I’ll go in in a sec, I told myself, squinting at the lecture hall across the street. I was so late already. It would cause a huge stir, just trying to find a seat. I considered my binder on the passenger seat. The exam was coming, I’d skipped almost half the classes and had no one to beg notes from. Not wanting to ponder my nonexistent backup plan, I drifted into the Dr. Laura show on AM 750. I’d started listening to it lately. Somewhere, Mom probably was too. It made us closer somehow. And a little farther apart.
I turned up the volume just in time to hear Dr. Laura punishing a caller who’d identified herself as shacking up with her boyfriend.
“Frankly,” Dr. Laura told her, “you’re being lazy and self-centered.”
Bristling, I leaned forward, willing the caller to fight back on my behalf.
Why does she have to get your approval, Dr. Laura? I demanded. Why can’t she just do what makes her happy? But the caller ignored my diatribe, promising to do better, clearly bereft of any independent spirit. Just like Dr. Laura had prophesied I would become.
Cold adrenaline vibrated in my fingertips. Did I have the balls to call in? Why, I would ask, did SEX put God’s panties in such a fucking bunch? Wasn’t God a tad smarter, or busier, or more distracted by important things, like the business of embodying unconditional love?
A minute passed on the digital clock, and the next caller tapped in.
“I was recently raped,” a woman sobbed. “And I got pregnant.”
Blinding daylight glared off my dashboard but I stared into it anyway, not noticing the pain. “I’ve struggled so much with this, Dr. Laura. I didn’t want to keep the baby. But I prayed about it with my husband, and even though it’s so hard… we’re going to keep it.”
There would be no going to class today. How could I even stand up with this knife in my gut? Who cared if I passed astronomy anyway. Who cared about the science of the solar system and the infinite universe and the divine fucking plan, if the God who held it all in place was like this, forbidding a woman any of it unless she obeyed and became a captive breeding sow, her destiny bound to whatever untied beast happened to mount her that day. According to the Bible, all she had to do was trade in her sex and her freedom, and in return be yoked with the glories of indentured motherhood. All she had to do was leave her life of unpaid prostitution, and become God’s unpaid prostitute.
“I am so proud of you,” Dr. Laura gushed as the caller continued to cry. “You are my hero.”
These, the principles I was to espouse if I was going to go all the way with God.
It’s almost laughable, I thought, wiping tears from my eyes.
Almost. But not quite.
16 | America’s Next Top Girlfriend
“… be self-controlled, chaste, homemakers, good-natured, adapting and subordinating themselves to their husbands.”
—TITUS 2:5
I decided that I was going to give Justin the best birthday party ever. I figured it was either that or throw myself off a cliff. I’d recently gotten fired from my job slicing cow tongue at Bagelicious, so I figured now was as good a time as any to redouble my efforts into the only purpose I had left: becoming the kind of woman every man wants to fuck and/or marry.
A contender for America’s Top Girlfriend—in addition to having a working vagina—spends at least 40 percent of her time cleaning her boyfriend’s apartment and the remaining 60 percent avoiding looking fat or heinous; hiring strippers for house calls is also on her to-do list. These activities distract her from her complete and utter lack of purpose, while also serving to blind other males to the fact that she doesn’t pay any rent.
Which is why, on Justin’s twenty-first, I found myself arranging chairs in a circle in our living room and collecting entry fees from our neighbors, the Georgia Tech guys.
“I want a girlfriend like you!” one of them said, slapping me on the ass as I counted bills.
I looked around, hoping everyone had heard that.
But when my hired stripper arrived, she was disappointingly hot.
“Where’s the birthday boy?” she asked. “Right over there,” I said, slipping her a wad of twenties.
I took my rightful place in the background, where it was my job to control the boombox so she had the right beat with which to bounce and ripple her naked ass in Justin’s face. I monitored his crotch for signs of arousal and pretended to laugh, suddenly nauseous.
This is what it takes to win, I scolded myself.
“Happy birthday, baby!” I shouted. “Woo hoo!”
Afterward, while our engineer friends emptied their wallets, wondering if they could pawn their textbooks to cover after-show blow-job packages, Justin pulled me into our room—an office with newspaper taped over the French doors—to pummel me with pent-up libido, which he promised was totally not for the stripper but instead all for me.
Later, when we emerged, the Tech guys were still there, hanging with Joe on the wraparound couch. Since they couldn’t afford to pay for sex, they’d downgraded to watching the Braves game. And during the commercials, a DVD of back-to-back gangbang cum shots. It was basically one snot-covered female after another, each with her eyes closed, tongue thrust skyward, drowning in the abysmal rain of three to eight dudes. Then she’d smile for the camera, strings of cum dripping off her eyelashes. Around me, the guys hummed with approval.
“Why the fuck is she smiling?” I demanded, gagging. “She’s covered in biohazard!”
“Shut up, you’re missing the point,” said Joe, forwarding to a different one. “Okay, here we go. This… this is the chick I was talking about.”
“Can you fix my leak?” she says, and begins masturbating. This looks dangerous, considering the three-inch blades of her square-tipped acrylic nails.
“I think I can help,” says her pale, sickly, pockmarked male co-star.
Within thirty seconds, she’s getting rammed up the ass.
“This bitch is unbelievable,” Panjhi said. Panjhi: the twangiest, most beer-swillin’, confederate flag wavin’ good ol’ boy to ever call Sri Lanka his native home.
“Can you believe her?” he hooted. “I mean, hot damn. She’s perfect.”
I leaned closer. Her bottom, which was all you could see, was a tanned bread loaf of muscle and seamless puff, like she’d been dropped out of a butt-manufacturing assembly line. She thrust it aerobically toward the sorry looking dude, whose chest and waist were as saggy as hers were taut. Her boobs were like cement grapefruits, the nipples threatening to burst; one aimed toward the ceiling, the other for the wall.
“Those are fake!” I cried, my jealousy exploding.
“Those are good!” said Panjhi, with a smile that seemed hostile. She was leveraged into acrobatic positions and corked in every possible hole with all her friends and neighbors. It looked painful, but she loved it all, her pert little face hawing with ecstasy.
“If I could have that woman, I would dedicate my life to Jesus.”
“You already did that last week,” I muttered, wondering what had happened to my upbeat and endearing personality.
“Hey, Justin, can you just make her shut UP for five minutes? I’m trying to have guy time,” Panjhi complained.
Justin was transfixed, drinking a Sprite beside me, popping his knuckles. Without unpeeling his eyes from the screen he leaned over to me, knowing. “Don’t worry. They all resent their mothers. It’s obvious.”
My eyes dropped to my folded legs, compressed within their denim tubes, the unsexiest things in the room. I wanted to cry. I was never going to look that good while getting gangbanged. I was never going to sprout plastic tits. It was futile. I was no longer in the running toward becoming America’s Next Top Girlfriend.
I stood up and huffed out.
“What’s the matter?” Justin said, finding me alone in the dark in our office of love. We were about to have the same conversation we’d had a hundred times. But if Justin lived for anything, it was to save me. He closed the door and sat down next to me on the be
d.
“How can you love me,” I said, wiping my eyes, “when I’ll never look like that?”
“You’re beautiful. I love your body.”
“No, you don’t,” I cried. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not. I know, all right?”
“Know what?”
“That you’d rather marry a girl with a better body. Any guy would.”
“First of all,” said Justin, putting on his best psychologist voice, “I’m not some asshole, okay? I’m Justin. Second, you have no grounding in reality. Third, you are an idiot. I cannot believe I am in love with such an idiot.”
While he was good at listening and consoling his patient, Justin also contradicted himself in ways that were so subtle they were easy to ignore. For instance, his obsession with the legs of certain supermodels. Not the whole body, just the legs, just Kathy Ireland folded in half, no torso or head needed. Her tan, disembodied, manlike quadriceps were so buff that they made him convulse with longing, sometimes running to the bathroom so he could rip a hole in the magazine with his dick.
“You could bounce a quarter off her calves!” he told me, by way of explanation.
“Ah,” I said, knowing that he still loved me unconditionally. But just in case he didn’t, I began a new weight-lifting regimen that was sure to put me back in the running. It involved cutting my eating in half—which meant one meal every other day—and following Justin to the gym every day to kill my quads, and any other muscle that insisted on being female and flabby. Which was basically every muscle I owned.
Quadulating my toothpick legs till they nearly buckled—that I could do. But the not-eating part was hard. I lacked the self-mutilating talents of an anorexic. And though the guilt over an Oreo or two had driven me to stare down the toilet bowl, jamming my finger down my throat till my eyes watered, I was born without the ability to make puke on demand. For that I’d need a beer and two shots of tequila, then I could projectile vomit like the girl in The Exorcist.
So to trick myself out of caloric intake I’d have to create something far weirder, my own brand of eating disorder, like spitting my half-chewed junk food into the garbage disposal, or a Dixie cup, if one was handy. I mean, I just wanted to taste the chocolate bar, or the baklava, or the macaroni salad. Just wanted to chew it a bit, not digest it or process it as fat.
I’d wait till Justin left, and take my package of Little Debbies into the bathroom, and chew and spit, chew and spit, chew and spit. It would stand to reason that the slimy mess I created should have prompted a gag reflex, but no, not that lucky. I dumped out my cup into the toilet, flushed, took one more look at Kathy Ireland’s bufftastic legs poking out of the magazine holder, and emerged from the bathroom appearing completely normal.
“Who ate all the cookies?” Justin wondered aloud.
I shrugged as though I couldn’t imagine who would do something so piglike. It certainly wasn’t me, systematically unloading them from their plastic cylinders and into my mouth like a human Nerf gun, so I could chew and spit them all into the trash. Boy that would be weird.
But the last—and final—test of my worthiness was Lesley.
Lesley was a high school senior from Texas who was visiting our college on a school trip. When Justin had met her, he’d looked deep into her eyes and known—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that she’d been his horse around the turn of the century, during his incarnation as a Lakota Indian. Her name had been Nee Maha. This flashback had come to him while studying a painting of pinto horses. Then he saw a horse sticker on her retainer case, and knew.
“I got her number,” he told me, knowing that if anyone should be happy for him, it’d be America’s Next Top Girlfriend Runner-up.
“Really?” I asked over the blaring Native American flute music. There were candles burning everywhere, enough to set off the internal sprinkler system. He’d been praying again. Holding a holy vigil. For her. I felt like I’d been kicked by a buffalo.
“I have to call her,” he explained.
“Oh,” I said, sullen. Justin stared at me, waiting.
“But I have to do it alone.”
“Why can’t I listen?”
“I’m sorry,” Justin answered, giving me a hug, assuring me that it wasn’t romantic, it was just very karmic. “Now could you just…? Out here?”
I gathered my things and drooped against the wall outside the front door, trying not to lapse into another round of suicidal thoughts.
Justin’s not bound to the rules of this world, I reminded myself. He’s deep. Very fucking deep.
Nope, still off. Something was off. Something big. But what?
With the laser precision of a McDonald’s happy meal toy, I scanned my radar over the sum total of our relationship, hunting for clues.
An hour later, when he emerged from his spiritual phone call, I still hadn’t quite figured it out.
“Lesley was just so cold,” he murmured, ready to cry in my lap. “She refuses to remember. Why, why, why am I cursed to relive this?”
“Karma?” I offered, with my cheeriest dead eyes. I felt like motor oil was dripping down my face.
“Has to be karma,” he said. “Or destiny. Which is why I’ve decided. I have to go to Texas to see her. In person. I have to. Her spring break is coming up and…”
His voice was drowned out by the sound of a bus, running over my head.
“What’d you just say?” I asked.
“Listen, I wish to God I didn’t have to go see her,” he soothed. “But I do.”
Suddenly I saw it. Justin and I had no future. The healings, the public prayers in the food court, the Bible studies, the kung fu, the past lives—I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want to be a close second. I didn’t want to exist only as a prop in someone else’s adventure.
“If you leave,” I managed, “things will never be the same when you come back.”
“There is nothing sexual going on!” He laughed, incredulous. “It’s like… it’s like… going to see my little sister!”
I started to cry, wiping my eyes on my sleeve.
“C’mere,” said Justin. “So dramatic.”
“I’m serious,” I warned, pressing my fist against his shoulder as he pulled me in. I hated how he talked like that, even if he was right.
“If I don’t do this,” he went on, “I’ll always wonder. Before I can be totally yours, I need to see what this feeling is about.”
This feeling?
“I gotta get out of here,” I sniffed, not knowing where I was going. Maybe he’d beg me to stay.
“Bye, beautiful,” he said, the way you call to a pouting child. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“No” I called back and closed the front door behind me.
I could feel him shrugging it off. He was used to me running away. He’d talk me out of it later. And if he couldn’t, well. There was always Lesley.
I walked to my car, oppressed by the dusty blue evening sky overhead. It reminded me of Texas. I pictured a natural blond, calm and petite, riding horses around her ranch, a brief composite sketch of everything I wasn’t. How fucking boring is that, I thought, and sagged. They’d probably hold hands while eating Texas-style BBQ, and Justin would stare into Lesley’s eyes with honey-glazed sincerity, the same way he’d stared into mine.
I unlocked my Cavalier, pushed the crumpled wrappers onto the floor and collapsed into the driver’s seat. I waited for the sadness and grief to hit me, but nothing came. I pulled the door shut hard and waited.
Still nothing.
You don’t want him anymore, that’s why. I waited for this blasphemy to trigger an earthquake of sobs, but nothing stirred. There was only a little glimmer of relief, a flash of me in my natural state, undiluted by Justin. I seemed happier.
I put the key in the ignition, and nodded to whoever would become my inevitable replacement, conceding defeat. The windows of Justin’s apartment stared back, unconcerned.
I need to
see what this feeling is about, he’d said.
“I think I do too,” I sighed, and the engine revved to life.
17 | Special Forces
“So the Lord changed His mind…”
—EXODUS 32:14
Not long after Justin left, I decided to go out dancing alone, to see what it was like. I wanted to act like the girl I’d always wanted to be, long before I’d become the girl I was supposed to be.
Out on the crowded dance floor, I fingered the little black straw in my drink and bounced to the beat, feeling awkward. For a second I startled, thinking I saw Justin. My eyes were still trained to zero in on tan skin and dark hair. But it wasn’t him. This guy was taller, his chest and neck wider, his shaved hair coming to a handsome widow’s peak. I watched him dance, moving closer. Definitely some nonwhite blood in that boy. Latin maybe. I sipped long and hard on my drink till I pulled up nothing but ice chips and cold air.
Then he noticed me—or at least my halter top—and grinned with warm, clear eyes.
“Is that haircut real?” I screamed over the thrashing 808. “Are you like in the army?”
“Special Forces,” he boomed back, and my pupils dilated.
“You’re fucking with me,” I said, sucking again on the empty straw.
“Scout’s honor.” He laughed. “Why?”
Oh, my God, not a warrior in a past life but in the present one? There were no words to explain how much this small technicality turned me on. It was very, very promising.
“Nothing. You’re gorgeous,” I told him, the alcohol now running loose in my blood.
“So are you,” he said, reducing me to a puddle.
What started out as respectable dancing rapidly deteriorated, exacerbated by the hard muscles of his upper thigh, which were gently bumping me into total submission. His rhythm was impeccable, his body insane, his smile kind. Before long, I’d fastened myself into a human koala clip.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 21