“That was cheap!” he’d seethe.
Yeah, cheap, I’d answer back, salivating for the husky firecracker who had trounced him. But I liked Dante. Or, I sorta liked him, I thought. Hey, we even had our own Sting song. And our own retarded handshake.
“The way you just smiled at me,” he’d say. “That was way blinky.”
When things were good, they were not just good, they were “blinky.” He stretched his lanky arm out to me for the signature move he’d created. He called it “twiddles”—curling his fingers and wiggling them with mine—which always had to accompany any blinky situation. Twiddles made me want to crawl into a hole and die, but it made Dante go goofy with happiness, so whatever. Twiddles.
My idea of a good date with Dante was lying back on the couch at his house, pretending to watch TV while he ran his hand up my thigh. I’d push it back down—no, no, no, I told him, those kind of twiddles are NOT blinky—though my crotch throbbed and my panties dripped for more. No doubt future husband would ask for a full write-up on this event, and would be so pleased. But my tightly clamped legs drove Dante up the wall.
“Do you want to know what would be really blinky?” he breathed into the phone one night.
“What,” I asked, dreading, excited, ready for the Test.
“If when we’re making out, you would kiss my stomach and then put your head down lower, unbutton my jeans, and…”
“Mm-hm?” I carried the phone casually and quickly into an empty room.
“And go even lower… and pull down my boxers… and put your mouth on it. That would be sooo blinky.”
Silence.
“I think you’ll really like it, trust me,” he said, breathing hard.
Reams of prerecorded excuses scrolled through my mind, too fast to pick. I stared out the dark window at the lone streetlamp. In the next room Mom rummaged in a kitchen cupboard.
“Know what?” he said, trying a different tack. “If you liked me, you’d do it.”
“We’ve only been going out for like two weeks,” I said.
“I think you just don’t like me.”
Oh, crap. I never wanted anyone to think I didn’t like them. Then they might not like me back! And people liking me back was the only fuel source I was designed to run on.
“Just because I don’t want to do that doesn’t mean… I mean, of course I like you!”
“Well then why wouldn’t you do that? Aren’t you my girlfriend?”
I thought: Sucking dick is supposed to be special. We needed to get to know each other. I’m worth waiting for. Jesus loves me, this I know. Blah, blah, blah. The truth was Dante’s penis—perhaps because it was attached to Dante—was sort of icky. It was much easier to just get titillated by his hands persisting up my thighs.
At our next couch date, Dante tried Plan C. It was very subtle. While we were kissing, he applied gentle pressure to the top of my head as one might a Pez dispenser. He was trying to train my face to find his dick. When that didn’t work, he sat up and ignored me, flipping the TV channels. Oh no. I was going to get dumped again.
As a last resort, Dante sent his platonic female assistant Brittany to call me later that week. The news was out: Dante had deemed me a prude. Prude, that was his dad’s word, you could so tell. Dante’s dad was in the stands sweating bullets at all his wrestling meets, anxious to score his son a victorious heterosexual encounter before it was too late.
“I just thought you should know,” Brittany said, and I could tell instantly she was jealous that Dante had never asked her to kneel ’n’ bob.
“Just because I don’t want to do certain things,” I told her, “doesn’t mean I’m, like, frigid.”
Frigid. I was not frigid. Frigid people were afraid of sex. They hated sex, whereas I longed for any possible kind of sex, just not real sex, not until my future husband, or a stunning carbon copy of one, had come on the scene, pun intended in Jesus’s name.
“You have to at least take off your shirt,” Dante explained on yet another phone call. “Otherwise…” I waited through the long pause. “Otherwise I don’t know where this is going.”
I wasn’t stupid. I’d been down this road with Liam. I knew I couldn’t cut him off and have nobody liking me. Then what? Return to my depressing life on the back porch with Jesus? I hadn’t put up with blinky and twiddles all this time for nothing. I’d have to play the tit card. It was time. I tried to psych myself up by thinking about how jealous Brittany would be. I wasn’t desperate. Desperate? Me? Please. I was just so excited for him. Sure, he sucked at sports and was so cheesy it sometimes scared me, but he could forever polish the metaphorical crown he would earn as the First Guy to See My Tits. I was ready to bring the burnt offering. All we needed was an altar.
On the next date, Dante parked his blue Volvo in the moonlight and we cut through the woods to the top of an overlook and paused. The lights of houses twinkled below.
“Now this,” he said, “this is way blinky. Twiddles.”
I agreed. This was not cheap and seedy, but lo, ripe with heavenly meaning. In the splendor of the full moon, with angels singing soprano and rapidly rising to a crescendo, I prepared myself to sin lightly. We kissed for a few minutes, then I unbuttoned my blouse, revealing a frilly new Maidenform (carefully selected) while Dante fell to his knees in worship.
I unlatched the clip and let it slide off.
“Blinky!” came his muffled cries as he covered his face with my 34Bs. My God, I thought, looking down. Manna to a starving man. And to think I harvested these little pied pipers without sit-ups, makeup, magazine how-tos, or any brain power whatsoever. Straddling his bony frame, we made out until making out was not enough, and he educated me in undulating together through jeans.
“Dry humping,” he whispered.
Dry humping, I thought. Like a kind of dog food. But soon the genius behind the disgusting term was revealed. This was sterile, guilt-free sex—no groping, no nudity, no sin! Good old-fashioned galloping and grinding, like grandma used to make. There weren’t even bases associated with this, the outfield of sexual dog chow. La-di-da, don’t mind me, just riding along on the lump in his jeans, until boom, it hit me. It happened.
Maybe we did it for too long, or maybe it felt too good, but suddenly my gyrating hips started thrusting completely out of my command, like I was being remotely controlled, or sucked into a vortex, a black hole, a swirling pleasure so all consuming it annihilated my ability to think or care about anything. Blasting upward like a rocket, I scrambled off his lap, terrified that I’d snapped my spinal cord in half.
“Whoa.” I breathed, panicking to count my fingers and toes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” I whisper-screamed, groping around in the grass. “I’m fine! Something happened! Felt like I… like I almost died!”
“Blin-ky.” Dante sighed, sounding bored. He was splayed on the ground with his yet unopened boxers puffing out of his unzipped jeans.
“Wow.” I looked up at the stars. “Wow, oh my gosh! I guess that’s… what sex is like!”
Dante sat up. “So you like it? You want to try it now?”
I looked at him, then covered my semiexposed tits. They had bought me like, what, five minutes?
“Lemme work up to it,” I said.
But a blow job was definitely not on the menu. I stalled, and within two weeks I found my severance package from Dante waiting in my locker, folded origami-style.
I hope you realize there won’t be a perfect guy trotting toward you on a white horse to sweep you off your feet, only me. I know I’m not everything you want in a guy, but you’re not everything I want in a woman, so what? The special thing we have (that makes marriages work) is our friendship.
His dad had written that, I was pretty sure. “Girlfriend” meant obliging dick sucker, and “friendship” was the golden ticket to the next wrestling tournament, and the exclusive honor of watching him get snapped like a spandex-covered toothpick.
The letter
went on:
What’s worse? You need my friendship as much as I want you to be my girlfriend.
Love,
Your “friend” Dante
I sat down and worked on two or three revisions of my response, making sure every word was perfect, and my handwriting was perfect, and the paper was perfect, in case he wanted to worship it later, perhaps use the corners to dry his tears. I told him how important our friendship was and that we should build on that before orally exploring the wonderful world of Girlfriend.
Dante’s response, shoved into my hand in the hallway, was scribbled on the corner of a dirty cafeteria napkin.
Fine, I see we’re no longer blinky. But my hormones told me to give it a try. I was very attracted to you, but I think I’m over that now. No hard feelings?
All the wind in my sails died. The prom. My fear of wet humping, noncanned variety, had cost me the ticket to his senior prom. Oh, no. Not prom. Dante wasted no time awarding it to some other girl who gave him unlimited helpings of head between class. Twiddles.
How could he have gotten over me and my tits so quickly? Just a short while ago, he worshipped them as gods. And now: a dirty napkin in my hand. I bet Jesus and His Heavenly Eunuchs didn’t have any “hard” feelings about it. It was their business to be soft.
I hadn’t even liked Dante, and look, the whole thing had backfired. But, whatever. My misery would be all the more appreciated by stupid future husband.
Oh, but Dante—sniff—Dante was gone!
After school, on the bus ride to benchwarm another basketball game, I slumped in the front seat, drying my eyes with his note. Alyssa passed down the aisle to take her seat in the back, with all the other pretty cocksuckers, and I pined for her hair, her life. If I’d been pretty like that, Dante might have stayed around to love me, even with my legs crossed and his dick unsucked.
Now it was back to my old life where, ironically, I would spend most of my time sucking.
My schedule was a veritable cornucopia of pure, unmitigated suck. I continued to suck generously at both the violin and the piano, I sucked at basketball and volleyball, I had also joined track so I could suck at throwing a discus. I made sucky vegan brownies for the Animal Rights Club suck sale. Then, for shits and giggles, I joined the Amnesty International club so I could sit in the back and discreetly suck at picking my nose. And as I shuttled from one extracurricular suckfest to another, gathering little Reese’s Pieces for my future college résumé, my mother never suspected that secretly I would’ve let all these spinning plates fall and crash. I would’ve pimped out my soul and sold my own mother for one shot at the single thing I couldn’t even fess up to wanting. It was called an orgasm. But I didn’t know what it was called. In my mind, it was that thing that happened by accident, back on the cliff with Twiddle-dick.
As far as I knew, this urgent, epic quest required a boy. It could not be practiced. It could not be scheduled. It existed within the confines of the word boyfriend, and then, only after you’d vetted him, teased him, and tested his resolve for months—or days, depending on how hot he made you—until finally you accidentally gyrated on him at a certain angle for a little too long and: boom. You’d go unconscious with pre-Rapturized bliss.
But now at least I had gleaned two important pieces of data about myself. 1) I was willing to suck dick, but 2) I was not willing to suck Dante’s dick. In order to suck a guy’s dick, he had to be hot. Although what “hot” was, I wasn’t sure. It was very subjective. Any guy could be good-looking, but he didn’t activate into Hot until you caught him being nice to you. From there, it would attack your heart like fire ants on a half-baked worm.
It was the way he talked, the way his clothes hung, a chance sighting in the hall that would ignite days of swooning.
I waited and watched for Hot, anxious.
Then Trent showed up in drama one day, but only to get out of taking a class he hated even more.
The white-bread crowd steered clear of Trent since he showed up daily with unpleasant variations to his body, homemade piercings, a Mohawk, HATE Sharpied on his knuckles, his pants razored off at the knee. He had painted the symbol for anarchy on his army backpack, which he wore over his chest like a baby carrier: ta-da, the principle in action. He was too troubled to do anything fake, like lift weights or do sports. But when he smiled at me one day, with that brooding demeanor and those muscled forearms and big, square, scarred-up fists, one thing began to pulse in my diminutive brain: Hot.
He was not soft core, no, he was forced entry. I imagined him bullying me into submission and ravaging me against my will. It wouldn’t be my fault. Yay! Then later, when we were done making out, my Christlike nature could bring him closer to a life full of kindness and meaning.
Trent seemed to be in favor of shooting humans, but he loved animals. He showed up to a few of our animal rights club meetings, which consisted of me and a bunch of depressed, oversensitive girls who related to anything trapped and abused. Trent sat there on the counter, saying nothing, chewing the wire of a paper clip.
He noticed me noticing him. He’d go out of his way to be extra obnoxious, tripping some freshman while I watched.
“Watch out for my shoe, asswipe.” Then he’d grin at me.
I’d never once been on the winning end of a bully’s power trip. It was fucking heady.
I welcomed his company into the Dante-Liam void of drama class. Trent was the antidote to blinkiness. Even serial-killer creepy was better than lame-wrestler-pussy boy. Even though I’d given him the blinkiest night of my life, damn it.
At least in drama class I could count on the dim lighting in the auditorium, which helped render my face 40 percent less visible when Dante walked in with his new girlfriend, flushed from fellatio. Then came Liam, carrying the stage manager’s ass over his shoulder, making her laugh like crazy. God, they were all so attractive and happy. I sunk deeper into my chair, longing to evaporate.
Then came Trent, last as always, meandering down the aisle toward the stage. He sat directly behind me and propped up his feet by my head. He wore red-and-white-striped suspenders pinned to camouflage pants, and weathered, black Doc Martens that pined to kick a child actor’s head in. I was his polar opposite, a heavily permed Christian wearing printed leggings from a clearance rack at the Limited.
“How’s Dante?” he asked me. I turned to look at him and that wide, fake grin. Real grins, of course, were for posers.
“Shh,” I said.
“Oh, look!” Trent yelled, ignoring me. “There he is! Your old boyfriend! With the girl you got ditched for!”
Dante looked over at us and I died. Whereas Trent lived for awkward confrontations, I lived to hide from them. I slumped over and pretended to look through my book bag.
“Trent!” I hissed. “Shh!”
“Quit being a dick,” Dante called back.
“What did you say?”
“You’re a dick, Trent.” Dante slung his bag down next to an empty row of seats.
“Oh, Dante,” moaned Trent, like he was jacking himself off. “Y’know I think I’d enjoy beating the fucking shit out of you.”
“Try.”
“Oh, you mean that?” Trent was suddenly all business, crackling his knuckles and sending a ripple through HATE. A few people hushed and looked over. There was a pause as Dante stared him down, reviewing the possibility of his swollen and disfigured prom picture, his dad’s disappointment.
“Dude,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief, “chill.”
Then he sat down like it didn’t matter, but you could tell. It was total submission.
“You kids have fun now.” Trent chuckled.
I was nearly breathless. He’d said “fucking shit”! I longed to put it on playback, especially the part where Dante pretended not to be scared. It was awful, awful stuff, and oh—there it was, right there: I burned with the pleasure.
After school in the parking lot, Trent screeched over in a beat-up black hooptee and asked if I wanted to go over
to his dad’s apartment. Apartment? People in Avon didn’t have apartments.
“Sure. I’ve just got to run to my locker,” I told him, then ran to the pay phone to get permission from my mom.
“You’ve got a project?” Mom asked.
“Yeah, just an hour or two and we’ll be done.”
Mom was trusting. She knew I had a thing for Jesus.
In the passenger seat I looked at his wrists resting on the top of the chewed-up steering wheel, a cigarette dangling in his fingers. He was almost two years older, but it seemed like ten. He caught me looking at him and pointed back at me, like I had just done something hilariously stupid.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
At his disheveled, parent-free, and decidedly nonsuburban digs in the neighboring town, he showed me a photo album of him and his skinhead friends, all wearing armbands and doing the heil Hitler.
“We’re the new skinheads,” he assured me. “It has nothing to do with being racist or any of that. It’s about ska. And animal rights.”
I flipped through page after page of eerie group photos of Trent and his skinhead friends posing in front of a big red-and-black swastika, looking like they were in a trance. He watched my muted horror with an aw-shucks grin.
“Don’t look so worried,” he said, ruffling my nonmoving, oversprayed hair, which now probably looked ridiculous. Trent didn’t notice. He leaned back and began to detail the fighting scars on his hands.
“This one’s from when I beat my dad with a beer bottle. And this over here is when he burned me back with his cigarette.” I wondered if I should believe him, or if this was Trent’s version of foreplay. Any minute he was either going to kiss me or kill me. What would I do? Act normal? I stood up and walked over to the tanks of reptiles stacked by the window. It was dark outside and the fluorescent lights glowed purple.
“Something is wrong with his skin,” Trent muttered over the iguana, for a moment seeming soft. “My brother didn’t take care of him.”
Silence passed, and he stepped closer, like it was time. He was going to do something wonderful and severe to me. I waited for it to pass, and unfortunately it did—he jammed his fists into his tight pants, two taut notches on his hips. Saved. Darn it.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 13