I didn’t end up there right away.
For a few days, when I exited the lunch line, I scanned the cafeteria for the ratio of bodies to empty chairs, frantic to locate the exchange students. So what if they wore scarves indoors and smelled funny? They were the equivalent of social Switzerlands because they had no past and no future, and would talk to anyone. But if there were no foreigners to be found, I had to sit alone. Sometimes Jimmy, the boy with Down syndrome, would sit in the empty seat next to me.
“Hi!” He’d smile, elated. “I love you!”
“I love you too, Jimmy,” I said, feeling worthless. The cafeterial universe expanded all around us, an oppressing orbit of round tables, each one like an atom packed with the spinning electrons of friends tucked safely into their tightly packed nuclei. Jimmy beamed at me like he’d just seen the light, but I didn’t know how to make conversation with him. I didn’t really want to either, since I was on the verge of imploding. The vast, airless space of our empty table was condemnation. It was quarantine. It was nakedness. It was better to never step foot in here again.
The next day, desperate but nonchalant, I headed purposefully out of the cafeteria, no idea where I was going, hoping I was allowed to hide, hoping it was clear to onlookers that I wasn’t going to go hide, no don’t be ridiculous, I just had tons of busy and exciting things to take care of.
Cortney was sitting at a crowded table of hot upperclassmen and long-haired deadhead chicks. She was flanked by her new bestie, a girl so laid-back she seemed chronically high. Since I had forced Cortney to dump me, their new pastime had become laughing at me, which was possibly the worst thing ever in the history of worst things. As I strode past, I notched up my everything-is-going-great disposition, which wasn’t easy to do when carrying a lunch tray into a locker room. I braced for their screeching laughter behind me, and it seemed to ricochet for miles.
It felt weird to sit on a toilet seat with pants on. But it was better than being stared at. I chewed my sandwich, trying not to look at the stained tile, while the three good fairies whizzed about my head, feeling sorry for me.
The poor dear! they cooed. The little darling! Let’s make her a cake. Make it blue! No, pink. Pink! No, make it blue!
The door into the bathroom swung open. I picked up my feet and stopped breathing.
“This one’s locked,” a girl said, then whispered, “but there’s someone in it.”
Laughter.
“C’mon, hurry up and pee.” They ignored my hiding and kept talking.
“Wait for me,” said the other, going into the stall beside me.
“I can’t. I gotta go!”
“Fine. Just go. I thought you were my friend. Fine.”
“I have to go!”
“Go! Leave! I’ll just mention a certain blow-job incident to a certain somebody.”
Silence. A toilet flush.
“Look at you, you’re stressing out. Ha-ha. Relax. I’m just kidding. But please, wait for me next time.”
Blow jobs. They were everywhere. All the freshman girls around me, dropping like aliens in Galaga, shot down by the firing joysticks of hot, hard upperclassmen.
After school, in the locker room before basketball practice, I was privy to more and more secondhand sex. One of our starting forwards was Alyssa: tan, popular, sexy. She was the only one called “sweetheart” by our permanently angry coach. About every fifteen minutes he’d toss his clipboard down the suicide lines, disgusted beyond words. But Alyssa could chuck an airball and run into the wall and still be sweetheart.
“No, sweetheart. Arch your wrist.”
“Sweetheart, come here.”
“Grab the ball, sweetheart.”
Then to me, eyes averted: “Hey! Get your head outta your ass!”
Alyssa pulled off her shirt by the row of lockers, and I stared with longing at the curve of her muscled legs. She was telling our point guard about her hot date, and I hung on every word as I dressed alone.
“… He got on top of me,” she whispered, “and he wouldn’t stop! I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ After it was over, it felt like I had diaper rash.”
“Oh my God, are you serious?” asked her friend. “That’s so funny.”
I looked up at my friend Mallory, who was lacing her basketball sneakers on the bench next to me. We exchanged question marks. Diaper rash?
Alyssa giggled. “I could hardly walk.”
Oh. They were doing it. Of course. That’s why Coach liked her. It’s a pheromone given off by penetrable females: I might sleep with you too. That’s why her boyfriend kept being her boyfriend, month after month. Sex was the secret to dating longer than three minutes. Once you had sex with him, he’d follow you anywhere, even the mall. Like the guys you see sitting half-asleep in the armchairs by the ladies’ fitting rooms. Like hungry, bored, whipped dogs. You could come to school looking like crap, with food in your teeth and wearing the same ugly pants as yesterday, and there he’d be, smiling with open arms, ready to give you more diaper rash.
“But she’s only a freshman!” I whispered, wondering when it was exactly that I started speaking like my mom.
“Slut,” whispered Mallory, pulling her shirt down over her sports bra before I could stare at her chest too, which for some reason I always found myself doing. “I’d never go all the way with Rob. I’d go to third, though.”
“You’d let Rob… finger you?”
“Probably. Or your brother,” she said with an evil laugh.
“Gross,” I moaned. “I’d go to third when I’m, like, in college.”
Mallory looked at me like I was crazy. “Hell, I’m not waiting that long.”
But I had to wait. For me and God, sex was like a line at the deli. You don’t ask questions, you take your number, starve, and hope you get called soon. And you spend Friday nights waiting with Jesus.
I pretended to go to bed. I lay there until my family was asleep and the house was dark, and I crept down one stair at a time, avoiding all the creaky places, gliding so not even my knees cracked. I opened the screen door inch by inch, no sudden noises, and slipped out into the cold moonlight. I sat on the planks of the deck, with my headphones, and forwarded it to the right song, the one I picked out for God. “My life is for you,” the song went, and I was the singer, my vibrato bursting like a bullet train of prayer, straight to the rafters of heaven. “Use me for your will!” Suddenly I was so important, so powerful, that I’d been transported straight to the front of the line, my face pressed against the glass ceiling of heaven. I was all up in the grill of Almighty God!
“Send help,” I begged. “I really hate this place.”
But the song ended and our bubble of communication burst. Silence rang in my ears.
God? Do you copy?
Restless, I turned off the tape and switched on the FM radio, spinning the dial slowly from 88.5 to 107.1, past static and classic rock and smooth jazz, waiting for my answer, like a satellite dish pointed out into space noise. I would know the answer by the words of a random song timed just so, telling me the plan for my life. God was so great, He could make fish and loaves out of the sad playlists of local Connecticut radio stations.
And sometimes, when it really worked, and my question was answered perfectly in the singing voice of Peter Cetera, I knew that Jesus could hear me. It was like my own private phone call to heaven. It was a high better than drugs. I mean, I wouldn’t know for sure if it was better than drugs, but I did know I was getting drunk on God, an organic spiritual buzz, the way nature intended.
Those poor lost souls at Avon High School, missing out on the wonderful joy of their Blessed Redeemer, way down in the depths of their hearts!
You spend this much time with God, I imagined myself someday explaining to them, the throngs of the lost, and your life is bound to get better!
But that was only because things couldn’t get any worse.
9 | Thespian Sex
“… her young breasts were crushed by the Egyptians.”
Monologue performance week in high school drama class was the ultimate power trip. We sat in the dark, and narrowed our keen eyes toward the stage, pencils poised on our comment cards.
Too much fidgeting, I wrote on one. You abandoned your focus. Your accent does not sound English. The glasses look too feminine.
The actor being scrutinized mumbled “scene” and his performance concluded, the class crackled with weak applause. Too many props, too little subtext, I thought to myself and passed my note card o’ wisdom to the aisle. My stomach tied in delicious knots, awaiting my turn.
I was different. I was talented. I was gonna nail it. Jaws would drop, cheers would thunder, envy would reign.
You’re gonna be famous!
Oh, stop, I’d gush.
The only teensy-weensy impediment to my amazingness was memorizing lines. But what are lines really, mere words, when you have talent?
I stood onstage, holding my fist aloft, 1.21 gigawatts of drama quivering through my body, but my mind ticking on empty: line, line, line.
But I wouldn’t give up. Not like the others. No. I was professional. There was no shame in calling for your line, so long as you stayed in character.
“Mother,” I wept, brimming with the anguished subtext, “why did you… line…”
“Never,” hissed the script holder.
“Mother! Why, why, WHY did you never… line…”
“Love me.”
“Love! Me!” I breathed, in a dying stage whisper. “Line.”
Afterward, in critique, our class would sit in a circle on the stage and take turns sharing what we thought of each other’s performances, provided we didn’t edit. Meaning we had to be brutally honest. But you couldn’t just say it sucked. Even if it did. You had to state only what you obseeerved or how it made you feeeel.
Sometimes, it went something like this:
“I observed that you were really… unprepared.”
“You’re judging.”
“I’m not judging, I’m observing.”
“I observe that you are sometimes… hypocritical.”
“I observe you are being rude. That makes me feel… like hitting you.”
“Guys,” said our teacher.
“I observe me observing you threatening me. And I’ll FEEL happy when you get arrested for assault.”
With so much drama and serious inner work going on all around me, it was easy to fall in love with someone who loathed serious inner work. Someone like Liam, a freshman two years younger than me, but also a real living, breathing bona fide child actor.
I had never seen anyone who could ad lib like Liam. Sometimes when the teacher left, he’d chuck costumes, scripts, and pieces of plastic furniture offstage, rattling on in a dialect he’d made up off the top of his head.
“Who did that?” the teacher demanded, returning to survey the mess.
“Who did that?” Liam asked me calmly, his face right in mine. “Who did that?”
I pinched my nose and tried not to pee my pants.
Later in the costume closet, Liam would corner me, hanging a plastic wreath around his neck.
“My character needs to wear this,” he’d plead. “Needs it. NEEDS. IT.”
“Okay, but what’s the subtext?”
“He was raped by a Christmas tree when he was five.”
The constant laugh track of an older girl was an aphrodisiac for him. And I had never met a guy with intelligence and comic timing. Or ego. It made me swoon. Plus, he had that perennial baby face that all sitcom casting directors love. And once, a limo had picked him up in the roundabout at school.
“Big audition,” he’d told me, before being whisked away to New York. I watched in awe.
Since he was too young to drive, he invited me over to his house one Friday evening. It was massive and modern, carved into the nouveau riche side of Avon Mountain, where there was not a vinyl-sided split-level in sight.
“You know I do commercials, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I purred. “Tell me more.”
“You can tune in next Tuesday night for my cameo as a juvie on Law & Order.”
“Wow!” I had no idea what a juvie was, or a Law & Order.
We shot pool downstairs, and I leaned over my cue stick as sensuously as I could, my wrists overwrought with tinkling fake gold bracelets. He dropped big, smoldering compliments.
“Those are really pretty.”
“Shut up.” I giggled.
Then we went for a walk so he could expound on the life and times of Liam. His loves, his hates, his hopes and dreams, his life on the silver screen, which would start any day now.
I watched him talking and fantasized about being his arm candy. It was a big dream, but I could practice in the mirror. This is me, waving good-bye as the limo whisks him to the studio. This is me, deferring to Liam when reporters ask questions. This is me, dabbing my eyes when he accepts the Academy Award.
But about a hundred feet into our walk, Liam pulled out a different persona in the shadows, along with a squashed pack of cigarettes.
“You smoke?” he asked, lighting one.
Oh, my gosh. I knew all the names of every disease that smoking could cause, but I’d never touched one. I would be brave now. I would take one. Like in the movies. Oh, things were about to look up for me.
He lit it for me and I tried to inhale but couldn’t pull past the reflex in my trachea, handed it back coughing and teary-eyed. He blew rings over my head, huffing it down to a nub. I watched, amazed.
“What?” he said. “What?”
“Kiss me,” I said, and braced for it, knowing that an actor, of all people, should know the cue for a love scene. But instead Liam collapsed at my feet in the road, arms sprawled, mouth open, like he’d been shot.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God.” He laughed. “My God. That was perfect! Cut! Can you just say that, just one more time maybe?”
I couldn’t believe he’d totally upstaged our love scene. But it wasn’t my job to question. It was my job to be the best portable studio audience I could possibly be.
Driving home with the salty smell of tobacco on my fingertips, I wondered if I should give Liam something illegal of my own. Like my boobs. But tits were not like Marlboros. They had virtue attached to them, whereas cigarettes merely gave you bad breath.
Oh, he’d get them all right, but he’d have to wait. At least till maybe our fourth or fifth rehearsal. It was hard to say. He made me really hot.
The next weekend, we had our second date at my house. I got my love scene all right. We were kissing on the couch, ears pricked for the footfalls of my mother, and his thumbs started stroking me, right over the nipple. It was glorious, but no no no, NOT in God’s script. I twisted away more than once.
“You’re kidding,” he said, sitting up.
“I’m sorry.” I giggled nervously, not looking at him. “We haven’t been going out that long.”
“So, you don’t… I can’t… what?” he marveled, doing his trademark eyebrow lift.
“Well you know… when we’ve been together… for a while…”
I straightened up, gathering my mental flashcards from Bible class.
This was not the groupie he’d planned for. I looked into his lively eyes and realized the bulb inside his movie projector had snapped to off. Come Monday morning, I got a cheerful “hey” from him in the hallway, followed by “this isn’t working out,” and then, “we’re becoming the people we swore we’d never be.”
“Wait, what?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as our stage manager passed by him and snatched his ball cap.
“Hey!” he laughed, bounding off after her. “Bring that back!”
What he was trying to say to me was, in the biz, the supporting actress should oblige when the leading man cops a feel.
Argh! I had wanted to let him, wanted to so bad, but I just couldn’t.
By seventh period I realized I had not only bee
n dumped but also immediately replaced with said stage manager, who was a svelte, popular toy-size girl with hair bigger than her body.
I steeled myself as I opened the auditorium doors and made the dead man’s walk to the stage. Liam was no longer funny. He was a shithead, and I missed him terribly. But the heavenly minions guarding my tiny sweater puppies had much rejoicing to do.
Liam and the stage manager paired up for the midterm exam to perform a scene from Some Like It Hot. I knew I was in for something bad as they swaggered up onto the stage. They lit cigarettes, which was really shocking of course, rattled off a few lines, then began making out frenetically, which was nothing short of epic and groundbreaking. Liam’s hands grabbed her tiny rump and squeezed it for the audience, so we could all get a good look at him breaking off a piece. The teacher winced, the class snickered and cheered, scribbling reviews on their comment cards, and my head imploded quietly. I hunched over in the front row, 135 pounds of ungainly flab, penciling a dark, Saturn-shaped circle. I observe your subtext is total asshole. Then I tore up my card and stormed out.
Albeit unbearable, at least something was going on here. Something was actually happening in my life, and something was better than nothing. I immediately scrambled for another drama class boyfriend. Someone who could provide me with more manna from heaven, more of this life-sustaining drama.
There was one possibility: a pale, slightly gay-seeming upperclassman named Dante. My God, he even had a drama class name. I liked him because he liked me. I desperately liked being liked, especially in drama, where the stage manager was forever giving Liam erotic back massages before group.
Focusing on Dante’s good parts—a nice smile at certain angles, lots of female friends—yeah, he was appealing, sort of. Sure, he was the skinniest, most easily pinned guy on the wrestling team, though he had dieted and sweated his way to the newborn class. It alternately pleased and pained me to watch his willowy ass pace the sideline at wrestling meets. It was like watching the boy version of myself, only worse, since he thought he was hot shit. After getting tossed out of the ring like a Frisbee, he would complain about the referee.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 12