They can be really fun. So,” she held up the backpack again, “did you bring anything?”

  I nodded frantically. “Yeah, totally. I have, like . . . four . . . anal beads in there.”

  She looked confused, lifting the bulging pack and shaking it, trying to determine how it could be so heavy.

  I nodded urgently. “They’re huge.”

  Her eyes widened. “Kinky,” she said with the kind of witless, automatic approval of the unfathomable that had been my de facto response for the entirety of our time together. It was then her phone began to ring and she walked off. “That’s probably the other girls . . .”

  By myself for the moment, the panic really set in. I had no idea how I was going to get out of this without seeming relentlessly prudish and un-fun and therefore, worse still, unfuckable. Not to mention, at that age I watched porn because I thought it was hilarious, had never masturbated and thought you could get an orgasm from kissing.

  Then, of course, he showed up. She was on the phone and let him in. He came over to where I was and introduced himself. The thrill of actually touching his hand was almost too much to bear, considering it felt like my vital organs were all shutting down in unison. He was so much taller than me. He then set his backpack down and it landed heavily. There was hope for me yet.

  “What’d you bring?” I asked.

  He looked at me oddly and said, “The textbook?”

  “Me, too!” I blurted.

  “. . . Cool,” he said, nodding unsurely. He went to sit down.

  I turned my attention to Tiffany’s phone conversation going on in the kitchen. “What do you mean you can’t get it?” she was saying. “We need like a gram. I don’t fucking care what his deal is.” Her face crinkled. “Then go get some more.”

  There I was in the basement with my knees bent so my head didn’t touch the ceiling, wondering how I was going to talk my way out of this weeknight teenage orgy and the four supposedly enormous anal beads in my backpack without sounding like the child I absolutely was. Some sort of rash flaring up out of nowhere? No, that would ruin future sexual appeal. I didn’t have any condoms! No, that didn’t seem to deter teenagers any from fucking. It’s not like they teach you to prepare for this. Hours before I’d been making flash cards about social stratification and then bam! The boy I’ve loved from afar for months is going to handcuff me and take my virginity in a moldy basement while a former model watches beneath a frayed poster of Starry Night.

  I looked around and saw him sitting quietly, staring off into space, and the room seemed to go quiet and I realized the only way out of this was to tell the truth. If he didn’t like me anymore because I was a socially inept, frightened virgin who didn’t want to have group sex with him, then we just weren’t meant to be. I was going to tell them the truth and if that was embarrassing or objectionable to them, then they could fuck off and I was more than happy to go home right then and complete the best damn suit of chain mail Wine Country had ever seen. So I stood up and started to shake.

  “I’m really sorry,” I began.

  He looked at me, uncertain.

  “Motherfucker!” Tiffany shouted. She stormed into the living room and said, “Their fucking car just broke down and the fucking dealer is getting paranoid. I need to go bail these bitches out, so you guys have to go. Let’s take a raincheck.”

  It was like my fever broke. I grabbed my backpack and dashed out the front door without saying goodbye to either of them. I made it to the Volvo my mother had loaned me for the night, trying to unlock the driver’s side door as fast as possible. I dropped the keys in the dirt, shouted a stream of expletives and knelt down to find them. While I frantically searched, Tiffany hurried outside and drove away. He came outside, too. He went to his own car, stopped, walked back around and stood over me.

  “What’s with you?” he asked.

  “They were going to have sex with you,” I said, now more anguished by the missing car keys than anything that had transpired before.

  “Those girls?”

  “Yeah. They said it was going to be a study session but I guess that means orgy. How am I supposed to know that? I’m a homeschooler.”

  I found the keys just as he walked back to his car and sat down on the hood. I stood up and, for some reason, had the idea to walk over to him.

  “I kind of thought that’s what was going on,” he said, “but you can never be too careful, so I brought the textbook and a box of condoms.”

  I sat down next to him. “I guess that’s pretty smart.”

  “Community college girls are all about the dick,” he said. I thought he, too, sounded very worldly.

  I sighed and shrugged and at this point, the whole harrowing ordeal had subsided and my nerves were left to fray and I had no more will to fret about my desirableness. “I wouldn’t know.”

  He squinted at me. “You’re weird. How old are you?”

  “Not old enough for this.”

  He laughed and I lit a cigarette and he made fun of me for not being old enough for that, either. We sat on the hood of his car for a while and talked about all the things we had in common, which were actually very few. Having just one TV show you both watched growing up or reading the same book and liking it seems like all the intimacy in the universe when you’re sixteen.

  I’m still pretty proud of myself for being ready to stick to my guns like that and turn down an orgy with the best-looking person I’d ever seen. He and I became friends and started dating about six months later. When I eventually lost my virginity to him on a twin bed in an equally filthy house he shared with an obsessive-compulsive forty-five-year-old Scientologist who refused to throw away newspapers, I remember looking up at the ceiling as the Internet radio “chill” drum and bass played and having no idea I was about to be in the worst relationship of my life. So, if you think about it, sticking to my guns that time really fucked me.

  SEXUAL PREDATORS AND ME

  In the six months between avoiding that orgy and w
hen I actually lost my virginity, I had another occasion to lose it and I’m extremely glad I opted not to. After the orgy situation, I resigned myself to not being sophisticated enough for my male classmate (whom I’d eventually date) and, during this period of dejection, I met a man who was what I can call now, with some hindsight, a sexual predator. And by “with some hindsight,” I mean “by applying critical thought.”

  When you’re sixteen or seventeen, you have absolutely no clue what’s good for you and what obviously isn’t. You can be flattered, manipulated, charmed into believing just about anything or anyone. These generic statements are how I’ve decided to begin an extremely personal account of shitty decisions I made or nearly made as a teenager, and after that I’ll try to step back and shoehorn you into my own experiences again somehow.

  The junior college ended up giving me enough socialization that I eventually entered the time-honored teenage girl stage of dressing like a midrange escort. First, I threw out all my old clothes. Gone were the XXL Oasis tees in sherbet, replaced by bondage-y plaid skirts and visible garter straps and this weird Renaissance blouse that interlaced all the way down the front, to the navel. I’m not proud of this phase. At the time I thought I was very chic and provocative like an editorial in W, but really I just looked like an asshole and my bra was showing all the time. There I was, about sixteen—and a very young sixteen at that—now trying to direct male attention to me, where before I’d taken a very passive role in flirtation.

  I had a friend named Craig, who was nineteen or so and didn’t live with his parents. Craig was (and is) a fundamentally decent person and this story isn’t about him. He worked in some technological capacity for the theater department at the local junior college. One night, a bunch of friends and I went to see a performance of The Tempest he was working on. We were all enjoying the play as much as you actually enjoy watching this caliber of Shakespeare production and then Ferdinand—sweet, boring, simple-brained Ferdinand—took the stage.

  You’re not supposed to like Ferdinand as a character because he’s lame and one-dimensional, yet there I was transfixed. I don’t recall much about his skills beyond that he was a little fey and overbearing but I do remember his face. He held himself like an adult. It turned out he was one.

  After the performance, Craig and a bunch of his lighting friends were smoking on the steps of the theater. I was there, all tall and awkward, wearing some stupid long black coat. Ferdinand appeared in our circle and I was too excited and embarrassed to even speak. It wasn’t so bad, actually, because I didn’t think anything of myself at the time and so figured he wasn’t interested in me anyway.

  His name turned out to be Jesse and Jesse turned out to be Craig’s new roommate. Jesse was also an astounding twenty-four years of age, mature beyond comprehension as far as I was concerned. He looked like Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride, but more sexually threatening (basically, perfect). Suddenly I wanted any and every excuse to hang out at Craig’s house. It so happened that they were throwing a wrap party that weekend and I was invited. I went home that night and taped the playbill into my diary and wrote about Jesse’s handsomeness.

  —

  That weekend at the party, I spent the first hour or so pretending to be cool. I was talking to Craig and other mutual friends, smoking, not making eye contact, talking loud enough to get Jesse’s attention but seeming not to cultivate it any further. Then I went upstairs. Because I am fucking mysterious.

  I had devised a plan. I had devised the dumbest plan ever imagined in the history of teenagers. I went upstairs and sat down in a room by myself and pulled out a notepad I’d brought. I began to scribble notes on it—meaningless ones, of course, but nebulously related to whatever unreadable novel I was working on at the time. My plan, of course, was to lure Jesse’s attention by revealing myself as a fellow creative, so compelled by my instincts that I needed to slip away and channel the muse. There I sat, alone with a notepad, in tortured artist drag.

  Wouldn’t you know it, about half an hour later, just as I was considering giving up, Jesse wandered around the door. To my great joy, he appeared to have been looking for me. I was nearly too thrilled to speak when he sat down. Now I will relay some dialogue that agonizes me to see in print.

  “What . . . are . . . you doing?” he asked with the flared pauses of a community college theater major, the question itself like an illicit dare. He tucked his chin when he spoke, so he always seemed to be peering at you from under his brow; a great trick in any young man’s arsenal to make himself appear more complicated.

  “Writing,” I replied with all the importance in the world, for questions like his were meant for gilded answers. Because that’s what my soul wants.

  “Why?” he asked with sudden, obvious interest.

  Here I mustered the kind of gravity and bottomless self-importance that only an overencouraged sixteen-year-old virgin can access and said, “Actors have to act,” and I gestured to him languidly like a character in a foreign film or how I imagined that would go, “writers . . . have to write.”

  Look, I’m sorry. Clearly as a teenager I was the worst person on earth. However, I can handle sharing this exchange because no one who reads it would come off any better. As teenagers, we all made others endure our misguided and bottomless narcissism. Not every teenager affects these appalling pretensions exactly, but just about every teenager is an idiot. It’s only a matter of what kind.

  We discussed the extremely serious novel I was working on and he talked about his aspirations as an actor/musician. As for his aspirations of being a sex offender, he kept that pretty close to the chest. We ended up talking for half an hour or so before Craig noted our absence and came upstairs to find us. Craig insisted we come back downstairs and I hated him for an instant. The rest of the night went on. Jesse ended up getting so drunk that we didn’t talk to each other again.

  Soon I was spending every afternoon and evening I could at Craig’s, eking out any excuse to be there. If I was in the neighborhood, I’d stop by. I’d call and ask if Craig needed a lift or wanted to get dinner so we could hang out at his place after.

  —

  My parents noticed I was spending all my time away from home. At this point, those two rode a pretty hard line that I wasn’t supposed to have sex until I could support myself financially (i.e., not under their roof). Still, robust conversation—and ruthless bluntness—are Cardiff family hallmarks.

  I was sitting in the car one day with my father, shrewd and attentive, and he asked if there was anything they should know about. I told him that I was hanging out at Craig’s and it was nothing like that. Because I am incapable of hiding things from my parents, the fuckers, I added that Craig had a handsome roommate, although that had nothing to do with my sudden disappearance.

  Just to drive home how incapable I was of lying to them, I then blurted out that Craig’s handsome roommate was twenty-four. There was a silence between my father and me. I realized I had overplayed the hand.

  Theater. He’s into theater.

  “I think he’s gay, though.”

  My father looked at me skeptically. At this point he’d already rooted out what was going on. “He’s gay, huh?”

  Wait. Don’t say yes to that. Sudden visions of a perfect world flooded my dumb teen brain, visions of Jesse and me together and happy and standing on clouds and maybe a garland or some other flowy thing in my hair. How would my parents ever make the leap from Jesse being gay to Jesse being my fiancé? I needed to set expectations without startling them.

  “Yeah. I mean, I think. I’m not sure. He’s kind of asexual.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Like, a regular guy but not . . . like . . . sleazy.”

  What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Saying.

  “All right,” my father said and nodded. “He’s twenty-four?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sixteen.”
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  And then I got that defensive teenage tone. “I know.”

  “So,” my father said, “you can keep spending time at Craig’s house. But if this guy touches you, I’m going to kill him with a bat.”

  Don’t let the violence of that alarm you. This was my father’s de facto response to hearing about boys. My parents were incredibly permissive and trusting of me all the time, but as soon as the subject of teenage sex was broached, my father became some sort of barbarian conquerer, braining his enemies on the temple steps with savage precision. It was pretty endearing.

  Though I had kind of blown my cover, it didn’t matter because I wasn’t banned from Craig’s. I was free to explore this thing with Jesse as I saw fit.

  Days went on, and the more time I spent at Craig’s apartment, the more I became exposed to Jesse’s eccentricities. When you’re a teenager in a small town in California and the only things that make you feel less alone are Marc Bolan and The Simpsons, you are pretty vulnerable to the appeal of eccentricities in charming, handsome older men.

  Shows? He likes watching shows? And listening to music?!

  For one, Jesse was obsessed with Bruce Lee, which is a pretty cool obsession to have. He kept in shape by practicing Jeet Kune Do in his room while listening to electronica. If that doesn’t turn you on, you are probably not a sixteen-year-old girl. He had even (seemingly) read books. Most alluring of all, he talked openly and explicitly about sex, in a manner that teenage boys I knew were incapable of doing. Once he left a tie on the coffee table and I picked it up and he chuckled to himself that he’d tied an ex-girlfriend to his bed with it and then “went down on her.”

  As an adult, I know that offering this kind of information, solicited or otherwise, is objectionable. As a teenager, I found it provocative—though Coffee Thomas did more or less the exact same thing, he didn’t have the smoldering good looks or self-possessedness of Jesse. I also didn’t consider the dubious logistics of the statement, what with his bed being a mattress on the floor. I spent longer, later nights there, just wanting Jesse to talk to me and pay attention to me and invite me a little bit deeper into his strange world of adulthood.