by Laura Ruby
He yanks his arm away from me. “What other girls?”
“All the other girls,” I say. “I mean, every party we were at, you made sure you flirted with every stupid girl in the room.”
“I’m friends with them.”
“Right,” I say.
“So I like to talk to people. So I like to talk to girls. That doesn’t mean I did anything with them, at least not after I knew.”
“Not after you knew what?”
His breaths come short and hard, and he looks at the row of lockers as he answers. “Not after I knew that you might be into me. The pool party, when you followed me to my car. After that day, I always ended up with you.” He doesn’t seem happy about telling me this.
I shake my head. “You never talked to me at school. You barely even said ‘hey’ to me in the hallways. It was like I didn’t exist.”
“I didn’t talk to you because you didn’t talk to me! I’d say two words and you looked like you were going to puke. You couldn’t sprint away fast enough. And at all those parties, I thought you were avoiding me. I thought you didn’t want anything serious. What was I supposed to do, follow you around like that freak Chillman? Is that what you wanted?”
No, I couldn’t have been so wrong. It’s not possible. I take a deep breath. “So what about Pam Markovitz?”
“What about her?”
“Why’d you screw her?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Now I know you’re crazy. I didn’t do Pam Markovitz.”
“Liar,” I say.
“Who told you that? Pam? Who knows how many guys she’s—”
“Shut up about Pam,” I say. “You don’t know her. And Pam wasn’t the one who told me.”
“Then who did?”
I don’t say anything. I’m not seeing Luke and the empty hallway, I’m seeing Jessica Berger’s basement the way it was six months ago, two weeks before Halloween. I’m seeing Ash talking to Nardo, looking like she’d gnaw off her own arm to get away from him. I see Cindy Terlizzi and Joelle and Ray Dale and all the usuals, but I don’t see Luke, and I don’t see Pam Markovitz. I start to panic. He’s talking to her, he’s with her, she knows what to do, she’s not afraid, she likes it, she’s better than me, she’s done it lots of times before. And then I hear Chilly whispering in my ear: Looking for your boyfriend? He’s a little busy right now. Guess who he’s with? You’ll never, ever guess, or maybe you will. Just wait, any minute now, they’ll come down together. And then they do. Pam Markovitz first, and Luke right after her. She flips her hair and says something to him and he smiles, his teeth flashing. I see myself putting my drink on the table and walking right out of the house and all the way home.
Luke’s dropped his mitt to the floor and he’s gripping my shoulders. “Hey,” he says, “who told you that I was with Pam? Who?” He shakes me just a little and my shoulders curl in toward my heart.
I look down at the tile, where his cleats have left clots of reddish dirt. “Chilly.”
He lets go of me. “Chillman told you.”
I nod.
“The guy who took that picture of us and sent it around to every cell phone in the country.”
I nod again.
“And you believed him?”
I feel the imprint of his hands on my arms. If I have to nod once more, I think my neck will break.
Luke reaches down, scoops up his glove, slips his left hand inside it. “So you bought what your psycho ex-boyfriend told you without even asking me if it was true.” He punches his glove with his fist. “Now who’s the one who’s been dropped on her head?” He pushes past me and leaves me standing there alone.
Sinner, Repent
It’s one of those fiercely sunny late-April days that make you think it’s warmer than it really is. I huddle in the pew in the short-sleeve shirt I thought would be perfect today but totally isn’t and watch the light shoot through the stained-glass windows. Blazing and bright, the church looks like God herself decided to drop in and decorate the place, like she’s letting me know that maybe, just maybe, she might forgive me for being the biggest, most horrible, gullible self-involved moron that ever lived.
I think it’s kind of nice that she’d send the sun as a signal, nice that she’d consider forgiving me.
Also handy, because I don’t plan on forgiving myself anytime soon.
My mother pats my hand. “We’re so proud of you,” she says. For a minute, I don’t know what she’s talking about. And then I remember. The acceptance letters. I’ve gotten two, one from Columbia and one from Cooper Union—my two top choices. Just like that, I know where I’m going to be for the next four years. Studying architecture in New York City. All I have to do is choose one school or the other.
I should be happier.
Pastor Narcolepsy steps up to the pulpit. Something’s different about him—he’s all spry, even twitchy. At first I think that he’s finally discovered the virtues of coffee. But it turns out that he’s been doing some thinking. About sex. And, for the first time in forever, he’s actually awake.
“I was watching a television program the other day, a program interrupted by a commercial for a video. The only point of this video, it seemed, was to show young women exposing themselves at parties and on vacation in exotic places. The girls were all smiling and looked like they were having a wonderful time. And of course, the young men in the video seemed to be having even more fun than the girls were.
“It occurred to me that this is happening all too often in our culture today. Young women seem to subscribe to the ‘less is more’ theory of fashion, which these videos take to the extreme, and young men seem to be in no hurry to denounce the trend. Not that the latter is surprising.”
We laugh, not because the joke is so funny but because we’re all in shock. Pastor N.? Awake? And talking about topless girls on spring break in Cancun? What the heck is going on? My dad is sitting so still that he could be a cat. My mom sneaks glances at me.
“My point is that young women are being increasingly objectified in movies, TV, games, and music videos. We are so used to seeing these images that I don’t think we really register them anymore. But in our culture, women are becoming less than people worthy of respect and more simply objects to be admired, or even used and abused. They are things. And things, as we all know, are disposable. What these girls don’t understand, and what young men don’t seem to understand, is that this is demeaning to both the user and the used.”
Pastor Narcolepsy scans the audience as if he can tell who’s been used and who’s been doing some using just by looking at us. I feel like he’s looking right at me, and I slip down lower in the pew. I’m colder than I was before; the skin on my arms is rough and yellowish, like a plucked chicken’s.
“Would it surprise you to hear that human sexuality is a holy thing, a gift given to us by God? In Genesis, we learn that Adam and Eve came together ‘naked and unashamed’ because they experienced sex as a spiritual as well as a physical communion. A meeting of soul mates. In contrast to this deeply spiritual and a physical communion, this profoundly joyous experience, sex that is a product of mere lust can’t even begin to reach the same heights. This is why Jesus condemned it. He thought that lust made sex less than it ought to be—sacramental. Holy.”
Great, my lust has condemned me. My lust has made me cheap. Bring me a scarlet letter and I’ll wear it on my forehead. “S” for slut. “S” for stupid. “S” for sin, for smash, for splinter.
“Why do we often feel so lost and guilty when we’ve had lustful thoughts or had meaningless sexual encounters?” says the pastor.
I don’t know, maybe when you assume someone thought you were just a piece of ass and then you turned around and treated him like one?
“It’s because we have desensitized ourselves, we have reduced sex to a cheap hormonal response. We have forgotten the holiness of this sacred act. Sex was not given to us to create intimacy; sex was given to us so that
we can express intimacy, the intimacy that already exists with our spouses. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the marriage vow.”
Interesting message. Teenagers, sex is AMAZING. And you can’t have any.
Pastor Narcolepsy is on such a roll that he gets chummy with the congregation. “Listen, guys, sex is so important and so vital a gift that it is simply not an act to take cheaply or lightly.”
I can feel my dad tense up next to me; I can feel how much he wants to grab me and start screaming, ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS? ARE YOU HEARING THIS? I wonder if he slipped the pastor a request and a few dollars, like you do when you want the DJ to play that special song. I suppose this is a do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do situation.
My mom reaches out and pats my leg. Pat, pat, pat. “P” for pat!
“I work with a youth ministry, and some of the kids I counsel can tell you stories that would make your hair curl! One boy, a thoughtful, delightful teenager, has recently renounced his sexual past and now tries to live life anew. ‘Pastor,’ he tells me, ‘I’m a born-again virgin.’ Of course no one can turn back the clock and regain one’s virginity, but one can turn away from one’s mistakes and let God help us forge a new path.”
Pastor’s got lots more to say about sex and about Jesus and about God and about those crazy “young people” who don’t understand how they’re cheapening themselves and each other. He goes on and on and on. I start to tune out. I get it, I get it—he might as well be cracking me on the head with a frying pan—but I’m all confused anyway. Maybe—because I am the most repulsive, disgusting, loathsome sinner, one of those crazy, lustful young people destined to appear in a “Girls Gone Wild” video—maybe God will suck back her bright and cheerful spring light and never ever ever forgive me, but all that talk about touching bodies and touching souls makes me think about Luke, about the one and only time we actually did it (the one time we had cheap and meaningless physical—and totally unspiritual—intercourse as the result of mere hormonal responses).
But that’s the problem—it didn’t feel that way. Not cheap. Not meaningless.
Which is probably why the whole thing got me into so much trouble.
Love Hammer
Early October, late on a Saturday night. I got a message.
Instant Message with “salvs42”
Last message received at: 11:32:07 PM
salvs42: doin anything tomorrow?
audball13: not much
salvs42: having peple over wanna come?
audball13: K what time
salvs42: 2
audball13: sounds good
I sat at my computer for a long time. Luke had never IM’d me before. I’d never seen his house before. Was it just another party? Did it mean anything? Ash would say no. Ash would say that he was just trying to get some.
Ash was right. And she was wrong, too. Because Luke wasn’t the only one.
Sunday, I told my mom I was going to Ash’s, Ash that I was going to Joelle’s, Joelle that I was studying, and walked the ten blocks to Luke’s house. I was the only “people” to show up. Luke and a very small, very excited cotton ball met me at the door. The cotton ball danced all around my shoes, sniffing and yipping as Luke let me inside.
“Down, Daisy,” Luke said.
“She’s so cute,” I said. “Hey, Daisy.” I bent down to pet her and she spun around and around in a teeny doggy frenzy. She licked my hand as if it were a slab of liver.
I smiled up at Luke. “I would have figured you more as the German shepherd type.”
“Nah,” he said. “Daisy attracts all the chicks.” Luke scooped up the dog. “Let’s go to the den.”
“Where is everyone else?”
“They’ll show up later, maybe.”
“Oh,” I said, butterflies boinging off my stomach walls. For now, we had the house to ourselves.
We walked down a hallway, past the kitchen and into the family room. Pictures of Luke and his brothers crowded every wall and table. I wanted to inspect them all, but I was afraid I’d seem too nosy. I did pick up a picture of an older couple in identical pleated pants. Both were blond, but the man had a neatly trimmed beard. Still, they looked almost exactly alike.
“These are your parents?” I asked.
Luke peered over my shoulder. “Yep, that’s the twins.”
“They do look like twins,” I said. “Except for the beard.”
“We keep trying to get Mom to grow one,” he said, “but she won’t go for it.”
“Where are they?”
“Visiting my aunt on Long Island. They won’t be back till tonight.” He put Daisy on the floor. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you have.”
I sat down while he disappeared into the kitchen with Daisy on his heels. I inhaled, trying to identify the scent of the house. Everyone’s house smells different, some in good ways and some in not-so-good ways—like burned cabbage or cat pee or whatever. Luke’s house smelled like lemon furniture polish with a hint of boy. It smelled happy.
Luke came back with two Cokes and a couple of straws. “If you want a glass, I can get you one.”
“This is good,” I said.
He sat down next to me. Daisy jumped on the coffee table and stared at me as if I were supposed to be supplying the entertainment. I peeked at Luke and thought about the entertainment, what I could do to supply it. I felt all shaky inside, my ligaments twanging, my temples pounding. Would it be strange if I put my Coke on the table and jumped him? Probably. I should sit here for at least five more minutes before I did anything like that, right? Maybe ten minutes. So what were we going to do for ten whole minutes? There was usually a party going on all around us, I usually had to wait for at least an hour to get his attention. This was too weird.
“I like that picture,” I said, pointing at a large photo on the wall. It was a black-and-white portrait of Daisy, but the focus and perspective were odd—her face sharp and clear, but the rest of her small and fading out. Kind of cool and kind of funny at the same time.
“Thanks,” he said. “I took that.”
“You did?”
“Yup. I’ve got some more in an album in my room. Do you want to see them?”
It was a line, maybe, but what did I care? I was having an out-of-body experience again, or, more accurately, an in-the-body experience. Why else was I there? “Okay,” I said.
I followed him out of the den, down the hallway, up the stairs, and into his room, Daisy running ahead of us, claws clicking. I was surprised that the room wasn’t the usual blue—it was orange, with a wood floor and a rumpled bed with red sheets, blankets, and pillows. It had your typical guy stuff: bookcases with loose stacks of books and pictures, a pile of sneakers, a desk with a computer, and some pages from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition tacked on the wall, along with your usual row of sports trophies of different sizes, some team photographs, and a signed baseball. Not neat, not messy, the room was sort of pleasantly disorganized, like a set designer had carefully arranged everything for maximum effect before the play was about to start. The boy smell was stronger in here, too: musky, the way the crook of Luke’s neck smelled when I pressed my nose there. My toes curled up in my shoes.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said. He pulled some clothes off a chair threw them on the floor. Then he opened a drawer in his desk, fished out a photo album, and handed it to me. I sat down and paged through the album, expecting to see more doggy photos, but found mostly black-and-white portraits. Some of his family, some of other random people, a lot of them girls. (I wondered if he kept some extra girls in the closet or in the basement for when he was bored.)
But the photos were good, some of them really good. I stared at a hot girl I didn’t know with this cutie-pie spray of freckles across her nose. I immediately hated her, but loved the picture. “These are great,” I said.
He sat down on the bed, Daisy on his lap. “Thanks. My dad just bought me a new camera. Well, it’s an old came
ra from the fifties. Called a Hasselblad. Maybe I can take one of you sometime?”
“Maybe,” I said. It occurred to me that I had no idea what his plans for the future were—or if he even had any kinds of plans, if he wanted to stay in high school forever. “Are you going to study photography somewhere?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of the schools I applied to have some sort of photography classes, just in case I want to take some. But I’m not sure what I want to do yet.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. A lot of people didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do, but I couldn’t understand it at all. How can you not have any plans? “Where’d you apply?”
“Mostly around here. Rutgers, Penn, a few other places.”
“What’s the top choice?”
He grinned. “Wherever I get in. And then whoever comes up with the most money, I guess. I’m hoping for some sports scholarships.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So where are you going to go? Princeton? Harvard? Yale?”
“All of them,” I said. “I’m triple-majoring.” I didn’t say anything more in case I lost my nerve and began babbling uncontrollably about architecture and interior design and a thousand other massively unsexy things he probably couldn’t care less about.
“Well,” he said. “That’s good.” He lifted Daisy and then set her down on the floor. “You know, you’re kind of far away over there.”
I felt a little jolt. “I am, aren’t I?”
“How about coming over here?” he said.
I put the album on the desk, stood up, and went over to the bed. All the other times that we’d found some corner or some car to make out in, I never knew exactly what was going to happen, exactly what I might do. But standing in front of the bed, his bed, with his happy boy scent filling my nose, I knew. I had a condom in the pocket of my jeans, one from a package that I’d snuck out and bought myself even though I’d had to wear sunglasses and the cashier guy gave me his best girls-don’t-buy-condoms-don’t-do-it-you’re-too-young-and-wherethe-hell’s-your-mother frown. A small part of my brain, the good girl part, squeaked, Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? I told it to shut up and go take a nap.