by Laura Ruby
Flamingo is amused. “Why not? Is it sacred or something? Are you Samson? Besides, think about how different you’ll look with dark hair. I swear no one will recognize you.”
I’m sure that everyone would recognize me if my hair were blue, with lime-green polka dots. But then, the thought that it might take people a few extra seconds makes me hesitate. Flamingo moves in for the kill. “I dye my hair all the time, and it works out fine for me. If I don’t like what’s going on, if things are crappy or just boring, I make my hair another color and I’m a new person. Easiest thing in the world.” She smiles at me, a different kind of smile than the ones I’ve been getting the last few days. A sweet smile, a friendly smile, an I-don’t-know-who-you-are-and-I-couldn’t-care-less smile. She starts to ring up the stuff, and I don’t stop her. “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re going to be great.”
We Interrupt This Program for a Special Report
I’m twenty-five bucks poorer when I walk home, and I’m not happy about it. I don’t know why I let some punk girl in flip-flops talk me into buying stuff that will turn my hair the color of dirt. Dirt! And who is so dumb that they believe dyeing your hair can make you a whole new person? I fumble around in the bag for the receipt.
Great. She forgot to put one in there, and I forgot to ask for it. Twenty-five bucks down the tube because I couldn’t face Luke’s mom’s van.
My dad’s not happy, either. Apparently, he went to a lawyer and got some answers on the legal front. Since no one’s face is visible in the picture, he tells us at dinner, it would be difficult to prosecute anyone for sending it.
“He did say that we could at least threaten to sue,” my dad says. “Since it’s probably a kid who sent the picture around, we could shake him up.”
“What will that do?” I say.
“What do you mean, what will it do?” my dad says, chewing his broccoli vigorously. “It will stop the little monster from doing it again.”
“Dad, I don’t even know who sent it.”
“Did you ask that boy?”
I want to say What boy? but I know what boy. “No,” I say. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“I wouldn’t want to talk to him, either, after what he did to you,” my dad says. “Now that I’m thinking about it, you shouldn’t talk to him. You should let me talk to him. I’ll shake him up.” For a second, he looks so mad that I worry he’ll find Luke and rip his arms off. And maybe some other key parts, too. Not that it wouldn’t be a teeny bit satisfying, but I know that if my dad even talks to Luke or his parents I will never, ever hear the end of this. Everyone will just blame me anyway.
“Dad, I don’t want you to do anything,” I say. “I want to forget about it.”
“Forget about it?” he says. He turns to my mother. “Elaine, will you talk some sense into her, please?” He scoops up his plate and practically throws it into the sink. “I have to look at some prom gown catalogs.” He stalks from the room.
I push my broccoli around my plate. “Dad’s freaking out.”
“We’re all freaking out,” my mom says. “You’re not eating.”
“I don’t like broccoli.”
“You love broccoli.”
“I love the cheese sauce that goes on the broccoli. I never liked the broccoli.”
“I’m worried about you.” My mom starts clearing the table. “I called my doctor. He had an appointment available, and I—”
I knew it! I start moaning: “Mom…”
“Audrey,” she says, her voice firm. “If you’re sexually active, you need to see a doctor. This is not debatable.”
I wince at the phrase “sexually active.” So weird and vague. So not sexy. So not the way I’d describe anything I’ve ever done. “Do I have to go to a man?”
“He’s a good doctor,” she says. “I’ve been going to him for years. But if you want me to make some more calls—”
“Fine,” I say, too embarrassed for the both of us to argue. “When’s the appointment?”
“Next Friday. Four o’clock.”
“You’re taking me, right?” I say, suddenly terrified that my dad will want to do it.
“Yes,” she says. “You might not be comfortable talking to us about these things, but I want you to be honest with the doctor.”
I nod.
“I mean it,” she says.
“I know.” I feel like I’m at the doctor’s already, splayed out under the bright lights. I can hear the questions now: Are you sexually active, Ms. Porter? When did you first become sexually active? How often are you sexually active? Did you know that sexual activities occurring in green vans are more likely to result in hair the color of dirt?
“Can I ask you a question?” my mom says. She doesn’t wait for me to say yes before she says, “Did you care about that boy?”
I feel a flare of anger at this, and then it’s gone. “No. I just picked him up off the street.”
“Audrey…” she says.
“Yes, I liked him. Of course I liked him. Jeez. What do you think?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You read magazines and see TV shows about what kids are doing. Scary things. Bets and games and contests. Girls doing things just to be popular. All that stuff on the Internet.”
I don’t say anything; I can only imagine what was on the latest episode of Oprah.
Mom blows a curl from her cheek. “This is exactly what makes parents crazy,” she says.
“What is?”
“This. All of this. One day you’re building little cities out of toothpicks, and the next…” She trails off. I finish her thought in my head. And the next you’re blowing random guys. What a world! It must be the rap music! The video games! Someone alert the media! We need to do a Special Report!
But that’s not what she says. “The next minute, you find out that your child isn’t a child anymore, that she’s being confronted with things that could hurt her or even change her life forever. I speak from experience.” Again she tries to tell me that sex is beautiful, but that’s not what her face says. Her face says that sex is kind of icky and sort of frightening. Something that you have to gear up for. Something that requires medical attention. Maybe it’s only beautiful for people over a certain age. Or maybe it’s beautiful for everyone other than somebody’s daughter.
But she’s still forging ahead. “You open yourself up to so much,” she says. “I’m not just talking about pregnancy and disease, I’m talking about your heart. I’m talking about people breaking it. It’s wonderful and natural,” she says. “But only with people you can trust.”
She can’t tell me how you know who you can trust. “What, do they have neon signs on their foreheads or something?”
She looks depressed and defeated, and I feel bad. She’s trying to help and I won’t let her. Why can’t I let her? “This is why the pastors at church say it’s smart to wait,” she says.
As far as I can tell, the pastors at the church like to talk about everything but sex, except to tell us to “save ourselves for our husbands and wives.” Both pastors are at least sixty years old. Who says they can even remember sex? And besides, me and my mom both know how I came to be. An unplanned little bomb that blew up in my parents’ senior year of college. I try not to sound pissed when I say, “Is that what you think?”
She’s been wandering around the kitchen, shifting things—the fork here, the tub of butter there—but not really putting anything away. She gives up and sits back down at the table. “I think it’s best to wait as long as you can. Until you find someone you love.”
“So you waited for Dad,” I say.
My mother looks extremely uncomfortable, as if she’s suddenly been stricken with intestinal cramps. “This is not about me. I’m just one person.”
Whoa. “You didn’t wait?”
“What I did or didn’t do is not the point,” she tells me. “Every person is unique.” She looks down at the table and brushes some crumbs into her palm.
Now that we
’re talking, I realize that I don’t want all the sordid details, that I really don’t want to know who my mom was with and when. I mean, yuck. Then I realize that it’s probably how she’s thinking of me—my daughter, sex, yuck. For something that’s supposed to be all God-given and Song of Solomon and comfort-me-with-apples fabulous, it feels about as beautiful as drinking from a toilet bowl. At least that’s what it feels like afterward, when someone’s taken a picture of you and decorated the world with it and your mom is about to drag you off to the clinic for tests.
I notice that she’s not asked me exactly the kinds of “sexual activities” I’ve participated in, whether or not I’m still a virgin. She doesn’t want to know, either. I guess if I could do this one thing, I could do almost anything.
She’s right.
“You think I’m a slut.”
Her head whips up. “No, I do not think you’re a slut. I absolutely do not think that. And neither does your father. How could we? We love you. And nothing has changed that. Nothing will ever ever change that.”
“I feel like a slut,” I say. “I didn’t before. But I do now.”
“Oh, honey,” she says, and grabs my hands. She squeezes so hard that my knuckles go white.
Talking about sex totally wrings my mother out; she goes to bed at about eight thirty. I’m so tense and be-freaked that I have a hard time getting into my homework, but when I do, it’s like I disappear for a while, let all the facts and figures scour my brain, scrub it clean and light. Cat Stevens curls up in my lap as I read, purring so hard that I feel the vibrations in my fingertips.
Hours have gone by before I look at the clock again. After midnight, I put the books away and sit at my computer. I tool around my friends’ blogs for a while, occasionally pushing Cat Stevens out of the way when he decides to do his happy-kitty parade march in front of the screen. Joelle has publicly threatened to murder the person who took the photograph of me and Luke and offered a “lunch date at the restaurant of your choice” to anyone who has any information on the “perpetrator,” and then goes on to babble about starring in Hamlet, even though it hasn’t been cast yet. On her blog, Ash dissects horribly depressing lyrics, which means that she has her favorite angryshriekypunky songs on a loop again. She’s probably sitting in her bedroom, enveloped by a cloud of gray smoke that she’s only halfheartedly trying to blow out the open window, cutting up whatever photos of Jimmy she hasn’t already cut up. Or maybe she’s just cutting up the pieces into smaller pieces.
I don’t have as many messages as before, and for some reason I’m able to read them. They’re the same crap, but it’s like they’re talking about some other girl. Pam Markovitz or Cindy Terlizzi or someone. They don’t even make me mad. I think of Ash, how she kept asking, Aren’t you mad? Don’t you want to know who did this? and wonder why I’m not mad, why I can’t seem to get there for longer than two seconds, why I haven’t been spending my time making lists of possible suspects, why the first thought I had after I found out about the picture was my history test. I should be mad. I should be something.
Someone has sent me another copy of my picture, and I can’t help but stare at it. On my big computer screen, it’s incredibly clear. I’m amazed that it’s me. I’d never gone down on anyone before, never really wanted to before. The only reason I had any clue how to do it is because me and Ash had once Googled for instructions, which Ash then demonstrated on an ice pop. Back when she did goofy stuff like that, back when she and Jimmy were in love.
I touch my mouth, the way you touch your mouth after you’ve been kissed, the way I did when Luke first kissed me at Ash’s party at the end of the summer. I can still taste the salt on my tongue, but I can’t connect the picture to me—all that striped blond hair shining; all of that pale, naked skin glowing in the dark. I look at Luke’s hands, how they clutch the bedspread, like if he doesn’t hang on tight, like if he doesn’t sit as still as he can, something crazy-awful could happen. He could float up to the ceiling. He could fly out the window. He could separate into trillions of atoms and disperse into the air.
My eyes wander from the picture to the corner of my room where I’ve dumped the bag from Sally Beauty Supply, then back to the picture again. Bag, picture. Bag, picture.
Yeah, I should be mad. Or sad. Something. Anything. I jump up from my chair, grab the bag, and head to the bathroom.
Bad
At my high school, the DeSalvio boys are legend. First there was Jeff, four years ahead of Luke. Tallest of the three, Jeff had wheat-blond hair, midnight-blue eyes, and a butt you could bounce quarters off of. Girls—and, rumor has it, more than one teacher—practically threw them selves at him when he walked down the hall. But Jeff was the nice one, the committed one. He dated a pretty but not gorgeous girl named Anna Pritchard for the last three years of high school, and on into college. We all figure they’ll be married and procreating a month after they get their degrees, propagating the luscious DeSalvio genes to torment future generations of women.
After Jeff came Eric, otherwise known as Eric the Red because of his looks-like-it-came-from-a-box-but-didn’t red hair and his wild Viking habits. Eric went through girls like Kleenex but was so smooth about it that no one seemed to mind too much (or they were so busy fighting each other that they forgot to get mad at him). Eric was thrown off the football team after he was caught on the field after dark with one of the cheerleaders. He claimed he was helping her practice some dance moves, but since none of the cheerleading routines required that the cheerleaders go bottomless, no one was buying it.
And then there was Luke. Even though we’d spent years speculating, no one really seemed to know him. He was just as popular as his brothers, but you couldn’t pin him down—he wasn’t exactly straight-edge like Jeff and he wasn’t exactly wild like Eric. Rumors flew about who he’d been with at which party, but he rarely hooked up with anyone for long and he never offered up any details himself. People whispered: He’s way hot, but he’s a huge player, he spent two hours locked in a walk-in closet with Barbara Morganstein and then the next day asked Georgia Herman to the spring dance, he’s really nice once you get to know him, but he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, avoid him like the plague but do anything to get his attention. Come here, go away, come back, wait!
After Ash’s end-of-the-summer-party and my first marathon make-out session with Luke, I understood the confusion. I was the confusion. I walked around as if I’d been hit in the head with a falling piano. My speech was garbled as a drunk’s, I tripped over my own feet, I ran over our garbage cans during a driving lesson. My mother became terrified that I had a vision problem or perhaps some kind of spectacular, inoperable brain tumor after she watched me walk smack into a closed door. For the third time. (I ended up at a specialist’s.)
I couldn’t think of anything else but Luke. The way he smelled. The way he kissed. The way his hands felt combing through my hair. My skin alternately tingled and flamed, and my bottom lip swelled up to twice the size because I couldn’t stop nibbling on it.
I was insane.
Ash was like, “Verdammt. You’re acting like you’ve never been with a guy!” I had, but not in the same way. Not even close. Before Luke, it was all so technical. Did you kiss? Did you French? For how long? Did he try anything else? Did you let him? Would you let him go further? Even when I was in the middle of kissing someone, even when I liked that person or thought I did, my brain was always chattering, chattering, chattering: I hope my breath’s okay God why is he flicking his tongue so fast it’s making me dizzy what time is it I hope it’s not after eleven because my dad will kill me if I don’t get home by eleven is he trying to get up my shirt already why didn’t I wear my nice bra why did I have to wear the stretched-out old cotton one it makes me look all droopy like an old lady maybe Mom will take me to get some new bras and underwear too maybe this weekend but I can’t go this weekend because I have to write my “Scarlet Letter” paper and I have a math test on Tuesday and I don’t think I even want
him up my shirt it tickles he’s an idiot he can’t work the clasp and I want to laugh and what if he tries to get in my pants I have my period oh God YUCK!!
Kissing Luke, I’d felt the opposite, my brain going all hushed and quiet, murmuring things like oh and wow and hmmmm. Ash got worried. She told me about his rep, she told me not to get too crazy, she told me that just because there was one hookup didn’t mean there would be another one.
The second time came just a week after the first. Pool party at Christina Webster’s. Christina worked with Ash on the school literary magazine, where they selected the best nobody-understands-me-I-am-lost-in-the-darkness-so-must-wear-chains-and-way-too-much-eye-makeup poems from the dozens upon dozens that were submitted every year. Christina was not particularly lost, not particularly dark, and didn’t wear nearly enough black eyeshadow for Ash’s tastes, but she did have a large in-ground pool in her backyard and parents who weren’t all that interested in her, so Christina found herself with a lot of new friends every summer.
Anyway, me and Ash and Joelle showed up around three o’clock. Joelle immediately peeled down to her dental-floss bikini and demanded that we help her put on her sunscreen. (No real tans for Joelle; she claimed that they ruined the skin.) Two girls lotioning up an almost-naked, soon-to-be movie star is enough of a show for any high school guy; we were instantly surrounded by about eighteen dripping-wet boys in long board shorts, demanding to know if we wanted anything—coffee? tea? or me? Ha!! Joelle batted her eyelashes and Ash rolled her eyes while I scanned the party for Luke. I was desperate to see him again, thought I might just hyperventilate and die if I didn’t. And then there he was, climbing out of the deep end, and I thought I might hyperventilate and die anyway. His shorts were a neon shade of orange that somehow perfectly set off the golden tan (I guess he didn’t think that tans ruined the skin) and the sun-bleached hair. The body, that not-too-big, not-too-small body, was fatless and sculpted, the most delicious-looking abs in the known universe rippling from his nearly hairless chest down into the waist-band of his bathing suit. Luke reached up and slicked his wet hair from his face. I nearly toppled out of my chair when I saw that the delicate undersides of his arms were a shade paler than the rest of him.