Every Exquisite Thing

by Matthew Quick

  “Shannon’s mother called. Your best friend was a regular, apparently. But she said you never went. Why?”

  “Did you want me to go?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So why would you ask me that?”

  Mom looked at me for a long time and then said, “Do you like boys?”

  “What?” I said, even though I realized my mother was asking me if I were a lesbian.

  “It’s okay if you don’t. I just wanted to—”

  “Can we not talk about this?”

  “Fine,” Mom said, and then stormed out of the room like I had offended her. And I’ve thought for years about that conversation and what it meant. She never said she was proud of me for not going with the older boys, nor did she say she thought any less of Shannon, who was a regular at our home and clearly one of Mom’s favorites—they used to talk a lot about beauty tips. And then I realized that not going along with the crowd—even when it meant not performing oral sex on older boys—could make you seem odd or weird.

  My dad never said a word to me about what my friends were jokingly calling our “middle school sex scandal.”

  But, of course, Shannon asked me why I never went along with them. It was maybe a month or so after the parents put an end to the sex rides. We were in her room and she was halfway through one of the many small bottles of peach schnapps her high school hookups had given her in exchange for blow jobs.

  “Do you really think you’re better than us?” she said, a little tipsy, and then laughed. “Just because you’ve never had any fun with a boy? Or is it that you just don’t like boys?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The lesbian rumors began the next day in school—boys coughing into their hands and then quickly saying, “Um, dyke.”

  It was all so ridiculous and more than a little depressing.

  The funny thing was that I absolutely knew Shannon had started those rumors, or at least she didn’t defend me, because she was popular enough to make them stop, but I kept pretending that Shannon and I were friends anyway. She did the same. She racked up assists on the soccer field. I scored a lot of goals. Our coaches and parents said we were the perfect team, and so I tried not to do anything to upset our “on-field chemistry.” And all the adults in our lives pretended not to notice that Shannon was routinely drunk and having sexual experiences with a different boy every so many weeks. To be fair, many of the kids in my middle school were doing the same exact thing. Who knows? Maybe giving blow jobs is a natural rite of passage that can be a wonderfully rewarding extracurricular activity, and I was missing out—I was one of the weird ones.

  But it wasn’t even about the sex. I had nothing against sex. I wanted to experience it just like everyone else. What I initially resisted was the crowd mentality of it. Blow older boys because everyone else is. Drink because everyone else is. If it had been “ride a live two-hump camel to school because everyone else is,” I still would have resisted because I don’t want to be like everyone else. And I love riding camels! Shannon hates riding camels. I know because we rode them at the zoo when we were in second grade. There is a funny pic. Me waving and smiling in between two humps as Shannon screams and cries on a camel behind me. And if I’m being truthful, there was a part of me, even as a little kid, that enjoyed the camel ride simply because Shannon didn’t. I was so tired of doing everything she liked that it felt redemptive to be doing something she hated, or, more accurately, not doing something she loved.

  “You should go to more parties, Nanette,” Mom would say when I stayed in and read on the weekends. “You need to be more social. Like Shannon.”

  The lesbian rumors suddenly stopped when we started high school, and I’m pretty sure that Shannon had something to do with that, too, because it was the year her mother came out as a lesbian and left her father. Shannon and her mother moved across town and in with a woman lawyer whom Shannon’s mom met, ironically, via “the middle school sex scandal.” Around this time, Shannon stopped going to parties and spent a lot of time in my room crying and telling me all her secrets—such as which boys she’d blown versus which she had actually fucked. I mostly listened because I thought that was the right thing to do.

  Regardless, she earned more assists and I scored more goals, and our varsity team won a lot of games, and my father cheered like a madman on the sidelines and my stock portfolio grew.

  After I kissed Mr. Graves and he stopped meeting me during lunch periods, Shannon kept asking me what was wrong, saying I was clearly depressed. There were a few times I was actually tempted to tell her the truth, but then I would remember all the homophobic comments I had to endure during our middle school years, and I’d juxtapose those with the fact that Shannon was now the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance in our high school, of which I was also a proud member, representing the straights, and somehow I knew better than to let Shannon see any real part of me.

  Shannon got pregnant during our junior year.

  She wasn’t even sure whose kid it was, so she didn’t tell any of the boys she had slept with. According to our math, there were three candidates. I know, because I was the only person she told about her pregnancy, and she told me everything. Her last period had been at least eight weeks before, and she’d been secretly terrified for almost two months. She cried ferociously when she told me. We stayed up all night one weekend making a pros-and-cons chart so she could decide whether to have an abortion. By morning, she had decided that she would indeed “terminate the pregnancy,” and so we went to the kitchen and showed her two moms the pregnancy tests.

  Shannon’s biological mom completely lost her mind, only she didn’t yell at Shannon for being pregnant, but for “allowing” it to happen.

  Shannon’s stepmom, Joyce, was calmer about it and pleaded with Shannon’s real mom, saying, “They even made a pros-and-cons chart. How many kids would do that in an effort to prepare for this conversation?”

  Shannon was sobbing by this point, and I was staring at my hands.

  I went to the abortion clinic with Shannon and her moms, only to find out that Shannon somehow had a “silent miscarriage” and didn’t know it—apparently, a tiny baby’s heart can just stop beating—which everyone agreed was “a blessing,” so we went out for an expensive dinner in the city, a French place called Parc, and then we never talked about what had happened ever again.

  My friend went on the Pill and kept saying I should be on it, too, even though I wasn’t sexually active.

  The funny thing was that we all had to sign a contract at the beginning of every sports season that said we would not drink alcohol, do drugs, or use tobacco products, and yet almost all athletes at our high school broke that contract weekly and made fun of me for taking it seriously, because they didn’t know about the mimosas I had with Mom on Sunday mornings.

  My father once told me that he drank beer in high school, and then he added, “There’s nothing wrong with a beer or two. Just stay away from liquor, okay?” And I knew that he was giving me permission to drink, but I didn’t anyway. I didn’t really want to drink, and I didn’t like going to the parties where Shannon would get so drunk that she could hardly stand and would end up having sex in the bed of someone’s parents.

  I found it all so very depressing.

  I used to try to talk to Mr. Graves about it and he would say, “I don’t want to know,” and then cover his ears, which was when I realized that there was nothing he could do about it. He had to pretend that his students were really smart, conscientious kids destined to be the type of adults who would make a positive difference in the world—his belief in the power of teaching required this—and I started to understand that it was hard for a teacher to spend the entire weekend grading essays and lesson planning for a bunch of sex-crazed, alcoholic kids.

  “Do you know what most sex-crazed, alcoholic kids grow up to be?” Booker once said to me. “Their sex-crazed, alcoholic parents.”

 
And I thought about how everyone knew that Shannon’s dad was always at the local bar drinking and, according to my parents, “hitting on anything and everything with boobs.” He had become sort of notorious after Shannon’s mom left him for a woman. It was almost as if he was trying to prove his manhood or something. And Shannon’s two moms drank a lot of wine, too. There was always at least one open bottle and glasses poured whenever I visited Shannon’s home. I assumed Carol and Joyce probably hooked up while Shannon’s biological parents were still married.

  I got this crazy idea that maybe if I refrained from sex and drinking—maybe it would mean that my parents weren’t sex-crazed alcoholics.

  Maybe they would remain married and be happy.

  Maybe my mom wouldn’t hate the way my father chewed his food, and maybe my dad would put his arm around Mom again the way he did when I was little.

  I knew it was an inane thing to believe, but it helped.

  It was something I could do.

  And it wasn’t even hard—until I met Alex.

  Ironically, Alex didn’t seem all that interested in sex. I had been to enough parties sober to know the sexual tendencies of teenage boys—the way they would try to rush things along the same way they would bang on the bathroom doors when their bladders were full of beer and say, “Come on, I really need to go!” as if we girls might be filing our nails in there or maybe just reading a book. I’d watched them lean in too close during conversations. I’d watched their hands casually land on the thighs of my teammates, and I’d watched my teammates pretend not to notice. I’d even seen boys adjust their genitalia in the middle of conversations with my teammates because the boys were aroused, and I’d watched my teammates pretend not to notice, even though they all talked about the boys’ dicks in great detail when the fellas weren’t around. And I had never been interested in any of it.

  I used to worry that I was asexual or something, but as Alex and I got to know each other, taking long rides in his Jeep with the top down, going to art house movies, reading each other poetry on park benches in the city, I started to realize what sexual attraction was all about. I found myself glancing at different parts of Alex’s body and wanting to explore—not because all the other girls on my team already had, but because it all suddenly felt so right, natural, real. And I also started to worry because Alex wasn’t putting his hand on my thigh or leaning in too close or grabbing me. He just listened to everything I had to say, and I could tell he was really interested, which made me worry he didn’t think I was pretty. That was a new fear for me. Suddenly, I wanted to be attractive, adored, desired.

  12

  Dozens of Deadly Laser Beams

  “I want to quit soccer,” I told Booker as we were sitting on his backyard bench next to Don Quixote and his windmills. We were drinking ice-cold glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade garnished with mint leaves picked from Booker’s garden. “I really don’t want to play my senior-year season.”

  “I can’t have this conversation again. If you haven’t quit by now, you never will. You’ve been thoroughly brainwashed by the soccer community.”

  It was true that I had told him I would quit all through winter indoor and then after spring soccer and then after the summer sessions with the young semipro trainers from England who always ended up at our parties and sleeping with my teammates, who all fell in love with their accents. But that was all before Alex.

  “I’m going to quit tomorrow. I’m calling Coach and telling him I’m done,” I said rather defiantly, but I didn’t do it.

  It was a speech by Shannon that finally pushed me to the breaking point, on a blazing-hot August day, the first official practice of our senior year. Coach Miller had run us hard through conditioning—full-speed dribbling and passing sprints; long, seemingly endless attacking and defending drills; and my least favorite, where he made squares out of cones and you had to play keep-away for twenty minutes, and if anyone stopped moving for even a few seconds, the whole team had to sprint a mile and start over. Coach always caught at least one person, and we had to sprint two miles that day before we got our full twenty minutes. The whole practice, I kept thinking about Alex and how I would much rather be somewhere alone with him, expressing myself and discussing literature, than conditioning with girls I didn’t really like or understand, all in an effort to kick a ball into a net more times than girls from other schools did.

  At the end of each practice, we’d sit between the goalposts and Coach would give us a talk before he allowed the captains to take over, at which point Shannon and I were expected to give motivational speeches and address any concerns that other girls didn’t feel comfortable bringing up directly to Coach. Shannon always assumed that leader role very easily, which was almost comical, because anywhere else in her life—when she was not addressing shin-pad-wearing girls in a soccer goal—she was prone to follow boys with seedy plans for her. And I wondered if she was just following Coach’s plans for her the same way she got into those cars full of high school boys back when we were in middle school. Maybe Shannon would do whatever an older man told her to do.

  “Your goal this year, ladies,” Shannon said, waving her index finger over the entire team, “is to win a state championship. Anything less than that is a failure. But if we bring the state title home this year, you’ll have that for the rest of your lives. No one will be able to take it away from you. No matter what else happens or doesn’t happen from then on, you’ll always be a champion. Forever.”

  It was the same pep talk bullshit we had been hearing and parroting since we were little kids playing for the Rainbow Dragons, but maybe it was also like eating one too many bites of food, because suddenly I felt like I was going to vomit.

  “We have the talent and the dedication and—hey, Nanette, where’re you going?” Shannon said.

  “I’m quitting like a motherfucking champion!”

  “What?”

  All my teammates laughed, maybe because they were so surprised that I used the word motherfucking as an adjective. I hardly ever cursed. But cursing suddenly felt good, and so I yelled it once more, even louder.

  “I’m a motherfucking champion!”

  This time no one laughed.

  As I walked across the field, I could feel my teammates’ eyes on me—dozens of deadly laser beams searing into my back; I didn’t dare turn around.

  I held up two middle fingers over my head—something I had never before done in my entire life—and it felt like I was finally free.

  My coach came running after me. “What’s wrong, Nan?” he said. “What’s going on here?”

  “My name is Nanette,” I said, surprising myself. He had been calling me Nan for almost four years, and I hated it. It felt like he was making fun of my name, the way he said it. Always dragging out the syllable, like he thought it was stupid, maybe because I was the only Nanette he had ever met, so he chopped my name in half to punish me for being unique. “I quit,” I said. “I’m done running around after a ball. You can’t make me do it anymore. No one can! I’m already a motherfucking champion! A champion of myself.”

  “Whoa. Slow down. What happened?” he said, completely ignoring the swearing I was doing.

  “I just don’t want to play anymore. I hate soccer. There. I said it. Finally.”

  “Do you need to talk to Ms. Train?” he said, which was code for Do you have your period? Ms. Train was the assistant coach, only she didn’t know anything about soccer. She was there to deal with “woman problems.” Here I was, telling the truth for the first time, and he wanted to erase it—make it not count—with my menstrual cycle.

  “No,” I said, and then added, “Fuck soccer.”

  That night, Coach came to my home, and we all had a sit-down talk.

  “Where did this come from?” my dad asked. “You don’t mention anything, and then suddenly out of nowhere, you just start cursing and quitting?”

  I thought about how this wouldn’t surprise the two people who knew me best—Booker and Alex.
Even Mr. Graves wouldn’t have been surprised, and I hadn’t spoken with him in months. But my mom and dad, the people with whom I lived, were shocked.

  My father and Coach talked a lot about how many goals I had scored and how I could break the conference scoring record this year, having already broken the school record as a junior, and how colleges would surely invite me on “official” recruiting trips to offer me full scholarships, and it was like they were arguing for me not to kill myself, the way they were talking, as if I were doomed to a shitty life if I stopped playing soccer. Like I wouldn’t count as a human being if I stopped scoring goals for teams.

  “Her grades are good enough to get her into the best colleges without soccer,” Mom finally said. Mom was a cheerleader in high school, and I always got the sense that she didn’t think girls should do anything athletic but cheer, so her being on my side was depressing. Also, the smile on her face let me know that she was sort of messing with my dad in front of Coach—like she was attacking his manhood.

  “That’s really not the point here,” Dad shot back at Mom, which was when I realized that my relationship with my father was about to turn for the worse and Mom was trying to form an alliance. By not playing soccer, I was severing the one real connection Dad and I had, and maybe that was why my father was so upset.

  (Later, Booker would say, “Well, you weren’t going to play organized soccer for the rest of your life, so this moment with your father was imminent. You can’t live for someone else. At some point you just explode, which is probably why you began spouting curse words like a Roman candle.” At least he understood.)

  “You made a commitment to your teammates,” Coach said, pointing his index finger at my face from the stylish comfort of my parents’ white leather couch. “You made a commitment to me. You signed a contract.”

  “You know that every girl on the team violates the no-drinking clause. Are you headed to their houses next to give them the same lecture? I can tell you the names of my teammates who drank with the English soccer coaches you hired to train us—it was all of them except me!” I said, surprising myself again. I had never talked to Coach like that before. “But you already know that! So don’t talk to me about fucking contracts!”